Author: Helena

Meanwhile, in the gulag

    Attentive reader Christiane has been following some of the news stories about developments in the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo cases. Since she figured that I was out of touch while in Iran (and Syria), she compiled a collection of some of the most significant of these stories.

    Thanks so much, Christiane! These look like really valuable references to have here on the blog.

    So the following is a lightly edited version of what she sent:

Meanwhile, somethings seems to be moving concerning the situation of prisoners,
both in Abu Ghraib or in Guantanamo. Here are 11 links:

1) On the 30th of November the NYTimes reported
on a leaked ICRC Report concerning the Guantanamo prisoners. (Also,
here.)

Usually the ICRC reports are kept secret (it’s a well established policy of
the ICRC; in exchange they are granted access to the prisons and can make
suggestions in order to improve the detention conditions.They also denounce
what breaches the Convention and try to negotiate their end).

It is a good sign that some one in the administration leaked these reports.
Maybe the government will eventually have to do something about it.

2) On December 1 the NYT carried this
editorial on the subject, calling for an intervention in the Congress
“who should make the actual government more accountable”. (Also here.)…

Continue reading “Meanwhile, in the gulag”

Inconveniences of travel

It’s Monday morning in Philadelphia. We flew (back) here yesterday from Beirut, transiting through Paris-Charles de Gaulle. None of the four bags we checked made the connection. Grrr.
We met the college student daughter who’s been so kindly looking after my car, had a nice dinner with her, then checked into an overpriced hotel before the drive home. Toilet blocked. Grrr.
Oh well, it’s still pretty amazing that a person could travel so broadly and have such great experiences and interactions as I have over the past couple months. I am hugely aware and appreciative of that fact. My Auntie Katie, who raised me, was a very accomplished woman, a pioneer in elementary education. And she never in her life traveled outside England– not even to Scotland or Wales…

Islam and Democracy discussion

On Thursday, I was honored to participate in a long round-table discussion on “Religion and Democracy” that was co-sponsored by Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran and the center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington, DC. The session I was part of was held in a conference room at the Education Ministry in Teheran.

What follows here is a description of the substance of some of the most striking presentations made at the conference by Iranian participants. Please note that this account is a copy of what I wrote toward the end of this earlier JWN post. But I wanted to put this description up as a post on its own so that interested readers can join in a description on the Comments board that is limited purely to the substance of what I described there.

What follows also includes some of my own immediate reflections on what I heard.

If you want to read a bit about the fascinating back-story behind the holding of the conference, then go to that earlier post.

The participants in the Teheran session included CSID President Abdel-Aziz Sachedina, a distinguished professor of Islamic studies at the University of Virginia; Abdelkarim Soroush, a political philosopher who works in Germany now, but was previously at Princeton, Harvard, etc; Mohsen Kadivar, a tall, gentle-looking figure in mullah’s robes who teaches at Tarbiat Modares University in Teheran; Forough Jahanbakhsh, who teaches at Queen’s University in Toronto (and was the only other female participant); Ali Paya, a professor in Teheran who chaired the sessions and did much of the translating; and around a dozen others.

(Kadivar has his own website which certainly looks worth a lengthy visit. It has a good section in English, and one in Arabic, as well as all the Farsi material. In the Bio info in the English-language section, you can read that “Kadivar was arrested for the first time in May 1978 ? the last year of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi Shah’s reign in Iran… 20 years later, the unconstitutional Cleric Court of Iran found him guilty of campaigning against the Islamic Republic because of the statements he had made in an interview with the banned Khordad Daily … [and] he was sentenced to spend 18 months in Evin Prison, Tehran, and was released on July 17, 2000. He is still campaigning for the reform of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”)

The proceedings were all bilingual, with the presentations given in either
English or Farsi and then afterwards rendered orally into the other language.
Here, I’m relying mainly on the notes I took during the session, though
I’ll also refer to the abstracts of the presentations distributed by the
conference organizers… Longer versions of the presentations will later
be published as a book, though I believe some of them may be available before
that on the CSID’s website.

Now, read more about Thursday’s session…

Continue reading “Islam and Democracy discussion”

“Islamo-fascist slut” fights back (peacefully)

The Comments boards here on JWN have hosted some really great discussions. They also, sadly, host some really nasty, commercially generated spam, much of it pornographic, that I’m constantly trying to control, ban, push back, fight, and reduce. Sorry to all readers about my shortcomings in that rergard.
… And then, there’s “Michael Patton”, a person who comes onto my Comments boards here, accuses me of being an “Islamo-fascist slut” and in addition lets fly with strings of deeply ignorant, xenophobic accusations and innuendoes that make the Comments boards feel very hostile indeed…

Continue reading ““Islamo-fascist slut” fights back (peacefully)”

Qom, Islam, views of democracy…

(Writing started Friday morning, Teheran airport.)

Yesterday, Thursday, was one of the most interesting days of this whole,
two-month-long visit to the Middle East. In the morning, Bill and
I went to Qom, the religious-studies center where Ayatollah Khomeini
and numerous other architects of Iran’s Islamic revolution received their
intellectual training. In the afternoon, we spent nearly four hours
at a conference in the Education Ministry where cutting-edge thinkers from
today’s Iran– including one wearing the robes of trained mullah– grappled
with fundamental issues in the relationship between religion and democracy.

But I guess that before I take you through that day, I’d better back up
a little…

Continue reading “Qom, Islam, views of democracy…”

From Teheran

We got to Teheran. Never made it to Mashhad for reasons I’ll explain later. Today we had a great tour round the bazaars here. We’re being hosted by an extraordinarily kind and very religious Iranian family, after the plans for Mashhad fell through. More later.

Catching up with Nir Rosen

I’m a bit behind with my reading. I just want to bookmark this piece by Nir Rosen, written in October I think. He was embedded with an Armored Cavalry Regiment in western Iraq.
The piece is titled “The wrong Ayoub”. It uses the description of a unit forcefully breaking into a guy’s house, wounding him, and arresting him– only later to discover he was the “wrong” Ayoub– to illustrate the atrociously poor level of intelligence the unit was relying on.
This part, at the very beginning, is also very troubling:

    According to a major from the Judge Advocate General’s office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process, at least 7,000 Iraqis are being detained by US forces. Many languish in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposes English-language procedures on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed.
    Some are termed “security detainees” and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they are still a “security risk”. Most are innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant-colonel familiar with the process adds that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, that would entail a court martial, which would imply that the United States is occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or a liberation.

To Iran!

So! We’re off early tomorrow. We got our visas yesterday, and our tickets today. We have tickets to Teheran for tomorrow and shall then somehow find a flight to Mashhad where our conference (“Islam and Democracy”) starts on Wednesday morning. The whole trip will be incredibly rushed– we might have to leave Mashhad on Thurs. evening to catch our flight back here, Friday… Oh well, it should be interesting.
I haven’t been to Iran since the 1978-79 revolution. A whole generation has grown up there since then…
Btw, I was just surfing the BBC website. They have a new, experimental, “hosted” blog-type thing there, with contributors from Iraq. It went up on their site today and will run in the first instance for two weeks.
So far, the contributors (all of whom have been invited to contribute by the Beeb, I think) include five Iraqis, one British contractor and one US army lieutenant.
It struck me as a little stilted. Certainly it lacks the intimacy, verve, and passion of Faiza’s blog, and those run by her sons, etc. The US army guy, Bryan Suites, comes across as incredibly Chief Wiggles-y, and the British contractor tells us only that he works, “for an international company in the International or Green Zone in Baghdad.” So what is his business, exaactly? The Iraqi contributors all tell us what they do. Even Suites does. But not “Stuart Ritchie”. Whoever he is.
A quick glance at what’s up there so far revealed a few interesting descriptions of things. But I think I’ll stick with the real blogs by Iraqis that I’ve been reading up till now.
Zeyad, over at Healing Iraq, had an interesting post up on November 20. (Actually, it’s the most recent one he has up there, as of now.) He was describing, in very vivid and factual terms, how the rash of attacks that plagued Baghdad around then felt to him and his family.
At the end, he noted:

    One can’t help but notice that the clerics who usually incite holy wars in Iraq against the US occupation on the expense of Iraqis are based in countries allied to the US such as Qatar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. On the other hand, you have Sheikh Salah Al-Din Kuftaro, son of Sheikh Ahmed Kuftaro, the late Grand Mufti of Syria, publicly denouncing the behaviour of Iraqi insurgents yesterday during Friday prayers at the Kuftaro mosque in Damascus. He described them as the “present day Kharijites” and their actions as “unislamic”.

That’s a really interesting observation.
Kuftaro was the Sheikh we went to visit in Damascus last week, as described in the second half of this JWN post.

Fallujah war crimes evidence

The Boston Globe‘s Anne Barnard was embedded with a task force from the Army’s 1st Infantry Division throughout much of the battle of Fallujah. She had an account of her experiences in yesterday’s paper that provides excellent, firsthand evidence of the issuing of commands that seem clearly to contravene the Geneva Conventions, especially in regard to the use of grossly disproportionate violence inside the city.
I note that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Canada’s Louise Arbour, has already expressed her concern about the level of violence used by the US in Fallujah. I can’t remember if she also said she’d like some form of action to be taken on this? Frankly, I don’t know what form such action might take. The US is, as we know, not a signatory of the ICC. The only other forms of legal-type action that could be taken would be a case brought by another state in the ICJ (but which state would do it? “Iraq”?? Ha-ha-ha) — or, a prosecution from within the US military for contraventions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is supposed to include all the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.
I guess political action inside the US is the only thing, at this point, that can rein these guys in.
Anyway, I’ll just quickly take from Barnard’s excellent account the four clearest points–most of them taken from before-action briefings that she attended– where I see the laws of war apparently being contravened:

    (1) To avoid booby traps and ambushes, battalion leaders told the men to fire at houses and buildings before entering them. That made for a trail of destruction. There was no way to know for sure if they were hurting noncombatants, even in a city where most residents had fled.
    [Commanders are under an obligation to take positive steps to avoid inflicting harm on noncombatants. Such steps studiously avoided here. ~HC]

Continue reading “Fallujah war crimes evidence”

Palestinian elections-2

Marwan Barghouthi as the Palestinians’ Mandela? It has always been
a possibility. And it is one that, despite the Fateh Revolutionary
Council’s recent decision to back Abu Mazen as the movement’s candidate in
the upcoming PA elections, is still being actively considered by many
in the upper echelons of Fateh.

I imagine that in the first instance that would be “Mandela, the representative
of all the nationalist prisoners, whose release becomes an international
cause célèbre“, rather than “Mandela, the wily political
prisoner who manages to negotiate a far-reaching political deal with his
captors, while always keeping within the discipline of his movement”… Though
that other step may come later, God willing.

Except for this: remember just how many years Mandela had to be in jail (28),
before he reached his deal with De Klerk… By that standard, it would
be another 23 years or so till the Palestinians and Israelis reached their
deal. A depressing thought, altogether.

Anyway, this prospect of Fateh launching a broad campaign to focus on “Free
Barghouthi”, echoing the “Free Mandela” movement in which so many of us participated
back in the 1970s and 1980s, is just one of the things I learned about by
reading this
article, from Saida Hamad in East Jerusalem, in the online version of
Hayat today. I even, as an exercize in my Arabic-language reading
skills, wrote out a complete translation of the piece in English…

(Why is this happening? We were planning to be on our way to Teheran
today. But the Iranian visas didn’t come through until just after the
departure of the flight we were supposed to be leaving Beirut on. There’s
a possibility we can get another flight, Tuesday. Meantime, I don’t
want to be sitting here in our apartment in Beirut twiddling my thumbs…)

So anyway, the four most interesting things in Hamad’s piece were these:

  1. The info about the possible “Free Barghouthi” campaign. As you
    can see from the translation I provided, the “old guard” guys in Fateh reportedly
    promised this to Marwan as part of the quid pro quo they offered
    him in return for him agreeing not only not stand against Abu Mazen in the
    January elections, but also (gulp), actually to support him… The other
    parts of the quid pro quo were: (a ) A commitment to hold the 16th
    meeting of Fateh’s policymaking General Conference no later than August,
    so that both the Central Committee and (I assume) the Revolutionary Council
    can be renewed there through democratic means… (In contrast to much past
    practice.) Plus (b) the possibility that in connection with the “Free
    Barghouthi” campaign, Abu Mazen would name Marwan as his “Vice Presidential”
    candidate in the PA election…So far, it looks as though Marwan drove a
    pretty hard bargain…

Continue reading “Palestinian elections-2”