My column marking the tenth anniversary of the start of the Rwanda genocide is out in Thursday’s Christian Science Monitor. I reflected quite deeply before writing it, and it seems to have come out more or less as I wanted.
This afternoon (Wednesday), I spoke at a gathering an energetic, social-activist student at U.Va. law school called Heather Eastwood had organized, to commemorate the genocide. I used some of the ideas from the column, but talked at greater length about many aspects of the genocide. The crowd was larger than either Heather or I had expected. (They have exams coming up there soon.) And then, people asked some really good questions and we had a good discussion.
One of the big points I made was that the standard, familiar-to-Americans, ‘criminal-justice’ approach to dealing with the legacies of atrocities is not necessarily the best one. These were nearly all law students! And the ones who came to the talk were probably disproportionately supporters of the human rights movement’s broad global campaigns in favor of war-crimes courts for every atrocity… But still, the sheer gravity of the kinds of problems I described with that approach them seemed to strike them.
One of the last questions had to do with whether I thought the Rwandan government could have gotten both accountability and reconciliation. That gave me a welcome opportunity to explore that question more than I had until then. I noted that there is often, in practice, a trade-off between the attainment of these two goals; that attaining each of them requires a serious investment of time, resources, and attention; and often societies simply cannot attain both and therefore have to choose between them.
I talked a bit about the very different set of choices made by Mozambique in 1992… Anyway, it was a good discussion.
I note that inside Rwanda itself, President Kagamae presided over large-scale commemorative activities in which he blamed mainly the “international community” for the genocide, and identified the victims as merely “Rwandans”… This, in continued pursuit of his argument that the categories “Hutu” and “Tutsi” don’t exist any more.
Author: Helena
W’s Iraq debacle unfolds
Swish, swish, swish… Can you hear it? That, friends, is the sound of our president’s chickens coming home to roost in Iraq.
I know I’ve said before that I get no pleasure from seeing this terrible–and quite avoidable–tragedy unfolding there. It will mean more families in the US and in the “coalition” countries hearing that dreaded knock on the door. It will mean many more Iraqi families hearing news of the death of a loved one. It will mean more people returning to their homes broken in body and spirit. It will mean –most likely–more political and social disruption yet to come, in Iraq and in neighboring countries. More grief, more pain, more suffering to come.
And it didn’t have to be like this.
Last night, at a seder in Washington DC with some politically active (and very anti-Bush) friends, we raised our glasses to “Next year in the White House”. That, it seems to me, is the only way at this point for the people responsible for this debacle to get anything like what they deserve for their lying, their scheming, and their war-mongering.
As I think I pointed out the last time things went downhill badly in Iraq for the US forces–last November–I had foreseen so much of this happening. One of my main points of comparison is what happened to the Israelis after their quite “voluntary” attempt to launch regime-change-by-force: in Lebanon, 1982. See this portion of a JWN post written March 21, 2003 (or the whole post there, if you want to: it’s in ‘Archives’, for some technical reason.) Or this one, from May 20, 2003.
None of this is rocket science. It just takes a basic understanding of the fact that most people in the world don’t like to have their countries remade by foreign occupation armies. I don’t know why that should be so hard for some people to understand.
But now, we are where are. More and more cities in Iraq are being taken over by–their own people! USA Today scooped the biggies by reporting that “about 24,000” of the US troops who were supposed to rotate home over the next few weeks would have to stay on, instead. (Thanks to Yankeedoodle for picking that up.) The brass and the suits in the DoD are each, separately, rushing big-time to pursue a policy of CYA… And the Prez has been… playing baseball.
Hey, Dick Cheney! Isn’t it time you had someone go in there and re-program young Junior?
There is only one even half-way plausible way for our Prez to get his backside out of this mess…
Human Rights Watch, on Israel
So many of Israel’s blindly ardent defenders in the west make the claim that Amnesty Internatinal and Human Rights Watch criticize Israel “disproportionately”. This past week, HRW executive director Ken Roth wrote a good op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in which he stoutly defended the organization’s record.
Since I’m on HRW’s Middle East Advisory Committee, I am happy to provide that link to Ken’s piece. Ah, but I just checked: they require registration. So here is the full text:
- The truth hurts
By KENNETH ROTH
Apr. 1, 2004
As the UN Commission on Human Rights meets for its annual session in Geneva, one can understand why Israel feels picked on. Many commission members are abusive governments that will spend an inordinate amount of time condemning Israel while doing everything possible to protect themselves and their allies from critical scrutiny.
It would thus be understandable if the Jerusalem Post were to criticize the commission or others who apply a similarly blatant double standard. But in recent months, the Post’s opinion pages seem fixated instead on Human Rights Watch – an organization with a long record of objectively reporting on not only Israel’s conduct but also abuses by Palestinian groups and repressive governments throughout the region and the world.
Human Rights Watch reports are taken seriously by the press, the public, and policymakers of nearly all political persuasions, including the Israeli government. Yet it is precisely this credibility that seems so irksome to the Post’s opinion writers. At a time when Israel desperately needs a hard-nosed, honest evaluation of its human rights practices, the Post’s opinion writers seem determined to demonize those who are most capable of providing that assessment. Sadly, truth is rarely an obstacle to these attacks.
The ‘threat that dare not speak its name’
Alert JWN readers will recall that I wrote here just a couple weeks ago about ambitious Charlottesville hometown boy Phil Zelikow, who’s the Exec Director of the 9/11 Commission. (And also, most probably the subject of at least one string of its enquiries, since he was a leading member of the national-security portion of the Bush transition team.) Altogether a very well-connected guy…
So it should have been no small beer, back on September 10, 2002, when he told a hometown audience in Charlottesville:
- Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 — it’s the threat against Israel…
And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.
I wish I could have been the one to break that story! But I wasn’t. It was Inter-Press Service’s Emad Mekay who broke it March 29. See e.g. here.
Now, in a sense, this is not “news”, because it’s been easy enough to triangulate all along that with this particular bunch of neo-cons running the DoD, the attention paid to Israel’s needs would evidently be disproportionate. But hearing it from someone as very well connected as Zelikow–as he expressed it at a one-year-after-9-11 forum at U.Va. Law School–somehow gives this theory a lot more impact.
If I were working more wholeheartedly on this story, I’d love to do a follow-up interview with Zelikow now, that is, one year after this disastrous war against Iraq that was still, back in September 2002, just a twinkle in Wolfie and Doug Feith’s respective eyes. (Okay, maybe quite a bit more than that by then… )
But I have this book on Africa to write. Shoot. Still, maybe Mekay or someone else will be following it up.
Beware, language twisters at work
The Bushies have distorted and twisted the meaning of so many of the words of our fine English language that it might seem irrational of me to take note of one particularly irritating distortion I saw–and not for the first time!–in today’s WaPo.
It’s in a piece by Thomas Ricks on a hot tip that his idol, General Petraeus, will shortly be named to head back to Iraq to oversee the organization of all the “Iraqified” security forces there after this strange self-immolatory event the Coalition is planning for June 30.
Self-immolatory? Well, not quite… Ricks quotes Deputy Secretary of “Defense” Paul Wolfowitz as saying:
- There’s not going to be any difference in our military posture on July 1st from what it is on June 30th, except that we will be there then at the invitation of a sovereign Iraqi government, which I am quite sure will want us to stay there until…
Excuse me? What is the meaning of the word “sovereign” in that sentence? I can understand what its function is, there and in a hundred similar sentences. But in the context of this sentence it is particularly clear that this function depends totally on a 180-degree twisting of the real, commonly understood meaning of the word.
Remembering Rwanda: ‘Frontline’, and my interview
Bill and I watched the ‘Frontline’ special on Rwanda last night. It was beautifully done, in general, and gave much cause for continued reflection and thought.
One of the really constructive things they did was to highlight and explore the absolutely heroic role played by a small number of individuals during the genocide. It was a pity that all the featured heroes except one were non-Rwandans, since I know that many Rwandan nationals– Hutus and Tutsis–also made extremely heroic, life-saving decisions during the genocide; and always, at literally existential risk to themselves. I want to write more about this later.
But still, the Frontline program was mainly about the reaction of outsiders to what happened in Rwanda; and from that perspective, showing so concretely that there were outsiders who did make a difference for the better through simple acts of huge courage and grace just sets in even greater contrast the cowardice of people like President Bill Clinton, national security advisor Tony Lake, and even, I would say, the resposnible people at the UN: then-sec-gen Boutros Boutros-Ghali and then-head of peacekeeping Kofi Annan.
Among the real heroes highlighted were:
Continue reading “Remembering Rwanda: ‘Frontline’, and my interview”
Contractors in Iraq: the convergence
This use by the U.S. military of private U.S. contractors for security duty in Iraq is something fairly new and very unsettling in international affairs and international law.
I mean, how weird is it that Paul Bremer, who’s the top representative of the U.S. military’s top civil-affairs unit, gets protected by contract soldiers, not by the U.S. military itself?
What is the status of all these guys under the Geneva Conventions? They are not acting directly in the military chain of command.
Does that make them “unlawful combatants”, I wonder? Or, if taken prisoner, would they be considered to be regular POWs?
Anyway, I learned from ABC News tonight that there are around 15,000 of them there in Iraq now. Many more fighters than even the Brits have in Iraq!
The more I thought about it, the more the whole set-up seems like some kind of a harmonic convergence among so many interests:
* Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld’s interest in turning the U.S. military into a lean and mobile fighting-machine. (No time for training and maintaining large numbers of ‘boots on the ground!’)
* The Prez’s general desire to outsource everything in sight… Government jobs to non-government companies… US jobs to India and China, etc etc.
* Karl Rove’s desire to keep the number of ‘actual’ U.S. forces who are recorded as casualties as low as possible between now and November 4… and
Iraq: an administrator’s-eye view
I realize that there are many massive political developments underway in Iraq. I don’t have time right now to say anything new or interesting about them. But I just wanted to make note of the following little sub-set of the story…
There’s a slightly dank-looking blog out there in the blogosphere called Deeds. It’s written by someone using the pseudonym “John Galt” and describing himself as “a U.S. citizen working in the CPA in Baghdad”. If you click on the link “Who is John Galt?” you end up at a picture of a cat.
Why all this secrecy? He links prominently in his blogroll to something called Debkafile, which is an unabashedly pro-Likud website full of alleged “hot news” from the Global War on Terror… Maybe that’s a clue, right there?
Anyway, he hasn’t been posting much recently. Too busy winning the war on terror, eh, John? But cruising through his blog quickly today I found a fascinating set of contributions to his Comments board, as follows:
- John, I am here at the CPA again. I was in Al Ramadi for three weeks, which is in Al Anbar. I was helping 82nd transfer everything to the Marines. Things were okay when I arrived, but as the Marines moved in I noticed that hostilities were growing. Here are a few things that I noticed:
Voices from Mozambique
I’ve been struggling quite a bit with (re-)shaping and (re-)writing the section on Mozambique for my current book-writing project, “Violence and its legacies”. Actually, the conference I went to on Sunday/Monday on transitional justice etc has really helped me to solve a problem in the writing.
At one point during the conference, I remarked out loud on the fact that there we all were, some 45 people, nearly all from “western” or “northern” cultural backgrounds, all earnestly discussing a bunch of problems/issues that disproportinately affect people who come from very backgrounds very different from ours.
“We need to get more people from Africa, from the ‘south’ generally into the room and the discussion here!” I said.
A little later, Maurice Eisenbruch, who’s a professor of Multicultural Health and indeed the Director of the Centre for Culture and Health at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, took my suggestion a little further… He conjectured what a Cambodian or East Timorean traditional healer might conclude if he had been a fly on the wall during our meeting thus far…
(I hadn’t met Maurice before. He was one of a number of really interesting people I met there.)
So okay, the problem I’d been confronting in my writing was mainly this: How to “shape” all the many really significant and interesting things I heard people say in Mozambique last year as I gently elicited their views on the efficacy of the peace process their country went through in 1992-94, as well os whether they might have liked to see war-crimes courts or truth commissions brought to bear on the situation then. (The answer to both those latter questions was almost always a resounding “No!”)
So I had to figue out how to shape (i.e. edit) all the interesting things I’d heard from them, for two main reasons. (1) To get the material to fit into the end of an already overcrowded chapter. And (2), so that my own analytical frame would control the narrative.
After what happened at the conference, I thought…
Conference on Trauma and Transitional Justice
I’ve been here at the Airlie House Conference Center in Virginia at a conference on Trauma and Transitional Justice in Divided Societies since Saturday night. It has been extremely “busy”, and has dealt with many very important issues.
Sat. night we got to see a pre-premiere showing of Anne Aghion‘s great new film about Rwanda, called “In Rwanda we say… “ Apparently it, and her earlier film about Rwanda, “Gacaca”, will both be shown in the US on the Sundance Channel on, I think, April 5.
Anne was also here, and answered questions after the showing, which was really great. I’ve admired her work for a while now, so it was good to meet her.
Two of the highlights of yesterday’s very full program were presentations made by South Africans: Judge Richard Goldstone, who’d been the first prosecutor of the UN tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwand and a member of South Africa’s Constitutional Cour; and Paul Van Zyl, who was the Executive Secretary of the TRC in SA and now works for the NY-based International Center for Transitional Justice…
I don’t have time to recount most of the really interesting things they said. Goldstone gave some interesting background on the political-negotiation background to the formation of the TRC in SA– more, I think, than I’d heard from him when I interviewed him in Johannesburg in 2001.
The most interesting thing that Van Zyl said was that he didn’t see any necessary connection between a retelling by violence survivors of the human rights violations of the past, and personal healing. He noted that while there had been thousands of instances of that apparently having happened during the work of the TRC, there were also many instances in which the experiences that survivors had at and with the TRC had been “literally heartbreaking for them”; and he recounted a particularly poignant example of that.
Continue reading “Conference on Trauma and Transitional Justice”