Author: Helena

Testimonies from Fallujah

Terrible, searing testimonies now coming out from inside Fallujah. If you can only read one, I suggest this one from a Russian (or, Turko-Russian?) doctor who’d been working in one of the city’s hospitals. (Not clear which.)
Look especially at the references he makes to the results of the extreme water shortage inside the city:

    Together with Americans the flies invaded the city. They are millions. The whole city seems to be under their power. The flies cover the corpses. The older is corpse, the more flies are upon it. First they cover a corpse as by some strange rash. Then they begin to swarm upon it, and then a gray moving shroud covers the corpse. Flies swarm upon some ruins as gray monstrous shadows. The stench is awful.
    The flies are everywhere. In the hospital wards, operating rooms, canteen. You find them even where they cannot be. In the “humanitarian” plastic bottle with warm plastic-stinking water. The bottle is almost full, simply someone opened it for a second and made a gulp, but this black spot is already floating there…
    It is a general crisis with water. There are simply no clean sources. The local residents fetch water from the river, muddy, gray and dead. You can buy anything for water now. The sewage system is broken, the water supply is broken, and electricity is absent in the city.
    I am afraid to imagine what will happen in two weeks. Hepatitis will take toll of thousands. They say already that people at the outskirts are in fever with the symptoms of typhus. But one cannot verify it. They prohibited moving in the city…

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Families in pain

Be sure you’re sitting down before you click on this link, which shows scenes from funerals of some of the US military personnel killed in Iraq during October and November.
The site where I found the pics, cryptome.org, also carries an invitation to kill George Bush, from which I completely disassociate myself. However, I think they’ve done a great service by compiling and presenting a number of collections of very moving photos (mainly AP photos) of the funerals of those killed in action. The link I give is to the latest of those pages.
I cried when I scrolled slowly through this collection.
Then I also thought of the even greater number of Iraqis killed in the present war, and the extremely degrading situations in which the mortal remains of many of them have been left… I also thought of the extreme anguish suffered by Iraqi family members who do not know if their loved ones are dead or alive, and can only imagine the torment of, for example, a wounded family member left to rot and to dehydrate in some bombed-out house inside Fallujah.
Is it better to know or not to know “the whole truth” about the fate of a threatened loved one?
Is it better to launch a war in the face of a presumed threat, or to seek to have one’s concerns addressed through methods other than war and violence?
How can we inform US voters better than before about the true human costs of war?
Why hasn’t President Bush gone to a single one of these funerals?
No answers here. Only questions.

U.S. Quaker activism against war

The Friends Committee on National Legislation is a public interest lobby founded by American members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), that for more than 60 years has sought to “[connect] historic Quaker testimonies on peace, equality, simplicity and truth with peace and social justice issues which the United States government is or should be addressing.”
On November 14, FCNL’s governing committee adopted two important documents. The first sets out the “Legislatve Priorities ” on which FCNL will focus during the term of the upcoming (109th) U.S. Congress. The second is a Minute on Moral Values. You can find both texts here.
The Legislative Priorities build directly on the historical testimonies of Quakers– against war, and for a radical commitment to human equality and human wellbeing. So here, after all the deliberation that the FCNL decisionmakers engaged in, are the five top priorities that they identify:

    * Remove all U.S. military forces and bases from Iraq, and fulfill U.S. moral and legal obligations to reconstruct Iraq through appropriate multinational, national, and Iraqi agencies.
    * Promote a framework for national and international security that includes peaceful prevention and resolution of deadly conflicts, active pursuit of arms control and disarmament, adherence to international law, support for the United Nations, and participation in multilateral efforts to address the root causes of war and of terrorism.
    * Restore and assure full civil liberties for all persons in the United States or under its jurisdiction, and promote human rights around the world through international institutions and treaties.
    * Change federal budget, tax, and fiscal policies to reduce military spending, meet pressing human needs, and address structural economic violence.
    * Promote long-term protection of the environment and eliminate a critical cause of violent conflict by reducing oil consumption and accelerating development and use of renewable energy sources.

I am so happy and energized by the clarity of this listing! Quakers may be small in number, but throughout the 350-year-long life of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), they– we– have often played a crucial catalytic role in bringing about real structural change in the societies in which we live.
And now, we are all citizens of the world…

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Post-conflict election: Mozambique

Mozambique will on Dec 1-2 be holding the third of the democratic national elections it has held since the termination of its civil war in 1992. If the election proceeds successfully, as seems to be expected, this will be yet another piece of evidence of the success of the country’s whole conflict-termination experience.
I note in addition that in this election the ruling party, Frelimo, will have a new presidential candidate, Armando Guebuza, replacing Jose Chissano, who has now completed his two-term limit.

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Post-conflict election risks

Can hasty, ill-planned elections actually impede democratization in post-conflict societies? You bet they can. “It is one of the perverse realities of postconflict elections that this lynchpin of the democratic process can also be its undoing,” argues Benjamin Reilly of the Australian National University in a recent book on “The U.N. Role in Promoting Democracy”
The book will be launched by its publishers– the United Nations University– in New York next Thursday. But some its main points have been previewed in an op-ed that university vice-rector Ramesh Thakur has in today’s Daily Yomiori.
Thakur writes (fairly optimistically, imho) that, “in Afghanistan, the world’s most fledgling democracy, President Hamid Karzai succeeded in legitimizing his rule through elections and preparing the ground for a longer-term peaceful system of power-sharing arrangements.” Then he asks,

    Will the same happen in Iraq in January? Hopefully, but not necessarily.
    An election by itself cannot resolve deep seated problems, particularly in a society deeply traumatized by conflict. According to a new U.N. University study of experience in several countries, ill-timed or poorly designed elections in volatile situations can be quite dangerous. They risk producing the very opposite of the intended outcome, fuelling chaos and reversing progress toward democracy. They can exacerbate existing tensions, result in support for extremists or encourage patterns of voting that reflect wartime allegiances.

He notes that,

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Neo-Nazis in Israel

Sometimes, when you’re running a well-funded colonial venture, you have to put up with having the most disturbing kinds of riff-raff queueing up to take part… But I suppose from the point of view of some Israelis, just so long as the riff-raff in question aren’t, ahem, actually Palestinians seeking to return to their ancestral homes and homeland, then you’d be prepared to put up with them?
But Russian anti-Semites being given help to immigrate to Israel?? Now that’s what I call a story… And Lucy Ash of BBC radio gives an interesting glimpse into it at the end of this piece, which was first aired yesterday.
Her piece is a broad look at what’s been happening to the numbers of the Russian Jews (and non-Jews) who have migrated to Israel in a huge wave since the fall of the Soviet Union. While she leads with some reporting about the high numbers of recent Russian immigrants to Israel who have been “returning” to their earlier homeland, it was this part, lower down in the story, that caught my eye:

    Zalman Gilichensky, a teacher from Jerusalem, claimed that people with very distant Jewish roots and even anti-Semites are being encouraged to move to Israel.
    He said he has evidence of more than 500 outbreaks of anti-Semitism over the past year and he has set up a website to monitor them.
    The incidents include swastika graffiti on the walls of synagogues, and verbal and physical abuse.
    “The only way to stop these attacks is to change our immigration policy,” Mr Gilichensky said. “It does not bother me that some non Jews come here.
    “But I cannot see why we are importing people who hate our guts. Would-be immigrants should have to prove they know something of our history and respect our customs.
    “But the government has done its best to sweep all this anti-Semitism under the carpet because these attacks are so damaging to the image of Israel.”

Ash added that the Israeli Attorney-General has launched a criminal investigation into,

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Pentagon board trashes “public diplomacy” efforts

Today, the NYT published a story by Thom Shanker in which he wrote that,

    A harshly critical report by a Pentagon advisory panel says the United States is failing in its efforts to explain the nation’s diplomatic and military actions to the Muslim world, but it warns that no public relations plan or information operation can defend America from flawed policies.

The advisory panel in question was a “Strategic Communications Task Force” appointed by the Defense Science Board. (I think the DSB is the descendant of the historic DARPA agency, which gave the world the internet.)
So I rushed on over to the DSB’s website and found the whole text of the 102-page report right there.
[Update, 11/27: For some reason, the above link doesn’t work for everyone. (It still works for me, though.) However, The Federation of American Scientists has helpfully also put the text up on their site: here. Thanks to alert reader Allen for telling us about that.]
The report was presented to the folks in OSD–to, I think, Paul Wolfowitz– back at the end of September. But I suppose nobody, including no-one I know of in the blogosphere, was paying much attention to that arcane corner of the OSD (Office of the Sec. of Defense) back then. People were mainly focused on the US elections. So it’s taken till now for this fascinating report to get the attention it needs.
I skimmed through the whole thing really quickly this afternoon. It is actually, perhaps, even a bit “better” in many ways than Shanker writes. (In other portions though it’s pretty bad: pablumy, and filled with media strategists’ jargonizing.)
So anyway, thanks to my new skills in being able to copy large chunks o’ text out of (some but not all) PDF files, here are some of the parts I found most interesting.
By the way, if you want to go to the link I gave above and read the whole thing, I’d advise you to go to Chapter 2 first, which is where the most interesting criticisms of “public diplomacy” efforts up to the present can be found.
Okay, Helena’s annotated excerpts start here:

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Anguish in ICRC over Iraq

The Swiss daily Le Temps yesterday (11/24) had an
article (purchase reqd) about the dilemmas the International Committee of the Red Cross
has been facing in Iraq. The piece is by Richard Werly, one of the few
Swiss journos who have been able to work in Iraq in recent weeks.

Ominously, the piece is titled, “After two weeks of fighting, Falludjah
is still closed to the ICRC convoys”.

Alert JWN readers will of course be aware that the ICRC is not “just another”
international humanitarian aid organization, but it’s the international body
that is charged by the world’s governments with guarding the integrity of,
and supervising the implementation of, nearly the whole body of the international
“laws of war” — Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, etc etc.

So when the ICRC gets systematically stymied in its work, this is a serious development in international affairs, and could mark a continuation of the desire of many in the Pentagon to “roll back” the entire structure of the laws of war.

(My big thanks to the JWN reader who supplied the translation here.)

Here’s how Werly starts:

Can the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) still
work in Iraq? The question comes back more bluntly after the bloody battle
of Falludjah, the Sunni insurgents’ stronghold retaken by the US Marines
and their Iraqi allies. Two weeks after the assault was launched on the 8th
of November and while sporadic fightings are still going on, neither a crew
nor a humanitarian convoy of the ICRC have been able to enter in this city
of about 200 000 inhabitants…

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Author of the Palestinian “democracy hurdle”?

Today’s WaPo has an intriguing article by Dana Milbank in which he writes that just nine days after Bush’s re-election he had a special meeting in the White House with Natan Sharansky… Or, as Milbank describes him, “an Israeli politician so hawkish that he has accused Ariel Sharon of being soft on the Palestinians.”
Sharansky has apparently recently co-authored a book called “The Case for Democracy”, which argues that nothing should be given to the Palestinians at all until they have established a full democracy. (Under conditions of foreign military occupation?? Exactly how are they supposed to do that, again?) His publisher got copies of the galleys to Prez Bush, who was so impressed that he (a) invited Sharansky over and (b) incorporated most of his ideas into the policy toward the Palestinians that he outlined at the joint press conference with Blair.
As Milbank writes,

    Sharansky made waves this spring when he rallied with Jewish settlers to oppose the Likud prime minister’s plan for a unilateral pullout from Gaza — a plan that Bush had endorsed. Sharansky, head of a Russian immigrant political party, said Sharon’s plan, though supported by a number of Likud hard-liners, would be “encouraging more terror.” A figure who has previously railed against the “illusions of Oslo” and described that famous accord as “one-sided concessions,” Sharansky resigned in 2000 from Ehud Barak’s government over the Labor prime minister’s plan to attend a peace summit in Washington.
    “He’s been suffering in the political wilderness in Israel with these ideas for some time,” [his co-author Ron] Dermer said of [Sharansky]. But when it came to Bush, Dermer said, “I didn’t see a lot of daylight between them.”

This whole idea that a nation must be fully democratic before it can allowed its independence is quite bizarre, and quite a-historical. Did the US colonists have a full range of their own fully democratic institutions before they fought for and won their independence from the British Crown? Of course not! It took them 13 more years, as I recall, to work out the details of the US Constitution.
In the modern (i.e. post-WW2) era, no other nation has been obliged to “prove” its democratic credentials before being given independence… Of course, a working democracy is a very desirable thing. But to make it a precondition for national independence? That is the bizarre thing.
Anyway, I could write a bunch about this whole cart-before-horse idea, but I have to go… Just finally, though, I’d note that the tired old proposition that “democracies don’t launch wars against other nations” is palpable nonsense in the present era.

Syria-2

(From Damascus. Written Tuesday evening.) As I started writing this, the plaintive quarter
tones of the evening call to prayer were reverberating from the minaret very
near to us. Now, that one’s stopped and I can hear other ones coming
thinly from other minarets around town. On Saturday, when we had dinner
at a restaurant up on Jebel Kassioun looking down on the city, we could see
many of its minarets picked out with green neon lighting: little green spears
sticking up from a broad, spreading carpet of orange street lights and lit-up
homes.

From ground-level I’ve seen some of the churches that have blue lighting
for the crosses topping them. Sunday evening we wandered around the shadowed
streets of the Old City’s Christian Quarter and heard the broad tones of
heavy church bells. Church bells on a cold and rainy Sunday evening…
that reminds me of so many poignant things about my childhood.

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