I've been struggling quite a bit with (re-)shaping and (re-)writing the section on Mozambique for my current book-writing project, "Violence and its legacies". Actually, the conference I went to on Sunday/Monday on transitional justice etc has really helped me to solve a problem in the writing.
At one point during the conference, I remarked out loud on the fact that there we all were, some 45 people, nearly all from "western" or "northern" cultural backgrounds, all earnestly discussing a bunch of problems/issues that disproportinately affect people who come from very backgrounds very different from ours.
"We need to get more people from Africa, from the 'south' generally into the room and the discussion here!" I said.
A little later, Maurice Eisenbruch, who's a professor of Multicultural Health and indeed the Director of the Centre for Culture and Health at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, took my suggestion a little further... He conjectured what a Cambodian or East Timorean traditional healer might conclude if he had been a fly on the wall during our meeting thus far...
(I hadn't met Maurice before. He was one of a number of really interesting people I met there.)
So okay, the problem I'd been confronting in my writing was mainly this: How to "shape" all the many really significant and interesting things I heard people say in Mozambique last year as I gently elicited their views on the efficacy of the peace process their country went through in 1992-94, as well os whether they might have liked to see war-crimes courts or truth commissions brought to bear on the situation then. (The answer to both those latter questions was almost always a resounding "No!")
So I had to figue out how to shape (i.e. edit) all the interesting things I'd heard from them, for two main reasons. (1) To get the material to fit into the end of an already overcrowded chapter. And (2), so that my own analytical frame would control the narrative.
After what happened at the conference, I thought...
Heck, I don't need to control this narrative. Let the people speak, Helena!
Then I thought, too, heck, I don't need to cram this all into the end of the chapter I was writing: I can give it its own chapter!
So that's what I started to do today. The existing chapter that I have feels pretty good, and is a good length for a chapter-- 10-K-plus words. And this next chapter that is almost writing itself for me from my notes also feels pretty good.
I suspect I'll probably end up doing the same with the Rwanda and South Africa sections of the book...
I have another three writing/publishing projects of various sizes that are all also coming to a climax right about now. The smallest (from the perspective of my input) is the interview I did with Frontline last week about the Rwanda genocide, that is going to be part of the web archive for the 2-hour special they're running tomorrow evening. For that, all I had to do today was run thru the trasncript they'd made of our phone interview and correct/clarify a few things. The transcriber did a pretty good job.
The "middle size" one is the fairly lengthy piece on Gaza etc that I wrote for Boston Review last month, which is also due to come out tomorrow or thereabouts. (I'll let JWN readers know when they get the full text up on their website.)
And the largest project has been this lengthy process of co-authoring a whole book-length manuscript with 13 other folks, most of them Quakers, on the Israel/Palestine situation. The book is almost ready!!! I can't believe it! We are down to fine-tuning issues on the cover, the maps, and some last-minute rights issues... But I went through the page-proofs fairly rapidly yesterday, and it's looking beautiful.
It is called: When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. Of course, when it comes out, I'll let you all know and give you ordering information!
Anyway, all of this stuff going on means I haven't had much time recently to blog. Dead-tree publishing projects keep getting in the way here!
I've been here at the Airlie House Conference Center in Virginia at a conference on Trauma and Transitional Justice in Divided Societies since Saturday night. It has been extremely "busy", and has dealt with many very important issues.
Sat. night we got to see a pre-premiere showing of Anne Aghion's great new film about Rwanda, called "In Rwanda we say... " Apparently it, and her earlier film about Rwanda, "Gacaca", will both be shown in the US on the Sundance Channel on, I think, April 5.
Anne was also here, and answered questions after the showing, which was really great. I've admired her work for a while now, so it was good to meet her.
Two of the highlights of yesterday's very full program were presentations made by South Africans: Judge Richard Goldstone, who'd been the first prosecutor of the UN tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwand and a member of South Africa's Constitutional Cour; and Paul Van Zyl, who was the Executive Secretary of the TRC in SA and now works for the NY-based International Center for Transitional Justice...
I don't have time to recount most of the really interesting things they said. Goldstone gave some interesting background on the political-negotiation background to the formation of the TRC in SA-- more, I think, than I'd heard from him when I interviewed him in Johannesburg in 2001.
The most interesting thing that Van Zyl said was that he didn't see any necessary connection between a retelling by violence survivors of the human rights violations of the past, and personal healing. He noted that while there had been thousands of instances of that apparently having happened during the work of the TRC, there were also many instances in which the experiences that survivors had at and with the TRC had been "literally heartbreaking for them"; and he recounted a particularly poignant example of that.
"There are many good reasons to have truth commissions," he said. "But you cannot really claim that you're doing so in order to heal the wounds of victims of violence."
Well, on the general theme of how the needs of victims/survivors of atrocious violence are indeed to be met, we also heard some sobering news from Harvey Weinstein from the Med School at UC Berkeley, who's done some interesting studies on the relationship between the work of the ICTY and ICTR and the prevalence of psychological trauma in those societies.
Remember that in the Security Council resolutions establishing those two courts, the SC members solemnly expressed their desire that the courts contribute to the national reconciliation within the affected societies...
Weinstein said he found "no direct link" between the holding of criminal trials and reconciliation in either society. (He actually had a lot more detailed data than that, from broad epidemiological studies he and his team had carried out in both places. His own professional background is as both an MD and an MPH.)
He also found that for survivors of violence, "justice" was defined in much broader terms than merely the prosecutorial sense.
Finaly, we did also have a bunch of presentations from people doing "trauma-healing" work in Rwanda and elsewhere. These were interesting but a little problematic, for reasons I don't have time to go into here.
Heck, today the conference ends. So within the next hour I need to get dressed, pack, check out, and have breakfast. Then be organized and perky enough to undergo another 5.5 hours of conferencing.
I've been mainly immersed in matters Mozambican this week. (When I wasn't doing other bits of work on Palestine or Rwanda.... Tenth anniversary of Rwandan genocide coming up April 7th. Great-sounding 'Frontline' special on that subject on April 1st. My contribution to it will be on their website, not on the broadcast.)
So anyway, back to Mozambique. I was writing about the landmark elections they had there in October 1994. Those were the country's first-ever democratic elections. The commitment to holding them was enshrined in the General Peace Agreement that in October 1992 ended 17 years of truly devastating civil war between the Frelimo government and the Renamo insurrectionists...
There is at least one aspect of those elections that is of direct relevance to the elections hopefully to be planned soon inside Iraq-- namely: the key role that the "international community" played not solely in helping to organize the elections but also, crucially, in certifying their outcome.
All of which bears out my theory that the esential "legitimacy" of a sovereign government has much to do with the ability of this government to win the recognition of its legitimacy by other governments, as well as its ability to win the "consent" of those over whom it governs. (Recognition of other beings as fully right-bearing persons also has much to do with the recognition of this status by other persons, as well. But that's a whole different, though intriguingly parallel, line of enquiry.)
So, in Mozambique in 1994, the elections were due to be held October 27-28. But on October 25 the Renamo chief, Afonso Dhlakama suddenly went into a funk and declared that he and his people would not take part. Yikes! A similar thing had happened with the IFP, in South Africa's elections just six months earlier--but ended up getting resolved. But in October 1992, in Angola, UNITA's Jonas Savimbi had contested the results of the UN-sponsored elections immediately after his defeat in them had been announced; and he then reignited his insurgency against the Luanda government... And that horrifying civil war has only recently now been brought toward an end...
So in Mozambique, Dhlakama went to his home city, Beira, and holed up there, and refused to come down to the capital, Maputo.
All the diplomats who were in the country, desperately eager to see the elections work, went into a big tizzy. The South African Ambassador was the only one Dhlakama would talk to. He flew up to Beira and started talking to him. Dhlakama expressed all the complaints he had about Frelimo's alleged misdeeds in the organization of the election...
Negotiations ensued. In the early morning of October 27, the head of the electoral commission, Brazao Mazula, announced that the two-day-long elections would go ahead as planned... Still no constructive word from Dhlakama... But the negotiations continued round the clock...
In the early morning of the second day of the election, the key foreign diplomats finally told Dhlakama that if he agreed to take part in the elections, they would promise that after the election they would not certify it to have been 'free and fair' until after they had had the chance to examine the validity of all his complaints against Frelimo. In fact, they even signed a solemn declaration to that effect, in his presence.
He went on national radio announcing that he and the rest of Renamo would be taking part, and urging people to vote for him.
Electoral commission chief Mazula went on the radio announcing that the polling places would be kept open for an additional day.
The elections continued successfully. It was not till mid-November, however, that the UN secretary-general's representative declared that he judged that the elections had been free and fair. Mazula then announced the count: Frelimo had won-- both the Presidency, and a majority in the parliament. The caucus of foreign ambassadors gave their endorsement to the result; and Dhlakama swallowed it.
And so, that final act in the termination of the 1975-92 civil war ended successfully. Thank G-d! Dhlakama became transformed from being the truculent head of the very violent insurgency into being head of the parliamentary opposition. In 1999, the country had a second election, with more or less the same result.
But in late 1994 the role of the group of foreign ambassadors had been crucial. They gave Dhlakama the confidence he felt he desperately needed, but lacked, in the integrity of the electoral process. (That process, by the way, was controlled by an all-Mozambican election commission, not by the UN, though the UN helped. On the election commission, Renamo had seven seats, Frelimo had ten, and four were held by indepedents, including Mazula.)
And the relevance of all this for Iraq is?
Well, I'm too tired to spell it all out for you all, but I'm sure you JWN readers are smart enough to see some possible parallels there...
The following is a translation from Arabic of the appeal by 70 Palestinian intellectuals and officials that appeared in the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam earlier this week. The translation came from someone at the American Task Force on Palestine.
It looks like an interesting, generally well-crafted and constructive text. I'd love to see the original, however, if someone can send me a link to it, as the translation doesn't look totally sound.
PUBLIC STATEMENT
We the undersigned, members of the of the Palestinian people from all political, intellectual and social sectors who are unified in their struggle and steadfastness, affirm our condemnation of the blatant aggression launched by Israel against our people, which was embodied two days ago with the criminal operation conducted by Sharon and his right-wing gang which resulted in the martyrdom of the leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his struggling comrades.
We reaffirm our people's rights, stipulated in all international covenants, and the use of all methods to defend ourselves. We are almost exploding from the pain and hurt of the disaster but despite this we call upon our people in the homeland, and in line with our national interest, to take the initiative from the hands of the criminal occupation gang and arise again in a wide ranging peaceful and popular intifadah with clear aims and sound speech wherein our people own the element of its initiative and the path it takes. This way we can make Sharon miss the opportunity of crowning his aggression against our people and sacred places by putting the final touches on his security plans.
We call upon a unified intifadah as a new step to revitalizing popular work organized with basis that have a clear program and a political revenue. We reaffirm our commitment to our just and legitimate demands of our rights and call for alignment based on national unity and unified leadership to resist the occupation.
Enough Criminal Assassination Operations
Enough Bloodshed.. Enough Occupation
The signatories:
1- Ibrahim al-Hafi
2- Ibrahim Msallam
3- Ahmad Jbara (Abul Sukkar)
4- Ahmad Hallas (Abu Maher)
5- Ahmad Fares
6- As'ad Odeh
7- Amin Maqboul
8- Buthayna al-Duqmaq
9- Jad Is'haq
10- Jamal Dar'awi
11- Jamal Zaqqout
12- Jamil Rushdi
13- Jihad Abu Zneid
14- George Hazboun
15- Hasan Dweik
16- Hanan Ashrawi
17- Hakam Taleb Thyab
18- Haidar Awadallah
19- Khader Ayesh
20- Khalil al-Atiri
21- Dimitri Diliani
22- Rihab al-Eisawi
23- Radwan al-Sameri
24- Riyad al-Malki
25- Zuheira Kamal
26- Ziad Hammouri
27- Sari Nuseibeh
28- Saeed Zeidani
29- Salman Jadallah
30- Sameer Shehadeh
31- Siham Thabet
32- Suheil Saleem Abdul Fattah Salman
33- Shaher Sa'ed
34- Shafiq Zaydieyeh
35- Shukri Radaydeh
36- Salah Hikmat al-Masri
37- Abbas Zaki
38- Abdullah Hijazi
39- Abdullah al-Kiswani
40- Abdul Ilah al-Atiri
41- Abdul Fattah Hamayel
42- Abdul Qader Faisal al-Husseini
43- Arafat al-Hidmi
44- Azzam al-Ahmad
45- Izzat al-Rasini
46- Ikrima Thabet
47- Imad Abu Kishek
48- Imad Awad
49- Ali Hasasneh
50- Anan al-Atiri
51- Ghazi Hanania
52- Ghassan al-Harami
53- Ghassan Hanania
54- Fathi Saleem Yasin Abu Zeid
55- Fadel Tahboub
56- Fahed Abul Haj
57- Cairo Arafat
58- Lucy Nuseibeh
59- Lilly Feidi
60- Mohammed al-Rimawi
61- Mohammed al-Sha'bi
62- Mahmoud al-Aloul
63- Mahmoud al-Labadi
64- Naser Younes
65- Nayef Sweitat
66- Nour Eddin Ibrahim Shehadeh
67- Hashem Abu Lafi
68- Yasser Abed Rabbo
69- Yousef Harb
70- Yousef Aref.
B'tselem's server is up again today. If you go here, you can find the following information, which covers the period from the beginning of the current intifada (September 29, 2000) through 10 March 2004:
The number of extrajudicial killings is higher than I had estimated yesterday. Significantly, too, as you can learn if you go here, the policy was pursued under Barak and not solely under Sharon.
The first assassination that B'tselem lists there, during this intifada, was that of Hussein Muhammad Salim 'Abayat, age 34, from Taamera, Bethlehem, who was killed by Israeli security forces helicopter missilefire aimed at his car, in Beit Sahur, on 9 November 2000. Two 52-year-old women were killed as "collateral" damage in that attack.
The word "B'tselem", by the way, is Hebrew for "in the image", and is a reminder that all human beings are created in the image of G-d.
Israel's killing of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is by no means the first act of "targeted killing" (= extra-judicial execution, = assassination) that the Israeli government has carried out in recent years. This is a practice whose sheer barbarism has been recognized by nearly all other governments of the world. Even repressive governments that have in fact carried out similar acts in the past (including Israel, until a couple of years ago) made some effort to "hide" their responsibility for these killings.
The apartheid government in South Africa did, we all know, carry out extrajudicial executions, including of many people known to be in the custody of its security forces. In those cases, the killings were never described as deliberate acts of killing, but excuses were given that the deceased had "slipped on a piece of soap and fallen through the window", or "had been shot while trying to escape."
The terror regime in Argentina deliberately killed thousands of opponents in the most heinous way. But it always tried to hide the fact and the details of those deaths: hence the large-scale phenomenon of the "disappeared".
Israel itself carried out many acts of assassination prior to the current intifada. Most notable were the killings of three PLO leaders in Beirut in 1973 and then the killing of Abu Jihad in Tunis in January 1988. But on all those earlier occasions, the Israeli government was happy to keep the same kind of (translucent) "veil of possible deniability" over its involvement that it has for years wielded with regard to its huge nuclear-weapons program.
Everyone in the international community in those (post-Frank Church) days recognized that it was just not "appropriate" for governments openly to admit to their involvement in extrajudicial killings. Engagement in such acts did, after all, seriously undercut the most basic foundations of any idea of the "rule of law".
That dissociation of governments from openly admitted involvement in assassinations lasted until the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli PM in 2001. Then, as part of his well-known tendency toward defiance of longheld international norms, he announced that "targeted killings" of accused terrorist leaders would henceforth be an open part of his government's policy.
Btselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has a good list of the number of openly admitted assassinations the government has carried out since that announcement. I think it is more than 80-- but their website is not currently responding, so I can't check that. The site also notes that a large number of people--far more than the 80-plus actual "targets", and many of them innocent bystanders-- have also been killed as "collateral damage" in these operations.
Many of those earlier assassinations, like Shaikh Yassin's, were carried out by helicopter gunships. Not exactly known as mechanisms for fine discrimination of targets.
In response to today's news, European Union foreign ministers have gone on the record to condemn the whole concept of extrajudicial killings:
Not so the Bush administration.
Condi Rice's only comments were twofold: (1) to voice a totally milquetoaste and content-less appeal for "calm" in the aftermath of the killing, and (2) to deny vociferously that the Bush administration had known in advance about Sharon's plans to do this.
Methinks the lady perhaps protested a little too much on the latter score?? Why on earth would anyone even imagine that Sharon might have given his American friends a helpful heads-up before he undertook an act that quite foreseeably escalates tensions worldwide??
The reason for the Bush administration's non-condemnation of the Yassin assassination is quite clear: Washington itself also these days reserves the right to engage in extrajudicial executions of those accused of involvement with terrorism. We have seen at least one clear episode-- that one in Yemen four or five months back-- where US forces have done just that.
In asserting the "right" to undertake such actions, the Bushies were following the lead of their master in so many tactical aspects of the "war on terrorism": Ariel Sharon. That's why they don't condemn his use of acts of deliberate, extrajudicial killing today.
Welcome to the Dark Ages of the collapse of the rule of law.
Veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, who heads "Gush Shalom" ('the Peace Bloc') commented on his government's assassination of Hamas spiritual guide Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as follows:
"The fate of the State of Israel is now in the hands of group of persons whose outlook is primitive and whose perceptions are retarded. They are incapable of understanding the mental, emotional and political dimensions of the conflict. This is a group of bankrupt political and military leaders who have failed in all their actions. They try to cover up their failures by a catastrophic escalation.
"This act will not only endanger the personal security of every Israeli,
both in the country and around the world, but also the existential security
of the State of Israel. It has grievously hurt the chances of putting and end
to the Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Muslim conflicts."
Avnery mentioned that in the early 1980s the occupation authorities
encouraged the founders of Hamas, hoping that they would create a
counter-weight to Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Even after the start of the
first intifada, the army and the security services gave preferential treatment
of Hamas. Sheikh Yassin was arrested only a year after the outbreak.
"There seems to be no limit to the stupidity of our political and military
leaders. They endanger the future of the State of Israel."
Riverbend (from Baghdad) hasn't been posting a lot recently on her blog. But when she writes, it is always so well and so movingly done that it's worth waiting for.
Here's what she was writing yesterday evening about the first anniversary of the "liberation":
But we've learned a lot. We've learned that terrorism isn't actually the act of creating terror. It isn't the act of killing innocent people and frightening others-- no, you see, that's called a 'liberation'. It doesn't matter what you burn or who you kill- if you wear khaki, ride a tank or Apache or fighter plane and drop missiles and bombs, then you're not a terrorist- you're a liberator.
The war on terror is a joke-- Madrid was proof of that last week-- Iraq is proof of that everyday.
I hope someone feels safer, because we certainly don't.
Before the US assault on the country, just about all those schools were functioning. (Iraq is not Afghanistan, after all. Males and females have both been well educated for a couple of generations there.) A small number of the schools got damaged during the fighting of March-April last year-- but the much larger number were ransacked and damaged during the looting that followed the US "victory". Preventing any such looting was wholly the responsibility of the occupying forces: one they notably failed to exercise.
So for the US spokespeople to crow about how many schools etc they have renovated, and to make it seem like some kind of an achievement, is getting things backways on. That damage should never have been allowed in the first place. Rumsfeld should have planned properly for the post-combat phase. But he failed to. It is quite dishonest of him and his minions to claim any "credit" for having renovated a proportion of those ransacked classrooms in the months since then.
It's like trying to claim "credit" for having (partially) stopped beating one's wife...
And talking of hometown Charlottesville news, here was ambitious hometown boy Philip D. Zelikow in a front-page story in the New York Times yesterday.
Zelikow-- in addition to being the Director of U.Va.'s Miller Center of Public Affairs-- is also the executive director of the official government panel of enquiry into the 9/11 disaster.
But he has also become a focus of enquiry for the commission since back in Dec 2000-January 2001 he was a leading member of incoming "President" George W. Bush's transition team.
One of the issues the panel is investigating is the question of the degree of priority (or lack of priority) that the Bush national-security team gave to the terrorism/Al-Qaeda threat in the months leading up to September 11.
Of course, the revelations in the about-to-be-published book by former counter-terrorism boss Richard A. Clarke will also provide a lot of evidence on this point. (Clarke's tenure as White House counter-terror coordinator spanned the Clinton and GWB administrations.)
What has been revealed from Clarke's book so far has been pretty damning to the Bush team. See, e.g., this story.
Clarke is due to testify before the 9/11 commission on Tuesday. Also expected up Tuesday or Wednesday, according to yesterday's NYT story, will be Clinton administration luminaries like Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and Sandy Berger. The Times reports that they
They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush's national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice's deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.
Do you think that panel member Philip Zelikow may have to recuse himself because of his close relationship with potential interrogee Philip Zelikow?
Maybe he should ask Justice Scalia for an opinion on this tricky issue...
Anyway, the week ahead promises to be an interesting one for the panel.
Sorry I haven't been posting much recently... I was really busy last week, and then today got hit by exhaustion.
Yesterday, I took part in our hometown commemoration of the first anniversary of the start of the US-Iraq war. It was a march along a busy part of Route 29, preceded at one end by a one-hour vigil at a busy intersection, and followed at the other by a silent vigil on "the Lawn" of Thomas Jefferson's famous University of Virginia.
The events were organized by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice, which has a great new website.
So in the morning, I was thinking, "What kind of sign shall I carry?" I mulled over a few slogans I could write. Then I opened the WaPo, and there were two whole pages of small ID pictures of US servicemen and women who had been killed over the past two-and-a-half months, with bare biographic details.
There was my sign!
I tore out the two pages, got two large pieces of poster board and wrote at the top of each: "Mourning ALL the victims of this war, including... " and then I taped one of the WaPo pages onto the rest of the board. It seemed to say just what I wanted it to. I looked quickly online for some "symbolic" photos of the vastly greater numbers of Iraqi war dead, but couldn't find anything satisfactory. Anyway, I thought the wording indicated my concern for their deaths, too.
So I was standing aat the first vigil holding up one of these signs, and a woman I didn't know came up to me, looked at it carefully, then pointed to one of the pictures and said, "That's my brother-in-law."
It was very moving. We talked a bit. She had come up to Charlottesville from Durham, NC, to take part in the march-- a multi-hour drive. I urged her to carry the sign with her brother-in-law's picture on it, since I had another one I could carry, anyway; and she did.
For the first vigil, and then as we walked south down Route 29, some of the placards invited passing motorists to "Honk for peace". We got a significantly higher proportion of honks than I have ever heard before.
I think the unpopularity of this war has been increasing fairly rapidly since the beginning of this year. I consider that to be cautiously good news.
But at what a cost, what a tragic cost!
Also, I'd like to see a big increase not just in the unpopularity of this war, but also in the unpopularity of the whole idea of using force and coercion in international relations. Let's hope that that happens, too.
Well, here we are again. All that nasty little current of isolationist, xenophobic hate-speech that we heard in the US in the run-up to Bush's invasion of Iraq-- remember the "Axis of Weasel"?--is now coming out again inside the country's culture in response to the Spanish people's anti-Aznar vote last Sunday.
And Tom Friedman is leading the charge.
I might have said Dennis Hastert, except I was talking about the national "culture".
Tom's piece today-- the headline for which, Axis of Appeasement picks up on a concept he features prominently in the text-- contrasts starkly with this other view expressed on the same page by Maureen Dowd. Maureen picked up on Hastert's unbelievable mean-spirited diatribe against the Spanish voters for having chosen to, as he put it, "in a sense, appease terrorists." She commented:
Meanwhile, back in Friedman-ville, that particular caped superhero writes:
"I - will- not- let - the - increasing - desperation - I - feel - because - of - the - problems - in Iraq - drive - me - to - making - unfounded - allegations - against - decent - people.... "
Supporting the first democracy-building project ever in the Arab world -- ? Wouldn't that be great!! As I noted here, it might, just might, be on the point of happening. But the US has not yet credibly demonstrated any real commitment to making possible the building of democracy in Iraq...
But if that does happen, and if the democracy-building project goes ahead under the only auspices that will make fair elections a real possibility--those of the UN-- then Spanish PM-elect Zapatero has already told us that his forces will be there to support that mission.
So here's another suggestion to my old bud, Tom Friedman. After you've taken a few more deep breaths, could you think of apologizing to the Spanish voters and their new leaders for having plastered that ugly great Scarlet 'A' on their foreheads? And could you signal your real readiness to engage in a respectful worldwide discussion--including Iraqis and non-Iraqis-- of how the desired end of free elections in Iraq is to be reached?
Being a democrat, after all, means a lot more than just casting your vote in an election, or supporting the organizing of elections all around the world. At its core, what it means is a readiness to understand that decent, honest people can disagree about serious subjects; but that there are ways to work out those disagreements through consultation and dialogue rather than name-calling, threats, vitriol, and violence.
So Tom, notch down the rhetoric, why don't you. Then people might take you more seriously as someone who might truly espouse--and be prepared to live by--democratic ideals at the worldwide level.
One thing Tom Friedman might usefully go back and look at--if, indeed, he ever bothers to read anyone else's writings these days--is this Op-Ed piece by Ian Buruma that appeared in the NYT yesterday.
Buruma is a very thoughtful essayist and writer who has written movingly about many aspects of global culture--as well as about what it was like for him, growing up in the Netherlands in the post-Nazi-Occupation era. He writes:
Some might question whether America is as shining an example of these good things as is often claimed. Nonetheless, spreading them around is certainly a more appealing policy than propping up "our" dictators in the name of realpolitik. Still, history shows that the forceful imposition of even decent ideas in the claim of universalism tends to backfire ? creating not converts but enemies who will do anything to defend their blood and soil...
The real question for the Western universalists, then, is whether the cause of moderate Muslims is helped by the revolutionary war that has been set off by the American and British armies. For that is what the war in Iraq is: not a clash of civilizations, but a revolution unleashed through outside force...
Plenty of us, as it happens: all those of us who warned that "democracy" is not something that can be delivered on the tip of a cruise missile, or implanted into another country by brute force...
All those of us who realized that, for all the claims by some naive Americans about the "universality" of the values they claim to represent (but don't, as Buruma notes, always actually live by), in fact those values are not "universal", but only one, particularly American form of highly individualistic, free-market liberalism.
Many Americans, Denny Hastert probably included, I am inclined to forgive for the essential provincialism of their views in this regard. I mean, this country is just so darned huge that the vast majority of US citizens have never traveled to a foreign country-- and a startling proportion even of our legislators have never bothered to apply for passports. So what do they know, sitting here in their secure little citadel of free-market individualism?
Tom Friedman, however, I am inclined to hold to a higher standard. We can't totally excuse him on the grounds of lack of awareness of other cultures and other approaches to the project of democracy. He knows, much more than Denny Hastert, whereof he speaks. So I guess we have to conclude that it is not ignorance that drives him to his extremes of vitriol and rhetorical illiberalism. I think he must, at some level, be an ideologically committed adherent of the doctine of "liberal imperialism."
But Tom, it's never too late to change your mind!!
Here is my latest CSM column, out today. The editors there put a good headline on it: Movement controls stunt Palestinian lives - and democracy.
I mentioned in there that I'd been part of a group that convened in late 2002 to look at the prospects for a new Palestinian election. That effort had been launched by some well-meaning folks at American University in Washington, DC, and at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies. But it got absolutely nowhere. The Israeli government never showed itself ready for a minute to allow the kind of conditions (freedom of movement and expression; general public security) that would allow an open, fair, and credible election to take place in the occupied territories.
Wouldn't it be great if someone-- maybe that great advocate of democracy now sitting in the White House?--could persuade Prime Minister Sharon that that would be the right thing to do?
Of course, Pres. Bush might have a little bit of a credibility problem of his own if he pressed someone else running a military occupation to allow free and fair elections in the occupied territories.... Especially after the pathetic attempt his own administration made last November to circumvent the approach of free and fair elections in Iraq. (Click 'Rube Goldberg' in the Search box here.)
But still, there is now some hope that the people of Iraq will be able to hold free and fair elections, under some kind of U.N. auspices, some time around the end of this year.
Actually, the Bush administration seems, belatedly, to have come to the recognition that such an arrangement-- elections to produce (hopefully) a credible, legitimate Iraqi leadership, plus the essential ingredient of UN auspices--may be the best bet it has to be able to draw down the US's own treacherous over-exposure inside Iraq, and to allow the US forces to be taken out in something approaching good order.
So why wouldn't the Bushies urge their Israeli friends to do something similar in Gaza and the West Bank? Could it be that they understand that Sharon really does not want to pull Israel's control mechanisms, and its troops and settlers, totally out of those areas? And perhaps, too, that they actually sympathize with Sharon's preferences in that regard?
So much for democracy.
The courageous, visionary Israeli peace organizer Gila Svirsky delivered a moving address/homily at an event the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions held to mark this week's one-year anniversary of the killing of U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie. A friend sent it to me today, and I'm very happy to share it here with you:
I was not present in Rafah that terrible day, but I have frequently replayed in my mind the events leading up to the moment when a bulldozer rolled over Rachel Corrie. I think to myself: What compelled this young woman, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, to travel 10,000 miles from home, to throw in her lot with a family not her own, a people not her own, and ultimately meet a death that came suddenly, swiftly, in an instant of shocked comprehension.
In the biblical book of Ruth, we read of Naomi whose two sons have died, leaving two young widows. Naomi chooses to depart from the land of Moab and return to her home in Judah. She encourages her daughters-in-law to remain in Moab, their own land. One daughter-in-law kisses Naomi and bids her farewell. The other, Ruth, chooses to accompany Naomi to the distant climes of Judah. Why does Ruth go? "Entreat me not to leave thee," says Ruth, "for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God." And she continues, "Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: if the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me".
The biblical figure of Ruth journeys to her new people, expecting never to return, but to be buried in foreign soil.
The modern figure of Rachel journeyed to her new people, expecting to return for the start of the school year, and never to be buried, or to be buried at some vastly distant unimaginable future, but never to find her death in the soil of her chosen destination...
She journeyed to her new people expecting to find another culture, another language, another way of interacting, but never to find another attitude toward the taking of life. She journeyed expecting to see death, but never to experience it directly, never toencounter herself as the object of deliberate death.
In his treatise Fear and Trembling, the philosopher Kierkegaard recounts the
story of Abraham as he takes his son Isaac to be sacrificed on Mount Moriah.
The story is so unfathomable - how could Abraham take his son, his only son,
and be willing to slaughter him for no apparent reason other than God's
inscrutable request? Kierkegaard constructs several scenarios with thoughts
and emotions that may have been coursing through Abraham's heart as he
walked his son to the place where he would kill him.
Writes Kierkegaard in one such scenario: "It was early in the morning,
Abraham rose betimes, he embraced Sarah, the bride of his old age, and Sarah
kissed Isaac, who had taken away her reproach, who was her pride, her hope
for all time. So they rode on in silence along the way, and Abraham's
glance was fixed upon the ground until the fourth day when he lifted up his
eyes and saw afar off Mount Moriah, but his glance turned again to the
ground. Silently he laid the wood in order, he bound Isaac, in silence he
drew the knife - then he saw the ram which God had prepared. Then he
offered that and returned home.From that time on Abraham became old, he
could not forget that God had required this of him. Isaac throve as before,
but Abraham's eyes were darkened, and he knew joy no more."
In my mind's eye when I see Rachel standing on that mound of earth and
facing the bulldozer, I envision a young woman looking at the small window
fast approaching her in the brow of the bulldozer, trying to peer into that
dark space, to find the eyes of the soldier who was driving, perhaps someone
her own age, someone who also loved to dance and joke with a younger
brother, someone who was thinking about how long it would take until he
could finish this job and get back to the base where he didn't have to face
the anger of people who don't understand what he's doing, thinking about his
weekend pass and his own future, maybe he would go back to school and finish
that course, or about his own loneliness, and how it is to be out here alone
at the gears every day, and then there's this girl out there, and why doesn'
t she get out of the way. What was the next thought of this young man?
"Shall I kill her?" or "Shall I scare her - she'll move at the last minute"?
or "I'll show them once and for all" or "Still time to brake". Or some
other brief words that race through his mind as he hurtles ahead.
In this land where blood pours down like lemon drops and covers all the
senses, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, we cannot know what thought compelled
this young man to carry out the deed. Blood pours down like lemon drops and
covers all the senses, and the senses ascribe new meanings to things. Later
that day, he may have wept and found comfort among his friends. He may have
shrugged it off - another killing in the line of duty, a sad but necessary
evil, a dirty job but someone's gotta do it, another notch in his belt of
military exploits. But we do know one thing: He will live with the death
of Rachel for the rest of his life. He may not read every article about
her, he may agree only with those that justify his deed, but we know that he
reads some of what is written, and we know that he thinks about what
happened that day, and if things could have, somehow, ended differently.
How do we know this? We know because we agree with Rachel, who risked her
life in the belief that whoever was driving that vehicle would stop before
he harmed her. We know because we believe, like Rachel, in the fundamental
decency of every human being, and that even those who kill, harbor pain
inside their hearts for that death. We do not have to forgive this man or
this system that led him to kill in order to understand that the trauma of
Rachel's death, which affected hundreds of thousands, millions of people
throughout the world, also affected the man who took her life.
On that blindingly sunny day in Rafah, when optimism glints irrationally
from every tank, every M16, every dogtag on the necks of 18-year-olds in
uniform, photos of loved ones in their pockets, Rachel stood her ground with
ease, waiting for his eyes to meet hers, waiting for decency to slow the
grinding treads, waiting for the moment of sanity to kick in, to interrupt
the flow of tension swelling toward collision, waiting for the inevitable to
happen - that reason would prevail.
Today we are one year from that moment, 12 months of time to think about it,
and still no more capable of fathoming what transpired that day: that until
the moment of impact, Rachel never lost her faith in the decency of this
bulldozer driver; that until the moment of impact, the driver never
understood that he was capable of this terrible crime.
Writes Kierkegaard, "It was a quiet evening when Abraham rode out alone, and
he rode to Mount Moriah; he threw himself upon his face, he prayed God to
forgive him his sin, that he had been willing to offer Isaac, that the
father had forgotten his duty toward the son."
In my own efforts to understand these terrible deeds, the one on Mount
Moriah and the one in Rafah, I ask myself: At Moriah, what was the more
terrible - that Abraham had been willing to sacrifice his son? Or that God
had demanded this of him?
And in Rafah, who is the real sinner - the soldier who ended the life of a
girl on a mound of earth in a land not his and not hers - a land where
Rachel, like Ruth, was invited and welcomed, but he was an interloper and
resented? Or, in Rafah, too, is the real sinner the God who had demanded
this of him - God the army officers, God the brutal policies, God the
society of those willing to inflict pain on others to still their own fears
and traumas?
And whose gaze turned from one of trust to astonishing alarm? The driver,
who trusted that Rachel would leap away before it was too late? Or Rachel,
who trusted that the driver would halt the vehicle one tread sooner?
I end with an excerpt translated from "Season of the Camomile" by the
Palestinian Samir Rantisi. This poem was written 16 years ago after the
killing of an Israeli and a Palestinian near the village of Beita:
why didn't you find someone besides me to be a symbol?
why didn't they find someone besides you to be a victim?
why could they only find Beita in the spring.
Gila Svirsky
Delivered at an evening in memory of Rachel Corrie sponsored by the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions.
Thoughtful human-rights theorist Michael Ignatieff has a one-year-after piece in the NYT mag today. He starts off with an apparently frank and engaging admission:
I couldn't see how I could will the end -- Hussein must go -- without willing the only available means: American invasion, if need be, alone...
So I supported an administration whose intentions I didn't trust, believing that the consequences would repay the gamble.
... An administration that cared more genuinely about human rights would have understood that you can't have human rights without order and that you can't have order once victory is won if planning for an invasion is divorced from planning for an occupation. The administration failed to grasp that from the first moment an American tank column took a town, there had to be military police and civilian administrators following behind to guard museums, hospitals, water-pumping stations and electricity generators and to stop looting, revenge killings and crime. Securing order would have meant putting 250,000 troops into the invasion as opposed to 130,000. It would have meant immediately retaining and retraining the Iraqi Army and police, instead of disbanding them. The administration, which never tires of telling us that hope is not a plan, had only hope for a plan in Iraq.
Nobody, Michael? What nonsense! Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki had known a lot about what it would take to run an effective occupation in Iraq, and about the quite foreseeable circumstances in which this would need to be done, when he testified on Capitol Hill many weeks before the war... There were people in the State Department's Bureau of I&R; who were willing to state in fall of 2002 that they judged that Saddam had destroyed all his WMDs long ago... And you live right there in Boston, I think. So you could easily have seen this column that I wrote in the CSM on January 9, 2003...
And that's just for starters. Your claim that "nobody actually knew very much about Iraq" is quite unjustified. What you mean, perhaps, is that nobody you listened to closely turned out to have known much about Iraq, which is a different proposition completely.
Elsewhere in the piece, Ignatieff reveals that on the night the US bombing of Iraq began, he had been with an--unnamed-- Iraqi exile. How nice for him. Many Iraqi exiles are, I know, decent, honorable people. But a good number of exiles did, nonetheless, form a very incestuous, unscrupulous, and insistent little coterie of war-mongers, so people who heard their point of view-- as Ignatieff apparently did-- would certainly have needed to make an effort to hear different points of view...
What most saddened me about this piece, however, was the extent to which it revealed that Ignatieff--whom I have generally thought of as a smart and decent internationalist-- seemes to have bought the line that the US doesn't really need the UN any more. At least, he gives no recognition that it might need it, and that a more robust American recognition of this fact might be the sole saving grace to be extracted from the whole sorry US-Iraq imbroglio.
For example, he mischaracterizes the French position, writing that the French "weren't ready to authorize military options." Well, as De Villepin said in February-March, they weren't ready to authorize a military option right then-- because they wanted to give the UN inspections more time. But they might well have done so later. Later--if it seemed clear that Iraq was not complying with UNMOVIC's demands, which it never was up till March 19, 2003-- even Russia and China might have been prepared to support an attack, as well as France.
And then, at the very end, Ignatieff seems to be telling us that it is only the continued presence of US forces in Iraq that can stand between the Iraqi people and total chaos:
If he wants to save anything of his credentials as an internationalist, and not just the "liberal imperialist" that he seems to be from many parts of this text, Ignatieff should spell out clearly that the US cannot and should not continue to rule Iraq alone; the UN must be brought in.
Equally, the US must itself be brought much more firmly back into accepting the responsibilities and upholding the rules of the UN.
Ignatieff, however, says neither of these things. In my view he has a lot more thinking to do than he shows evidence of here--about what the whole Iraq affair reveals about the US, and what this whole sorry record means for the future of Iraq, the US, and the world.
I have been cerebrating quite hard on writing the book on Violence and its Legacies. At least, that's how it feels to me.
Last Wednesday, as part of that work, I posted up here Martha Minow's list of 8 meta-tasks that societies might think they need to accomplish (and to prioritize) in the aftermath of atrocious violence. I invited readers who had lived in post-atrocity societies to comment on the list. Nobody did, which was a bit depressing. Maybe I cast the invitation too tightly. Does anyone out there have any comments?
Anyway, I've been writing about Mozambique. Oh, where on earth to start?? I have so much incredibly rich material from my two (admittedly short) visits to the country and from all my reading!
But then I thought, Helena, you've got these three very diverse situations you're studying. (Mozambique 1992, Rwanda and RSA 1994: for details of the whole project go here.) You need to find a way to explore that diversity in an analytically fruitful way rather than let it just pull the whole enquiry quite apart. ("So just what do apples and oranges have in common, Mr. Darwin?" "Funny you should ask that question, friend...")
So here's what I've come up with so far-- and really, I came to this from a writerly perspective which is one special kind of an analytical/intellectual perspective, namely: how in heck to put words, sentences, chapters etc together in a linear way that actually makes sense and reveals something worth revealing??
Maybe I need to back up. (As you can see, I'm not always good at this "linear" thing.) My big concern here-- and the reason that I think that you JWN readers and all your friends should all be totally riveted by my project--is that truly atrocious inter-group conflicts never come from nowhere. They always come from somewhere. (Duh!) Therefore, a goodly part of the project to prevent future atrocious conflict should focus on situations that have been deeply conflicted and have shown atrocious conflict in the past, and to try to minimize the chances that that earlier conflict and violence don't get iterated in one way or another.
So I'm looking at those three case studies, all of which concern conflict-termination efforts that took place around a decade ago; and I'm trying to figure out the effectiveness from today's perspective of the mechanisms those societies used as they tried to defuse all the potentially explosive legacies (political, cultural, social, psychological, etc) that the earlier violence might have left them with.
Okay, so the apples and oranges issue: how to deal with it?
Here's what I'm proposing doing. I have one chapter that "describes" the relevant aspects of each of the three situations. (Hey, or possiby more than one chapter for each, but I do need to keep this project under some discipline... So let's say one chapter each for now?) What I have figured that I need to do, if the project is to have much intellectual unity/utility is to look at the same sets of questions in each of these chapters. That will, I hope, provide a sturdier base for the kinds of analytical questions I'll be looking at in later chapters.
Okay, I know this isn't methodological rocket-science. But I have been pursuing this project sort of intuitively, and mainly on my own, all along. And I was quite pleased today when I was doing some forward mapping work for the Mozambique chapter and I suddenly realized, as a writer, what I needed to be doing here.
So here are the five sets of issues I'll be looking at for each case:
2. The nature of the conflict during which the atrocities were committed. (Was it primarily a contest between easily identifiable, pre-existing kinds of human groups, or was it more clearly "just" political? Was it dyadic or multi-sided? Were the tensions primarily internal to the society in question or was there a large external role in stoking/perpetuating them?)
3. The state of the society at the time of conflict termination. (What internal cultural resources did it retain for peacebuilding and reconciliation? What level of infrastructural and financial resources did it have? ...)
4. The circumstances of conflict termination. (Was the end of the conflict negotiated, or imposed by one side by force? [If negotiated: Was it negotiated before the UN's establishment of its first ad-hoc tribunal in February 1993? Was it negotiated under extrenal auspices, if so whose?] What roles other than sponsoring negotiations did any outside actors play during conflict termination? Was conflict termination explicitly linked to any democratization plan? ... )
5. And then finally, we come up to my "main" variable here, which is What approach did the post-conflict government or other actors adopt in order to try to handle the painful legacies of the earlier conflict; and how successful was it?
Well, who knows? Maybe this approach will work out well and result in a useful and readable book. Maybe it won't; and I'll end up composting (in an intellectual sense as well as, perhaps, a literal sense) much of what I've done so far. If so, so be it... But I do feel for now that I've hit on a bit of a Eureka moment regarding how to get this darn' book organized and written.
A letter from Chuck Fager at Quaker House, Fayetteville NC
Dear Friend,
I'm writing you today to express my deep concern about the campaign being mounted on "FreeRepublic.com", a militantly conservative website, against the large peace rally we're planning in Fayetteville on March 20, the anniversary of the Iraq invasion.
Quaker House, you may recall, is a faith-based project that does peace work and counsels soldiers and sailors seeking discharges from the military. It has been pursing this mission here in Fayetteville for 35 years since its founding in 1969.
Quaker House is part of a coalition preparing for this march and rally. We believe this will be the largest peace gathering in Fayetteville since May 17 1970. On that day several thousand protesters, including hundreds of GIs, gathered in a city park, to hear Jane Fonda and other speakers denounce the Vietnam War.
That 1970 rally was peaceful, but the aftermath wasn't.
Three nights after that rally, on May 20, 1970, the original Quaker House was firebombed, and had to be abandoned...
When I read the many false statements on Free Republic about our plans for our March 20 peace rally, that unsolved firebombing is something I can't forget. Similarly inflammatory rhetoric was aimed against peace protests then too. We're going to gather in the same park, only a few blocks from where Quaker House is now.
As local liaison for the march steering committee, I have kept in regular contact with Fayetteville police about our plans, as well as the FreeRepublic efforts. The police have been professional and cooperative, and we're confident they will be there to protect our rights, and theirs.
At the March 20 rally, the program will prominently feature veterans and military family members, to underline our message that calling for an end to the Iraq war and occupation shows real support for U.S. troops and their families in a very difficult time.
For that matter, we have no objection to a peaceful FreeRepublic counterprotest in Fayetteville. They should be as free to express their views as we are. But the numerous slanders and falsehoods being spread about our rally on FreeRepublic are very disturbing to me, as is the ominous tone of many posts.
We'll feel safest here if there is a large turnout on March 20. So we're calling on all those who believe in free expression and peace to come and join us. Help us deliver our positive message to the servicemen and women at Ft. Bragg and elsewhere, let them know we support them and their families, we want them safe and together. On March 20 we want to recognize their courage and sacrifice, dedication that is being tragically wasted in an illegal war and occupation.
Come and help us demonstrate to our neighbors in Fayetteville, and to our government, that the way to show real support for the troops is by ending the war and bringing them home now. Let's also show those who wish we would simply disappear in silence that just as in 1970, harassment and intimidation will not succeed.
Keep us in your prayers, and I hope to see you here on March 20.
And if this message speaks to you, I ask you to pass it on to others who may find it useful.
Thanks and peace,
Chuck Fager
www.quakerhouse.org
- - - - - - - - - -
Several FreeRepublic allegations are excerpted below. They are untrue, and some are also menacing.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1078193/posts
JWN reader Maria, from Madrid, has posted a very moving Comment on last night's post.
Please, everyone read it.
Dear Maria, thanks for connecting with us and describing that wonderful interpersonal solidarity as you did, on what must have been such a terrible day for you.
... It is not only Spanish people who feel they were all on that train. I feel I was, too.
I have only been in Madrid once. I'm almost certain I rode the trains there. It was March 1993. I had been in Cuenca helping to organize the first-ever meeting between human-rights activists from Israel, Arab countries, Palestine, and Turkey. The meeting was very, very moving. (Cuenca had been a center for the Spanish Inquisition, a fact that kind of helped bring all our participants together.)
Afterwards, I had a day or two to unwind in Madrid. I went of course to see Picasso's Guerníca. I stood in front of it crying. Tears literally poured down my chest.
My friend Sylvia Escobar, who'd helped to organize the meeting, had told us how Picasso had said he'd allow the painting to return to Spain only after Spain became democratic-- and how its return in 1981 had given so many Spanish people the confirmation that this was really at last happening...
It took 44 years for Picasso's hopeful dream to be fulfilled. But it happened.
Maria, we are all with you, your family, and your community.
How ghastly, how world-shattering for Madrilenos today's multiple bomb attacks were.
It is still quite unclear if these were Basque radicals, or Islamist extermists, or some new coalition between those forces.
What struck me on the BBC TV news tonight, after all the grisly footage and anguished interviewees in Madrid, were scenes of a massive silent gathering of people in downtown Bilbao. They looked so thoughtful, so sad. In their just silent getting-together, they seemed clearly to be repudiating those in their midst who might have (as I assume they judged) committed those outrages.
If it was indeed Basques who did it, and if that repudiation in Basque-land was really so widespread, then surely some Basque people will start to give some tips or leads to the police.
Here's a link to my column in Thursday's Christian Science Monitor. I had to do huge rewrite right up against deadline, for reasons I shan't go into here. So it's a little ragged. Plus the headline they put on is a tad ambiguous...
Oh Helena, just stop explaining and apologizing. Just let the people just read it and decide for themselves.
Next installment next week there. I've already talked with them about doing at least two columns in April on the Rwanda and S. Africa decennials. And today I heard from PBS 'Frontline', which wants me to do something for a big special they're putting together about Rwanda for April 1st. That's good.
Today, I got back seriously into doing what I should have been doing for ALL of the past year: writing my book about post-atrocity policies with special reference to three countries in Africa. Here is a link to the project of which this book will be the principal product.
All this Middle East stuff has been WAYS too distracting.
I have all this great material from the work I've done on the Africa book. Today I organized and fussed around with all the material I have for the Mozambique chapter, so tomorrow I can start writing it.
The more I have thought about this book, the more I have decided that the list that Harvard Law Prof. Martha Minow produced in 2000, of "meta-tasks" that societies struggling to escape from atrocious violence need to prioritize among, should form a major organizing principle for it. Not that I totally agree with Martha's list. I would have drawn up a slightly different list (and probably shall, in the "Conclusion" to the book.)
But hers is an excellent starting point, a good object for the book's interrogation. In the hope that some of you folks out there who read JWN might have your own experiences of having lived in post-atrocity societies, maybe some of you have some ideas on the value of her list?
Here it is:
1. Overcome communal and official denial of the atrocity; gain public acknowledgment.
2. Obtain the facts in an account as full as possible in order to meet victims' need to know, to build a record for history, and to ensure minimal accountability and visibility of perpetrators.
3. Forge the basis for a domestic democratic order that respects and enforces human rights.
4. Promote reconciliation across social divisions; reconstruct the moral and social systems devastated by violence.
5. Promote psychological healing for individuals, groups, victims, bystanders, and offenders.
6. Restore dignity to victims.
7. Punish, exclude, shame, and diminish offenders for their offenses.
8. Accomplish these goals in ways that render them compatible rather than antagonistic with the other goals.*
----
* Martha Minow, "Hope for Healing" in Rotberg, Robert I., and Dennis Thompson, eds., Truth v. Justice : The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), p. 253.
Happy International Women's Day to all my women and men readers!
This is truly a good day to think about the position of women in society-- in all societies, and in the world.
I'm reading the UN's Human Development Report for 2001, the most recent issue that I have to hand. On "Gender Empowerment Issues" the US is ranked 10th, behind--in rank order--Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Canada, New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany, and Australia. Personally, I find that being behind Australia, with what I think of as its macho culture, and Germany, with its echoes of Kinder, Küche, Kirche, fairly shocking. (UK = #16.)
But more to the point, I urge all of you to head on over to Yvette Lopez's great blog, "A Taste of Africa", and read this March 7th post. In it, Yvette, a Filipina community organizer who's doing some skill-sharing in Somaliland with Somali counterparts, describes some of the planning for International Women's Day that she got involved in with a women's group in Gabiley District.
Ya know, I've always enjoyed reading Yvette's blog, and I have a link to it up on my Main page here on JWN. But today, reading that post, I thought, Wow, Yvette is not only an extraordinary, spunky, and inspiring individual-- she also has a real talent as an engaging and vivid writer in English.
(Yvette, how many languages do you speak?)
So head on over there, and leave her and her Somali friends a Comment! I'm going to.
For millions of people in southern and central Africa, April 1994 was a very momentous month; and the ten-year anniversary of it is coming up.
In Rwanda, at the beginning of the month, President Habyarimana's plane was brought down, setting into train the long-planned, long-prepared horrors of the country's anti-Tutsi genocide. During the thirteen weeks that followed, some 14% of the country's entire population was wiped out: around 800,000-1,000,000 people killed. Eighty percent of the dead were Tutsis, the rest, Hutus who tried to shield them or otherwise to resist the hate-fueled bloodlust of the killers.
In South Africa, meanwhile, April 1994 was a month of hopes laced with great trepidation and tension as the country made the last preparations for its first-ever democratic election, scheduled for the end of the month. Everyone was wondering: Would the Inkatha Freedom Party participate, or would it try to make the country ungovernable and thereby force the postponement or cancellation of the election? And then, there was the threat of disruption from the White extremists, who also had good connections in the country's security forces....
In South Africa, the negotiations over the terms on which the security forces would continue to provide security for the elections continued until the second or third day of the elections themselves... It came that close to not working out... In the end, the ANC and its allies had to commit to providing some form of amnesty for perpetrators of apartheid-era atrocities, in return for having the elections conducted under conditions of general (though not total) public security.
I'm thinking, what do I want to do this April to mark these two, very important anniversaries-- each of which, moreover, has a completely different content?
They are linked in one troubling and slightly gruesome way. Nearly all the accounts of how the genocide unfolded in Rwanda stress that in March and April 1994 the attention of the worldwide media and of analysts of African affairs in important western capitals was nearly all, at that time, focused further south, on the cliffhanging negotiations still underway in South Africa... Nobody was really paying sufficient attention to what was happening in Rwanda--either in the days immediately after the plane downing, or throughout those weeks before it, when preparations for the genocide were already clearly well underway.
One lesson some people in the international community took from that was that what was needed--for Rwanda, as for other countries in which there seem to be many preconditions present for a rapid escalation of inter-group violence--was some form of dedicated "early warning system".
One attempt to provide such an early-warning system came with the creation of the "International Crisis Group". The President and CEO of the ICG is former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, and the Chair of his Board is former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari. The ICG has established a solid track record of doing good, regular research reports on "crisis-prone" areas. Last fall, it started publishing a new "product": a special, monthly watch list of countries that needed special attention.
this new ICG product, named "Crisiswatch" is clearly meant to have some predictive value. Oh, they are brave folks, over at ICG. They started publishing their "crisiswatch" lists back on September 1, 2003. Here's what they were predicting back then:
Conflict Risk Alert
Cote D'Ivoire Ethiopia/Eritrea, Israel/Occupied Territories, Iraq, Nepal, North Korea, Sudan.
Conflict Resolution Opportunity
Burundi, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan.
I guess the ICG folks got the message pretty rapidly. from "CrisisWatch No. 2", published October 1, 2003 onwards, they haven't double-sided themselves like that again. For what it's worth, here's the analogous "Watch List" for March 2004:
Haiti, Sudan
Conflict Resolution Opportunity
Cyprus, Sudan
Another response to the demonstration, post-April 1994, of the need for "early warning systems" was the establishment, with help from the Swiss government, of Fondation Hirondelle, a foundation that tries to upgrade the indigenous media capabilities in at-risk countries and regions.
I have been particularly impressed by what I've seen of the work of Hirondelle-trained and -supported journalists in and around Rwanda. When I was in Arusha last spring, doing my field research on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, I got to know a couple of the Hirondelle journos covering the court. One of them, Gabi Gabiro, went back to Rwanda soon after to continue reporting for them from there.
He's done some really excellent reporting there, focusing both on the reactions of Rwanda's people to the work of the ICTR (which is conducted in neighboring Tanzania), and on the work of Rwanda's own Genocide Courts and gacaca courts.
This February 18 report on the gacaca courts was particularly good. So was this one, about the experiences of some of the Tutsi women who (barely) survived horrendous gang-rapes during the genocide, and who subsequently contracted HIV/AIDS.
So maybe that's the best thing I can do to commemorate the genocide: try to make some of the great reporting by Gabi Gabiro and his Hirondelle colleagues better known.
Why do we not see Hirondelle's reports published in all the major newspapers around the world? I think April 1994 is the time we should try to make that happen.
Salam/Pax, the cosmos's most famous Iraqi blogger, survived the Karbala bombing, and also has written beautifully (though oh too briefly) about the whole experience of having been there for Ashoura.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Riverbend wrote a lovely and to me very heartening short post about the after-effects of the Ashoura bombings...
I meant to get the ref to her post up here earlier. Sorry about that. I seem to recall that both she and Salam have written in the past that they have "mixed", Sunni-Shiite heritages. Maybe I'm wrong about her.
What burns me up is that in the midst of all that emotional period-- Ashoura, the bombings, their aftermath, Sunnis and Shi-ites trying to figure out how to get back together again, etc-- Paul Bremer was out there pursuing his inherently divisive agenda of trying to get everyone to sign off on his pointless little interim constitution.
Has he no cultural or emotional sensitivity? (Silly question.)
"Hot" news out of Baghdad today about the failure of the Iraqi Governing Council to sign what, it turns out, was to have been called the Transitional Administrative Law... Poignant pictures of the table all ready for the cermony with the 25 pens lined up down each side of it... The children's choir members eagerly awaiting their turn on the stage.
I'd like to quote Macbeth:
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
See this post from last Saturday (Feb. 28th), in which I argued that the attempt to ram through this law right now was "illegal... pointless and diversionary... and divisive."
So let's hope they quit banging their collective heads against that particular brick wall once and for all. Let's hope they turn instead to the playbook so beautifully sketched out in the report that Lakhdar Brahimi presented to Kofi Annan last week.
The focus there is on how credible, legitimate elections can be organized in a country in a situation as complex as Iraq's, in order to start to generate a credible, elected national leadership there.
That national leadership will then, at some point down the pike, deliberate on the issue of the Constitution. And on the Status of Forces Agreement (if any) with the US. And on federalism, and the role of women, and everything else.
Who gets to run the country in the meantime?
The USG has now stated clearly that it wants to abdicate all of its responsibilities as occupying power as of June 30. (Though actually, the matter is not quite as simple as that.)
But given that statement of intent to "abdicate", and in the absence of a legitimate national government, only the UN can offer some veil of legitimacy, or "recognition", to a transitional administration. And that transitional admionistration really doesn't need a special new set of laws rushed into force at this point as a basis on which to operate. (The IGC has muddled along without any such new basic code in place, up until now.)
But at least, the UN--unlike the Bushies--has a decent, workable plan for generating a legitimate national leadership in Iraq within the next year.
Of course it won't be easy. But having or not having that cobbled-together little Transitional Administrative Law in place makes, I submit, very little difference at all to the essentials of the situation.
Samuel Huntington, Mr. "Clash of Civilizations", has his knickers in a twist once again. This time, it's over the alleged "threat" that Hispanic immigrants pose to "America's identity, value, and way of life."
Writing the lead piece in the latest issue of Foreign Policy mag, Huntington twitters on about the fact that this wave of Hispanic immigration is unlike any other earlier waves of immigration in that it threatens to swamp the existing culture of the country. (H'mm, wonder if the native Americans feel this is so unprecedented?)
"The use of both languages [English and Spanish] could become acceptable in congressional hearings and debates and in the general conduct of government business," he harrumphs.
He writes of the possible or probable transformation of the U.S. into a bilingual country that it, "would not only revolutionize the United States, but it would also have serious consequences for Hispanics, who will be in the United States but not of it."
Whatever that means.
One of the few endearing things about this article is the great title that the FP team --led by Hispanic editor and publisher Moisés Naím--have put on it: "José, can you see?"
Anyway, let's hope that Sam H either has a pre-school grandchild, or reads the Washington Post Style section as assiduously as I do. Because right there, in the lead article, is a great antidote to such fear-mongering. It's a piece by Jennifer Frey about the enormous appeal to the pre-school and elementary-age crowd of a feisty young bilingual TV heroine called "Dora the Explorer".
Well, I could fall for the name, for starters.
The piece is about the general Dora phenom, and it's also about the palpable excitement at a live "Dora" show given in DC's Warner Theater. (The "original", Nickelodeon version of Dora is a cartoon character.) Here's what Frey writes:
"Dora the Explorer" has since grown so popular that the network recently surpassed $1 billion in merchandising sales of Dora-related products. In the preschool demographic, Dora sells more footwear than Barbie. She sells more pajamas than Pooh. She sells more Band-Aids than Spider-Man, and she even tops those Disney princesses -- Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella -- when it comes to children's apparel. The Dora Popsicle is Good Humor's bestseller...
Dora happens to be Latina. And bilingual. Not that kids seem to notice much. Or, more to the point, not that kids care. Ask what color Dora is, and they'll say things like "she has a pink shirt." To them, Dora is just a 7-year-old girl who spends her days embarking on adventures with her friend Boots the monkey and evading the evil fox Swiper . . . all the while effortlessly switching between English and Spanish.
And by the way, Sam, you ever tried reading the proceedings of South Africa's democratic parliament? They have something like a dozen official languages there, and MPs have the right to speak in any one of them. Some of those languages don't even use the Roman script... But they manage. In fact, they get along just fine with it all.
I have a little theory here, as it happens. My little theory is that the era of monolingualism is really just a tiny blip in the whole march of human history: the blip that corresponds, in some limited parts of the world, to the consolidation of the monolingual nation-state. Benedict Anderson and all that.
But in most parts of the world, even today, people are not monolingual. Go to Africa, or Asia, or much of Latin America, and people as a matter of course and daily habit switch easily between three, four, five, or six different languages. And now, in Europe, the former, often strictly policed monolingualism has been replaced by a high degree of fluency in, and switching between, anywhere between two and five language.
That will-- I hope--be the future for all of us. It's not difficult; it doesn't have to undermine democracy; indeed, it often can enhance it. Heck, there are things I only know how to do in French, Arabic, or Lebanon's inimitable Frarabic. Like natural childbirth or discussing car repairs.
So Sam, why don't you do yourself a favor and start playing with and listening to your grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Greet them with a friendly "¡Hola!" Ask them what they think of Dora.
I think this would do a lot more for your general state of wellbeing than sitting around looking for signs that "America as we know it" is about to fall apart. You would no longer have to comb through the works of Robert Kaplan in order to find the one source he quotes who "proves" some part of your thesis. That would be "Alex Villa, a third-generation Mexican American in Tucson, Arizona," whom Kaplan quotes as saying that, "he knows almost no one in the Mexican community of South Tucson who believes in 'education and hard work' as the way to material prosperity and is thus willing to 'buy into America'."
And you think that that scraping of the barrel of anecdotalism is evidence of anything at all??
How about the evidence of your own eyes and ears, Sam? Who is it who does the yardwork in your neighborhood? Who is it that does most of the scut work on construction crews? Who pulls the graveyard shift at the local Macdonalds? And those folks "don't believe in hard work"??
Gimme a break.
I'm off to find me a tape of "Dora'. This is something I knew nothing about before I read today's piece in the WaPo Style section. Is this a great country, or what?
Iraq, Haiti, Israel-Palestine, the world... Everywhere, the failure of the Bush team's foreign-policy approach is quite evident.
Now, the Democratic Party has a candidate. But it is not enough for John Kerry simply to criticize Bush's foreign-policy approach. Strikes me that to be fully persuasive Kerry also needs to get out there and promulgate a clear alternative to the Bushies' approach.
For example:
Where the Bushies advocate untrammeled U.S. unilateralism, Kerry should advocate a thoughtful attempt not just to re-engage seriously with international institutions, but beyond that, a commitment to making those institutions inclusive and accountable to the peoples of the world-- and to making them effective in resolving the problems of the world.
Where the Bushies advocate military solutions to almost every problem overseas--including those that evidently require a completely different set of tools-- Kerry should advocate a robust commitment not just to pursuing non-military means to address the world's problems, but also to building up the U.S.'s and the world's "arsenal" of such non-military means.
A change in mindset like this would have many implications at the level of concrete policies. (We can discuss that more, later.) But what I am afraid of is that, instead of getting out there and proposing a bold and clear alternative to the Bushies' approach, Kerry might end up just suggesting nips and tucks around the edges of the existing policies. That would, I feel, concede far too much validity to the arrogant, U.S.-uber-alles worldview that the Bushies seem to take as a given.
Yes, the U.S. is fine country, with many millions of fine people and some fine institutions and ideals. But no, imho, it is not the single pinnacle of human achievement at this point in human history. It has imperfections. On a number of important scores, other countries do a lot better. We can learn from them. We in the U.S. can gain a lot through being willing to engage in active and respectful cooperation with people from other countries, people from other cultures...
Can Kerry get out there and start saying all this in a persuasive way to the American people? I hope so! For starters, he does have a fair bit of multi-culturalism right there in his own intimate family: a Jewish grandfather, French cousins, a Latina wife. But it's not just about personal biography. It's about vision. And the kind of vision I'm talking about really means taking on quite a lot of the shibboleths of American culture that are generally far too little examined...
Like the obsessive belief in unconstrained individualism, whether at the level of persons or of nations. Like the alleged "value" to the nation of our bloated military forces and equally bloated defense industries. (Just imagine if 80 percent of those well-trained people and government resources had been put into building national and running elements of national infrastructure like roads, schools, and hospitals, instead. What would our economy and our society have looked like now?)
You think these are tough arguments to make? And a tough time to try to make them?
I'm not so sure about that. Look at the victory the British Labour Party won--against Winston Churchill-- in the elections of 1945. The British Tommies who had gone over into Europe, suffering huge losses and hardships as they advanced, had along the way learned advanced lessons in power, politics, and what it is that makes the world work. Across the board, their horizons had been stretched; they had met people from different cultures, and from parts of the UK itself that they might never have visited before. They knew, better than anyone, who had done the real hard work of winning the war. And it wasn't Wuinston Churchill, sitting in his famous bunker in Whitehall...
So they came home and voted in droves against Churchill, and for Labour-- the party that offered them a credible hope for a better future. One key aspect of that alternative vision: the promise of Britain's first-ever National Health Service, an institution that I grew up with in the 1950s and that I still revere as an essential part of my "British-ness".
(Even Maggie Thatcher, during the height of her anti-government rampages of the 1980s and early 1990s, never dared to touch the core of the NHS!)
Have the US soldiers now cycling their way back from Iraq been undergoing any similar kind of political epiphany? I don't know the big picture. But there's much evidence that for many individual service members and their families, a kind of rapid lesson in the falsity of the neo-cons' promises has certainly been getting underway...
That's why we need Kerry, the man who at a young age understood in his gut the arrogance, stuipdity, and sheer human cost involved in any attempt to impose America's will on another country seems to me to be an ideal person to put forward an alternative vision that does not rely on such a bullying approach in international affairs.
What about it, John?
I am just saddened beyond words by today's bombings in Kerbala and Kazimiya (Baghdad).
There is something particularly sickening about people launching such horrific attacks at times of particular religious/community significance. I recall the recent dual attacks against the Iraqi Kurdish leaders during their celebration of Nowruz-- and also, a couple of years ago, in Israel, the suicide bombing against the families celebrating Pesach in the Park Hotel in Netanya.
Enough! Enough!
Regarding the Nowruz bombings and the latest attacks, one can only up to this point speculate whether the same person/organization is beyond both sets of incidents, and if so who that might be. I seem to recall the Kurds had found a suspect?
This is all so eerily reminiscent for me of the early days of the Lebanese civil war in April, May, and June of 1975, which I lived through from day to day. None of us knew what was coming next.
In those days, the "tinder" for conflagration was everywhere present in terms of old resentments, etc, etc. Plus there was no effective state apparatus that could guarantee public security. (Many Lebanese people have always had a strong anti-government cast to their thinking, and the state there had been kept weak and impotent by design.) But there were definitely foreign hands stirring things up, as well. Certainly the Israelis were active, building up their ties with some of the Maronite extremists who wanted to eradicate the Palestinians' political/military presence in Lebanon. But the Palestinians themselves, the Syrians, Iraqis, Saudis, and all other regional and world powers were also all eager to pursue their own ends inside Lebanon at that time....
That's what happens when you don't have a functioning state: everyone else from the neighborhood and from far beyond piles in and treats the country and its existing divisions like a football field on which they can kick around their own private grudges over the corpses of the country's people.
So I weep for the Shi-ites, I weep for the Kurds, I weep for all Iraqis. My special hope/prayer for them all is that they can find some way, with or without the help of outside parties, to (re-)build a decent and working national compact among themselves that will provide a strong foundation for the working Iraqi state which is the only institution that, at the end of the day, can provide the continuing atmosphere of public security that all of the world's peoples need.
Here's a little fragment from my recent trip to Israel/Palestine that I wanted to share.
I was sitting with a colleague at Bir Zeit University who'd been telling me about the Islamic List having recently swept to (yet another) victory in the Student Council elections. I enquired if I could have a quick talk with one of these student leaders; and soon thereafter a very interesting young man came by.
In the course of the conversation, he expressed support for the continuation of the "martyrdom operations" (amaliyat istishhadiya), also known in the west as suicide bombings, that Hamas and Islamic Jihad resumed after the failure of last summer's hudna (truce).
I put to him something an Israeli friend told me once, namely that when there are bombing attacks against Israeli soldiers, the general effect is to turn the Israeli public against the policies of their government, "since soldiers are seen as carrying out the policies of the government; but they are also our own sons"; whereas when there are bombing attacks against Israeli civilians, the general effect is to cause Israeli society to rally more strongly around the policies of the government...
"No," he said. "The Israelis only understand the language of force! We have to punish them all till they end the occupation."
Note the extent to which this argument mirrors one heard frequently in Israel, to the effect that, "The Palestinians only understand the language of force! We have to punish them all until they stop defying us... "
"But look!" I told the young man. "Look at your own society! What happens when the Israelis punish the whole community here? With all the closures, and the house demolitions, and the Wall, and everything else. Does that make Palestinians become more flexible and willing to give in to Israel's demands? No, of course it doesn't. It makes people here angrier, and more determined to stick to their demands. Aren't I right?"
"H'mm," he said. "Well, yes, but-- that's different."
Actually, I wish I'd had more time to talk with that young man, and with many more Islamist Palestinian activists. From conversations I've had with Palestinian Islamists in the past, and from my more recent indirect studies of their situation, I know they are not irrational people. They have a worldview very different from that of many people in the west. All the more reason, then, to talk with them, to discuss those those differences, and figure out how we can all come to agreement on living together in a way that works.
I also, by the way, urge (and have tried to practise) talking to extremists from the Israeli settler and pro-settler movement. Each and every one of them is a person entitled to consideration and respect.
I do know from my past experiences in Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation work, that the theory that "if you can only get people talkng together", then everything will work out fine, is often proven quite false. In fact, in the project I was helpding to direct, back in the early 1990s, it was quite evident that for some participants, "to know members of the other side" was definitely not a recipe for starting to "love" them. In some cases, quite the opposite occurred, indeed!
All the more reason, then, for us who are not direct stakeholders in the situation to try to keep lines open to all parties, and to work quietly and calmly to broaden all the circles of dialogue that do exist. I consider that the current US-led campaign to try to delegitimize the idea of contacts with any Islamist groups in the Palestinian community, as elsewhere, is both very one-sided (do they also urge the cutting of all contacts with the settler extremists?) and, quite evidently, counter-productive.
Look back, after all, at the record of last summer's hudna. Who was it who was able to "deliver" that significant (even if not quite total) degree of self-control to the hotheads in the Palestinian community? It was not tired old Yasser Arafat. It was the leaders of Hamas and Jihad.