Author: Helena

Bush, Hizbullah, and disarmament

My recent long article on Hizbullah has continued to evoke a broad– and fairly predictable– range of reactions in various places. I’ll be giving a public presentation on the subject in DC on June 1, in case any of you is able to get there. (More details later.) The date is a little delayed, I know. But I really do need to focus on finishing my violence-in-Africa book. Then in late May, I’ll be teaching a summer course over at Eastern Mennonite University….
Anyway. Bottom line here. I’m a member of an on-line discussion group on (mainly) Gulf affairs, and recently started reading some postings there on the topic of Bush and Hizbullah. So yesterday I dashed off the following comment:

    It is extremely “rich” that the same Bush administration that has handed over a lot of the security work in Iraq to the Pesh Merga (and some to foreign mercenaries) should be the one saying that party militias can absolutely not be allowed in Lebanon! However, the general principles that the state should have a monopoly on the means of force and that security forces should come under the governance of the civilian political leadership (preferably, a democratically constituted one) are very valuable ones indeed.
    In Lebanon, the state, being itself weak, has until recently in essence subcontracted many of the security reponsibilities in South Lebanon to Hizbullah, which had “won” that right by being the force that liberated the area from foreign military occupation. (How many other people remember the Israeli-forced “high noon at Kawkaba” back in March 1978?) Hizbullah’s command of this private militia is certainly not a desirable situation over the long or even shorter term. But it is overwhelmingly the business of the Lebanese themselves to deal with it. It was interesting to see the very low degree of support the recent Zogby poll found, in many segments of Lebanese society including Maronites, for the idea of a forced disarming of Hizbullah. The Lebanese seem clearly to prefer negotiations to regularize the situation of the people who currently staff the Hizbullah-affiliated territorial defense and deterring-Israel formations in the South. Perhaps this could be done along the lines recently suggested by Sheikh Naim Qasem. This would broadly parallel the efforts Abu Mazen has been pursuing to fold the combatants from Hamas and other militant groups into the centralized PA security structure.
    Let’s all continue hoping and working for a comprehensive peace in the area– Israel-Syria, Israel-Lebanon, intra-Lebanese, Israeli-Palestinian, etc. In that context, the amounts of national revenue that all these parties keep tied up until now in military preparedness could be radically reduced. Until then, some form of citizen-based, territorially organized defense probably makes a lot of sense for the people of south Lebanon.
    I’d like to be able to argue that a completely nonviolent civilian mass movement might “hold off” the Israelis better than such a force. But the comparative records of the Palestinians’ (largely nonviolent) first intifada, which won them nothing lasting from Israel, and Hizbullah’s exactly contemporaneous pursuit of armed struggle, which in combination with expert civilian organization did succeed in liberating national territory, would make that argument a very hard sell indeed…
    Helena Cobban

Oh heck– just because the argument would be a hard sell, I shouldn’t make it? What on earth kind of un-Quakerly thinking is that??
So I’ll make it:

    The people of south Lebanon could do really well to study the nonviolent means by which Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha movement not ony resisted the entire weight of the British Army in India but was also able to persuade the British to pull their forces out of India completely.
    Go for it!
    Using these means successfully requires a strategic and very deeply philosophical commitment to the principles of nonviolence. But since Hizbullah has already shown its high level of experience and expertise in civilian mass organizing it already has much of the groundwork in place for such a campaign.
    And no: nonviolence is by no means anathema to Muslim teachings. One of Gandhi’s key lieutenants in his principled and successful movement against British occupation was the Pathan leader Badshah Khan, the “Gandhi of the Northwest frontier.”

Ach. That stuff is so important, I’ll have to come back to it again sometime soon.
But for now, I just want to add into this post some points that were made in that same on-line discussion forum by the Beirut-based writer Nicholas Blanford, who gave me permission to reproduce them here.
Nick, who’s been following Hizbullah a lot more closely than I have and has done so for a number of years, wrote the following:

    A few points perhaps worth noting.
    1. The debate has yet to begin in earnest on the future status of Hizbullah’s military wing, the Islamic Resistance, and it probably won’t begin until at least after the parliamentary elections scheduled to be held at the end of May. What Hizbullah has been doing through its various declarations is staking out its initial bargaining position. Essentially, their position is as follows: They want the Islamic Resistance to remain intact and under Hizbullah’s chain of command while accepting increased coordination with the Lebanese Army (i.e., the government). They will not initiate military confrontations with the Israelis along the Blue Line (the UN name for Lebanon’s southern border with Israel and the Golan Heights/Shebaa Farms) with the exception of the Shebaa Farms theater in the south east corner. They will, however, reserve the right to respond to Israeli acts of aggression (overflights, ground breaches of the Blue Line etc). Since 2000, Hizbullah has cultivated a public image of defender of Lebanese sovereignty from Israeli aggression, and its initial bargaining position deviates little from its current modus operandi along the Blue Line.
    2. The Islamic Resistance is the beating heart of Hizbullah and the party will do what it can to retain it. They will play for time in the hope that domestic and/or regional developments will intervene to rescue them. In the meantime, the party is even willing to subordinate potential political gains for the sake of the Resistance. That means co-opting and appeasing other Shiite/Sunni political groups to retain them as allies and defenders of the Resistance, rather than alienate them by competing aginst them politically and turning them into opponents.
    3. The big question is how far Hizbullah will go to keep the Resistance intact. Will they risk destabilizing Lebanon for the sake of the Resistance or will they yield if the majority of Lebanese clearly support disarmament?

Continue reading “Bush, Hizbullah, and disarmament”

Bushies close to losing Iraqi ‘second chance’?

It’s twelve weeks today since January’s significant (if certainly not perfect) multi-party election in Iraq. And still, the party list that won the majority of seats has been prevented– both by the strictures of the US-dictated Transitional Administrative Law and by the manueverings of key US allies in the country– from being able to form a government accountable to the elected National Assembly.
The Bush administration, it seems to me, has just about completely “blown” the extremely valuable second chance it was handed, virtually on a plate, by the Iraqi voters back on January 30th.
The “first chance” Washington had to effect constructive social and political reform in Iraq was right after the US military victory back in April 2003. As longtime JWN readers will recall, I always opposed the decision to go to war. But once it had been fought, and apparently militarily “won”, I did not pursue a vengeful attitude toward its authors but instead advocated strongly for a reconciliatory and rehabilitative approach.
They didn’t take my advice. (Nothing new there, but I persist in giving it.) Instead, they pursued many of the most anti-humanitarian tactics of classic colonialist “pacifications”, particularly through their mass-detentions policy and their launching of extremely nasty “punitive expeditions” in Najaf, Fallujah, and elsewhere. All of which expeditions were chosen in preference to the option of negotiations that was very present in all or nearly all of those situations.
At least, though, the Bushies showed some commitment to the goal of democratic elections. On this blog and elsewhere, I spoke out and lauded that goal, despite the many evident shortcomings with the idea of trying to hold decent elections in a situation of continued military occupation and rampant public insecurity.
The majority of the Iraqi people showed great courage, and turned out to vote. And miraculously, through that act they offered the US occupation authorities in Iraq an extremely valuable “second chance”. Indeed, this second chance had even more legitimacy than the first one, since it was won through the US forces’ support for a fairly genuine exercise in Iraqi popular consultation.
Moreover, unlike the Bushies’ “first chance” back in April 2003, the second chance was something that democrats and reformers throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds could empathize with, and openly hope to emulate. It therefore had an extremely broad “resonance effect” throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. (A failure of the ‘democratic experiment’ in Iraq will, as a result, have a much broader domino effect than anything the US suffered as a result of the failure in Vietnam… )
Much-needed political and social reform could, it was hoped, come through the act of voting! How much more palatable is that as an strategy, for everyone, than the idea of reform coming through military aggression?
But the Bushies are, I think, very close indeed to having blown this second chance…
Is it too early to make a definitive judgment on this? (I have been keeping the “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter up on the sidebar here for more than seven weeks now, and have always hoping to be able to take it down “soon”….)
The latest word on the AP wire tonight is that,

    Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari [has] decided, some members of his political bloc said, to shun further attempts to include members of the party headed by [Iyad] Allawi, the secular Shiite politician who had served as prime minister as the country prepared for elections Jan. 30.
    … Al-Jaafari’s list could be put to parliament as early as Monday, some of his bloc said. Others indicated the Cabinet announcement would be made Tuesday.

But as the writer of that piece, Thomas Wagner, notes: “Many such forecasts have proven wrong so far.”
But even if Jaafari is able to win parliamentary support for his list on Monday or Tuesday, how much real ability will his government have to govern?
This is an extremely serious issue. And much of the answer lies in the hands of the country’s US occupation administration. (I hope JWN readers haven’t for a moment been taken in by the Bushites’ protestations that they are “not an occupation force” in Iraq any more. Of course they are– both in fact, and under international law.)
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would chart its own course in pursuing questions of internal politics. Certainly, it would not have to listen to fatwas such as that issued by Donald Rumsfeld when, during his recent visit, he explicitly “told” the Iraqis what they could and couldn’t do with regard to former Baathists.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would have full control over national resources and national revenues.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would chart its own course with regard to national security. That course would most likely involve reaching agreements with the country’s neighbors, as well as with those portions of the occupying forces still remaining (or not) inside the country.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government could make its own appeals to whatever portions of the international community it should choose to, for help in attaining any of its national tasks. It would certainly not feel beholden to any diktats coming out of Washington.
… Meanwhile, we should note that much of the “story” that has been told by the mainstream US media about recent events in Iraq has claimed that the situation in the country got notably better for a whole period after the elections, and is only now threatening to get worse.
But that is actually a completely wrong view to present…

Continue reading “Bushies close to losing Iraqi ‘second chance’?”

The ‘fog of investigations’

WaPo article by Josh White today:

    An Army inspector general’s report has cleared senior Army officers of wrongdoing in the abuse of military prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere, government officials familiar with the findings said yesterday.

Why am I not surprised?
White’s piece notes that Brig. Gen Janis Karpinski is the only flag officer so far to have been recommended for punishment.
The article also provides a brief and generally clear summary of all the many previous (and deeply overlapping) ” investigations” the military has carried out over the past year into the abuse/torture of detainees.
Clausewitz, of course, was the person who famously coined the phrase “fog of war”. I sometimes think that what the Penatgon’s high-ups have achieved by organizing these numerous overlapping investigations has been to create “the fog of investigation”.
But maybe I’m too cynical.
What I do know is that there has been nothing like the clear, unequivocal leadership that has been needed from every civilian and military portion of the US national command structure that states flat-out that no act of torture or abuse will be tolerated!; that any suspected instances of abuse or torture will be investigated immediately, and any guilty party punished!; and that the Geneva Conventions and other essential humanitarian-law protections for detainees remain our sole standard!
Those kinds of clear leadership actions are what I was calling for in May and June of last year when I was writing a lot about the need for a clear posture of zero tolerance for torture. Here, or here, or here.
The Bushies, though, chose not go that route. Now, I know full well that as I write this, US government employees and contractors somewhere around the world are abusing and torturing detainees– on my tax dollar. It makes me sick to my stomach. It also makes me think more seriously than before about trying to become a war tax resister.

Former fighters work together in Lebanon

A really great article by Nora Bustany in the April 22 WaPo about a group of Lebanese former fighters working together to promote reconciliation.
They were brought together by Initiatives of Change, a non-governmental organization formerly known as the Moral Rearmament Association.
I know that the MRA played an important role in facilitating quiet, behind-the-scenes contacts between French and German opinion leaders after WW2. I hadn’t caught up with their recent work. It looks really interesting.
I can’t write more now (rushing for plane to Philadelphia) but I just note that I’ve been writing quite a bit about a similar initiative– that has gotten former foes to work together doing joint peace-promotion efforts in a Mozambican context– here, here, and in my continuing book-writing project.

Iraq open thread #2

I’m in a real rush today. There was an interesting article in toway’s WaPo by Ann Scott Tyson (embedded). It gave a clear picture of how the US forces have almost zero control of the terrain, just 25 miles out of downotwn Baghdad. (Okay, so there are huge areas of Baghdad itself where they have no control, either.)
I found this portion, where a US Army captain commanding a small position at the south of the “Triangle of Death” is describing his situation to a visiting colonel, particularly interesting:

    Capt. Ryan Seagreaves, of Allentown, Pa., told McMaster that he needed engineers to reinforce and expand his austere base so that there would be room for more Iraqi forces. He said he also needed dirt to fill protective barriers. Iraqi contractors are so terrified to work in the area that a convoy of 10 earth-filled dump trucks recently refused to travel south to McMaster’s base. One driver fainted when told the destination, he said.

Traditionally, when officers in modern armies needed more “dirt” to fortify their position, they would either dig it up themselves or be supplied by their logistics people with military earth-moving equipment to get the job done… Now, they are reliant on outside “contractors” to do even this basic job?
When the British Army suffered terrible losses and strategic setbacks in Iraq back in 1916-17, it was precisely because of completely insufficient logistic support for their forward positions. And yet, in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld blithely thought he could ignore the lessons of history (and all the good advice the uniformed military had tried to give him), and decided to go ahead and conquer Iraq with an ultra-“lean” attacking force, anyway.
The US forces– but also, to a much greater extent, the Iraqi people— have been suffering the chaotic, disastrous consequences of that decision ever since.
I’ve been thinking of trying to write a broad strategic survey of what’s been happening with the war, but I absolutely need to continue concentrating on my Africa book.
So while I do that, I’ll leave the comments thread here for y’all to put in additional news about Iraq.

Iraq: parliamentarian humiliated by US soldiers

This, from AP’s Thomas Wagner a couple of hourse ago:

    in the National Assembly, lawmaker Fattah al-Sheik stood and cried as he described being stopped at a checkpoint on the way to work Tuesday. He claimed an American soldier kicked his car, mocked the legislature, handcuffed him and held him by the neck.
    “What happened to me represents an insult to the whole National Assembly that was elected by the Iraqi people. This shows that the democracy we are enjoying is fake,” al-Sheik said. “Through such incidents, the U.S. Army tries to show that it is the real controlling power in the country, not the new Iraqi government.”
    Al-Sheik’s small party has been linked to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who led uprisings against the U.S.-led coalition in 2004…
    The U.S. military said its initial investigation indicated that in the morning, al-Sheik got into an altercation with a coalition translator at the checkpoint. U.S. soldiers tried to separate them and “briefly held on to the legislator,” while preventing another member of al-Sheik’s party from getting out of his vehicle, a military statement said.
    “We have the highest respect for all members of the Transitional National Assembly. Their safety and security is critically important,” U.S. Brig. Gen. Karl R. Horst said in the statement. “We regret this incident occurred and are conducting a thorough investigation.”
    [Right. And we’ll hear the results of this “investigation” when? Actually, most of the basic facts about what happened could be “discovered” and reported on publicly just about immediately… Like, were handcuffs in fact used? Was the legislature in fact mocked? Let the US military get the whole truth out, right away. There is no need for any kind of a lengthy, time-wasting “investigation” on this: just the truth, and with due speed.]
    During a one-hour adjournment to protest al-Sheik’s treatment, lawmaker Salam al-Maliki read an assembly statement demanding an apology from the U.S. Embassy and the prosecution of the soldier who allegedly mistreated the legislator.
    Hajim al-Hassani, the parliament speaker, said: “We reject any sign of disrespect directed at lawmakers.”

So if an out-of-control soldier on a checkpoint treats an elected Iraqi lawmaker this way, how do you think they treat the rest of the Iraqi people?

“We have a pope”

So today, the western media have breathlessly broken into all their news bulletins to say that the cry of “habemus papum” (We have a pope) has gone up from the Vatican.
Like that’s news? Like, the 120 or however many aging male cardinals were going to sit around forever and not come to agreement on which of their number would become pope?
But when, I wonder will we hear the joyous cry from Baghdad that “We have a democratically accountable government”?? (Do you think it would sound better in Latin? My dear late father, a Latin-and-Greek teacher, would be ashamed of how unable I feel right now, several languages later, to compose this simple phrase in Latin…)
This new Pope sounds incredibly Dick Cheney-ish, don’t you think? The guy was put in charge of a high-level political “search” process that ended up discovering that the best candidate for the job in question was indeed…. himself???
Just thinking about this whole process makes me unbelievably glad I’m a member of a faith community (the Quakers) that doesn’t believe in the “anointing” of some people to be spiritual “leaders” while others– including, in the case of the Catholics, all the females on God’s earth– get stuck in the role of merely doing what they’re told.
I’ve been wondering, too, if the cardinals who think that they might, just might, get appointed pope at the next “conclave” spend much time along the way picking out their future papal “names”… How long do you think this Cardinal Ratzinger has been practicing signing his name “Benedict”??
But back to my main point. Ratzinger/”Benedict” was “elected” today, and will be installed as Pope on Sunday. Five days. In Iraq, the UIA list was elected to head the National Assembly back on January 30th, and huge numbers of factors have since intervened– including, most recently, the desperately obstructive maneuverings of long-time CIA cat’s-paw Iyad Allawi; not to mention Don Rumsfeld– to prevent that list from even forming its government, let alone taking over any of the reins of real power in Iraq.
79 days, and still counting. It makes even the Vatican look like a model of efficiency.

Miqati’s cabinet, Lebanon

Lebanon’s latest PM-designate Najib Miqati has now named his government. The new government’s main role will be to steer the country through its much-needed parliamentary elections, which should take place before the term of the current parliament ends May 31.
Miqati, who is apparently a mild-mannered guy with links to most parts of Lebanon’s political spectrum, has named a much smaller government than usual– only 14 members instead of the usual 30 or so. (The 30 figure had become traditional as a way of getting all the extremely intricate balancing of this tiny Armenian church sect versus that Greek Orthodox church sect versus that Druze sect, etc, etc, exactly “right”… It had nothing at all to do with actually delivering a decent level of government service to citizens on an accountable basis– much more to do with divvying up the national patronage cake among its greedy claimants.)
Organizing the elections–which still also requires passage by the existing parliament of a new election law, which has to happen each time in Lebanon!– will be in the hands of new Interior Minister Hassan Sabei, a retired General Security officer who’s considered close to the Hariri family.
My dear old friend Ghassan Salameh, who had previously served in a Hariri-led government as Culture Minister, comes back as Minister for Higher Education and Culture, both.
Ghassan served as political advisor to Lakhdar Ibrahimi when Lakhdar was the UN’s representative in Iraq in mid and late 2003. In November 2003, Ghassan delivered this interesting presentation on the Iraq situation to a gathering in London. In it, he urged the international community to transform the US military presence in Iraq into a truly multinational force operating under a UN mandate. He urged the occupying power to go slow on privatization of the Iraqi economy, and to work hard on trying to engage all of Iraq’s neighbors cooperatively in the project of reconstruction…
But I guess for the next few weeks, at least, Ghassan will be busy primarily on Lebanese political issues.
I strongly hope that Miqati and his team, and the whole of the present Lebanese parliament can succeed in having an election that is free and fair, and effectively insulated from all outside influence; that its results are accepted as legitimate by the vast majority of Lebanese; and that it generates a parliament and a new government who see their first duty as being to serve Lebanon’s citizenry rather than line their own (or anyone else’s) pockets.
If this latter outcome is won, that would truly be a first for Lebanon.
(If you haven’t yet seen my big Boston Review article on Hizbullah and Lebanon, you can find some good background material there on the role Hizbullah has played in Lebanese electoral politics over the past 13 years.)

Uganda: healing or judging?

This is an extremely informative and inspiring article in today’s NYT about the use of traditional healing ceremonies to reconcile conflict-torn communities in northern Uganda.
Reporter Marc Lacey reports from Gulu, in northern Uganda, that,

    two very different systems – one based on Western notions of justice, the other on a deep African tradition of forgiveness – are clashing in their response to one of this continent’s most bizarre and brutal guerrilla wars, a conflict that has raged for 18 years in the rugged terrain along Uganda’s border with Sudan.
    The fighting features rebels who call themselves the Lord’s Resistance Army and who speak earnestly of the import of the Ten Commandments, but who routinely hack up civilians who get in their way. To add to their numbers, the rebels abduct children in the night, brainwash them in the bush, indoctrinate them by forcing them to kill, and then turn them – 20,000 over the last two decades – into the next wave of ferocious fighters seeking to topple the government. Girls as young as 12 are assigned as rebel commanders’ wives. Anyone who does not toe the line is brutally killed.
    The international court [that is, the Hague-based ICC], invited to investigate the war by President Yoweri Museveni, has announced it is close to issuing arrest warrants for rebel leaders including, no doubt, Joseph Kony, the self-styled spiritualist calling the shots. But some war victims are urging the international court to back off. They say the local people will suffer if the rebel command feels cornered. They recommend giving forgiveness more of a chance, using an age-old ceremony involving raw eggs.

    “When we talk of arrest warrants it sounds so simple,” said David Onen Acana II, the chief of the Acholi, the dominant tribe in the war-riven north, who traveled to The Hague recently to make his objections known. “But an arrest warrant doesn’t mean the war will end.”

No, indeed it does not.
Uganda is not, alas, one of the countries I’m writing about in my current book project, which deals precisely with this issue of the relationship between “judging/prosecutorial” approaches to dealing with the legacies of atrocious conflict and alternative, amnesty-based and more “healing”-oriented approaches.
One of my key “cases” is that of Mozambique, where the local people used a very similar, healing-based approach drawing on many indigenous (that is, pre-colonial) healing traditions to deal with the legacies of the equally ghastly violence that occurred during the 1977-92 civil war there.
The Mozambicans concluded their peace agreement, with Italian and UN backing, in October 1992. That was just before the UN created the first of the ad-hoc war-crimes courts of the modern age– the one for former Yugoslavia, called ICTY.
After the creation of ICTY, and the parallel ad-hoc tribunal for Rwanda– ICTR– activists in the western-based human rights movement got the idea that creating war-crimes courts to deal with the legacies of atrocious violence was definitely the best thing to do… In 1998 they secured the passage of the “Rome Treaty”, which established a permanent International Criminal Court, ICC, which came into effect in 2002.
Since then it has been much harder for people seeking a negotiated end to atrocity-laden conflicts to succeed, because one of the key “incentives” peace-seekers had in pre-ICC situations– that of offering amnesty to former wrongdoers– had been almost completely taken away from them by the creation of the ICC.
Luckily, though, last week a delegation of 24 Ugandan men and women representing four different social groupings in northern Uganda visited ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to discuss the situation there and their concerns about the effects of a reckless issuing of indictments.
Back in July last year, Moreno-Ocampo had announced that he had formally “found” that there was sufficient evidence of atrocities in northern Uganda that he had decided to open a formal judicial investigation into the situation. This kind of “investigation” could normally be expected to lead to the issuing of indictments, though none has been issued– for Uganda or anywhere else– by Moreno-Ocampo yet.
The joint statement issued at the end of last week’s meeting between the delegates from northern Uganda and Moreno-Ocampo made the following points:

Continue reading “Uganda: healing or judging?”

Detentions / Hostage-taking

There have recently been a bunch of news reports about alleged Sunni extremists in Iraq having taken hostage “up to 100” (though no-one really seems to know the real number) Shiite Muslim residents of the town of Madain, south of Baghdad.
This hostage-taking is really a scary, scary phenomenon.
I remember how similar cross-sectarian hostage-taking was a big feature of the early years of the civil war in Lebanon. The agony both of those who are taken hostage and of family members left behind, who have no idea at all about the whereabouts, life/death status, or health situation of their loved ones (and always tend to fear the worst), is hard to convey to people who have never encountered such a happening.
Such actions should all be ended! Immediately!!
But what, at the end of the day, is the moral difference between such hostage-taking and the practice of the US and Allawist forces up to now, of taking massive numbers of Iraqi “insurgents” as detainees and holding them– often in undisclosed locations– for weeks and months without trial?
As I noted in this JWN post April 11, as of then some 14,400 Iraqis were being held without trial, by the US forces or the Allawist-Iraqi forces. Of those, roughly 6,500 were being held by the “Iraqi” forces, just a handful by the Brits, and nearly 8,000 by the US forces.
Shame!
Imagine the anguish of an Iraqi mother whose son or spouse has been picked up in such a raid and taken away– with no real thought of a trial in mind for him– to some distant US-run detention center. The location, life/death status, and health situation may well also be kept secret from the detainees’ family members for many long weeks or months. And we know that terrible mistreatment goes on in these places of detention and indeed– in the case of US detention centers– that non-trivial numbers of inmates have died as a result of their treatment there.
Someone explain to me how this is any different from hostage-taking?
In such situations of mass detentions without trial (Iraq, Palestine, Guantanamo, elsewhere), it is a completely natural demand from members of the targeted community that the people detained without trial should be freed. Simply freed. Unless credible charges of criminal wrongdoing are brought against them, in which case that should happen with due speed, in a duly constituted court of law.
But the powers that hold these “hostage” detainees are often, actually, seeking to use them as a bargaining chip, and to “win” something politically for their release. Or, they are seeking to use them to try to brainwash them, with the hope that by breaking the will of these numerous individuals they can break the will of the opposition movement with which they are assumed to be aligned.
Both such uses of hostages– indeed, the very act of hostage-taking itself– are quite forbidden under international law.
Does this prevent the US and Israel from continuing the practice? No, it does not.
The demand voiced by various opposition forces in Iraq for the release of all those detainnes against whom credible criminal charges cannot be brought is a basic one. New Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has said he’s interested in providing an amnesty for all insurgents who don’t have the blood of Iraq civilians (or, perhaps, Iraqi security forces) on their hands.
What’s to stop him just following through, immediately, on that offer? I think that as President he probably has the authority to free all the Iraqis held by his forces who have not been convicted of or charged with any crime. He also, certainly, has the moral authority to demand, flat out, that the “guest forces” now present in his country release all the Iraqi detainees that they’re holding as well.
So what about it, Uncle Jalal? What’s to stop you doing this? Turn yourself into a truly Iraqi national figure by demanding the freeing of your compatriots from the foreigners’ hands.
If at the same time you’ve been successful in winning the freedom of the hostages from Madain (however many they are), then you would end up with a lot more political legitimacy nationwide than you now have.
And solid democratic principles like “no imprisonment without trial” would meanwhile be strongly reinforced…