Helena – Page 281 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Basic services in Iraq: a proposal

I’m crashing on the deadline to write my increasingly lengthy Hizbullah piece for Boston Review. (Celebrated ‘New Years Eve’ at c. 11 p.m. last night. Go figure.)
So today, I was writing about Hizbullah’s impressive work in the provision of basic public services. Since the party was actually born in mid-1980s in the turmoil of a blisteringly destructive war situation, I immediately thought: Hey, why didn’t the Bush administration turn to these experienced pros to do the reconstruction/rebuilding job in Najaf, Sadr City, etc, instead of the US Army and Halliburton??
Okay, silly question, I know. But still, the contrast between H’s record in Lebanon and that of the US reconstruction effort in Iraq is certainly informative.
Here’s a fragment from what I’ve been writing:

AUB professor Judith Palmer Harik has studied the party [Hizbullah] for many years now. She notes that in the chaotic, civil-war-ridden circumstances in which Hizbullah was born, its ability to provide basic social services in an effective manner– and to provide them to all the residents in its areas of operation, not just to its followers– won it considerable loyalty and respect. She writes that after Hizbullah took over effective control of the south-Beirut Dahiyeh [suburbs] in 1988, it almost immediately started providing a reliable trash-removal service there, and that it was a further five years before the corruption-plagued central government sent any garbage trucks into the Dahiyah at all. Moreover, writing in 2003, she noted that though the government’s trash-removal efforts there still continued on a notably spotty basis, “Hezbollah still trucks out some 300 tons of garbage a day from the dahiyeh and treats it with insecticides to supplement the government’s service.”

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New year, new possibilities

Great news from President Bush, who has decided to increase tenfold, to $350 million, the amount of aid his administration will be giving to survivors of the Indian ocean tsunami.
We probably shouldn’t let up in our efforts to persuade the Prez to re-order his priorities towards global neighborliness and away from the waging of war (principally); but away the staging of extravagant parties, as well.
But still, it’s important to recognize that the guy has now made a dramatic change in his approach. Thank you, President Bush.
So, what other welcome changes of heart and of policy might we expect in the year ahead? Here are some of my dreams:

That the Palestinian elections of January 9 go off well, and that inside both the Israeli and Palestinian communities the desire for a realistic but generous peace starts to mount, unstoppably.

“Four Mothers” peace movement

That the Iraqi elections of January 30 go off “sufficiently” peaceably, and “sufficiently” fairly

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Relief, not parties!

The Red Cross is now saying that more than 100,000 of our fellow humans may have died already in the Indian Ocean tsunami. In the days ahead many more scores– perhaps hundreds– of thousands may die unless vital water-purification, medical, and other urgent relief supplies can reach them.
In the months and years ahead entire communities along those damaged coastlines may be wiped out unless solid, long-term reconstruction efforts can be organized.
President Bush has thus far pledged just $35 million of US funds to help meet these needs.
That compares with the more than $250 million per day that his administration is spending on waging a destructive quagmire of a war in Iraq.
Or, with the $30 million to $40 million that AP estimates his January 19 inauguration party will cost.
We could start creating our own little “tsunami” of protest at these outrageous priorities. My friend Jean Newsom– whose spouse, David, was formerly the US Ambassador to Indonesia– suggests that Bush’s inaugural festivities could be canceled and the sums saved sent immediately to help the relief effort.
I invite you to join me in calling the White House– +1-202-456-1414– and voicing this excellent suggestion to the comment-takers there. While you’re about it you might also urge the President to call for a humanitarian ceasefire in all the conflicts in Asia— and yes, that includes Iraq– so the world community can focus on the massive logistical, relief, and rebuilding challenges around the Indian Ocean.
If you’re a US citizen, you can also urge these policies on your representives in the U.S. Congress. If you don’t know how to contact them, go to this webpage, punch in your zipcode, and get all the info there.
If you want to make a useful donation to the relief effort– from the US or anywhere else– or want more info about it, go to this great site, which has truly multinational info, available in a number of languages…

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Fear (and a glimmer of hope) in Iraq?

Monday’s attack against the Baghdad headquarters of the (Shiite) Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which killed 13 SCIRI members,
was only the latest in a long string of acts of extremely deadly, specifically
anti-Shiite, violence in Iraq which seem intended to try to stir up a desire
for Shiite revenge against the Sunnis and thus to a total breakdown of trust
between members of the two groups.

So far, that plan seems not to have completely succeeded. For example,
on Monday, Al-Hayat reported that the (Sunni) Association of Muslim
Scholars was holding meetings with some of the Shiite members of Ayatollah
Sistani’s big “Unified Iraqi Alliance” electoral list.

In that
report, the AMS was also said to be offering to urge its followers to
participate in the voting– provided a firm deadline could be established
for the withdrawal of the occupation forces from Iraq…

This latter condition is, it seems to me, unlikely to be met by the Americans
any time prior to the January 30 polls. However, it is quite possible
that the Shiites in the UIA list with whom the AMS has been talking might
be ready to promise the AMS that, after winning, they will certainly stress
the need for an early timetable for American withdrawal.

I was very interested to read that report in Monday’s Hayat, and wonder
why it didn’t get picked up anywhere else. [I’ll put my translation
of the relevant excerpt further down in this post.] Many others did,
of course, pick up the the report that the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party affiliated
with Adnan Pachachi had decided to pull out of the elections.

But to me, the report about the AMS signals that there is still some possibility
for Shiite-Sunni coordination in Iraq, despite all the many efforts that
have been made to stir up tensions between the two groups.

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Tragedy in Asia

Such terrifying pictures and information coming out regarding yesterday’s Indian Ocean tsunami. They remind me of the urgency of us all starting to think and act like a single world community. The BBC has been reporting– so far– some 23,000 people known to have been killed. But the numbers are certainly rising.
So many people killed; their families bereaved. So many more badly injured. So many more again left homeless or otherwise vulnerable to the rapid spread of disease. So many hundreds of thousands of families’ and communities’ lives ruptured forever.
Human beings have incredible resilience. But if we were all, truly, a single human family, wouldn’t the leaders of the rich countries all now set aside their pursuit of marginal advantage here or there and say, “Yes! This where we can all pull together to make a difference!”
Instead of which, the Bush administration has announced it will contribute just $15 million worth of aid to the relief effort. A tragically small amount. And this, just a week after it marked the approach of Christmas by saying it would anyway be cutting back on huge amounts of emergency aid previously earmarked for the world’s poorest nations…
All this, while it continues to spend more than $250 million each day on waging the war in Iraq.
It’s obscene.
Why can’t the world’s leaders call an Asia-wide ceasefire– a ceasefire of all the conflicts now going on in the Asia-Pacific region, including those in Iraq, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere? Let’s call in the UN to regulate and resolve all those conflicts; and concentrate meanwhile on delivering all the longterm development aid that the storm-hit communities will need over the next five years.
I think that’s what a true “family” would do, don’t you?

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Quakers, simplicity, and Christmas

I belong to the “unprogramed” strand of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which means that when we come together to worship we do so very simply indeed. We have a square, undecorated worship space that every Sunday is opened up twice for people who want to come to pray or meditate together for an hour while we wait for the leadings of the Spirit of Love. Nothing “programed” or pre-planned happens during that hour at all. Sometimes, we’ll sit there for the full hour and no-one will feel led to speak. Sometimes, several people will speak.
In my early experiences of this way of worshiping I found it rather strange, since I’d grown up in the Anglican church. What, no music? No stained glass? No incense? No liturgy? No priest? No ‘communion’? Just– us?
Then, I really started to love unprogramed Quaker worship– for its simplicity, its inclusiveness, its surprises and riches, and its continual, experienced affirmation of the ability of every person to dig deep and discover the workings of love inside themselves.
One part of the way we worship and are organized is that we don’t have any priests, or– as George Fox, the founder of Quakerism in England in the 17th century, called them– “hireling ministers”. Nor do we have churches (“steeple houses”). This helps us to live out the Quaker testimony of simplicity. We don’t have to raise huge amounts of money to pay for the upkeep of grandiose palaces of worship or the salaries of church officials. We are a network of worship communities (“meetings”), each of which governs itself through a monthly “Meeting for worship with a concern for business.”
Another part of the way we worship is that we don’t stick to–or indeed, have any need for– a liturgical calendar. Not for us the massive Christmas-related extravaganzas that many Christian churches here and elsewhere organize. Our Quaker meeting here in Charlottesville, Virginia does have a tradition of having someone open our meeting house for worship twice on Christmas Eve– once at 7:30 p.m., and once at 11 p.m.– and inviting anyone who wants to join a special , one-hour-long meeting for worship at those times to do so. In what some of us think is a slightly un-Quakerly, possibly even liturgical, gesture, participants traditionally each take a candle to the worship; and the candles are placed together in a group on the floor in the middle of the bare, square meeting space…

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Palestinian municipal elections

AP’s Ali Daraghmeh is reporting that Hamas did pretty well in the small-scale municipal elections held in the occupied Palestinian territories yesterday. Indeed, Hamas did better than I’d expected in those elections, which were held in just 26 of the OPT’s more than 600 local jurisdictions.
Those elections were an important “test” of the good faith– in the run-up to the January 9 OPT-wide “presidential” race– of all the parties concerned: not only Fateh and Hamas, but also, crucially, the Israelis. Indeed, can the Palestinians or anyone else have trust in the January 9 vote if it is held while Israel still holds unchallenged control over all major aspects of the security situation within the OPTs?
The jury is still definitely out on that, given Israel’s arrests of numerous candidates in the municipals and the steps it’s already taken to obstruct free campaigning in the presidential race.
Daraghmeh writes that, according to early results he’d seen, Hamas won nine of yesterday’s 26 contests, and Fateh 14, with two of the races won by a joint Hamas-Fateh list and one– Ya’bed– still unreported. (He notes that in some cases interpreting the results requires a lot of local knowledge.)
For their part, Hamas claimed to have won 17 of the contests, so evidently both the major parties were claiming victory in some places.
Why was I surprised?

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A gift to JWN readers from Professor Sachedina

Abdulaziz Sachedina is a very experienced scholar of and in the tradition of (Shii) Muslim thought who’s the Francis Ball Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He’s the chair of the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy, which co-sponsored the conference I went to in Iran three weeks ago, and the author of The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2001.)
Professor Sachedina has visited Iraq a number of times since the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein. For an account of a conversation I had with him about Iraq last January, go here.
… So imagine my delight this morning when I saw he had sent the following, very important contribution to JWN, which I am of course honored to post here in full. It is worth a careful, close reading.

SHIITE RESPONSIBILITY IN THE IRAQI ELECTIONS
by Abdulaziz Sachedina
In the midst of today’s political turmoil in Iraq there is a ray of hope for the future. There is nothing more exciting for any nation than to be able to democratically elect a government to represent and protect its people’s rights. Yet as the people of Iraq prepare to choose a legitimate government in the elections scheduled for January 30, 2005, the 60 % Shiite majority bears a heavy moral burden. It has to reassure the 20% Sunni Arab minority that it will not be punished for its repression of the Shiites.
It was Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law and the inspiration of Shiite Islam, who emphasized the importance of forgiveness and compassion to those in positions of power. It is true that throughout their history in Iraq the Shiites have suffered when the minority Sunnis controlled absolute power. And under Saddam Hussein, powerful Sunni officials committed terrible atrocities against the Shiites. Not long ago, after the war began in earnest in March, 2003, in a meeting with Iraqi religious leaders in Amman, I heard a prominent Iraqi Sunni leader, Professor-Shaykh Qubaisi, urge Prince Hassan of Jordan to take over Iraq, so that the Sunni influence would continue in this “Arab” nation. The call appeared to suggest that if the Shiite majority were to come to power the “Arab” character of Iraq would be lost…

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Lebanon’s Hizbullah

I’m busy writing about (Lebanese) Hizbullah this week. It’s really interesting because,

possible directions the Shi-ites might take in Iraq (where they’re 60-65%)

unilateral

can the events in south Lebanon since 2000 tell us anything useful about how things may turn out in Gaza post a unilateral Israeli withdrawal there?

in itself

how have these Islamist modernizers achieved this?

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of writing to do, and need to keep reminding myself: Helena, this is just a short project; don’t let it drag on too long!
Oh, and about their relationship with Israel…

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Kosovo & the ‘humanitarian’ pretext for war

In this recent post I wrote about the subversion of allegedly “humanitarian” arguments that are used as pretexts for war. Today I found this recent piece by John Pilger, on Counterpunch, in which he produces some very sobering evidence about how this process worked regarding Kosovo.
He writes: