Unfolding tragedy in Palestine

I haven’t written much here recently about the ever unfolding tragedy in Palestine. Partly because I find it so painful. I have so many, very good friends who have made huge sacrifices in their lives (sometimes, of their lives) in pursuit of the goal of an independent and basically secular Palestinian state. I have felt their pain, even at times when the vast majority of people here in the US seemed quite insensitive to it, and seemed quite happy to deride any Palestinian nationalist longings as “terroristic” from the get-go. The first year I was living here in the US, in 1982, was the summer the Israeli armed forces were battling the Palestinians and their allies in West Beirut. The summer of the Sabra and Shatila camp massacres. I had lived in Beirut until just the previous year. Many of my friends were trapped in the grotesque, extremely violent siege that the IDF– under Sharon’s orders– maintained around the city.
Jane Fonda, once the icon of the US left, went to Lebanon and was prominently photographed posing with some IDF soldiers on top of their tank, that was perched above West Beirut, ready to fire. That’s how strongly most members even of the US “left” supported the Israelis (and opposed the Palestinians) at that time.
I’ve been wondering recently how to describe the current, cascading collapse of Palestinian secular nationalism. It’s hard to do. There are so many causes.
In one real sense, Palestinian secular nationalism– in the form in which it became incarnated back in the 1960s– has been on life support since at least 1993. The current collapse is just the end (or maybe not quite the end) of a very painful and long-drawn-out decay…

Continue reading “Unfolding tragedy in Palestine”

Quaker prison ministry, California

I found a wonderful blog today, written by a Quaker from Sacramento, California who pursues a QiGong-based prison ministry inside some of the state’s biggest and most inhumane prisons. It’s called Qigong Prison Ministry. (How hard is that?)
The blog’s author, Judy Tretheway, writes in a very straightforward, intimate , and inspiring way about her work. I particularly enjoyed the following recent posts:

Also, this one from November, which says:

    The Ultimate form of Worship is Silence.
    After meditating Saturday evening, preparing for Sunday Meeting for Worship.
    I can not offer myself in a greater way
    to the service of another,
    to God,
    than to listen silently,
    setting my own ideas and needs aside,
    to wait upon their direction;
    to hold them in highest esteem,
    to be in Worship.
    To be in awe
    is to be wordless.
    Not words, nor music; no scent, nor image
    can reflect God, name God or approach God.
    They are self-serving scratches
    at a keyhole so vast
    only the unbounded silence of expectant waiting
    might have a chance at opening the lock,
    that was never locked,
    And open the door
    that has always been open.
    Come put your silence into the lock,
    Open the door into the heart of God,
    Lay yourself in the doorway.
    Offer all that you might ever be
    And always have been.

Thanks so much for everything you do, and everything you have put on this blog, Judy.

Kurds acting independent

So now the Iraqi Kurds are reportedly going to be welcoming tour groups from Israel. Between that and their conclusion of a successful oil-exploration deal with Norway’s DNO oil company, the Kurdistan “regional” authority sure seems to be acting like an independent state already, doesn’t it?
Reidar Visser has a good analysis of some of the constitutional issues involved in the oil-exploration deal, here. As he notes, Article 110 of the (still by no means finalized) Iraqi constitution states that,

    “The federal and the producing regional and governorate authorities shall jointly [italics added, ma‘an in the Arabic] devise the necessary strategic policies for the development [italics added] of the oil and gas wealth in a way that achieves the highest possible benefit for the Iraqi people…” Additionally, the question of resource ownership remains unresolved altogether. The studiously ambiguous article 108 simply reads, “oil and gas are the property of the entire Iraqi population, in all the regions and governorates”.

Regarding control over borders, I am pretty near certain that the constitution still reserves that to the central government.
But what central government, you might ask?

Comment-posting problem solved

I think that the tech advisor and I (principally him) have now solved the problems JWN commenters have been experiencing over the past week. I’m not sure if your comments will actually publish onto the blog any faster than they used to. But at least, they should not now give the impression of “timing out” by coming back at you with error messages. And the counting thingy should be working properly.
Thanks so much, TA! Now have a good and safe time for the rest of your snowboarding vacation.

Fight over Iraq election in new phase

As I noted here, back on Tuesday, one of the “meta-narratives” of what’s going on in Iraqi politics these days is the contest over the validity of the election conducted on December 15.
This contest has seen two quick new developments in the past couple of days. Yesterday, Craig Jenness, the Canadian national who’s been heading the UN’s election-support team in Iraq, declared publicly, at a press conference in Baghdad, that: “The United Nations is of the view that these elections were transparent and credible.”
Well, that sure sounded definitive. Case closed, you might think?
Think again.
Today, AP’s Patrick Quinn has reported that a new international group will now be traveling to Iraq to review the elections. The new group (or indeed, perhaps it isn’t totally new?), known as the the International Mission for Iraqi Elections (IMIE) will reportedly include two representatives from the Arab League, one member of the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians and a respected European academic, acording to (apparently) a spokesman for the Iraqi Accordance Front, described as “Iraq’s leading Sunni Arab group.”
Quinn also wrote that IMIE already did some monitoring of the elections, in Baghdad, where it had been “assisted by monitors from countries of the European Union working under IMIE’s umbrella.”
He wrote that the IMIE review team,

    will travel to Iraq at the invitation of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. An official for the commission, Safwat Rashid, said a review could “evaluate what happened during the elections and what’s going on now. We are highly confident that we did our job properly and we have nothing to hide.”
    … The invitation to review the process and about 1,500 complaints lodged by candidates and parties was welcomed by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who said “these experts will be arriving immediately and we are ready to assist them, if needed.”

I find this interesting at a number of levels. The dispute over the validity of the election process is the main political issue, right now, that divides Iraq’s Sunni Arabs from its Shiite Arabs. Most Shiite pols (and Ayatollah Sistani) have thus far insisted adamantly that the process– which gave their main party, the UIA, a strong victory– was entirely fair, and the Sunnis have contested its fairness with equal or greater vehemence.
As I noted in a comment on this JWN post, Dec. 20, the possible divergence of views between the Sunni parties and the Sadrist trend within the UIA over the validity of the elections could indeed be a factor that prevents these two trends from taking any broader joint action in the political field… And if those two trends are unable to work together, then we might as well all say goodbye to any hopes for the survival of a single Iraqi state.
The Kurds, meanwhile, are probably just as happy as anything to see this issue dividing Iraq’s large majority of ethnic Arabs into two bitterly anatagonistic factions.
The story of the new, non-UN “international election-monitoring group” is interesting, too, for what it tells us about Khalilzad’s current strategies. He has visited both Saudi Arabia and one of the small Arab Gulf countries in the past couple of days– I forget which. (Though you’d never know about any of that if you read only the US mainstream media, whose reporting from Iraq has been really terrible over the past couple of weeks.)
Khalilzad seems to be trying hard to bring at least some of the Iraqi Sunni political class into the political tent that he’s creating in Baghdad. That’s been really difficult, and was made harder by the fact that the Sunni pols judged that the many complaints they had lodged about election fraud with the Iraqi electoral commission had not been considered with anything like enough seriousness by the commission.
I wonder, btw, why Craig Jenness was so quick off the mark to issue his apparent “certificate of a good practice” in public yesterday? Given the chaotic security situation inside Iraq before, during, and since the election, I honestly wonder on what basis Jenness felt able to render such a speedy and near-definitive judgment on the matter? But anyway, the UN’s election-monitoring unit has been in internal chaos for the past couple of years, culminating in the abrupt termination of its Director, Carina Perelli, just a few weeks ago, on charges of gross mismanagement, so it is hard to know what actual expertise the unit still retains at this point.
So anyway, Khalilzad almost certainly helped– with the aid of his hosts in the Gulf countries he’s been visiting– to cook up the plan for the “new”, and notably non-UN, election review process. My main guess is that he’s playing desperately for time… trying to find any way possible to find a way to, (a) get some credible Sunni pols into the next government and (b) persuade the UIA to let this happen.
All the very technical business about whether there was electoral fraud or not would, I am sure, be rapidly swept under the carpet if only he could find a way to bring about the political outcome he seeks. (So much for “democracy”.)
Meanwhile, many Sunni pols have been feeling deeply deceived by the thus-far-declared results of the election. And as this report from today’s al-Hayat makes clear, the militants inside the Sunni community have been quick off the mark to deride and threaten all the Sunni pols who had argued that participating in the elections could bring the Sunni community results of some serious political value.
Basically, that article (bylined Mushriq Abbas) says that since the election results have started to come out, opinion in the Sunni community has swung strongly toward the hardliners. Abbas reported that “the Partisans of the Sunna” (which he describes as close to al-Qaeda-in-Iraq) and the “Army of the Mujaheds” (which he describes as close to the “Islamic Army”) issued their first ever joint declaration that stated derisively that “The mountain of the elections labored mightily and gave birth to a mouse!” and “Those who ran after a mirage [i.e. who took part in the elections] have ended up only as chess pieces in the hands of their masters.”
The article also says that the declaration’s authors admitted that they had agreed to suspend armed operations during the period of the elections (as he describes it, this was “in deference to the popular will”) but that now, essentially all bets were off, and all mujaheds should just once again place their lives in the hands of God (i.e., resume their armed jihad.)
… So anyway, that’s just a little part of what Khalilzad now finds himself dealing with. It would be hard for anyone to be able to find a way to persuade all the different groupings and interests that have emerged inside Iraq to come to some agreement at this point. But an American viceroy, representing a government that has been responsible for inflicting massive suffering and harm on the Iraqi Sunni community continuously over the past 33 months, is probably one of the worst-placed mediators one could imagine.

Post-election Iraq, Part 2

[I just re-arranged the order in what follows, late Wednesday. Same content though. ~HC]
The two big narratives
As I see it, there are two big mega-stories currently dominating Iraqi politics, with a lot of criss-crossing other narratives going on within each of them, as well as between them.
The two big ones are:

    (1) the continuing contest over the legitimacy of the election process itself, and
    (2) the contest within the victorious Shiite mega-list over the policies it should pursue (as well as over the linked issue of who gets which job in the new government).

Regarding the second of those narratives, JWN readers would do well to go down to this recent post, where the well-informed Norwegian researcher Reidar Vissar has now posted two additional comments that describe his own increasing understanding of the power-balances within the UIA… Bottom line there: SCIRI is actually not as strong inside the UIA as many people seem to assume. Check out Vissar’s analysis there!
Regarding the first narrative, Iyad Allawi and the Sunni parties have been very busy in recent days marshaling the forces that question the integrity of major aspects of the election process.
Those parties have formed a new coalition called Mu’tamar al-Rafideen lil-Intikhabat al-Muzawwafa (Maram– the Conference of those rejecting forged elections), that has called for a re-run of the vote in Baghdad Province and elsewhere. Maram pols recently held a planning meeting in Amman, Jordan (a significant location for them); and today they organized a demonstration in western Baghdad which drew either “at least 5,000 particiapnts” (AFP), or “more than 10,000” (AP).
I think it’s great that Sunnis, secularists, and supporters of a non-sectarian Iraqi state pursue their grievances through the means of peaceful demonstrations (and of course, the ballot-box.) I have to say, though, that on the scale of events of a similar type in Iraq since March 2003, these numbers seem pitifully low. The Sadrists have put hundreds of thousands of supporters onto the streets at the drop of a hat, a number of times; and Sistani pulled out ways more than a million back in (was it?) late 2003.
Juan Cole wrote today that the Maram gathering in Amman agreed to, “inform the Arab League Secretary General, Amr Moussa, of their demands that the election be held all over again in the provinces where widespread fraud occurred, especially in the northern cities and in Basra and Baghdad… They are also planning to write a letter to Kofi Annan.”
He also cited al-Sharq al-Awsat as reporting that Maram pols Allawi, Adnan Dulaimi, and Saleh Mutlaq had decided “to boycott parliamentary sessions in an effort to paralyze it if it will not heed their demands.”
Juan’s comment on this boycott plan was this:

Continue reading “Post-election Iraq, Part 2”

Good times at Christmas

We were planning a pretty quiet Christmas, having had all the kids and their signifcant others here for Thanksgiving. We were thinking it would just be Bill, me, and our youngest, Lorna.
On December 24 I was just finishing writing this JWN post when who should come clattering up the stairs to my office but my elder daughter and her husband, who had just made the 7-hour drive from New York to come here for a surprise visit. How fabulous! We spent three days luxuriating in being together.
Saturday evening we had some good friends over and played some excellent rounds of charades after dinner. Sunday, the five of us opened our presents under the tree … I dashed off alone to Quaker meeting, which was a good one… we all spent a bunch of time cooking together and eating. (One vegetarian, two fishetarians, two carnivores… the food just piles up.)
We also spent a bunch of time doing crosswords (the daughters), competing at cut-throat Perquackey (Bill and I), and playing a little more gently a couple of good free-form Scrabble variants that we all enjoy. I think we all prefer the free-form variants over the real thing at this point. Real Scrabble just feels too darn ponderous.
I even decided to put good instructions for them over at Wikipedia. Here and here.

Solstices

Many people have noted the synchronicity of Christmas with other midwinter festivals and observances. And yes, there is something good and hopeful for people living a distance from the Equator as we come to the point in the year when the days, which have been drawing ominously shorter, start once again to lengthen.
We experienced that in New Zealand, too, this year, back in June.
But thinking about this made me think about the general, highly inequitable power relationships over the past 350 years between (some of the) people who are indigenes of nothern climes and just about all of those who indigenes of southern climes. These inequitable relations run across the entire arena of human affairs including economics, politics, and culture…
What kind of midsummer observances are indigenous southerners marking at this time of year?
And then, there are the whole swathe of cultures that grew up fairly close to the Equator, where changes in day-length or sun-angle are less important than the cycle of rainy seasons, monsoons, etc. Those don’t really track with solstices at all, though they generally have their own annual rhythm. I wonder what kinds of festivals and observances the various indigenous cultures of those climes would be marking right now?
Anyway, we’re now coming up to the (Roman-origined) New Year, too… All of these are fine occasions to do some reflection and stock-taking, and think about our wishes and commitments for the year ahead.
This past year has seen the continued, massive perpetration of violence in many of the world’s continents, and humankind’s continued engagement in practices that are highly inequitable among the world’s different peoples. But it also started to see some early checking of the exercise of unilateral U.S. power and the emergence within the US citizenry of new questioning about the nature, uses, and abuses of that power at home and abroad. In 2006, I hope we see much more of this questioning and continued work towards the building of a worldwide movement for nonviolence and human equality.
And though we Quakers don’t stick to a fixed liturgical calendar, we do (as I noted earlier) tend to think at this time of year about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth… A great and gentle teacher, a proponent of nonviolence, and a consistent advocate for human equality. He must be rubbing his eyes in sheer amazement at the many terrible things that have been done in his name– over past centuries, and down into 2005, as well.

Some server problems here

We’ve been having some minor server problems here the past couple of days. If you try to post a comment you may get a “500 internal server error” message back. It’s quite probable, though, that despite that message your comment will have been posted onto the correct page successfully.
But also, the counter thingy that tells you on the front page the number of comments on each post has been failing to count the newly posted comments.
So there may be many recently posted comments on the blog that you’re not aware of. (Including, possibly, ones you may have posted yourself and gotten the “500 internal server error” message for.)
Sorry about this glitch in service. Keep posting your comments! My trusty tech advisor and I will continue trying to fix this.

Legality and the Saddam trial

Throughout many long portions of its life, Saddam Hussein’s regime had a record as a rights abuser and perpetrator of atrocities equaled by few other governments in the world. Under most circumstances I would be delighted to see a person like that not just incapacitated (by being under arrest) but also on trial, and confronted with as full as possible a record of how much sheer misery his actions had inflicted on other people.
The trial now underway in Baghdad, however, has many flaws; and not the least of these is the fact that it attempts to create an impression of lawfulness in a situation marked indelibly with the politics of “might makes right”.
The international human-rights community seems fairly deeply split over the issue of this trial. (Or is that only the way it looks from here inside the US?) Many rights advocates around the world focus on the illegality of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as a factor that has irreparably tainted this court— which is indubitably a US creation (with a tiny, supplementary input from Brits and from Iraqis)– and prevents it from having have any recognized legal standing as a rights-based body. Other rights advocates have focused more on details like the weaknesses in the IST’s due-process protections or its power of capital punishment.
Yet other rights advocates, however– and these are mainly US nationals– seem to have been so enamored with the idea of “pushing forward the practice of atrocities law” and/or with the success of the US “project” in Iraq, that they have been quite happy to leap with a single bound over all those pesky questions about the “legality” of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, or the “weaknesses” in the court’s procedures, etc, and to give their full support to the IST throughout. Some of these individuals– including, for example, Michael Scharf of Case Western Reserve University Law School in Ohio– even took on the task of providing specialized training in atrocities law for the IST’s judges and investigators, on behalf of the US occupation authorities.
The questions about the underlying legality of the court’s operations have not, however, gone away– and neither has the discussion within the community of US-based human-rights lawyers over whether this issue indeed still needs to be addressed square-on by the IST itself before the court can proceed any further with its work, or not.
Last week there was a revealing discussion of this over at “Grotian Moment“, a specialized blog in which a panel of US-based law profs discusses the Saddam Trial from time to time.
In that post I linked to there, half a dozen of the blog’s author’s discuss the question, Who Won the Battle of Wills In the December Proceedings of the Saddam Trial? Well, the post was dated Dec. 14, so they didn’t have quite all the evidence they needed at that point. But in broad terms, the court’s proceedings of yesterday and today don’t seem to have changed very much in the trial.
The most interesting parts of that discussion, imho, are the contributions made by Cherif Bassiouni, a very eminent Egyptian-American legal scholar whom I have had the privilege of working with a little bit, and Leila Sadat, a law prof who is also (I think) an Egyptian-American.
Here’s what they said:

Continue reading “Legality and the Saddam trial”