I am still intrigued by the different windows into Iraq’s internal politcs that are provided by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting’s near-daily Iraqi Press Monitor.
Reading the IPM doesn’t give a complete picture of what’s happening inside the country these days. In the circumstances, a “complete picture” is impossible for anyone to provide! But many of the items covered in IPM you really can’t find easily anywhere else in the English-language open-source literature. So it provides a useful and handy supplement to what I read elsewhere.
Continuing in the latest-news-first style of the blogosphere, then, here are things I have found interesting in recent IPMs:
Author: Helena
Alert! Christian peacemakers attacked by Israeli settlers
The following came in from the Christian Peacemaker Teams, which have maintained a team of nonviolent witnesses in Hebron (al-Khalil) in the southern West Bank for many years now. You can learn more about CPT’s principles at their website.
- At about 7:15am on the morning of Wednesday September 29, Chris Brown and Kim Lamberty of Christian Peacemaker Teams were attacked by settlers while accompanying children to school. The two of them were walking a group of
children from the village of Tuba to the village of Tuwani along a road
where the children have experienced harassment from settlers in the past. A
group of five settlers came out of an outpost of the nearby Ma’on settlement
and attacked Brown and Lamberty with a chain and bat. All of the children
were able to get away to their homes without injury.
The settlers pushed Brown to the ground, kicked him in the chest and whipped
him with a chain. He has bruises and cuts on his chest and face and is
experiencing trouble breathing. They kicked and beat Lamberty’s legs. She is
not able to walk and has significant pain in her left arm and a cut on her
chin.
Lamberty and Brown were taken by ambulance to Soroka hospital in Beersheba
for treatment.
The ready recourse by many Israeli settlers to the use of direct physical violence–in addition to the much deeper structural violence that they perpetrate by being key participants in Israel’s broad colonial venture in the occupied territories–is a very worrying feature of the situation there.
So too is the laxity with which the Israeli authorities tend to treat instances of phsyical violence perpetrated by the settlers.
Today’s Ha’Aretz has this story, updating the tale of settler Yehoshua Elitsur, accused by police of having gratuitously killed Sa’al Jabara, a 44-year-old Palestinian man, near his settlement on Monday.
The police, who are expected to recommend that Elitsur be charged with manslaughter, had requested that he be kept under house arrest or some other form of surveillance pending the completion of the legal proceedings against him. But the Kfar Sava Magistrates Court–inside Israel– which has been hearing the case, turned down the police’s request.
Continue reading “Alert! Christian peacemakers attacked by Israeli settlers”
Great news!
The Simonas and their Iraqi colleagues are free! The Palestinian-Israeli CNN employee is free! Now, let’s pray for the wellbeing of everyone else who is unjustly detained, whether by governmental or extra-governmental forces.
Iraq’s four Grand Ayatollahs get it together?
Juan Cole today cites a Hayat news report that Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayyad has expressed some concern about talk of postponing the Iraqi elections beyond next January. Fayyad reportedly said that that the concern was shared by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and that they,
- plan to issue a joint statement on the issue. Fayyad insisted that elections are feasible, and that Iraqi government forces and “the Occupation forces” (i.e. the Americans) are sufficient to ensure an atmosphere of security in which the elections can go forward.
(That last claim does seem a little over-optimistic to me– unless the Americans switch into a considerably more de-escalatory posture than they’ve been adopting until now… Still, what do I know? I’m not a Grand Ayatollah!)
Well, and then most recently, we have this from Reuters (out of Teheran, at 10:26 New York time):
- Leading Shi’ite Muslim cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has expressed concern that Iraq has not yet met conditions for fair elections in January, a senior cleric from the Shi’ite majority said on Tuesday…
Abdulaziz al-Hakim, whose Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is part of the Baghdad government, told Iranian state radio [presumably, about Sistani]:
Continue reading “Iraq’s four Grand Ayatollahs get it together?”
‘Mini-me’: the proof
The WaPo’s Dana Milbank presents the proof regarding the amazing feat of political/rhetorical cloning by which Iyad Allawi became Bush’s very own ‘Mini-me’.
By the way, Juan Cole links to a Time mag piece about Allawi’s longtime sponsors in the CIA having had and then later shelved a plan to “help” the former Baathist thug win the January election.
The piece seems to be referring mainly to plans to shovel money into Allawi’s campaign. However, even if that particular plan has been shelved, you have to know that there are 1,001 other ways that an occupying power can stack the deck to rig an election, including by determining the security situation, stacking the election rules, etc etc. So the “integrity” of the electoral process is certainly still not assured.
King Abdullah (!) on prospects for Iraqi elections
The BBC and other news media are giving much prominence to the views Jordan’s King Abdullah has expressed regarding the prospects of holding timely elections in Iraq.
Excuse me?
Since when did that Hashemite monarch become recognized as any kind of an expert on democracy or democratization?
According to this page on Nationmaster.com, Jordan has a “3” listing in Freedom House’s annual assessment of the state of its civil and political liberties (on a scale of 7 = bad through 1 = good). And the “democratic institutions rating” it gets from the Polity IV project is -2.0 (on a scale of +10 = good through -10 = bad).
I must admit I’ve become rather fond of Nationmaster’s funky, well-presented combinations of international listings, facts, and factoids.
The question of the prospects for Iraqi elections is, of course, not a game at all.
There are a number of quite mind-boggling features of the current international discussion over this issue. One is the rampant disarray within the Bush administration on the topic— with Rumsfeld quite blithely contradicting all the confidence that Colin Powell and his people are expressing the ability of the Iraqis to hold the election before the January 31 deadline.
Another is that Powell looks as though he’s aiming at painting Kofi Annan into being “the bad guy”, whose “pessimism” and “foot-dragging” will be blamed for any ultimate failure of the elections to be held on time.
Not fair! How on earth can Kofi’s people get in there and do what needs to be done to help organize a free and fair election if the US military carries on rambo-ing around the whole country generally escalating tensions and making trouble?
In addition, there are many respects in which what is said by cabinet members and other administration flacks in Washington has come to bear almost no relationship at all to the actual situation on the ground in Iraq…
Continue reading “King Abdullah (!) on prospects for Iraqi elections”
Warning: U.S.-sponsored regime change can leaving you drowning in [excrement]
There are so many ways that war and political conflict kills people. Getting blasted to death by high-power munitions, regular guns, or car-bombs is one way; and people who’re killed in those ways are relatively easy to count.
In many conflicts, though, deaths caused by serious infrastructure degradation are more numerous. They’re also much harder to count. How can you count all the babies or vulnerable older people who succumb to water-borne diseases spread by the conflict-induced degradation of sewage systems??
Which brings us to two places where the Bush administration has effected its own form of force-backed “regime change” over the past 18 months: Iraq and Haiti. (I’m not even going to start analyzing Afghanistan here.)
So now, according to the many reports coming out of Iraq recently, large portions of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities are almost literally swimming in human waste. This is 18 months into the US occupation of the country. As occupying power, the US is responsible under international law for the repair and maintenance of items of major infrastructure–particularly those so central to the public health of the Iraqis.
But because of the ideological, anti-‘government’ biases of the Bremer ‘plan’ for Iraq, major infrastructure repair contracts were all doled out to foreign contractors, most of whom didn’t know beans about Iraq and cared less. (And now, even some of the money set aside for those projects has been diverted into “security”.)
So now, Iraq is seeing the emergence of something called Hepatatis E, which is particularly dangerous for pregnant women.
This article, from the UN’s news agency IRIN, tells us that a study by UNICEF had found that acute malnutrition among children had almost doubled since the war in March 2003, moving from 4 per cent to 7.7 percent. “Children who are acutely malnourished are literally wasting away and for severe cases their condition can be fatal,” the agency warned.
And the cause of those cases of malnutrition? Before the war, they were more or less straighforward cases of not having enough to eat, linked to the sanctions regime imposed on the country. Now, however, IRIN tells us that,
- 80 percent of current [malnutrition] cases are due to infections caused by dirty water resulting in diseases such as cholera.
In other words, because vulnerable people get cholera or other water-borne diseases they basically excrete out too many micronutrients and die of malnutrition that way, instead.
And then, there’s Haiti …
Continue reading “Warning: U.S.-sponsored regime change can leaving you drowning in [excrement]”
Robert Kaplan goes beserk
Robert Kaplan is an Atlantic Monthly writer who’s been fairly influential over the years. His books about the Balkans and West Africa both painted a picture of a world “out there”, far from the U.S., that was governed by ancient hatreds, dangerous to Americans, and irredeemable. He wrote a hate-filled book about those earnest US diplomats of an earlier era who actually cared enough to learn something serious about the Arab world: he made them out to be some heinous force for evil in the world, and thus contributed hugely to strengthening their demise and the rise of the wilfull “know-nothing-ism” regarding the Middle East in the US policy elite…
Now, he has gone even further in showing us his real colors. Taking the idea of a globalized “manifest destiny” role for the US to its logical extreme, he has now started calling openly for the US military to act in the rest of the world as though it were in “Indian country”.
What does this mean? As he tells us in this Sept. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, it means this:
Bush: AWOL on Haiti
Agence France Presse is reporting today that, six days after storm system Jeanne slammed into Haiti Sept. 18,
- The death toll in northern Haiti’s flooding rose to 1,160, with 1,250 missing, Civil Protection Office spokesman Dieufort Delorge announced Friday.
The BBC is reporting that the dying and desperation are still far from over in Haiti:
- People who may not have had food for days have been gathering around relief centres, hampering the handing out of supplies.
At one warehouse in Haiti’s third largest city, there were angry scenes as several hundred people surged against the gates of the building, desperate to get inside…
Survivors have to drink and cook with water from ditches containing rotting bodies and sewage.
“It’s a critical situation in terms of epidemics, because of the bodies still in the streets, because people are drinking dirty water and scores are getting injuries from debris – huge cuts that are getting infected,” Francoise Gruloos, Haiti director for the UN Children’s Fund was quoted as saying.
For those of us who live in North America– these are our neighbors!
Where is President Bush on this???
Why is the US military not flying shuttle flights of relief supplies and equipment into Haiti around the clock?
Why is the US Navy not offloading field hospitals, food, emergency housing materials, and water-purification equipment at every affected area, even as I write this?
Why are US citizens not demanding action by our government?
These are our neighbors.
I note that State Dept. today announced that the administration has released “approximately $2 million in funding for emergency humanitarian activities” to assist Jeanne’s victims in Haiti. That might be a start. But allocating the funding is far from the same as getting the aid in question actually delivered.
In this context, the actual politics of Haiti is fairly irrelevant. (Except inasmuch as we can say that a responsible, accountable government there would have had far better measures in place to deal with the tropical weather-systems that are totally foreseeable, every year, throughout the Caribbean… As we saw in nearby Cuba, which last week evacuated two million of its people from low-lying areas… )
For now, the people of Haiti need help, pure and simple.
I do note however that just seven months ago the Bush administration helped bring about the removal of the country’s democratically elected President and then installed its own puppet President there…
And even after that maneuver, this administration feels under no obligation to help the people of Haiti?
Shame! Shame!!!
p.s. I have found that this is the best site to get up-to-date info on the humanitarian situation in Haiti.
“That place”
So for Rumsfeld, Iraq today became “that place”. As in:
- “Any implication that that place needs to be peaceful and perfect before we can reduce coalition and U.S. forces would be unwise… ”
I guess that’s the kind of self-distancing locution one uses when one hates being pestered with questions about the subject at hand? Perhaps, because one has some flickerings of shame or uncertainty about one’s past decisions with regard to it?
As in this January 1998 statement:
- “I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Well, as they say: Clinton lied, and no-one died. But as for Rumsfeld and his buddies?????
Maybe “that place” will continue to haunt Rumsfeld for some time to come…
Do you think his conscience is starting to get to him?