Late Monday night, Condi Rice managed to wrest the Sharon government’s agreement to an arrangement whereby the Palestinians get to control one tiny portion of Gaza’s physical interface with the outside world. This is one aspect of the land border between Palestinian Gaza and Egypt. (You’ll note that Israel is not contiguous to that border.)
Israel still gets to control the passage of all goods transiting between Gaza and Egypt. They will be diverted to a special point where the lands of the three territories all come together, where their passage will be controlled by Israel. Regarding people, however, under the new agreement they will pass through the Rafah crossing point on the Egypt-Gaza border where on the Palestinian side they will be processed by Palestinian border-control officers, but under monitoring from an EU presence.
Will Palestinians from all around the world flock to Gaza in the weeks ahead? Will Gazans stream outside to visit places they could not until recently dream of visiting?
One first thing to understand is that every single family in Gaza has many family members living elsewhere. Conditions in Gaza under 38 years of Israeli occupation have been so harsh that many young people have had to emigrate to make any kind of a living at all. They went to Egypt (sometimes), to Gulf countries (much more in the 1970s and 1980s than recently), to Jordan, Europe, the Americas… all around the world. The new prospects for families to hold reunion gatherings must be heady indeed.
Israel still, apparently, wants to maintain a blacklist of Palestinians whom it wants banned from Gaza. We’ll have to see how that works out. I am sure that there are still extensive Israeli intel networks operating, even if only clandestinely, throughout the Strip.
Condi Rice’s “spin-meisters” have tried to present her winning of Israel’s agreement on the Rafah crossing as a big and significant political achievement. It’s no such thing. It’s one single tiny item on the enormous list of tasks that remain in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking… And it has come ways too late to win much “goodwill” for the Israelis from the Palestinians. Israel withdrew from Gaza, remember, more than two months ago, and has been hanging on and hanging on with its demands over the Rafah crossing and the other crossings.
Meanwhile, there are now just two months left till the Palestinian elections. Pres. Mahmoud Abbas has sadly little time between now and then to show his people that his administration is dedicated to meeting their basic needs… For all the past two months he has been left hanging in the air by the Israelis and made to look impotent and useless.
Author: Helena
Skin peeled off
The latest revelations about torture in the “New Iraq” are really horrific. Reuters has a good (by which I mean very disturbing) account of it… Including this:
- “There were 161 detainees in all and they were being treated in an inappropriate way … they were being abused,” Hussein Kamal, a deputy interior minister, told Reuters.
“I’ve never seen such a situation like this during the past two years in Baghdad, this is the worst,” he told CNN.
“I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralyzed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies.”
The BBC’s report is much fuller. It says:
- Sunday’s discovery is hard evidence and officials believe it may be the tip of the iceberg.
There are suspicions the building may also have been used as a base for a militia called the Badr Brigade, and that such militias may have infiltrated Iraq’s security services, our correspondent adds.
“May have infiltrated” is an amazing euphemism, since what has happened in large parts of Iraq is that the US/UK occupation forces have handed off public security to various militias–including both the Badr Brigade and the Kurdish Pesh Merga– quite knowingly. (And they complain about the Lebanese government allowing a militia to operate there!)
The victims of the latest barbarity were reportedly all Sunnis.
The BBC account notes that extreme mistreatment of detainees by Iraqi security forces and their allied militias is not a new issue:
- Anne Clwyd MP, the UK government’s human rights envoy in Iraq, said she had raised such allegations with Iraqi authorities back in May.
“It is shocking what has happened,” she told Newsnight.
She said the UK had been trying to help bring about a cultural change by providing human rights training to Iraq security forces.
“After 35 years of abuse, it takes a long time for people’s mindsets to change,” she said.
Also, this:
- The security forces have faced repeated allegations of systematic abuse and torture of detainees, and of extra-judicial killings.
A report by pressure group Human Rights Watch earlier this year said methods used by Iraqi police included beating detainees with cables, hanging them from their wrists for long periods and giving electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body.
That would be this report, from January.
The 161– or, in some accounts, “more than 170”– mistreated detainees were apparently discovered by US troops, who for some reason had been searching for a missing 15-year-old youth. (People get “disappeared” in Iraq all the time. This kid must have had some powerful relatives.)
The BBC report said:
- A US soldier who carried out the raid said: “It’s not what we expected at all, we were looking for a 15-year-old boy.”
The generally well-informed Salam Pax recounts some additional gruesome details:
- It is said that there were a number of dead bodies as well in the shelter and what the report doesn’t mention is signs of power tools used on the detainees. Apparently the officer in charge of this operation has something for drills; there were holes on feet and legs. Heading this operation there is an Iraqi officer and [he] is under the direct supervision of the current minister of interior affairs (security) who us a member of SCIRI. And I don’t really [buy] the spokesman’s line that the minister of Interior Affairs had no idea of what was going on, what I heard was that the officer in charge was under direct supervision from the Minister.
The tragedy of all that’s been happening seems almost overwhelming. Large numbers of Iraqi Sunnis have been receiving barbaric treatment for many months now– at the hands of both the US forces and the Iraqi-government/Badr forces.
By the way, the BBC today quoted Pentagon spokesman Lt.Col. Barry Venable as confirming that US troops used White Phosphorus bombs in last November’s attack against Fallujah:
- “When you have enemy forces that are in covered positions that your high explosive artillery rounds are not having an impact on and you wish to get them out of those positions, one technique is to fire a white phosphorus round or rounds into the position because the combined effects of the fire and smoke – and in some case the terror brought about by the explosion on the ground – will drive them out of the holes so that you can kill them with high explosives,” he said.
There is one serious error in that report. It states that a prof at Bradford University said that WP could count as a chemical weapon “if deliberately aimed at civilians”– but the actual quote they have there from the professor doesn’t say “civilians”, it says “people”… And the worldwide Chemical Weapons ban is a ban on using CW against anyone, whether combatants or noncombatants; it doesn’t specify “civilians” at all…
But anyway, in western Iraq, and in many parts of Baghdad, Sunnis have been targeted for ourageous mistreatment. Then, on the other side, we saw the terrible tragedy of the recent, Iraqi-Sunni-perpetrated bombings in Jordan.
Violence begets violence.
Yes, there was violence inside Iraq before the US invasion of March 2003. (But actually, in the three years immediately preceding the war, not very much of it at all.)
But in March 2003, President Bush and his advisors opted for a massive escalation of violence in and against the country— and after having unleashed the “shock and awe” cataclysm of the invasion, they proceeded to dismantle the Iraqi state, thus unleashing all the demons of inter-sectarian strife.
And now this, in the “new order” they created there: Skin peeled off..
Bring the troops home. Resign. Apologise. There are no further excuses. It is not just the skin of those men screaming in pain that has been peeled off. It is also the skin of all the Bush administration’s lies about this war.
Resources on the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood
I wanted to put in a link to Anthony Shadid’s informative recent interview with Syrian MB head Ali Sadreddine al-Bayanouni (also here).
Shadid wrote:
- “Syrian society today is destroyed,” [Bayanouni] said. “The primary aim right now is to transform society into a new era where political and democratic life will be rebuilt.”
About the MB’s political plans, Shadid wrote:
- “The organization is not going to be an alternative to this regime,” [Bayanouni] said. “The alternative will be a broad-based national government to which the Muslim Brotherhood will contribute, as does any other political force.”
Among the various Syrian political factions — Islamic activists, Arab nationalists, Syrian nationalists, communists and other leftists — nearly every party has abandoned the revolutionary, generation-old notion that it alone can serve as the agent of change. The Baath Party has not; the constitution still declares it “the leading party of both the society and the state.” In Bayanouni’s words, and in a spate of declarations, the Brotherhood has forsworn that role, mirroring reforms of the group in other countries including Egypt and Jordan.
In 2002, Bayanouni published a national charter that called for a democratic state and rejected violence. In 2004, the Brotherhood disavowed the idea that “we consider ourselves to be the movement that represents all Muslims.” In the same document, it endorsed women’s rights and said it would seek only the gradual introduction of Islamic law, leaving the actual legislation to elected representatives. (Requiring women to wear the veil, segregating education or banning alcohol “are not a priority at this point,” Bayanouni said in the interview.) A year later, in a National Call for Salvation, the Brotherhood disavowed revenge for past crimes and called for political parties and free elections.
Last month, it joined secular and minority opposition groups in endorsing what was called the Damascus Declaration, a four-page manifesto hailed by a still-feeble Syrian opposition as a blueprint for an alternative to Assad’s government and a first for cooperation between secular and religious activists.
“The Muslim Brotherhood,” Bayanouni said, “is ready to accept others and to deal with them. We believe that Syria is for all its people, regardless of sect, ethnicity or religion. No one has the right to exclude anyone else.”
…
At his home in London, Bayanouni talks about returning to the alleys of Jubaila, the quarter of Old Aleppo where he grew up. His father died while in prison in 1975, his mother after he went into exile in 1979. But, he said smiling, he will visit the rest of his family. “There are relatives I don’t even know,” he said.
For some Islamic activists, years in the West radicalize them, reinforcing their alienation in a culture that’s not their own. Not Bayanouni. He said his time in exile helped him reconsider his beliefs.
“One of the things I learned,” he said, “was to accept the other.”
And in that is perhaps one of the greatest ironies of Arab politics today. To a remarkable degree, albeit with different inflections and still untested, some secular and religious activists are speaking a common language of citizenship and individual rights in the face of authoritarian governments. Bayanouni … said he wanted to see “a civil state based on democratic institutions.”
“The religion of the majority is Islam, and the ethnicity of the majority is Arab,” he said. “Those are facts on the ground, but citizenship is the base on which people should interact. Whatever is the result of the democratic process should be accepted.”
Here is the Wikipedia’s entry on the MB in Syria.
Here is a very informative mid-August interview with Bayanouni, on the Jamestown Foundation website. Nearly all the articles linked to at the top of that page are also informative.
Syrian crackdown, conference canceled
I got a sad email this morning, from a staff assistant at a reform-oriented organization in Damascus called the Tharwa Project. Just ten days ago, Dr. Samer al-Ladkany, the assistant director of Tharwa, had invited me to participate in a big conference Tharwa was organizing in Damascus under the title “”Recognizing the Multicultural Society for Successful Democratic Transitions.” Ladkany was inviting me to speak about some aspects of South Africa’s historic transition from minority-based rule to full democracy, and naturally I was pretty excited at the prospect of doing so. After all, in Syria power has for many decades now been quite disproportionately concentrated in the hands of the Alawite community that makes up roughly 11% of the national population– and it desperately needs to find a peaceful way to transition to a fully inclusive, accountable, and rights-respecting form of national rule…
In today’s email, the staff assistant wrote:
- I must ask you to put everything on hold for right now. I am very sorry, but we are having some problems here in Damascus. I am not completely sure what is going on, but I went to work today, just to find out that we have been closed down…permanently. The worst part is, I have not been able to contact the director here in Damascus.
I guess that would be Ladkany. The “big boss” at Tharwa– the organization’s founder, Ammar Abdel-Hamid– left Syria for the US around a month ago, after being warned by the security services that he should do so.
I am still hoping that ways can be found to urge Bashar al-Asad’s regime to– as I put it in this JWN post a couple of weeks ago–
- “do a Frederik De Klerk” — that is, to find ways to repair the broken fabric within his own country by opening up serious political negotiations with his political opponents from the country’s majority population.
Obviously, right now, the prospects for that happening look significantly bleaker.
The latest move against the Tharwa Project in Damascus was, sadly, fairly predictable. Last Thursday, Pres. Asad made a strongly nationalist speech in which he came out swinging against Washington, and against the Washington-pushed activities of UN investigator detlev Mehlis. Al-Hayat’s Ibrahim Hamidi interpreted what was happening as Asad “preparing Syria for the probable imposition of international sanctions.” (As reported here.)
Then on Saturday, the mukhabarat (security services) arrested Kamal Labwani, a Syrian democracy activist who had just returned to his country from the US. While in the US, Labwani met in the White House with with U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor J. D. Crouch. He also did an interview for the (US government-operated) al-Hurra TV and other media outlets.
So it definitely looks as if the regime is in a defiant, hunkering-down mode. I think that’s a great pity. The well-connected and Damascus-based Syria expert Josh Landis has written on his blog, “Syrians will put up with sanctions lite if the government moves ahead purposefully with internal reform designed to free the economy.” I largely agree with that assessment. I also think that– like the international isolation that South Africa’s apartheid regime faced in the late 1980s– Syria’s growing international isolation today might well act to help persuade people at the heart of the regime that wide-ranging internal political reform is not only a good tactic, but also, a necessary policy if the interests of their nation and their sub-national community are to be preserved.
Josh does add, it is true, “Of course, it is hard to do this when being isolated.” I would add to that, that it would be extremely hard for the Syrian regime to open up the political space that is needed for reform when it is not only the subject of very hostile intent from the USA, but also in an actual and unresolved state of war with Israel.
Well, I have a lot of other thoughts about this whole subject. I should also, probably, take the opportunity of either writing something here on JWN, or writing something new in al-Hayat, to set down some of the things I would have said at the conference in damascus, if it were held.
Yes, there is much that is parallel between the experiences of the voteless majority in South Africa under apartheid and the powerless majority in Syria under the Asads. But there are also several signal differences. One is the seeming absence of any inclusive and highly disciplined opposition party on the model of the ANC. Actually, I’m not sure if the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood might reach some of the necessary criteria (though a problem there regarding “inclusivity”.) As for the secular-liberalizing opposition networks, they all seem to me to be dominated by prima donnas and individualists. In the latter category, I’m afraid I would probably have to include the Syrian liberalizer who’s best known in Washington DC– Ammar Abdel-Hamid, the founder of the Tharwa Project…. In his blog, Abdel-Hamid has called for the opposition to build “networks, networks, networks”. (Calling for the creation of single, disciplined party or front organization would, I think, be more effective.) But even regarding “networks” he doesn’t actually seem to be very respectful of the other people who might be in such a network. In this recent post he summarily dismissed “the Syrian opposition” as being “weak and idiotic.”
Altogether, a story that is tragic at many, many levels.
Most important, now, though: What can we do to try to ensure the safety of Samer Ladkany?
Eric Marliere on the French riots
- Ace JWN commenter Christiane tells us that
Le Courrier International
has an interesting interview with a sociologist specializing in the life
of the suburbs here. She even sent us a translation.
Thanks so much, Christiane! I am really glad to have something fresh, interesting, and well-informed to put up here– especially because I have been really busy leading a real life these past couple of days. Too complex to write about here, but I’ve had many experiences that I can reflect on, over time. So without further ado…
Interview:
Religion has nothing to do with the (French) riots
To sociologist
Eric Marlière, a researcher at
the CESDIP1)
and the author,
among other books, of Young in the suburbs, diversity of biographies or
common fate?2), there is no relationship between the riots
shaking the suburbs and the fact that the young men belong to the Muslim
culture.
Q. On many occasions, these past days, in the
European media notably, we could read that the riots having burst in the
suburbs are mainly the fact of small groups of young Muslims who in this
way want to fight their personal jihad against the hated symbols of the secular
Republic. Is that true ?
A. We can’t say that.
The violences are sparked by social motives, not by religious ones, even
if many of the youth launching them are effectively
of North African origin and thus we can suppose – because there are no statistics
on this matter – that they are of Muslim religion. They are sons of immigrated
workers, frustrated by the impossibility to become workers one day by turn,
because of a social exclusion lasting twenty-thrirty years, because of discriminations
and of the racism they are suffering every days
. The fact that they are Muslims is absolutely unimportant. That’s not the
question.
Q. What kind of role are the religious Muslim authorities playing in the
riots ?
A. The
clerics tend to stay aside of the violences, they don’t take part in them,
they don’t enter in the political debate. Even the most extremists, a tiny
minority, are keeping a low profile these days, and anyway, they are marginalized
by the most part of the the Muslim population. Sometimes, the local political
leaders may ask the imams for an intervention, but they mainly want them
to use their moral authority in order to calm the youths
and to remember them that Islam condemns violence and anarchy, like
other monotheists religions.
Q. What is the youths’ profile ?
A. They aren’t thugs. The discontent is also expressed by young graduates
who would like to enter in the active life but don’t succeed because the
doors of the employement world stay closed to them. These youths
share a deep feeling of economic injustice, which crystallizes in
the riots. They feel socially insecure in
France
, as if they were an internal enemy in their own country. That’s why I think
that we aren’t facing an ethnic conflict, but a social conflict, animated
by youths of the working classes who have no future
perspectives.
Gian Paolo Accardo
__________________________
Notes
1)
http://www.cesdip.org/
The CESDIP, Centre de recherches sociologiques
sur le droit et les institutions pénales (aka Center of sociological research
about law and penal institutions) is a public academic institute engaged
both in academic teaching and research.
2) Eric Marlière « Jeunes en cité,
diversité des trajectoires ou destin commun ? » (L’Harmattan, 2005)
http://tinyurl.com/9h32q
Jordan and regional geopolitics
Jordan, location of Wednesday’s very lethal bombings at three hotels, is in many ways a highly improbable country. It was created in the post-WW-1 carve-up of that part of the previous Ottoman Empire– primarily to be given as a sort of “consolation prize” to a branch of the Hashemite family that had previously been offered thet part of western Saudi Arabia that contains the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina…
But wouldn’t you know it, the warrior-dynast Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud insisted on staying on in that part of the Arabian peninsula. Insisted it belonged to his family, not anyone else’s. (And certainly that it wasn’t for the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas to give it away to anyone else.). So the Hashemites were left to wander like Moses in the desert…
But not for very long. The Brits rapidly installed one Hashemite leader in “Transjordan”, as it was then called, and they tried to install another in Damascus. But the French weren’t having any of that, so that one was shuttled over and recycled into Iraq, instead…
You get the picture? Behind a rhetoric that intermittently talked about the need for the “self-determination” of local Arab populations– as against their earlier rule by Istanbul– the British Colonial Office chappies (and uber-chapette Gertrude Bell) were busy playing “musical kings” all around the region… “And when the music stops you all stay where you are.”
Layered onto that, of course, was the (gasp!) imperial rivalry between the British and French. Did you ever look at a “political map” of this region and wonder why (1) so many of the borders between the states there are perfectly straight lines, or (2) why there’s a funny squarish tab of “Jordan” that extends east-north-east a little bit, up to join Iraq? All that is the result of intense negotiations– between the British and the French. (Self-determination? Well, I guess it depends what the meaning of “self” is.)
As for that tab that links Jordan to Iraq, the explanation for that is quite simple. It’s called an oil pipeline. If you drive along that long, extremely boring desert road there you pass through places with the quaint “names” of H-2, H-3, H-4, etc… Pumping stations that became way-stations and then ragged little towns.
Well, in the late 1990s, the Project for a New American Century and other pro-Likud neocons started pushing for their own, more recent version of Middle Eastern “musical kings”. This was the approach sometimes known as “Everybody Move Over One” (see, e.g., here.) Under EMOO, Israel would get to keep the West Bank. The Palestinians– who have been squeezed very hard in the West Bank since 1967 and have long constituted a numerical majority in Jordan– would “get” Jordan. And the Hashemites would play another round of musical kings and “get” Iraq.
Except it hasn’t really worked out that way yet, has it? Instead, what we seem to be seeing in the region is the unfolding of an EMOO theory that– like all the indigenous writing systems of this region– moves from right to left, rather than left to right. The Iranians– who didn’t even really feature in EMOO-Mark 1– have majorly extended their influence westward into Iraq. That has squeezed the Sunni Arabs of Iraq… And now, using the network of linkages that’s always existed between western Iraq and Jordan, the chaos and violence from Iraq have been bleeding over into Jordan, too.
No, I am not saying that this means that in the near future the Palestinians will suddenly be able to push westward back against the Likud and establish their own power in the West Bank. But I do think we can draw a few broader and more general lessons from what has been happening:
Jordan (and again, Iraq)
Do I need to write anything here to note how grotesque the thinking was of the people who organized and undertook suicide bombings against the three hotels in Jordan yesterday.
In at least one of the hotels, most of the people were killed were participants in a wedding feast. It is widely known in all the Arab countries that have big US-franchised hotels that one principal use of the ballrooms in such hotels is for wedding parties held by well-heeled (and sometimes not so well-heeled) members of the local community. Why bomb them? Why bomb civilian targets at all?
If the “grievance” of the bombers is with members of the local business or political community who might be profiting from the war in Iraq, there would be so many better ways of organizaing against that phenomenon. Through mass, nonviolent social action to force political change at the national level, for example…
But killing participants in a wedding feast? That is simply inhumane.
59 people died in those three bombings.
And today in Iraq, bombers killed 42 people at a restaurant… troops found 27 decomposing bodies near the Iranian border… and the US military proudly announced it had killed 37 “insurgents”.
Visiting British Foreign Minister Jack Straw was quoted as saying, “This is a very exciting time to visit Iraq.”
Tasteless? I’d say.
Saddam trial: more questions
On Tuesday, Adil Mohammad Abbas Zubeidi, one of the defense lawyers working at the Iraqi Special tribunal (IST) that’s trying Saddam Hussein and eight of his top henchmen, was gunned down in Baghdad and killed. Another defense lawyer, Thamer Hamoud al-Khuzaie, was also shot in the incident, but he escaped death and was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.
Zubeidi was the second of the the 13 defense lawyers to be killed in less than a month.
Tuesday’s incident raised yet again the key question as to whether a “fair trial” can be held for Saddam and his top associates in the anarchic and death-stalked city that is Baghdad today. Richard Goldstone, who was the first Chief Prosecutor of the Int’l Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was quoted by AP as saying, “It is just impossible to have a public trial if you can’t guarantee the safety of witnesses, judges or defense counsel.” ICTY, you may recall, has been sited in The Hague since its founding in 1993.
US-based legal specialists who have been watching– and in at least one case, also advising– the people running the Saddam trial now have their own blog. It’s called Grotian Moment: The Saddam Hussein Trial Blog. (The reference there is to Hugo Grotius, 1583-1645, an early-modern philosopher whose work formed a foundation for many of the principles of present-day international law– and of European imperialism, too, by the way.)
So anyway, on Tuesday, the GM blog’s Michael Scharf– a law prof who has also worked as a key advisor for the IST– wrote a post on the blog asking, “Are the Murders of Defense Counsel going to derail the trial?” and answering his own question… “No.”
Scharf makes this amazing “blame the victim” argument:
- the defense attorneys in part brought this tragic situation upon themselves when they elected to have their faces and identities broadcast during the first day of the trial, and when they subsequently refused to accept the Iraqi Government and U.S. military’s offers of security. Now they are seeking to exploit the tragic — but not unforeseeable — murders of their colleagues in an attempt to derail the proceedings….
Well, that’s not quite as bad as the Iraqi PM’s spokesman Laith Kubba, who according to that Newsday piece linked to at the top of this post,
- suggested that Hussein’s own supporters might have killed the attorneys to disrupt the trial. “We know that Saddam and his followers are ready to do anything … to block the work of the court,” he said.
Scharf concludes his blog post with this:
- I think that the judges will end up dealing with this problem by requiring the defense counsel to accept US military protection. If the defense lawyers continue to refuse to do so and to boycott the trial, the judges may tell them that as duly appointed defense counsel, they are officers of the court, and have a responsibility to accept the security and continue to participate in the trial, or they can face sanctions such as fines, imprisonment, and disbarment, and they can be replaced by court-appointed defense counsel who will not play these kinds of high-risk games in an effort to disrupt the proceedings.
His piece there on the GM blog is twinned with one from his colleague Laura Dickinson, who makes the case for moving the trial out of Iraq, even if only temporarily.
Of course, as I have argued both here and over on the Transitional Justice Forum blog a number of times (like, here), the whole question of holding the trial inside Iraq at this time is intensely political. It can’t be divorced from entanglement with the controversies swirling around the political-legal status of the US troop presence in Iraq, or from those around the status of the Iraqi transitional authorities that were created through a US-designed mechanism.
The IST’s “founding myth” is that it is an Iraqi court, and indeed that it plays a special role in defining the nature of the new independent state of Iraq. (What it notably doesn’t seem to establish very well is the important principle of the indpendence of the judiciary from the executive power.) John Burns wrote in the NYT yesterday, about the proposal to relocate the trials outside of Iraq,
- That proposal has been repeatedly rejected by Iraqi officials, and by American Justice Department lawyers who advise them, who have said holding the trial in Iraq is a test of Iraq’s sovereignty and of progress toward responsible government after the horrors of the Hussein era.
Note that use of the term “advise”.
Burns’s report was relatively good though. He described the arguments made by the defense lawyers more fairly than many other US reporters. For example,
- Reporters who went to the Shaab district of Baghdad after the killing [on Oct. 19] of the first lawyer, Mr. Janabi, found witnesses who said they had heard some of the men who stormed Mr. Janabi’s office saying they were from the Interior Ministry. Mr. Janabi’s body turned up shortly afterward on wasteland nearby, with gunshot wounds to the head.
“I got a phone call from Thamir al-Khuzaie,” Mr. Dulaimi [that is, saddam’s own main lawyer] said, “and he told me that the car carrying the men who sprayed them with bullets today was followed by a police car. Thamir said the police car picked both of them up after the shooting, and took them to the American hospital.
“It only goes to show how cleverly they coordinate these attacks. It is the Interior Ministry that has offered to provide us with protection against these attacks, but it is the ministry itself that is planning the killings.”
Burns is not so good, though, it seems to me, in doing any investigative reporting into who it actually is that controls all of the levers of power in this court’s proceedings. Who has physical control of the evidence? Who controls the IT systems? Who has physical custody of the prisoners? We really need to know how truly “Iraqi” this court is– or, how American.
Anyway, it seems to me at this point there is no way to foresee any satisfactory end to the question of “What will happen to Saddam Hussein?” The trial is supposed to resume on November 28. One scenario is that that will happen, the judges will rush through the Dujail case, announce a death sentence, and shortly afterwards Saddam will be executed. Other scenarios could have the case dragging on for a lot, lot longer, and possibly even disintegrating into increasing chaos over time.
One thing seems certain: this will not be the kind of clean-cut, “exemplary” legal proceeding with which one would like to see a newly democratic Iraq inaugurated.
CSM column on France (and Europe)
It’s been a really busy week. Monday, I had a deadline for my CSM column for this week. I started out writing something about the Middle East, and at around 11:30 a.m. realized I’d far prefer to be writing about the riots in France. So that’s what I did. It’s in today’s paper. (Also, here.)
Tuesday, I had to work on the editor’s suggestions for revisions of a piece I have in the January-February issue of Foreign Policy magazine. FP is a classy mag published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I haven’t published there since, oh my gosh, 1983. So this is a nice thing to do. The piece is basically a wrap-up of some of the big conclusions of my book on Transitional Justice in Africa. The darn thing is, though, that originally it was meant to be in the current (Nov.-Dec.) issue. So I went final on the text sometime in August. And actually, quite a bit has happened since then– especially regarding the International criminal Court (ICC) which issued its first indictments last month.
Well, I guess I’m glad they delayed running the piece by two months. They did it to accommodate late-breaking hurricane-related items. At least this way, my piece will also address these “pioneering” ICC indictments. But trying to give it, basically, three months’ worth of updating was more work than I expected.
Most of which concerns Uganda, by the way. If you want to find out more, read this post I put up on the Transitional Justice Forum blog last week.
Anyway, that’s a good part of why I’ve been feeling busy this week. Couple of other reasons, too.
And then, so much has been happening in the world this week! Where to start? Ahmad? Judy? Jordan? Syria? Iraq? Palestine? Cheney? Torture?
I guess one definite trend I’m seeing is the retrenchment of Blair’s political power inside the UK system, and that of Cheney’s power in this country. It’s slow. But it looks steady. Let’s see how broad we can make the agenda of the current “re-thinking”…
Dems win in Virginia, New Jersey
Our fine Commonwealth of Virginia was one of two states in which the governorship was being contested in today’s elections… and the Democratic candidate won! Great news! Especially since his GOP opponent had specially brought Bush into the state yesterday to try to give his campaign a last-minute boost.
Heh-heh-heh!
The winner is Tim Kaine, who’s currently the Lieutenant-Governor, and before that was Mayor of Richmond. Kaine is probably a little more progressive than the present (also Dem) governor, Mark Warner, who campaigned hard for him. The outcome is good for a number of reasons. Better to have a Democratic governor than yet another of the stream of incompetent GOP governors who preceded Mark Warner. (There’s a one-term limit on the governorship here.) Also it showed that Bush has bad electoral karma here, while Mark Warner’s seems to be good…
In New Jersey, the only other state where there was a gubernatorial race, the Dems also won… And Schwarzenegger did pretty poorly with his special “Initiatives” over in Califormia.
Here in Virginia, our Lieutenant-Governor candidate, Leslie Byrne, also won. Maybe it’s time we had a woman governor here!
- Update Wed. 10:2 a.m.: from the latest WaPo listing it seems that Byrne got defeated 51-49% while the race for state Attorney-General is still too close to call. The Dem candidate for that one is our local State Senator here, Creigh deeds.
I made the eight-minute walk along to our local polling station this afternoon. What a pleasant experience. My friend Liz Kutchai was staffing the Dems’ table near the door. She gave me some advice about the one electoral issue I wasn’t sure about. (Whether one should support or oppose the proposal for an elected school board in the city.) As we stood there, our Sherriff– an African-American woman called Cornelia Johnson– came up looking very spiffy in her brown uniform. Cornelia was up for re-election today, but stood unopposed. Mitch Van Yahres, who has just stepped down after many years as our delegate in the Virginia House of Delegates, was also there.
The Virginia legislature sits on a strange schedule: something like four weeks one year and six weeks the next year — that is, holding the longer sessions the year they consider the budget. The sessions are held in January and February. I think the idea is that people can be both farmers and legislators… But most of them nowadays are lawyers.
This Saturday we’re having the annual conference of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty here in town. Mitch has always been a stalwart opponent of the death penalty– but in a definite minority on the issue, in Richmond.
It’s a funny old situation here in this state. The Republicans have a pretty strong lock on both houses of the state legislature, but now we’ll be having the second Democratic governor in a row. Party politics in this country really is a strange beast, which I’m still struggling to understand…