How Casey’s mom feels about the WMDs news

    Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in the war and who left a comment on the Comments board here recently, just sent me the following letter:

Dear Friends,
Everyday there are fresh lies and fresh confirmation of the lies coming out of DC…I can tell you it is so hurtful to us families that more people aren’t standing up to bring our children home from the lie and quaqmire that is Iraq…I feel like I should have a daily column called: Who lied today?
Bush told us that Iraq had WMD’S and they were getting ready to use them on us at any minute. Condi Rice told us that we should attack Iraq immediately…and don’t let the “smoking gun” be a “mushroom cloud.” Rumsfeld and Powell showed us where the weapons were buried…Guess what? THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANY WMD’S AND THEY WEREN’T GOING TO HAVE THEM FOR AT LEAST A DECADE. The United States was in no threat from Iraq…and Osama Bin Laden is free to plot against our troops in Iraq and against the innocent Iraqi people and Al Qaeda grows stronger every day because of our Administration’s reckless, ignorant, and arrogant policies in Iraq.
Would it have hurt the Bushies and the rest of the war mongerers to wait a few months to confirm that Iraq HAD NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION before they pre-emptiviely attacked, invaded, and occupied a country that posed no credible threat to the USA? Would Casey, 1358 other brave Americans and thousands and thousands of Iraqis still be alive?…I think so and that is another stab in my heart and in my back.
Please write to your Congress Person and your Senators to stand up and do what is right…Barbara Boxer did it for the Ohio debacle….yes it is important that we have transparent and credible elections…BUT IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT TO BRING OUR TROOPS HOME FROM THIS NEEDLESS WAR. It is so important to support our troops by getting them the hell out of there….let Iraqis rebuild their own country…with money and supplies that we give them…bring the war profiteers home too and let the Iraqis have their jobs back.
Contacting the Congress
Love and Peace
Cindy

The trials of Rwanda

Filip Reyntjens, a very expert scholar of international law who is also an expert on Rwandan history, has now sent a letter to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda saying he will suspend all cooperation with the court’s Office of the Prosecutor until it takes steps to indict members of the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) who are accused of human rights abuses.
Reyntjens, who teaches at the University of Antwerp, played an important role in the prosecution’s work as recently as last September when he testified in the court against Theoneste Bagosora, accused of being the most important mastermind behind the nationwide organization of the 1994 genocide. (Reyntjens did, however, say in that tesgimony that Bagosora’s co-accused, Gratien Kabiligi, had played no part in organizing the killings.)
According to the Fondation Hirondelle report linked to above, Reyntjens sent a letter to ICTR Chief prosecutor Hassan Jallow in which he wrote that,

    failure by the ICTR to prosecute alleged perpetrators of the abuses was “meting out victor’s justice” and risked becoming “part of the problem and not the solution”.
    He said that it was his knowledge that the “special investigative team” of the ICTR had gathered “compelling evidence on a number of massacres committed by the RPF in 1994”.
    “These crimes fall squarely within the mandate of the ICTR, they are well documented, testimonial and material proof is available, and the identity of RPF suspects is known”, he wrote.
    He added that that in not pursuing the RPF, the tribunal “fails to meet another stated objective, namely to ‘contribute to the process of national reconciliation and the restoration and maintenance of peace’.”

    “While I remain committed to the cause which is at the heart of the mandate of the ICTR, on ethical grounds I cannot any longer be involved in this process. I shall, therefore, not be able to co-operate with the OTP unless and until the first RPF suspect is indicted”, threatened the lawyer-cum-historian.

Reyntjens was one of the people I interviewed in connection with my Violence and its Legacies project, back in 2001. (You can read some excerpts from our conversation here.)
His reference to “contributing to national reconciliation” comes from the November 1994 Security Council resolution that established the ICTR.
I’ve been trying to get another bearing on the extent to which the ICTR has succeeded in that regard by doing more reading in the Stover and Weinstein book, “My neighbor, my enemy” that I wrote briefly about here on Sunday.
Though much of the book has been really interesting and helpful, I’ve been a little disappointed in Ch.10, which presents the results of a 2,000-respondent opinion survey carried out in four different areas of Rwanda in February 2002 in order to describe “Attitudes toward accountability and reconciliation in Rwanda.”
One of my main problems with the design (and therefore, imho, the “reliability”) of the survey is that– in a country where the caste (or “ethnic”) divide between Hutus and Tutsis is still extremely sensitive and important– they report using a team of 26 Rwandan interviewers who were “nearly evenly divided in terms of ethnicity and gender.”(p.208). This, in a situation in which some 85% of the respondents could– if the sample is to be at all nationally representative– be expected to be Hutus…

Continue reading “The trials of Rwanda”

Read MG again

Read Marine’s Girl again, especially if you haven’t read this post, that she put up at 11 a.m. Tuesday. It’s a follow-on ICQ with her guy, from the one I linked to Monday.
Yesterday I was in Washington DC for the day. I have such strongly negative feelings about the policies that come out of that place, and their effects on ordinary people inside and (especially) outside the USA, that I almost have to force myself to go back there.
It turned out okay yesterday, because I was with some really, really nice people, doing wonderful things. Both in the afternoon, when I was discussing some possible professional projects, and in the evening when some dear friends from the 15 years I lived there hosted a small dinner for Bill and me.
I drove back home late last night. This morning I discovered a really nasty spam attack on the Comments boards here– lots of really vile porn, all over many recent Comments boards. So this a.m. I had to spend more than an hour deleting all those comments.
It makes me wonder even more what the point of this blog is. I suppose increased clarity on this will come, sometime.
Anyway, I can tell you that MG’s blog is truly a gift to the world. Lew, commenting here on the MG post I linked to on Monday, wrote, “I don’t think it’s real”.
Lew, I think MG is as “real” as it gets. I’ve been reading her wonderful reflections on life, and her ICQ’s with her guy, since ways before some really officious Marines Gunnery Sargeant harrassed her (on alleged “national security” grounds) into taking her whole blog down, back in November 2003. What was interesting then was that some higher ups in the Marines JAG division, or some other place relatively powerful like that within the Marines Corps, explicitly supported her right to continue doing just what she had been doing in the blogosphere. And so she has.
So please, all of you, if you have time, go on over to her blog and read the latest. (Why not leave her a nice comforting message there too, seeing as she’s fighting her own battles with cancer??)
If you really don’t have time to do that, at least be aware of this very important portion of her most recent ICQ record:

Continue reading “Read MG again”

Read MG

Marine’s Girl has a new post up. Read it. In case you haven’t been reading her before now, just know that she’s one heck of a feisty woman who lives with her son, Danny, in Michigan, while her fabulous boyfriend, who’s a Marine, is in Iraq. She’s having a tough battle with cancer, and indeed hasn’t posted much in recent weeks because of the effects of the disease and her medications. She’s been trying to get a discharge for her guy, so he can come back and help look after her.
So the latest post is the text of a long “ICQ” exchange they had….

Please support this conscientious objector

I got yet another email today from my friend Chuck Fager, who runs Quaker House in that hotbed of the US military culture, Fayetteville, NC. He’s asking for our help. Mainly, but not only, letter-writing.
Here’s what he writes:

    Dear Friends–
    Once again, we ask for your help in supporting a military Conscientious Objector, who is in jail for sticking to his beliefs.
    The GI in question is a Marine, Joel Klimkewicz. He’s been in the brig at Camp Lejeune, NC since mid-December. He’s serving seven months for refusing an order to pick up a weapon. He’s also being given a Bad Conduct Discharge, one of the military’s worst punishments, usually reserved for serious felonies.

Continue reading “Please support this conscientious objector”

On the bookshelf

These past few days I’ve been transitioning back into working on my
“Violence and its Legacies” project, a.k.a. my book about Africa, and my
reading’s been starting to reflect that. (Okay, apart from my near-mandatory
lunch-time read of the WaPo “Style” section.)

First up here on my bookshelf, actually, something that has very little to
do with Africa. It’s
Loving Without Giving In; Christian Responses to Terrorism & Tyranny

by Ron Mock. Ron is a really nice person, a sharp thinker and a clear
writer, who is also an Evangelical Quaker. That’s a slightly “different”
bunch of Quakers from my lot… Let’s just say “his” lot defines themselves
as specifically Christian Evangelicals. Ron was a member of our International
Quaker Working Party on Israel and Palestine, and I really came to like him,
and admire his drafting skills while we were working together there.

So his book attempts to give a “Christian pacifist” take on how Americans
should respond to the challenge of terrorism, in particular. It’s really
great that he’s published the book– especially because he writes it, as
far as I can see, from entirely within an Evangelical Christian viewpoint.
He takes Christian scripture very seriously; tries to reconcile the
differences between the writings of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament;
and lays out very clearly the different ways that different kinds of Christians
look at war-and-peace issues before plumping firmly for a Christian pacifist
worldview.

But mainly what I like about the book is the clarity and simplicity of his
exposition, and the deep psychological truth that I see in most of what he
writes. He writes, for example, about the corrosive effect that a deep-seated
sense of grievance has on the person who holds it, as well as on society
in general. He writes about how hatred can lead people to dehumanize
their enemies. And he pleads, throughout, for people experiencing a
sense to vulnerability to continue to try to see “that of God” (as Quakers
say) even in the people whom they fear the most.

Second up, a tome from the U.N. University called
The UN Role in Promoting Democracy; Between ideals and Reality

, edited by Edward Newman and Roland Rich. This one looks really interesting.
It has some weighty theoretical chapters, which I’m still getting through.
But then, it has case studies: Namibia, Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor,
and Afghanistan. Shameless empiricist that I am, I can’t wait to get
to the case studies. Maybe I’ll skip one or two of the theoretical
chapters…

And finally, for now, a book that I’m quite enthralled by,
My Neighbor, My Enemy; Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Atrocity

, edited by Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein. (That’s not Harvey
Weinstein, half-owner of Miramax.)

This book is the fruit of a broad, multi-year project run out of UC Berkeley’s
Human Rights Center in which researchers looked at the effects on community
mental health and attitudes of various steps taken to deal with the aftermath
of atrocities in rwanda and former Yugoslavia. Well, my project is
looking (in a slightly different way) at exactly that same issue in Rwanda–
but comparing it not with former Yugoslavia but with two other cases in southern
Africa: South Africa and Mozambique…

Continue reading “On the bookshelf”

Palestinian elections: pix from Ramallah Friends School

The Quakers have had two schools in Ramallah since the 1870s or so. There used to be one for the boys and one for the girls. But now one is used as an upper school and one as a lower school. Countless thousands of Palestinians– Muslims, Christians (but very few Quakers)– are graduates of the Ramallah Friends School. There is a small meeting (congregation) of Palestinian Quakers that grew up over the decades, around the school.
Anyway, I was cruising around the BBC site just now and found a lovely little photo essay from election day yesterday. It was all shot in RFS!
If you just want to see what a ballot paper looked like, go to image # 3 there.

Palestine/Israel: the work begins

So Abu Mazen won the Palestinian election No surprise whatsoever there. The turnout was down significantly from the last election, in 1996. (Actually, on the AP story I was reading, it said that Election Commission chief Hanna Nassir refused to release a final turnout figure.
Abbas obtained 62.32 percent of votes cast, streets ahead of his nearest rival Mustafa Barghuti, who won 19.8 percent.
And today, the Sharon-Peres version of a “unity government” in Israel just got sworn in, by 58 votes to 56 in the 120-member Knesset.
The government is committed to a platform mandating implementation of Sharon’s year-old “disengagement” plan, that is, the complete or near-complete withdrawal from Gaza and the dismantling of four so-called “illegal” outposts in the northern West Bank.
Sharon had declared that he would treat today Knesset vote on the new government as a “confidence” vote, i.e., if 61 members voted against it he would resign. As it was, 13 Likud members voted against him and he was saved only by the last-minute decision of some small leftist parties to support him.
But what if Sharon had– like Abbas– gone to the general citizenry to test their support of his approach? The latest “Peace Index” survey of Israeli public opinion, put out by the Steinmetz Center at Tel Aviv University, reports that as of Dec 27-28,

Continue reading “Palestine/Israel: the work begins”

Sistani speaks to the Sunnis

On Friday, I wrote here that, ” I would love to see [Sistani] or someone high up on the UIA list that he helped form making a really dramatic move to reach out to the Sunnis.” Yesterday, it seems that a “source close to Sistani”– and also, one dearly hopes, one expressly authorized by him– was trying to do just that.
As reported and translated by Juan Cole today, this Sistanist source told al-Hayat yesterday that,

    “The representation of our Sunni brethren in the coming government must be effective, regardless of the results of the elections.”

I believe that the source may well have been using al-Hayat as a way to communicate with many Iraqi Sunni figures inside and outside the country. Hayat is Saudi owned, and is widely read throughout the Middle East.
I’m sure that Sistani has numerous other ways of communicating his point of view with selected Iraqi Sunni leaders as well. But to reach a broad array of Sunnis, inside and outside the country, using al-Hayat would be a sensible choice.
In what the Sistanist “source” (un-named) told al-Hayat, he also attempted a vigorous defense of Sistani’s argument that the elections should not, at this point, be any further delayed beyond the presently scheduled Jan. 30 date. (This could also be a communication with Muqtada Sadr and others within the Shiite community who have started to argue openly for boycott or postponement.)
However, the source indicated that Sistani might yet change his mind on the no-postponement issue. In Cole’s version:

    ” … If Sistani became convinced that there was a likelihood of widespread fraud in the elections, he would not hesitate to urge that they be boycotted. But for the moment, he said, the alternative to elections seems to be chaos… ”

Juan’s translation of the article has a few elisions and what seem to me to be questionable renditions of the original. For example, in the immediately preceding quote, according to the Hayat original, the source was saying (HC version):

    ” … and the Marjaiyah [the Shiite source of authority] could at any time issue a fatwa to boycott the elections in the event that it becomes convinced that they will see widespread [election] fraud. And the alternative to elections, as we see it, is chaos… ”

I also went back to the original to try to gain a clearer idea of exactly what message it might have been that Sistani was trying to send to the Sunnis, and I came up with this translation, again slightly and, I think, non-trivially different from Juan’s rendering of this section:

Continue reading “Sistani speaks to the Sunnis”

JWN poetry corner– # 1

I read this in The New Yorker, and was moved by it:

    Now, when the waters are pressing mightily

      by Yehuda Amichai

Now, when the waters are pressing mightily
on the walls of the dams,
now, when the white storks, returning,
are transformed in the middle of the firmament
into fleets of jet planes,
we will feel again how strong are the ribs
and how vigorous is the warm air in the lungs
and how much daring is needed to love on the exposed plain,
when the great dangers are arched above,
and how much love is required
to fill all the empty vessels
and the watches that stopped telling time,
and how much breath,
a whirlwind of breath,
to sing the small song of spring.

    Translated from the Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier.