I was just watching the CNN footage of the massive British tank rolling backward and forward as it tried to get out of a tight corner in Basra, while being pelted with Molotovs.
It was extremely compelling footage, and may well considerably dent Blair’s ability to continue with the fiction that he’s doing something worthwhile by persisting to be part of the fighting coalition in Iraq.
I’m going to London this evening and shall report on what I find there.
Juan Cole has lots of material about what’s been happening with the Brits in Basra.
If as he indicates it’s mainly the Sadrists who’ve been active in this whole confrontation, that would seem to mark a significant geographical extension of their ability to exert influence.
Basra is, of course, an absolute logistic chokepoint for any foreign power wanting to control Iraq. If it passes into the hands of determinedly anti-“Coalition” forces, that considerably complicates any prospects of any orderly departure for the main (i.e. US) force. Unless it’s through a negotiated exit. So whoever controls Basra– whether it’s Sadrists or Badrists– has a non-trivial negotiating card in hand.
Author: Helena
What causes the perpetration of atrocities?
When most people in the west think about people who perpetrate
atrocities, they shift immediately (if they were not already in it)
into “judgment and denunciation mode”; and for the vast majority of
western rights activists that shift seems also to involve shutting down their
normal human curiosity about their fellow-humans, altogether.
It strikes me this shutting-down is of as little utility in the case of
atrocity perpatrators as it is in that of terrorists. Okay, we
all decry, oppose, are horrified by (or whatever) both terrorism and
the perpetration of atrocities… And maybe for some people it makes
them feel good to verbalize these denunciations in loud and judgmental
terms.
If, however, a person wants to end the perpetration of
either terrorism or other forms of atrocity, it is extremely helpful–
actually, indispensable– to try to find an answer to the question of
“why do some people end up doing these things?” Then, on
the basis of the results of such enquiries one can perhaps start to
craft better approaches and policies that can end pepetration in the
present and prevent it in the future.
Undertaking such an enquiry need not detract from one’s moral
horror. There is a problem, perhaps, in English, in the use of
the term “to understand”. At a purely intellectual level, to
“understand” how a bicycle works implies no moral stance toward the
working of bicycles at all. But to many people, the idea that it
might be worthwhile trying to “understand” why someone perpetrates
atrocities too often is taken to mean that one has (or is in danger of
developing) some sympathy toward the perpetrator.
I’ll say yes, that is a risk. I have interviewed a number of
people of whose acts I very strongly disapproved– and quite
frequently, the process of doing the interviewing both increases my
intellectual and human understanding of why the person acted as he did and engenders some sense of
basic human commonality with him. (This is not the same as saying that
I start to feel some approval of his devastating acts. It is, I
think, a fairly immature individual who is unable to make any
meaningful distinction between a fellow human and the very worst of his
or her acts.)
But oh, how much easier to stay on one’s own moral high horse,
expressing one’s denunciations left, right, and center without
undertaking the arduous task of seeking to understand the motivations
of the person one denounces!
How easy just to say that person who commits atrocious acts is just
inherently “evil”, and that’s that.
… All the above is a very wordy introduction to something I want to
write here about the value of the still-tiny field of enquiry called
“Perpetrator Studies”. It’s a field that we need a lot more
of! (I see that the estimable, Cape Town-based Institute for
Justice and Reconciliation has been doing
a little of it; basing their approach on that used in one portion
of the TRC’s work. Are there other good PS projects out there?)
I have just finished reading a remarkable book by the Croatian writer
Slavenka Drakulic, called They would
never hurt a fly: War criminals on trial in The Hague. I
think this book– and Pumla Gobodo-Madikazele’s A human being died that night—
between them provide a very useful gateway into “Perpetrator Studies”.
Drakulic is a very talented writer– of both fiction and
non-fiction. I’ve written about her book Balkan Express here before.
That was a collection of essays she wrote during the Wars of the
Balkans. This latest book is based on a lengthy “research trip”
she made to The Hague, in order to observe proceedings at the
International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In
the introduction she says:
My interest in writing this book was a
simple one: as it cannot be denied war crimes were committed, I wanted
to find out about the people who committed them. Who were
they? Ordinary people like you or me– or monsters?(p.7)
simple one: as it cannot be denied war crimes were committed, I wanted
to find out about the people who committed them. Who were
they? Ordinary people like you or me– or monsters?(p.7)
It rapidly becomes clear in the body of the book what her answer is: not “monsters”, but the
“ordinary people like you or me.”
A key turning point in Drakulic’s narrative comes on p.50 of my Abacus
paperback edition, where she is describing and reflecting on the
trial of three Bosnian-Serb militiamen accused (and found guilty) of
having participated in and helped to organize the mass sexual demeaning
and defilement of literally hundreds of Bosniak women and girls
whom they treated as sex-slaves.
She writes:
Continue reading “What causes the perpetration of atrocities?”
North Korea; Iran
Also, the North Koreans seem to have gotten a workable deal from their negotiations– including, centrally, a security guarantee from the US. Why don’t the Bushies give a similar guarantee to Iran?
Elections: Germany, Afghanistan
Interesting to be here in Europe at a time of such political uncertainty in Germany. Also, when are the results of the Afghanistan elections due?
IISS: Asian powers and the world order
Sunday morning, we had two very interesting plenary sessions at the
annual conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies
(IISS). In the first, M.K.Narayanan,
the National Security Advisor to the prime minister of India and Harry Harding, a longtime
China-affairs specialist who until recently was Dean of the
International Affairs School at George Washington University in
Washington, DC, talked about China
and India: The Asian rising powers debate. In the second, Kishore Mahbubani, the Dean
of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, and Marc Perrin de Brichambaut,
the Secretary-General of OSCE, talked about Competing world views and the
bases of international order in the 21st century.
Though the presentations were all of a high standard, what I want to
write about here are primarily those made by Mahbubani,
Narayanan, and Harding
because they had more thematic linkages with each other than the
presentation
given by Perrin. [Note: I think those links above should work if you’re
already in the archived version of this post.]
Mahbubani, a well-groomed, energetic man in probably his late fifties,
was until recently a high-ranking Singaporean diplomat.
(At the beginning of his presentation, he made a little joke about not wanting to be called
“Ambassador Mahbubani” any more, and said he was “still practicing
acting undiplomatically.”)
He started by quoting Marc Antony when he said, “I come to bury Caesar,
not to praise him,” saying he was coming to praise the way the US had
exercized its hegemony over the world order since 1945 and not to bury
it– though he said he feared the effect of his words might seem to be
to bury it.
There are, he said, five factors that have been leading to the decline
of the UN-based world order:
Hate speech and Lebanon
According to this Reuters story used by Al -Jazeera,
- Lebanon has detained three leaders of an ultra-nationalist Christian party after it distributed CDs calling on every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian, judicial sources say.
A prosecutor on Wednesday ordered the detention of Habib Younes, Naji Awdeh and Joseph Khoury Tawk, members of the Guardians of the Cedars Party, “on charges of breaching judicial clauses and harming relations with Arab countries”, the sources said.
The three leaders of the party, which was set up during the 1975-1990 civil war but has been dormant for the past 15 years, called at a news conference on Tuesday for “expelling Palestinian refugees and confiscating their property”.
“No Palestinian should be left in Lebanon”, and “Every Lebanese should kill a Palestinian”, are two of its civil war slogans distributed on CD during the conference, the daily As Safir newspaper said.
Well, it’s not only Al-safir that says that. Back in the late 1970s when I used to travel around the parts of East Beirut totally controlled (and religiously “cleansed”) by the Maronitist militias, nearly every piece of blank wall bore on it the slogan “It’s the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian”. These slogans were put up with spray-paint, sprayed through stencils. They bore the “signature” of the very extreme little group Guardians of the Cedars.
I wrote about that here a bit, when I was in Lebanon (and Syria) last November. I also wrote this:
- Throughout East Beirut, the walls had the stenciled-on slogan “It’s the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian”. Ala kul lubnani in yuqtil filastiniyan. I never saw anyone trying to cover those slogans over or otherwise erase them: they loomed over the public streets there for years.
And I saw, counted, smelled, and examined the putrifying phsyical remains of a good number of the thousands of Palestinians– women, children, men, old people– who were killed in the enactment of that openly genocidal campaign.
That is extremely depressing that 25 years later, that hate-speech and genocidal incitment is once again being distributed in Lebanon– and by the same group! Encrouaging, though, if this time around, the country has a state apparatus that is (a) strong enough and (b) motivated enough to try to crack down on it.
In general, I believe the answer to hate speech is more speech. But in the case of the Guardians of the Cedars, their proven track record of following through on their very explicit incitement indicates that judicial measures are completely appropriate for them.
(Hat-tip to the two friends from Kansas who got this to me.)
Riverbend takes on the constitution
The talented and wise young female Iraqi blogger Riverbend has now put her smart mind to work on analyzing the Iraqi constitution. (Hat-tip to commenter Jean for noting that.)
All of her observations there seem astute– including what she notes about differences between different version/ translations of the constitution.
She notes the complexity of this (draft) constitution’s references to the role of Islam in the projected constitutional life of the country, and writes:
- In the old constitution that was being used up until the war, the
Strategic Studies in Geneva
The blogosphere is a pretty amazing place. I’ve been at the annual (or actually not-quite-annual) conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, here in Geneva. The IISS is a venerable organization, headquartered in London, that is not nearly as “international” as it sounds– it’s overwhelmingly made up of people who are white and male…
Anyway, I was going to write up some of my notes from today’s sessions. The first plenary had former US Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter and the former conservative Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt. I wanted to check up on Bildt’s resume. So I Googled him. And wouldn’t you know he’s been writing his own blog since February!
It looks as though there’s some pretty interesting stuff there. It’s interesting to find someone who’s such a high-level mover and shaker as Bildt writing a blog. You can find there this comment about Paul Volcker’s recent report into the UN Oil-for-food scandal:
- You can not avoid the conclusion that what the massive Volcker Report investigation has found does not amount to much. In one case, Mr Savan clearly violated UN ethics rule, bu whether anything illegal was done remains to be clarified.
It is worth nothing, [I think he means ‘noting’?] that the Volcker Report fails to mention the very large amount of Oil-for-Food money that was transferred to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and for which there has been no accounting whatsover.
Then, if you go over to Bildt’s website, you can find a photo of him looking fairly dapper and also a link to the text of the address he gave here in Geneva this morning…
So I didn’t actually have to take notes during his speech at all!
He spoke of,
- rather a substantial and undoubtedly worrying decline in both the hard powers of the United States and the soft powers of the European Union.
American military power is seriously bogged down in the marshes, back alleys and deserts of Mesopotamia. And it is likely to remain so for some considerable time to come. No one will say it openly, but everyone knows that the world
In Geneva
Hi. I’m in Geneva on what looks like a poor internet connection. I came here through London and rode the trains between Gatwick and London City airports with huge pleasure. There is something so civilized about trains– about a society that still has a commitment to public transport, in general.
Thank God the July bombers didn’t scare people from using the public transport system in London! The two trains plus one bus I was on all seemed well ridered. (Ok, maybe not a word. But it should be.)
Unimaginable horror, Baghdad
Unimaginable horror in Baghdad– again!– today as a large truck-bomb and a series of other attacks kill at least 152 and wounds many hundreds more.
AP’s Slobodan Lekic writes there that,
- Al-Jazeera said Al-Qaida in Iraq linked the attacks to the recent killing of about 200 militants from the city of Tal Afar by U.S. and Iraqi forces.
Before dawn Wednesday, 17 men were killed by insurgents in the village of Taji north of Baghdad, which pushed the death toll in all violence in and around the capital to 169.
Wednesday’s worst bombing killed at least 88 people and wounded 227 in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah where the day laborers had gathered shortly after dawn.
The carnage was the worst single day of bloodshed since March 2, 2004, when coordinated blasts … hit Shiite Muslim shrines in Karbala and in Baghdad, killing at least 181 and wounding 573.
The blasts coincided with Iraqi lawmakers announcing the country’s draft onstitution was in its final form and would be sent to the United Nations for printing and distribution ahead of an Oct. 15 national referendum. Sunni Muslims, who form up the core of the insurgency, have vowed to defeat the basic law.
As I have noted on JWN numerous times before, the internal violence in Iraq since the elections of last January has hit by far the hardest against the country’s Shiite community. This is another example of that. So far, the Shiite political leaderships have urged calm and worked strenuously to prevent any form of a response that would take the form of anti-Sunni pogroms… And indeed, some Shiite leaders like Moqtada Sadr have energetically continued to pursue a policy of “national” unity with the country’s Sunni population.
Most of the attacks against Shiite civilian targets– like today’s– seem to be the work of foreign militants, acting with who knows what form of shady outside backing. It would be great to think that the perpetration of bloody and horrific excesses like today’s might succeed in turning all Iraqi Sunnis against the foul machinations of their extremist co-religionists who have come into the country from elsewhere…
Mainly here, though, I just want to express deep, deep sadness and empathy for all those afflicted by the present violence.
Where oh where is the responsible governance and protection of civilian populations that under international law is the responsibility of the power running the military occupation of the country?
(I was going to take down the black banner on the blog today. Maybe now I’ll have to leave it up for a lot longer.)