Helena – Page 274 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Riverbend’s post-election view

Here is a fascinating new post from Riverbend yesterday. (Thanks to commenter Frank for alerting me to this one– and also, its predecessor from River, which is likewise worth reading.)
River sounds a lot less personally sanguine about Iraq’s prospects after the election than Faiza (cautiously) has been.
River has her own take on the Islamic dress-code issue there, which is definitely worth reading. I also really love the folksy, intimate way she’s able to describe daily scenes in her life to us. She’s been posting a bit more frequently, recently. Let’s hope that trend continues.
Please, River!
I just want to paste in the concluding words on this recent post of hers:

Bushies fixin’ to fight Hizbullah

Steve Weisman has a piece in today’s NYT about both the Bush administration’s recent escalation of its campaign against the Lebanese party Hizbullah, and the difficulties it has encountered in Europe as it tries to drum up support for this policy.
The piece reveals Weisman’s usual close understanding of US politics and a level of misunderstanding of Middle East politics that’s only too common among “well-connected insiders” in Washington DC.
Weisman sources his story to “officials and diplomats” in both the US and Europe who, “would not give their names, saying they did not want to be seen as worsening tensions between the United States and Europe on the eve of Mr. Bush’s trip.”
Did not want to be seen as worsening tensions? Yes, that is apparently right, because the difference of opinion between the US and most of Europe over the Hizbullah issue seems to be very deep indeed.
Of course, the fact that the sources that Weisman claims are unnamed makes his whole story rather nebulous and hard to pin down. But I don’t doubt that– because of who he is, and because his editors decided to run the story on the front page above the fold– he had some pretty authoritative ones.
Here’s what he writes:

In the past two weeks, the officials said, France has rebuffed appeals by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, to list Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, which would prevent it from raising money in Europe through charity groups. The United States has long called Hezbollah a terrorist organization, but the French, American and European officials said, have opposed doing so, and argue that making such a designation now would be unwise, given the new turbulence in Lebanon.

That’s kind of interesting about the French, since back in September they were apparently enthusiastic supporters of Security Council Resolution 1559 that called for the dismantling of Hizbullah and other militias inside Lebanon (as well as Syria’s ouster from it.) President Chirac was also a very prominent presence at Rafiq Hariri’s funeral yesterday, having been a long-time friend of the Hariri family.
Ah, but here’s a very sly kicker from Weisman:

Israeli and American officials say

I wrote a bit here, on Saturday, about Israel’s newly energized diplomatic campaign against Hizbullah.
I wrote there, too, that the Jerusalem Post was running a piece that attributed to “PA security officials” a fear of a Hizbullah assassination attack against Abu Mazen.
Of course, so far we’ve not yet had any actual expressions of such a concern– either from Abu Mazen or from security officials around him– that haven’t come out pre-filtered through (or, indeed, generated by) Israeli or American sources… So why on earth should we take all that pre-cooked hasbara seriously at all?
Why didn’t Steve Weisman try to ask Abu Mazen, or someone around him, whether he actually entertains such fears about Hizbullah?
Oh, sorry, Abu Mazen’s an Arab. That must mean he’s a congenital liar, right? [Irony alert in this paragraph, friends.] Clearly, “Israeli and American officials” can be trusted on to know the truth about his fears and concerns much better than him…
(In that post last Saturday, I also quoted Hizbullah’s deputy Secretary-General, Naim Kassem as having categorically denied to a Reuters reporter that they were trying to recruit Palestinian militants to destroy new Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts. Oh, but he’s an Arab too, right?)
Okay, so I’m waiting till we have any concrete evidence at all, on any of these Israeli-generated allegations against Hizbullah, before I rush to judgment.
I guess that makes me part of the old-fashioned, “reality-based community”, right?
But back to the story of how the Hizbullah issue is causing fissures between the Europeans and the Bushies…

Continue reading “Bushies fixin’ to fight Hizbullah”

Faiza on the post-elections

Faiza has a good new English-language post up, containing her reflections on the post-election scene. She is still, like many thousands of Iraqis, hanging around in a neighboring country– in her case, Jordan.
This post is something she wrote last Saturday. The whole post is definitely worth reading. But if you can’t catch the whole thing, at least pay attention to what this wise woman writes about her country’s immediate priorities:

Nice work if you can get it, eh?

I am totally delighted that the Israeli Knesset has voted for the bill that authorizes the compensation package for the 9,000 settlers who’ll be relocated out of Gaza this summer.
Here are some details from a story filed late Wednesday by AP’s Ravi Nessman:

It seems to me that the settlers have gotten themselves a wonderful deal.
Imagine this: You take your family to a lovely seaside villa built on somebody else’s land (maybe some of the land expropriated for the Sinai settlements from my friend Freih Abu-Middain?) The government is so keen to have you move there that they give you all kinds of sweet deals on financing or renting your home, and perhaps the lovely irrigated orchards all around it. (Did you ever read Amira Hass’s lovely book Drinking the sea at Gaza, where she writes about the strong salinity of the water the Gaza Palestinians have to make do with, given how much of their customary water supplies have been overdrawn by Israel and the settlements?)
… Anyway, moving right along, you’re this Israeli settler, and you’ve been having this lovely life there. And then the government comes and tells you, sorry buddy, it’s time you moved out… and they give you nearly $100,000 for every man, woman, or child in your family.
Wow!
Great work if you can get it, eh?
Nessman gives more details of how the buyout will work:

Continue reading “Nice work if you can get it, eh?”

Notes on the development of transitional justice

I have just done a quick revision of the portion of the book chapter that I “junked” last week that deals with the development of the “transitional justice” field since 1945. And, as promised last week, I’ve now uploaded that text into the JWN archives.
This text is a part of my earlier plan for Chapter 11 of the “Violence and its Legacies” book. I appended to it, in the same file there, the latest version I have of the chart I’ve been compiling on truth commissions (which form only a part of the broader TJ field.)
I titled the text Notes on the development of ‘transitional justice’ since 1945.
In it, I make some important, preliminary arguments that the changes the field has already been undergoing, at the level of practice, in the past 10-15 years need to be made more explicit in the theory; and that the theory therefore, explicitly, needs to be made much broader and more holistic.
Some people have already started to reflect seriously on the need to broaden the definition and purview of the field, and the implications of making that shift. Luckily, some of them– Rama Mani, Bill Schabas, Gerald Gahima, etc– were at the UNU conference I went to last month. But I do think that more work needs to be done to make this shift more explicit.
I would really love to use this thread for comments and feedback.

Abu Mazen in the NYT

Today’s NYTimes has an intriguing interview with Abu Mazen that’s well worth reading. (I think you have to register to do so. Go thru Bugmenot.)
In digesting Abu Mazen’s comments at the top of the article, reporter Steve Erlanger wrote that, “The new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said in an interview this weekend that the war with the Israelis is effectively over”, a theme that was picked up in the headline.
I scanned eagerly down the text to find the exact way in which AM had worded this. But I found no actual quoted text that related to Erlanger’s attention-grabbing lede. What I did find was this:

Mr. Abbas said the war with the Israelis would be over “when the Israelis declare that they will comply with the agreement I made in Sharm el Sheik…”

… which I believe has a somewhat different, more conditional sense to it.
Never mind about that perplexing error, though. The AM remarks as quoted were significant enough.
He clearly signaled that his prime political focus will be on getting final-status negotiations started (and completed) as rapidly as possible:

it’s better for us and for the Israelis to go directly to final status

This fits completely with the assessment that Rob Malley and Hussein Agha had made in this late January article (which was also in the NYRB.)
Erlanger evidently asked AM how Sharon had responded to the suggestion to open a back channel to work out the details on final-status issues. He reported that AM laughed, and said Sharon had not responded:

“But we’ll talk more about it. Maybe he didn’t like it. We have to repeat it more and more in our ongoing negotiations.”

In the lede, Erlanger also wrote that AM had said that :

Then later, this:

Was the armed intifada of the last four and a half years a mistake? “We cannot say it was a mistake,” he said. “But any war will have an end. And what is the end? To sit around the table and talk. And they [Hamas and Islamic Jihad] realize that this is the time to come to the table and talk and negotiate.”

For now, AM made quite clear that his immediate priority was to secure the release of as many of the Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel, as possible. (There have been big, Hamas-led demonstrations in Gaza about this, over the past week.)
Prisoner releases have also, of course, been a big issue inside nearly every other transformational negotiation in recent decades.
Up near the top of the piece, Erlanger has a little reference to AM having said that, “The Americans were talking to him ‘in a very helpful way’.” I did not, however, see that expanded anywhere later in the text.
I have to say, for myself, I haven’t spent any time with Abu Mazen face-to-face for many years now. But just the way he has been carrying himself in the past couple of months is extremely impressive. He suddenly seems to have significant new amounts of self-confidence. That, allied with his natural modesty and self-deprecating nature, seem to give him a relaxed way of being in which he doesn’t have to be shrill and accusatory in order to be firm and get his view across.
I like the way he talked about Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in general:

Continue reading “Abu Mazen in the NYT”

A Valentine from the WaPo

Well, you know that in some places around the world, women’s rights, interests, and voice have been getting progressively devalued over recent years (while in others they’ve been becoming progressively more valued.)
In Iraq, I am afraid that women’s interests are about to be rolled back by the incoming regime.
And in Washington DC, women’s voices have almost certainly been rolled back a lot over the past 10-15 years.
Today, “Valentine’s Day”, I’m sad to report to you the final findings of the “Women getting WaPo-ed” count that I’ve been maintaining for the past eight weeks.
Today, the WGW count finally tells us that the men who run the most influential newspaper in the most important city in the world value women’s voices precisely one-ninth as much as they value men’s voices.
That is, as of today, the WGW count stands at exactly 10%. Over the past eight weeks, precisely 26 of the 260 authored pieces on the Washington Post‘s op-ed pages have been authored by women. (And I’ve been “generous” in assigning to the women’s score genders that weren’t easy to assign.)
I note that people in the west frequently get conniptions when they learn that in some Islamic codes of law, a man’s testimony in court “counts” for as much as that of two women.
But how many conniptions do we hear from Washingtonians when they contemplate the gross gender imbalance on the Op-Ed page of their daily paper? Nine men’s voices for every woman’s voice that gets published?
What is all that about???
It is my strong belief, moreover, that the gender imbalance on the WaPo’s op-ed pages has gotten worse over the past 10-15 years, not better. I don’t have any figures for that, but if any of you readers has some figures from the past, please send ’em on over!
At least, now, I’ve established what I hope will be an absolute rock-bottom base-line for the WGW count. I’m sincerely hoping the count will only go up from here? Maybe I’ll run it again some time in the future.
But for now, the Valentine’s Day message that the men who run the WaPo are sending to the women they encounter in their professional life seems to be this:

opinions

And Happy Valentine’s Day to you, too, guys!

A question about Iraq’s vote-count

I was just reading this story from AP, which attributed to the Iraqi Electoral Commission the same final distribution of the 275 seats in the National Assembly that AP had reported– without attribution to the IEC– yesterday.
Namely that the Sistanist UIA list gets 140 seats, the Kurdish list get 75, the Allawist get 40, etc etc.
However, I think that further down the list of lists there may be a question about the allocation of one seat that the IEC gave to the Sadrist list (one of three that they allocated to it), which I believe may more legitimately have gone to the Iraqi Islamic Party.
Here is my table of calculations for how I believe the seats were being (or should have been) allocated.
The easiest way to understand the counting is to read the table from left to right. First of all, the number of votes recorded for each significantly-sized list is divided by 30,750, which as I wrote yesterday is the raw “number of votes per seat”. After that first distribution of seats, 256 seats have been clearly distributed. You then have two sets of votes that have not yet “contributed” to a seat: all the “remainders” from the dividing process for the bigger lists, plus all the actual votes from all the smaller lists.
Each list should, obviously, get to “keep” its own remainders (my column D). But down at the bottom of the list of lists, there are many lists that by no means of remainder-distribution at all could end up qualifying for a seat. I put that cut-off point after #13, the Iraqi Islamic Party, principally in view of the fact that the IIP clearly had gained more than half of a “seat”‘s-worth of votes, and the next list on the list clearly had not.
So I then redistributed among lists 1-13 all the votes that had not been cast for any of lists 1-13, on a basis proportional to the number of votes each of those lists had originally won (my column E there).
I then added the sums of columns D and E to arrive at a total for an allocation of votes at “round 2”. That was column F. Those votes were then aggregated into “seats”, using the same divisor as in round 1, generating the additional seats given in column G.
But there are still remainders, and still four seats to be allocated.
At that point, I allocated those four remaining seats to the lists with the highest remainders in column H, which were lists 1, 2, 9, and 13. Of those four “lucky” lists, #13 (the IIP) had by far the highest remainder in column H. That’s why I certainly would have allocated one of those four “third round” seats to the IIP.
During the IEC’s whole remainder-distribution process, it notably did not give a seat to the IIP; but it apparently gave one to the Sadrist list. I really do not understand why, since I can’t see any way of fairly organizing the remainder-distribution system that would have given them an extra seat there.
Plus, I repeat, the IIP had actually won more than 50% (actually, 69.4%) of the votes it would have needed to win a seat without any remainders redistributed to it, at all.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see the IEC’s explanation of its process.
(P.S. It feels so good to be scrying vote-tallying processes in Iraq rather than body counts.)

Rafiq Hariri, RIP

Former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri and at least nine other people were killed in a massive car bomb attack on the Beirut seafront today.
A Sunni Muslim billionaire from Sidon, who made his fortune as a contractor in Saudi Arabia, Hariri was Lebanon’s PM from 1992 thru 1998, and again from 2000 till last October.
Initial speculation– in the case of this bomb as of the one that severely wounded MP Marwan Hamadeh last October– turned to the possibility of a Syrian hand in the attack. Both Hamadeh and Hariri had been in the movement that opposed the Syrian-backed extension in office of Maronite Christian President Emil Lahoud.
However, in both cases there is also the possibility that the attacks were part of an orchestrated destabilization campaign in Lebanon aimed at turning the Lebanese people even more strongly against Syria. Who might be behind such a campaign? On the principle of cui bono one would have to say certain hardline forces inside Israel.
The possibility of some kind of a Mossad hand seems to me even more likely this time around than in October. Since October, the Syrians have definitely been trying to handle their relations with Lebanon in a more intelligent, less heavy-handed manner.
Al-Jazeera is reporting that its office in Beirut,

[This would seem like the name of a Sunni fundamentalist group. ~HC]

The person is not a native-Arabic speaker. He was speaking Arabic with a foreign accent.

The AP account linked to at the top, like all other media accounts, reports that,

Syrian President Bashar Assad said he “condemned this horrible criminal action,” according to SANA, Syria’s official news agency. Assad urged the Lebanese people to reject those who plant “schism among the people” during this “critical situation.”

Before all my ardent pro-Israeli commenters get on my case here, let me just point out two things: (1) The use of car-bombs and other forms of roadside explosive devices has been an established Israeli SOP in Lebanon for many, many years (and has even recently been used inside Syria); and (2) Israel has maintained robust special-ops capabilities in central Lebanon throughout the whole period of Syria’s general domination of the area.

Continue reading “Rafiq Hariri, RIP”

Dec 2003 Golden Oldies up

I just posted the December 2003 JWN Golden Oldies onto the sidebar on the front page. Check them out. It was a pretty good month for JWN. Lots there about Iraq, war-crimes courts, and my first visit to China.
Warning: you may find lots of really nasty (including pornographic) spam posted into the comments of some of those posts. Sorry about that. When I have time, I’ll delete that nastiness.
Because of spam attacks like those into old posts, I now have a policy of closing the Comments boards after a certain amount of time. (Maybe two weeks?) So if you want to comment on any of those brilliant — or not so brilliant– old posts, here is the place to do it.
(By the way: I hope you’re enjoying my nod to Lusophonia regarding the date-stamps on the posts. I only discovered the range of language options for datestamps in the MT system recently. What shall it be next, I wonder? Possibly not Japanese.)