Author: Helena

UIA at around 50%

So finally, two whole weeks after Iraqis went to the polls, we have preliminary results of the Jan 30 election.
That story, from AP, gave only the (preliminary) totals for the three biggest blocs that ran. Another AP story, to which I can’t find a link, said the total number of votes cast came to 8.456 million.
So if you take the (preliminary) numbers listed for the three biggie lists, then you find that, of the ballots cast:

    the Sistanist, UIA list got 48.2%,
    the Kurdish list got 25.7%, and
    Allawi’s list got 13.8%.

Of course, the final percentages should be a little higher than this, in each case, once we know how many of the “ballots cast” were judged to be “invalid”.
[Update, Sun. mid-afternoon, NYC time: I just learned here that the 8.456 million figure is the figure for valid votes cast, so those percentages there HOLD. Also, the number of votes required to win one seat in the Assembly is about 30,750. Down at the bottom of this, I’ll try to give my estimates for seat numbers.]
Interesting how tantalizingly close to 50% the UIA list got. I should imagine that if they can make a decent working coalition with pro-Moqtada or other small Shiite parties, they would come in at over 50%, giving them the kind of strong electoral victory that I’m sure Sistani was looking for.
Lots of politics over the days ahead, no doubt. For starters, the IEC isn’t going to announce “verified” final results for another three days, after it has sorted out all outstanding challenges.
And then, there’s the politics of coalition building. Allawi was described in this Hayat story as offering PUK leader Jalal Talabani the presidency if he would enter a coalition with him. The WaPo today had a story about Ahmad Chalabi, who’s a little low down on the UIA list, desperately wooing Moqtada.
The big question remains. That is,how can the next administration (whoever ends up heading it: I’m kind of expecting Ibrahim Jaafari) win broad enough legitimacy both for itself, and for the constitution-writing process that desperately needs to get underway?
I’d say, legitimacy-wise, that whoever heads the new (still interim) administration needs to find a credible way to be able to draw in significant representatives of the Sunni community, as well as of major different strands of the Shiite community. It goes without saying that the Kurds, who are very well organized at the political level, also have to be– and will be– inside the tent.
An attempt to form a Shiite-Kurdish coalition to the exclusion of the Sunnis can’t work.
Okay, here, added in mid-afternoon Sunday, New York time, are the votes and rough seat counts (out of 275 seats), as taken from this AP story:

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Eyad Sarraj: hopeful in Gaza

Go straight here. Read why Eyad Sarraj, a dedicated children’s psychiatrist, human rights activist, and the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, titled this op-ed piece, This time, I’m hopeful.
By the way, I hope you got the chance to go over and read my CSM column, Thursday. The title of that one was, Hope takes root, again, in Mideast.
Sarraj writes of a recent encounter he had with the press:

    “Do you really trust Hamas to stop terror?” one of the journalists asked me. “Even when they announce that they are not bound by the agreement?”
    To his obvious shock I replied, “Yes.”
    I have spent many years observing Hamas at close range as it has grown from a small Islamic religious movement into a major army. I have been debating politics with its leaders and members for a long, long time. That experience leads me to believe that Hamas will very soon transform into a political party and will seriously contemplate taking over the government by democratic means.
    There are sound reasons for my optimism. The first is that Hamas finally has an incentive to halt terrorist activity. For years, its raison d’etre has been military action. But Hamas has just achieved an astounding victory in municipal elections in the Gaza Strip, winning 70 percent of the seats in local councils. Fatah, the ruling party that had long dominated the political scene, was roundly defeated. Hamas has a guaranteed political future when it chooses to abandon the armed struggle.
    Furthermore, close observers have noted important signs of change within Hamas over time. From remarks made by its spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, before his assassination last year, we understand that Hamas is now prepared to accept a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And as the recent elections showed, Hamas now participates fully in the democratic process — something that it once called a Western conspiracy, and even a sin.
    Hamas is becoming more organized, more sophisticated and more confident in itself. For example, in the first intifada, Hamas was quick to charge people with collaboration with Israel and to kill them. That was a sign of insecurity. The Hamas of today pledges not to kill fellow Palestinians, but instead urges the Palestinian Authority to enforce its laws.

Sarraj says he sees reasons for optimism on the Israeli side, as well:

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Zubeidi, Sharon, Hamas, etc

This, from Imshin, made me laugh out loud today. Particularly the part where Al-Aqsa Brigades commander Zakariya Zubeidi is quoted calling “Arik” Sharon “a real man”.
Zubeidi continued:

    When there was war in the Jenin (refugee) camp he [Sharon] came here to the headquarters himself. With a weapon, a helmet, everything. He was up front, like me. He killed us, yes, but I see him as a military commander. He

A little writing crisis here

Really interesting things are happening all over the world. The North Koreans have announced they have nuclear weapons… The Iraqi election commission has announced yet more problems in ballot-counting, necessitating yet further delay in releasing the results. (Do I smell a fish? Is Negrocontre desperately searching around for which UIA leader will take his dollar and become his humble servant?)… The situation in Gaza looks poised on a knife-edge… (By the way, here is my column from today’s CSM.) … All kinds of revelations are coming out about yet more heinous misdeeds in the US global gulag… A few score thousand Saudi men got the chance to go vote in highly constrained local elections…
As I said, a lot happening, about which I wish I were blogging.
Instead of which I am sitting at my desk having a really upsetting writing crisis. Long and short: none of the work I’ve done on my book in the past month is worth saving.
Aaaaaaaaaargh!
I won’t bore you with the details. All I’ll say is that– though none of what I’ve drafted will end up in the book, it is not totally wasted. From two points of view. First, everything I write helps me organize my thoughts and draws me, hopefully, to greater understanding and wisdom. (Blah, blah, blah.) That one is also known as the “mulch theory.”
And secondly, it ain’t wasted because nowadays I get to post it on the blog! And so, dear readers, sometime in the near future you can look forward to not one but two drafts of “Helena’s definitive accounting of the history of international atrocities law”! And my short draft of the history of truth commissions!
I bet you can’t wait. Right?

More on truth commissions

Jonathan and I are having a pretty interesting discussion down here on the topic of “what makes a ‘truth’ commission?” Stop on by, everybody, and share your views, too.
I’ve done a bit more work on the chart I’ve been compiling about the general phenomenon of truth commissions. Actually, while doing that, I’ve learned a lot more interesting things about the range of truth commissions that have operated around the world in the past 30 years.
For example, the t.c. established in Timor Leste (East Timor) in 2001 is titled the “Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor”. “Reception” there refers to receiving the perpetrators of (at least) small crimes back into their communities, in line with local cultural norms. Here is the Commission’s officially stated purpose.
I would love to learn more about the East Timor Commission’s whole process, which was apparently designed in line with national cultural norms there.
Their process was certainly designed to incorporate much more intentional reconciliation/ peacebuilding than the South African TRC. For example, former “perpetrators” of politically motivated acts of violence were expected to make a full confession (as at the SA TRC)– but then beyond that, a committee including local “elders” of the community would preside over a Community Reconciliation hearing which would come up with a “Community Reconciliation Act” (or acts) that this person would have to perform.
In SA, by contrast, the perps were not obligated to take part in any kind of a “reconciliation” process, or even to apologize or express remorse to their erstwhile victims. Production of a narrative that the Amnesty Committee considered to be fully truthful was enough to bring the perps full amnesty.
This little extract from the East Timor Commission’s “Update” for December 2003 and January 2004 gives a flavor of what was going on there:

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Thinking about Rwanda with Harvey Weinstein

I don’t know how many of you recall the three posts (1, 2, and 3) I put up in mid-January in which I wrote about Eric Stover and Harvey Weinstein’s new book “My Neighbor, My Enemy; Justice and community in the aftermath of mass atrocity”?

Well, ain’t the world-wide web a wonderful thing? Sunday evening, I got a really interesting email from Harvey, in which he gently challenged a couple of things I’d said there.

(I had a similar experience not long ago when the Israeli researcher and writer Daniel Sobelman, whose work I mentioned when I posted here about Hizbullah, in December, likewise got in touch with me. There, without even a challenge. Yes, the WWW truly is remarkable.)

Anyway, back to Harvey M. Weinstein, who you might remember is a psychologist and a clinical professor in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Okay, I can’t totally remember how much detail about his professional credentials I put into those earlier posts. But take it from me he’s one heck of a smart, well-informed, compassionate, and visionary guy.

His email gave me, as they say, “pause for considerable thought”. So I went back and re-read the chapter in the book that I’d voiced some criticism of in light of his comments to me, and got back to him. That was Chapter 10, an important chapter in which he and two co-researchers present the results of a 2,000-person attitudes survey that they had a big team conduct, in 2002, in a four significantly distinct kinds of locations around Rwanda.

I wrote my criticisms in the 2nd of those three posts linked to above.

Here is our correspondence this week:

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Peacemakers??? Maybe…

I just wrote a CSM column today, coming out Thursday. As I worked through it, I came to this amazing conclusion. How about if a stable peace between Israelis and Palestinians ends up getting made this year between an Israeli coalition headed by Sharon and a Palestinian coalition dominated by Hamas? (And under the sponsorship of, George W. Bush?)
Okay, let’s leave aside Bush for the present. Just think of the other two. Would that be a reciprocal “Nixon to China” move, or what?
(On the other hand, maybe for Mao, receiving Nixon was equally much of an ideological breakthrough? )
As I say in my column– the best folks to make peace with are, after all, your present enemies….

Remembering the “devouring”

With all the news coverage recently of the 60th anniversary of the Allied liberation of Auschwitz there was, as predictable, pitifully little mention of the 500,000 Roma people (Gypsies) who were killed in the Holocaust– some 21,000 of whom were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The Romani word for the genocide/Holocaust that their people suffered at the hands of the Nazis is porraimos, the “devouring”.
I’ve been re-reading Isabel Fonseca’s outstanding 1995 book, “Bury me standing: The Gypsies and their journey”. The whole of Chapter 7 is about the “devouring”.
Of Auschwitz-Birkenau she writes:

    The site of the Zigeunerlager, or Gypsy camp, is marked on the wall map in the arched entrance to the vast pitch of Birkenau. It was in the row of barracks farthest from the main gates, which meant that the Gypsies had a good view of both the gas chambers and the crematoria. Apart from a few crumbling brick chimneys, there is nothing left of the thirty-eight-barrack Gypsy camp. (p.254)

The whole chapter makes very, very tough reading. Josef Mengele was particularly interested in performing his vile experiments on Gypsies. The stories of Gypsy suffering in the camps– told mainly by Jewish or Polish survivors, for there were pitifully few among the Gypsies themselves–are all extremely upsetting.

    Mieczyslaw Janka, a Polish survivor, remembers the Gypsy family camp next to the hospital at Birkenau. “The Gypsy men would accompany our singing while their women danced. For this we would throw them bits of onion and cigarettes. One night the Gypsies were taken away and burned.” Outsiders’ recollections of the Zigeunerlager, cut off as always from other inmates, were often of sounds–we heard them (they would say), their singing, their playing, their crying, their moans and screams, and then, “one night,” their silence. That night was August 2, 1944. (p.266)

Fonseca, who is herself Jewish, soberly charts the many ways in which the suffering of the Roma has been ignored or minimalized in mainstream narratives of the Holocaust in the west. For example, she writes this about the 65-member U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, founded in 1979:

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The IDF and the settlers

An important piece by Gideon Levy in Sunday’s Ha’Aretz paints the sorry history of the IDF’s very close relationship with many segments of Israel’s settler society, including settler extremists.
He writes about the close and overlapping organizational links between the IDF’s Central Command–responsible for the West Bank– and “Yesha”, the “state within a state” coordinating body that the West Bank settlers have established:

    The IDF has accompanied the settlement enterprise from the start, back when the big lie about the “security value” of the settlements was still prevalent. Some of the first settlements sprang forth from within IDF bases, a distorted phenomenon in itself, and the boundary is sometimes blurred to this day. In Beit El, for example, IDF barracks abut the settlers’ residences, illustrating the lack of a border between Yesha and the IDF. The security deployment in the territories is also a dangerous mix of the army and militias, battalion commanders and security coordinators (a job settlers perform, armed by the IDF), and it is unclear who is subordinate to whom. The commanders of what is conventionally referred to as an “apolitical” army realize that their promotion is sometimes influenced by lobbying from the Yesha council. In recent years, this symbiosis has reached new peaks. There are even cases in which settlers stand with soldiers at checkpoints and decide who will or will not pass.
    Parts of the map of checkpoints and bypass roads, conditions of closure and encirclement, as well as sections of the separation fence’s route, were dictated by the leaders of Yesha and designed only to meet their wishes. The settlers demanded a pointless checkpoint between Ofra and Shilo, in the Hermiya valley, and they got it – until seven soldiers and three civilians were killed there in March 2002 and the checkpoint was dismantled. Hardly a day goes by without a meeting between senior IDF officers and the settlers. A growing number of IDF commanders in the field are residents of the territories. A large part of the IDF’s activities are coordinated with the most violent and unruly group in Israeli society…

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