Author: Helena

Legacies of torture, South Africa

This week, I have been focusing mainly on reviewing/revising the three South Africa chapters of my book on Violence and its Legacies. I find much of this project (South Africa, Mozambique) really heartening to work on, because the broad-level changes in the situations in those two countries over the past 15 years have been so evidently for the better. Yes, I know horrendous problems of poverty, social inequality, the legacies of colonialism, the ravages of HIV, and non-trivial problems of governance remain in both those countries.
But still.
Given a choice between South Africa today and apartheid South Africa; given a choice between Mozambique today and civil-war-gripped Mozambique– well, it seems evident to me which is better.
Along the way, though, in the chapters I’ve been working on so far in the past four weeks or so (Rwanda, SA), I’ve had to deal with a lot of narratives of torture and atrocity.
Many, many of the narratives of tortures carried out by SA’s apartheid regime seem shockingly familiar today, if you read the many accounts now surfacing of how the CIA (in particular) but also other US government bodies have been treating suspects in the “Global War on Terror”. There is something sickening about these governments that claim to be so “democratic” and so “civilized”, and that portray themselves, indeed, as “bringing the benefits of civilization to the natives”– but in fact, often interacting with the actual people of the subordinated, marginalized populations in an extremely barbaric way.
I have this emerging theory that the way the US deals with the rest of the world is sort of a macrocosm for how the White South Africans dealt with their non-White compatriots… Except that the SA Whites were around 11-15% of the relevant population there, while US citizens constitute only 4% of the population of the world. So the sheer chutzpah of our “leaders” claiming to be able to act “in the name of” or “on behalf of” or “for the good of” the rest of the world is that much greater.
Anyway here is an excerpt from my Chapter 5, South Africa from conflict to peacebuilding that will give you an idea of some of the things I find so familiar looking at US government actions today:

Continue reading “Legacies of torture, South Africa”

Yes, some worthwhile respect here

I see that today Juan Cole did refer to my work warning about the dangers of delay in forming the Transitional Government in Iraq.
Nice that someone gives public attribution and acknowledgement to my work here, eh? But then, I’ve always thought Juan was a very decent person, even when I have disagreed with him.
(Incidentally, we worked together back in the mid-1980s when he was co-editor of a book on Shiites and Social Protest to which I was contributor.)
Juan’s blog post there was reporting that some sources– apparently Kurdish– are saying that Iraq may get its Transitional Government formed by Sunday…
Let’s wait and see… Both whether they can do that, and also what powers the occupying army will allow the “government” to have…
Anyway, it’s still ways early to take down our “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counters…

Wanted: some respect!

I was, I think, one of the first, back in February, to point out that the complicated system put in place in Iraq by Paul Bremer’s bizarre and almost unilaterally imposed Transitional Administrative Law was seriously hampering the ability of Iraq’s elected leaders to form a government. Then on March 2, I started the “Democracy denied in Iraq” watch on the main sidebar of this blog.
It seems to be only recently that the mainstream US media and other bloggers like Juan Cole have noticed that this delay is indeed, in itself, an issue.
Does anyone cite or give credit to my earlier work on this?
Or, come to that, on the whole issue–now much remarked-upon in the US MSM and blogosphere– of the disgraceful absence of women’s voices from the op-ed pages of major US newspapers.
I wrote about that, and started my “Women getting WaPo-ed” watch back on Dec 21. I wrote about it a bit more in January, including Jan. 3rd.
Do I get any mentions, any citations, any respect for my pioneering work on that issue, either?
Hah! (That was a snort of disgust.)
Some respect, “guys”, please!
(I actually first posted this rant on JWN yesterday. But commenter Dick Durata suggested– wisely– that I should have made it a separate post. So here it is.)

Sistani’s justified impatience

So today, 51 days after the election in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani is finally reported as expressing his “discontent” over the delay.
51 days is no small matter. According to Paul Bremer’s unilaterally imposed and and excessively complex “Transitional Administrative Law” scheme, Iraq’s Transitional Government and the elected National Assembly have 213 days between the election (Jan. 30) and the deadline to reach agreement on the text of a permanent Constitution (Aug. 31, at the latest).
We have now seen nearly one-fourth of that time period go by– 23.94%, to be precise— without the system even having generated a Transitional Government.
No wonder Sistani’s getting impatient.
How long, I wonder, till he brings his people out onto the street again to demand the implementation of the people’s will?

    Time out for small authorial rant here: I was, I think, one of the first, back in February, to point out that the complicated system put in place by the TAL was seriously hampering the ability of Iraq’s elected leaders to form a government. Then on March 2, I started the “Democracy denied in Iraq” watch on the main JWN sidebar.
    It seems to be only recently that the mainstream US media and other bloggers like Juan Cole have noticed that this delay is indeed, in itself, an issue.
    Does anyone cite or give credit to my earlier work on this?
    Or, on the whole issue–now much remarked-upon in the US MSM and blogosphere– of the disgraceful absence of women’s voices from the op-ed pages of major US newspapers. I wrote about that, and started my “Women getting WaPo-ed” watch back on Dec 21. Wrote about it a bit more in January, including Jan. 3rd.
    Do I get any mentions, any citations, any respect for my pioneering work on that, either?
    Hah! (That was a snort of disgust.)
    Some respect, “guys”, please!

Iraq burning, Nero(ponte) fiddling?

It is now 26 days since I wrote this about Iraq:

    It is 24 days already since the election. It took the authorities an inordinately long length of time to certify the election. And now, where is the presidential council?

Since then, I’ve increasingly been wondering– what with Neroponte first of all preparing to leave Iraq, and then leaving for his big new intel-management job in Washington… And what with the continued failure of the Iraqi parties to reach agreement on forming a government…
So I’ve been wondering: who the heck, on the US side, has been responsible for shepherding along the political process there?
Look, we might not like the fact, but under the international law of military occupation the US does have overall responsibility for the good governance (hah!) of Iraq, pending conclusion of a final peace agreement between Washington and a representative Iraqi government.
And hey, it’s not just that Neroponte was up and leaving the place, but don’t you remember, some time back, we were all assured that National Security Advisor Condi Rice was going to be “in charge of running Iraqi affairs from Washington”?? But since then she too has been given new responsibilities and now she’s off tooling around various parts of the world in her dominatrix jackboots…
So who is in charge of the Iraq “file”? Maybe just Rumsfeld? Maybe purely the military?
Or how about…nobody?
Yesterday, Steve Wesiman had an intriguing piece in Sunday’s NYT titled U.S. Avoids Role of Mediator as Iraqis Remain Deadlocked.
Here’s what he wrote:

    Senior Bush administration officials said this week that the administration was avoiding direct intervention to break the deadlock among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions, still trying to form a government in Iraq six weeks after national elections.
    The officials said they had concluded that despite the bitter wrangling over how much power to distribute among the factions, particularly Shiites and Kurds, any attempt by the United States to mediate would be likely to backfire.
    “So far, we’re letting it happen,” a senior administration official said, referring to the Kurdish-Shiite dispute. “That’s really by design.”

This official gives the excuse that, “If we try to impose a solution, then anyone who gets the short end of the stick will hold a grudge, not only against us, but against the deal that was reached. It could lead to instability down the road.”
Well, maybe that’s the reason… Or maybe, given the horrendous levels of internal fighting (Sunni vs. Shiite) in the country in the 50 days since the election, Washington’s “non-intervention” in helping to resolve the government-formation problem has more to do with letting those two ethnic-Arab communities continue fighting among themselves while the Iraqi Kurdish parties sit pretty and gain in relative political strength as the other two communities mutually attrite each other?
Weisman– who was reporting from Washington– wrote that a second official he spoke to last week,

    said that Kurds, Shiites and some of Iraq’s Arab neighbors want the United States to play a facilitating role in forming a new government, but that Washington is resisting. “There’s pressure from the players out there, but not here,” he said. “We are comfortable exactly where we are.”

Oh, how fine and ducky for them, all those Bush administration officials sitting pretty in DC while the public-security situation in Iraq continues to be quite nightmarish. But where is “responsibility” in all this?

The price of democracy? (Iraq)

This piece of reporting, by Awadh al-Taee and Steve Negus of the Financial Times, is worth reading every word of.
It adds another dimension to the “First shoot, then lie” story I posted here ten days ago. Namely, that it’s not only the US troops who do this, but also the many private “security contractors”, i.e. foreign mercenaries, now rampaging their way around Iraq.
One particular twist in this story is that the miscreant mob was, as Taee and Negus wrote:

    a three-vehicle convoy belonging to a private security company, transporting a foreigner working to facilitate Iraq’s parliamentary elections

The mercenaries in that convoy shot their way through a crowded intersection, leaving behind them two bullet-injured Iraqi motorists, one of whom died of his wound later that day.
Is this a case of “we had to kill this Iraqi voter in order to save his ability to vote?”
How on earth does the foreign “electoral specialist” in question feel about this incident? How should he or she feel? (Actually, does she or he even know about what happened there?)
But do please read the whole of Taee and Negus’s fine story, which incisively shows how the stark power imbalance between Iraqi citizens and armed foreigners in their land impacts upon the Iraqis.
At one point they write:

    Under constant threat from suicide attackers driving explosive-rigged cars, coalition soldiers and contractors follow combat zone rules of engagement to protect themselves: warn drivers who stray too close, but if that fails, shoot. With procedures designed to protect the identities of anyone who might be singled out for retaliation, the victim’s families may never know what happened, let alone obtain justice. [And who keeps those ‘procedures’ in place, I wonder? ~HC]
    In this case, the situation was eventually resolved to the satisfaction of the victim’s family after negotiation with the security company. However, it is not clear if the parties would have found each other had foreign journalists not been involved.

Huge kudos to Taee and Negus for their reporting, and to the FT for publishing this piece.
I wonder (!) why we have seen no such careful and hard-hitting reporting in the US media?
I also note that even though Taee and Negus work for the grand “Pink old lady” of pro-capitalist journalism, they admit that they and their paper still felt intimidated enough by the “security company” involved that they did not actually use its name in the story: “its country manager, “John” (a pseudonym) preferred that it not be named. Given the very real risk of retaliation, the FT agreed not to do so.”
Pseudonymous foreign managers, anonymous western companies, lies, evasions, and killings… Yes, welcome to the “New Iraq™”.
By the way, Taee and Negus give us this very poignant little portrait of the man killed:

    The unarmed victim of the January 23 shooting was Abd al-Naser Abbas al-Dulaimi, age 29. Unmarried, he worked in the power station across the river to support his mother, two sisters, and the two children of an older brother who went missing in the 1991 Kuwait war. When he was shot, say police, he was out looking for petrol, which most Iraqis are forced to buy on the black market because of a recent shortage at the pumps. They found no weapons on his body, nor in his car.

Ullah yerhamu (God have mercy on him.) But what about all the dependents he left behind? Who will have mercy on them?

Lebanon: Holding the line for nonviolence

There was a car-bomb in Beirut a short while ago. In the north of the city, a mainly Christian area. Seven people reported injured, thank G-d so far none reported killed.
I hope to heck this is not the beginning of a slide back into violence. I wish every political and community leader in Beirut would publicly join a commitment not to resort to violence. I wish every foreign embassy and NGO would turn itself into an active nonviolence advocacy and monitoring group.
Can the line be held against the onrush of violence? Praying is not enough (though it might help). But it is human choices, human actions, and human leadership that must hold this line.

Paper on “Religion and violence”

You can now download and read a paper on “Religion and violence” that I first presented at a special colloquium on world religions that the American Academy of Religion held in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 2003.
Many of the papers presented there, including mine, will be published in an upcoming special edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, which is published by Oxford University Press.
Well, I’ve been kind of eager for the paper to be published and out there, so I could share it with a bunch of people and get some discussion going on what I said/wrote in it… The JAAR publishing process has seemed to me extremely lengthy but then I guess that’s in the nature of academic publishing. (As opposed to, for example, blogging.)
Now, I just heard that this edition of JAAR will be coming out this December. And here’s the neat thing about the rights to the text that I retain under the terms of the contract with OUP: I can “mount” the pre-published version of the Article–I’m quoting directly from OUP’s rights Agreement here–on my personal Web site, “as long as [I] acknowledge that the Article has been accepted for publication by OUP.”
Okay, I think I’ve acknowledged that.
Actually I’m just re-reading the Agreement here. Even after publication I am “entitled to use parts or all of the Article in other publications written or edited by [my]self, providing that a full acknowledgement is given to the Journal and to Oxford University Press…”
I guess I’ll just go back into the text of the Article, as I recently uploaded it here, and put that acknowledgement in there at the top, and then I can publish it here myself forever…
Done.

Mission accomplished?

So, Negroponte has today left Iraq.
Mission accomplished?
It depends what the mission was, of course. If it was to “lead” Iraq through a mockery of an election, leave the physical and much of the social infrastructure in tatters, public security a nightmare, and the political situation in an impotent impasse, then yes, jolly well done, John!
If on the other hand this man cares one whit about the wellbeing of the people of Iraq, he should be hanging his head in shame and slinking out of the country to hide for a very long time in an “undisclosed location.”
So how do the rest of us think John Negroponte will get treated when he gets to Washington? Feted or fetid?