Author: Helena

Iraqi constitution-writing, contd.

Alert readers will have noted that last night I put the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter back up onto the JWN sidebar.
I did so for two main reasons:

    (1) because of the continuation of the mayhem and massive civil strife that has plagued Iraq almost non-stop since the holding of the January 30 election, with almost no effective action having been taken by the occupying power(s) to end it, and
    (2) because of the news that the Iraqi “Foreign Minister” was now openly asking for the aid of the principal occupying power in the complex and extremely important internal-Iraqi business of trying to craft a workable longterm Constitution for the country.

The fact that the government (or at least, the “Foreign Minister”) was doing this indicated very strongly to me that the government (or at least, the “Foreign Minister”) sees the government’s principal mandate as coming not from the millions of Iraqi citizens who braved the threats of terrorists and others to walk to the polls on January 30, but from the occupying power itself.
Sure, people associated with the Constitution-writing body could seek ideas from any number of different sources as they go about crafting the country’s new Constitutioon. Why not? But for the “Foreign Minister” openly and prominently to appeal for the occupying power’s help in this matter strikes me as extremely destructive of the idea of popular legitimacy, or, if you will, the “consent of the governed”.
This morning, the DDI counter stands at 125 days of democracy having been denied in Iraq, starting at the date of the January 30 election. As I’ve noted here previously, the clunky “TAL” machinery issued a long time back as a ukaze/fatwa by Ayatollah Bremer (remember him?) allowed for precisely 213 days to pass between that election and the August 15 presentation of a final draft for Iraq’s permanent Constitution.
58.7% of that time has now elapsed. The 88 days left– under the terms of the TAL– for these crucial deliberations are simply insufficient. Especially if these deliberations must continue to be held under conditions of terrifying civil strife.
Of course, if the government that was confirmed by Iraq’s elected National Assembly back in April took seriously the idea that it drew its main operating mandate from that act of (nearly) democratic political legitimization, rather than from the heavy breath of the occupying power down its neck, then it might rapidly come to the conclusion that it has no need to remain bound to Bremer’s clunky directive regarding how Iraq’s transition to national independence should be effected.
The government could propose its own path of transition, seek to build and retain Iraqis’ popular support for that path, and then negotiate with the occupying power from a position of unassailable political strength.
As part of that path, it might indeed (as I suggested in this mid-April CSM column) decide that fashioning a long-term, indeed “Permanent” Constitution in the country is far too serious an undertaking to be bound by the rigid deadlines of the (quite undemocratic) TAL– and certainly, far too serious to be held hostage to the need to bring about a speedy withdrawal of the occupation forces…
In that case– in Iraq as in South Africa in 1994– a decent national election held on the basis of an “Interim Constitution” could work just fine as a way to generate a nearly totally legitimate national government. And then, after a truly accountable-to-the-democratic-will national administration is in place in Iraq, it would still have plenty of time at its disposal, and also, a greatly enhanced climate of public security: both these factors would then greatly strengthen the ability of the country’s various political currents to engage in reasoned deliberations with each other over the terms of their ongoing, “permanent” political association with each other and the nature of their governing arrangements…
But I guess that only an Iraqi “government” that sees its primary mandate as having come from the Iraqi people, rather than from the barrels of US Army guns, would even consider challenging the dictates of the TAL in such a way.

Democracy truly denied in Iraq?

Long-time JWN readers probably recall how much I hoped that the January 30th elections could provide a way for a credible, accountable-to-Iraqis administration to emerge inside Iraq, while also allowing a (relatively) violence-free way for the US administration to disengage from trying to control the affairs of that very troubled country.
It took a long time, after January 30, for the Iraqi parties to be able to reach agreement on the identity of the new Prime Minister and the make-up of the new government. While they dithered, I put up the ‘Democracy Denied in Iraq’ counter onto JWN’s sidebar.
Then finally, in late April, Ibrahim Jaafari was sworn in in front of the new elected Assembly as PM (though it took a little while longer for him to name some of his ministers.)
I took the counter down.
Today, after reading this account of the new “Iraqi” Foreign Minister openly and imho ignominiously appealing for greater US aid in crafting an Iraqi constitution, I decided it is time for the DDI counter to go back up.
That link is to a piece by Robin Wright in today’s WaPo. She writes:

    In talks with Vice President Cheney yesterday and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari requested greater U.S. and coalition help in crafting a new constitution. The deadline is now less than three months away, but deliberations have been slowed as Iraq still works on the composition of a constitutional committee.
    With time running out for writing the constitution and then holding elections in December for a permanent government, Zebari warned that the United States has withdrawn too much, leaving the new government struggling to cope and endangering the long-term prospects for success.

She wrote that Zebari also asked the Bushies for help on three other counts:

    — to ” to help bring the Sunni minority into the political process” (!)
    — for ” additional staff and resources to accelerate the creation of a new Iraqi army and police force”, and
    — to “speed up the confirmation of its new ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad”.

It is fact that the Bushies have been without an ambassador in Baghdad since March 17, when Amb. John Negrocontra hotfooted it out of the country. That’s eleven vital weeks that the massive US diplomatic mission there has effectively been rudderless. As Wright notes, the DCM position in Baghdad has also gone through a transition in the past month.
Now, I’m not going to argue that having a local US viceroy in place to tell the Iraqi politicians what to do (which is exactly the way that Jon Lee Anderson, writing recently in The New Yorker described Khalilzad behaving in Afghanistan) is necessarily desirable… But you would think, wouldn’t you, that the Bush administration would want to have an accountable chain of command in place in Baghdad to help it to manage the extremely strategically sensitive situation there?
Well, you might think that, if you thought they actually wanted to have some kind of an orderly transition there….
As it is, the disgracefully “AWOL/negligent” policy that Washington has been pursuing inside Iraq seems almost to have been designed to bring about a situation of ever greater instability and distrust within the country…. (Perhaps with the ulterior aim of turning round to a formerly accusing world and saying, “So! You see those Iraqis can’t govern themselves. That’s why we simply have no option except to stay there….” And on Wednesday the Security Council, to its great shame, seemed to buy into that argument when it renewed the “mandate” that it graciously gave the US-led forces forces in Iraq for a further –slightly indeterminate?– term.)
And the result of all these machinations?

Continue reading “Democracy truly denied in Iraq?”

Bush completely AWOL?

You have to know a President is losing political capital rapidly when he finds himself at a public press conference– as Bush did yesterday— having to answer a question about whether he has been losing political capital.
The loss of political capital was alleged in this article in yesterday’s WaPo, by Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei. They wrote:

    Two days after winning reelection last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of “political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained.
    In the past week alone, the Republican-led House defied his veto threat and passed legislation promoting stem cell research; Senate Democrats blocked confirmation, at least temporarily, of his choice for U.N. ambassador; and a rump group of GOP senators abandoned the president in his battle to win floor votes for all of his judicial nominees.
    With his approval ratings in public opinion polls at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush has been stymied so far in his campaign to restructure Social Security. On the international front, violence has surged again in Iraq in recent weeks, dispelling much of the optimism generated by the purple-stained-finger elections back in January, while allies such as Egypt and Uzbekistan have complicated his campaign to spread democracy…

In Tuesday’s press conference, Bush demonstrated how deeply he is “out of it” by responding to a question on Iraq with a disquisition on the Taliban. (?)
He also responded to a question about Amnesty International’s claim that the administration has established a “new gulag” around the world by dismissing it as “absurd.”
It took Dana Milbank, in today’s WaPo to add in this significant detail:

    “It’s just an absurd allegation,” he said with a chuckle.

Somehow, that “chuckle” really, really upset me.
Does Bush totally lack the ability to see that, whether you challenge the reports of torture and ill-treatment so carefully compiled by Amnesty and other rights groups or not, these issues are ones of deadly seriousness?
Especially for the leader of a world power that claims to be bringing democracy and “freedom” to all the peoples of the world?
Milbank’s piece– which is titled “Spelling nuance with a W”– doesn’t appear to be up on the WaPo’s website yet.
His thesis there is that the blustery, black-and-white worldview W displayed during his first term in office has been replaced by something more closely approaching nuance.
Bill and I agreed, after reading the article, that ‘evasion” would be a better term for it…

Guantanamo detainees sold into bondage?

How many of the roughly 530 detainees in the US detention center in Guantanamo were actuially sold into bondage by bounty-hunters eager to make a fortune from US rewards programs?
Quite possibly, a large proportion of them. AP reporter Michelle Faul has a very shocking piece on the wire today that makes this claim. She’s writing from San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she has been following the (far from fair) “military tribunals” staged for many of the Guantanamo detainees to date. She attributes the claim about detainees having been sold into bondage to testimony that detainees gave to the “tribunals”, according to trasncripts of the hearings that AP forced out of the US government through the “Freedom of Information Act”.
In addition, Faul quotes Gary Schroen, a former CIA officer who helped lead the search for Osama bin Ladenas saying the detainees’ accounts,

    Faul writes:

      [A] wide variety of detainees at the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, alleged they were sold into capture. Their names and other identifying information were blacked out in the transcripts from the tribunals, which were held to determine whether prisoners were correctly classified as enemy combatants.
      One detainee who said he was an Afghan refugee in Pakistan accused the country’s intelligence service of trumping up evidence against him to get bounty money from the U.S.
      “When I was in jail, they said I needed to pay them money and if I didn’t pay them, they’d make up wrong accusations about me and sell me to the Americans and I’d definitely go to Cuba,” he told the tribunal. “After that I was held for two months and 20 days in their detention, so they could make wrong accusations about me and my (censored), so they could sell us to you.”
      Another prisoner said he was on his way to Germany in 2001 when he was captured and sold for “a briefcase full of money” then flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantanamo.
      “It’s obvious. They knew Americans were looking for Arabs, so they captured Arabs and sold them

Muhsin Abdul-Hamid’s day in detention

It is, of course, quite possible that the US command in Iraq is so deeply ignorant and dysfunctional that it would send troops to arrest Muhsin Abdul-Hamid– the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party and one of the former rotating “Presidents” of Iraq under the CPA-created IGC– “by mistake”.
It is also entirely possible that this was the best way they could think of to bring him in for some important negotiations… And not a completely stupid way, either. This way, A-H is not tainted in the eyes of his constituency with having “talked” openly with the Americans. (Remember the negotiations the De Klerk regime had with Nelson Mandela, who was in their custody at the time… For a long time the “cover” they all used around those negotiations was that Mandela was discussing merely the improvement of the conditions of the political prisoners, rather than anything political… )
So who knows what was discussed during Abdul-Hamid’s day in detention Monday? If the Americans did make an overture to him to upgrade their political negotiations, then who knows how he responded? One day, we might all find out.

Lebanon’s disappointing elections

Two days after the first round of the Lebanese parliamentary elections, the mood in the country seems pretty disappointed– apathy and alienation from the country’s ultra-arcane electoral process seem to be ruling the day.
In Tuesday’s Daily Star, Hanna Anbar and Michael Glackin write:

    Oh dear. Just four months after Lebanon’s people electrified the world and toppled a government; less than five weeks after the last Syrian soldier left Lebanon, we have finally discovered it wasn’t just an inept government that Lebanese people had to deal with, it was an inept political class.
    For all the justified talk of “Cedar Revolutions” and “People Power” the abysmal turnout in Sunday’s first round of polling underlines the huge chasm that separates the aspirations of the Lebanese people from the painfully limited ambitions of their politicians.
    The run up to the start of Lebanon’s much touted elections revealed its political leaders, Hariri, Jumblatt, Aoun et al had all fallen spectacularly short of the people they purport to represent…

The first round of elections involved just Beirut. Nine of the 19 seats there were uncontested. As you can see from this official report on the contests for the other ten seats there, they weren’t really “contested” in any serious way at all… More like, the voting in each of those mutli-seat constituencies was cooked by the parties in advance, so the difference in votes between those who “won” and those who didn’t win was enormous.
Also, turnout was pathetic. Around 30%. This seems in good part like an indicator of large support for the recently returned General Michel Aoun, who was urging a boycott of elections that, he claimed, had been pre-cooked by all the old pols of the 1990s.
I think there are four rounds of elections altogether, covering all the country. The last round is June 19th. I don’t know the exact schedule of which districts vote when. (Can anyone help with that?)
Anyway, Hizbullah, having done a deal with Amal, reportedly looks set to do well in the elections. All the reports from the previous three rounds of parliamentary elections and the two rounds of municipal elections in which they’ve competed describe the discipline that marked the party’s participation, as well as the savvy political smarts they displayed in “playing” Lebanon’s extremely complex electoral game. (Even while they continue to argue for simple, and much more accountable, one-person-one-vote democracy.)
In previous elections they’ve always had to defer to Syria’s main puppets inside the Shia community, Amal. This time, they can relate to Amal on a much more realistic (that is, stronger) basis.
The elections do seem interesting at some levels, though. For example, the most amazing backroom deals seem to be underway– between Jumblatt and Hizbullah, potentially between Jumblatt and Aoun, etc etc.
So much better than fighting, anyway.

Hizbullah and the May 2000 liberation of South Lebanon

Last Wednesday, May 25, was the fifth anniversary of the intriguing victory that lebanon’s Hizbullah won when all the positions of the Israeli-puppet “South Lebanon Army” strung along the (in-)security zone that Israel maintained inside south Lebanon collapsed within a period of a few short hours.
The collapse of the SLA threw the Israeli forces that were still in the zone into a big tizzy, and as a result the withdrawal the IDF undertook back to their own country was much more hurried and much, much less dignified than they had planned for.
The “bloodbath” that the Israelis had long openly warned might befall the Christians of south Lebanon after an IDFwithdrawal never occurred. Most of those Lebanese– Christians and Shiites– who had worked with the SLA turned themselves in to Hizbullah and the Lebanese army and received two- to three-year sentences for treason in the Lebanese military courts. Some had fled to Israel; but over the months that followed most of them returned to Lebanon.
The most amazing thing about Liberation Day was that it nearly all happened because of a largely unarmed mass demonstration by Hizbullah-organized Lebanese villagers.
Here is an account of that day given in an interview last week by Timur Goksel, the longtime spokesman for (and political advisor to) the UN’s long-running Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL. It appeared in the “Liberation Day supplement” published last week by the Lebanese daily As-Safir. The translation is by a friend.
[Headline:] Events prior to and after the liberation…
Goksel: UN resolution 1559 is unrealistic and nobody knows who will

Conflict termination and “justice”

So, a couple of weeks ago I finished a decent draft of my book about transitional justice mechanisms and the success (or otherwise) of conflict-termination efforts in three countries in southern Africa… And I sent it off to a publisher for consideration, since somewhat foolishly I had failed to do much to “market” the text of the book before that. Oh well, can’t do everything at once. The draft is not bad, imho.
At this point, having done that, and having then intensively brainstormed some of these very same issues with the great bunch of learners from many countries (including many conflict-torn countries) around the world in the class I was teaching at Eastern Mennonite Univ. last week (PAX 668), I just want to write some quick notes here about three books that have come out in recent years on different aspects of my same topic, all of which I consider make very constructive contributions to this woefully under-developed field of knowledge.
I should just also re-stress here one of my own strong starting points in all my own work these days, name that war and conflict themselves inflict major violations on all the human rights of people living in areas directly affected by these conflicts. Contrary to the fantasies of some war apologists who live in secure western countries– including those political liberals who believe that wars can be fought “for humanitarian ends”– there is no such thing as a “clean”, violation-free war whose “success” in winning desirable ends is sufficient to justify the always regrettable “collateral” damage inflicted on civilian populations along the way… War, as I know from my own experience, isn’t like that. It kills people– including, always, many many people who are complete innocents. It also sets in train aftershocks of violence that reverberate quite unpredictably into the years and decades that follow…
Anyway, these books I wanted to write about. They are:

    Rama Mani’s Beyond retribution: Seeking justice in the shadows of war (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, and Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002),
    Roland Paris’s At war’s end: Building peace after civil conflict (Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and
    Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein’s edited volume My neighbor, my enemy: Justice and community in the aftermath of mass atrocity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

All these books are worth a close read. I’ll take them quickly, one at a time:

Continue reading “Conflict termination and “justice””

The withdraw-from-Iraq movement in Congress

The withdraw-from-Iraq movement is slowly gathering strength in the US Congress.
I’ve been away from most news sources for most of the past week, so I don’t know how much publicity has been given to the fact that on Wednesday evening 128 members of the House of Representatives voted for an amendment stating:

    “It is the sense of Congress that the president should