Author: Helena

Elections, legitimacy, and the ‘international community’

I’ve been mainly immersed in matters Mozambican this week. (When I wasn’t doing other bits of work on Palestine or Rwanda…. Tenth anniversary of Rwandan genocide coming up April 7th. Great-sounding ‘Frontline’ special on that subject on April 1st. My contribution to it will be on their website, not on the broadcast.)
So anyway, back to Mozambique. I was writing about the landmark elections they had there in October 1994. Those were the country’s first-ever democratic elections. The commitment to holding them was enshrined in the General Peace Agreement that in October 1992 ended 17 years of truly devastating civil war between the Frelimo government and the Renamo insurrectionists…
There is at least one aspect of those elections that is of direct relevance to the elections hopefully to be planned soon inside Iraq– namely: the key role that the “international community” played not solely in helping to organize the elections but also, crucially, in certifying their outcome.
All of which bears out my theory that the esential “legitimacy” of a sovereign government has much to do with the ability of this government to win the recognition of its legitimacy by other governments, as well as its ability to win the “consent” of those over whom it governs. (Recognition of other beings as fully right-bearing persons also has much to do with the recognition of this status by other persons, as well. But that’s a whole different, though intriguingly parallel, line of enquiry.)
So, in Mozambique in 1994, the elections were due to be held October 27-28. But on October 25 the Renamo chief, Afonso Dhlakama suddenly went into a funk and declared that he and his people would not take part. Yikes! A similar thing had happened with the IFP, in South Africa’s elections just six months earlier–but ended up getting resolved. But in October 1992, in Angola, UNITA’s Jonas Savimbi had contested the results of the UN-sponsored elections immediately after his defeat in them had been announced; and he then reignited his insurgency against the Luanda government… And that horrifying civil war has only recently now been brought toward an end…
So in Mozambique, Dhlakama went to his home city, Beira, and holed up there, and refused to come down to the capital, Maputo.
All the diplomats who were in the country, desperately eager to see the elections work, went into a big tizzy. The South African Ambassador was the only one Dhlakama would talk to. He flew up to Beira and started talking to him. Dhlakama expressed all the complaints he had about Frelimo’s alleged misdeeds in the organization of the election…
Negotiations ensued. In the early morning of October 27, the head of the electoral commission, Brazao Mazula, announced that the two-day-long elections would go ahead as planned… Still no constructive word from Dhlakama… But the negotiations continued round the clock…

Continue reading “Elections, legitimacy, and the ‘international community’”

Palestinian call for nonviolent intifada

The following is a translation from Arabic of the appeal by 70 Palestinian intellectuals and officials that appeared in the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam earlier this week. The translation came from someone at the American Task Force on Palestine.
It looks like an interesting, generally well-crafted and constructive text. I’d love to see the original, however, if someone can send me a link to it, as the translation doesn’t look totally sound.
PUBLIC STATEMENT
We the undersigned, members of the of the Palestinian people from all political, intellectual and social sectors who are unified in their struggle and steadfastness, affirm our condemnation of the blatant aggression launched by Israel against our people, which was embodied two days ago with the criminal operation conducted by Sharon and his right-wing gang which resulted in the martyrdom of the leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his struggling comrades.
We reaffirm our people’s rights, stipulated in all international covenants, and the use of all methods to defend ourselves. We are almost exploding from the pain and hurt of the disaster but despite this we call upon our people in the homeland, and in line with our national interest, to take the initiative from the hands of the criminal occupation gang and arise again in a wide ranging peaceful and popular intifadah with clear aims and sound speech wherein our people own the element of its initiative and the path it takes. This way we can make Sharon miss the opportunity of crowning his aggression against our people and sacred places by putting the final touches on his security plans.
We call upon a unified intifadah as a new step to revitalizing popular work organized with basis that have a clear program and a political revenue. We reaffirm our commitment to our just and legitimate demands of our rights and call for alignment based on national unity and unified leadership to resist the occupation.
Enough Criminal Assassination Operations
Enough Bloodshed.. Enough Occupation
The signatories:
1- Ibrahim al-Hafi
2- Ibrahim Msallam
3- Ahmad Jbara (Abul Sukkar)
4- Ahmad Hallas (Abu Maher)
5- Ahmad Fares
6- As’ad Odeh
7- Amin Maqboul
8- Buthayna al-Duqmaq
9- Jad Is’haq
10- Jamal Dar’awi

Continue reading “Palestinian call for nonviolent intifada”

More data on Israel’s assassinations

B’tselem’s server is up again today. If you go here, you can find the following information, which covers the period from the beginning of the current intifada (September 29, 2000) through 10 March 2004:

    At least 135 of the Palestinians killed were extrajudicially executed by Israel, 76 of them in assassinations carried out by the Israel Air Force and 59 of them in assassinations carried out by ground forces. In the course of these assasinations 90 additional Palestinians were killed, 28 of them minors. 80 of them in assassinations carried out by the Israel Air Force and 10 of them in assassinations carried out by ground forces..

So the number of “collateral” fatalities did not, as I had mistakenly written yesterday, exceed the number of those “targeted” for murder.
The number of extrajudicial killings is higher than I had estimated yesterday. Significantly, too, as you can learn if you go here, the policy was pursued under Barak and not solely under Sharon.
The first assassination that B’tselem lists there, during this intifada, was that of Hussein Muhammad Salim ‘Abayat, age 34, from Taamera, Bethlehem, who was killed by Israeli security forces helicopter missilefire aimed at his car, in Beit Sahur, on 9 November 2000. Two 52-year-old women were killed as “collateral” damage in that attack.
The word “B’tselem”, by the way, is Hebrew for “in the image”, and is a reminder that all human beings are created in the image of G-d.

Governments as assassins: back to the Dark Ages

Israel’s killing of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is by no means the first act of “targeted killing” (= extra-judicial execution, = assassination) that the Israeli government has carried out in recent years. This is a practice whose sheer barbarism has been recognized by nearly all other governments of the world. Even repressive governments that have in fact carried out similar acts in the past (including Israel, until a couple of years ago) made some effort to “hide” their responsibility for these killings.
The apartheid government in South Africa did, we all know, carry out extrajudicial executions, including of many people known to be in the custody of its security forces. In those cases, the killings were never described as deliberate acts of killing, but excuses were given that the deceased had “slipped on a piece of soap and fallen through the window”, or “had been shot while trying to escape.”
The terror regime in Argentina deliberately killed thousands of opponents in the most heinous way. But it always tried to hide the fact and the details of those deaths: hence the large-scale phenomenon of the “disappeared”.
Israel itself carried out many acts of assassination prior to the current intifada. Most notable were the killings of three PLO leaders in Beirut in 1973 and then the killing of Abu Jihad in Tunis in January 1988. But on all those earlier occasions, the Israeli government was happy to keep the same kind of (translucent) “veil of possible deniability” over its involvement that it has for years wielded with regard to its huge nuclear-weapons program.
Everyone in the international community in those (post-Frank Church) days recognized that it was just not “appropriate” for governments openly to admit to their involvement in extrajudicial killings. Engagement in such acts did, after all, seriously undercut the most basic foundations of any idea of the “rule of law”.
That dissociation of governments from openly admitted involvement in assassinations lasted until the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli PM in 2001. Then, as part of his well-known tendency toward defiance of longheld international norms, he announced that “targeted killings” of accused terrorist leaders would henceforth be an open part of his government’s policy.
Btselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has a good list of the number of openly admitted assassinations the government has carried out since that announcement. I think it is more than 80– but their website is not currently responding, so I can’t check that. The site also notes that a large number of people–far more than the 80-plus actual “targets”, and many of them innocent bystanders– have also been killed as “collateral damage” in these operations.
Many of those earlier assassinations, like Shaikh Yassin’s, were carried out by helicopter gunships. Not exactly known as mechanisms for fine discrimination of targets.
In response to today’s news, European Union foreign ministers have gone on the record to condemn the whole concept of extrajudicial killings:

    “Not only are extra-judicial killings contrary to international law, they undermine the concept of the rule of law, which is a key element in the fight against terrorism,” they said at their regular monthly meeting in Brussels.

Nearly every other other government in the world has also expressed the same view.
Not so the Bush administration.
Condi Rice’s only comments were twofold: (1) to voice a totally milquetoaste and content-less appeal for “calm” in the aftermath of the killing, and (2) to deny vociferously that the Bush administration had known in advance about Sharon’s plans to do this.
Methinks the lady perhaps protested a little too much on the latter score?? Why on earth would anyone even imagine that Sharon might have given his American friends a helpful heads-up before he undertook an act that quite foreseeably escalates tensions worldwide??
The reason for the Bush administration’s non-condemnation of the Yassin assassination is quite clear: Washington itself also these days reserves the right to engage in extrajudicial executions of those accused of involvement with terrorism. We have seen at least one clear episode– that one in Yemen four or five months back– where US forces have done just that.
In asserting the “right” to undertake such actions, the Bushies were following the lead of their master in so many tactical aspects of the “war on terrorism”: Ariel Sharon. That’s why they don’t condemn his use of acts of deliberate, extrajudicial killing today.
Welcome to the Dark Ages of the collapse of the rule of law.

Avnery on the Yassin assassination

Veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, who heads “Gush Shalom” (‘the Peace Bloc’) commented on his government’s assassination of Hamas spiritual guide Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as follows:

    “This is worse than a crime, it is an act of stupidity! … This is the beginning of a new chapter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It moves the conflict from the level of a solvable national conflict to the level of religious conflict, which by its very nature is insoluble.
    “The fate of the State of Israel is now in the hands of group of persons whose outlook is primitive and whose perceptions are retarded. They are incapable of understanding the mental, emotional and political dimensions of the conflict. This is a group of bankrupt political and military leaders who have failed in all their actions. They try to cover up their failures by a catastrophic escalation.
    “This act will not only endanger the personal security of every Israeli,
    both in the country and around the world, but also the existential security
    of the State of Israel. It has grievously hurt the chances of putting and end
    to the Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Muslim conflicts.”
    Avnery mentioned that in the early 1980s the occupation authorities
    encouraged the founders of Hamas, hoping that they would create a
    counter-weight to Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Even after the start of the
    first intifada, the army and the security services gave preferential treatment
    of Hamas. Sheikh Yassin was arrested only a year after the outbreak.
    “There seems to be no limit to the stupidity of our political and military
    leaders. They endanger the future of the State of Israel.”

Here is the English-language section of Gush Shalom’s website.

Riverbend on the anniversary

Riverbend (from Baghdad) hasn’t been posting a lot recently on her blog. But when she writes, it is always so well and so movingly done that it’s worth waiting for.
Here’s what she was writing yesterday evening about the first anniversary of the “liberation”:

    where are we now? Well, our governmental facilities have been burned to the ground by a combination of ‘liberators’ and ‘Free Iraqi Fighters’; 50% of the working population is jobless and hungry; summer is looming close and our electrical situation is a joke; the streets are dirty and overflowing with sewage; our jails are fuller than ever with thousands of innocent people; we’ve seen more explosions, tanks, fighter planes and troops in the last year than almost a decade of war with Iran brought; our homes are being raided and our cars are stopped in the streets for inspections– journalists are being killed ‘accidentally’ and the seeds of a civil war are being sown by those who find it most useful; the hospitals overflow with patients but are short on just about everything else- medical supplies, medicine and doctors; and all the while, the oil is flowing.
    But we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that terrorism isn’t actually the act of creating terror. It isn’t the act of killing innocent people and frightening others– no, you see, that’s called a ‘liberation’. It doesn’t matter what you burn or who you kill- if you wear khaki, ride a tank or Apache or fighter plane and drop missiles and bombs, then you’re not a terrorist- you’re a liberator.
    The war on terror is a joke– Madrid was proof of that last week– Iraq is proof of that everyday.
    I hope someone feels safer, because we certainly don’t.

And while we’re on the subject of looting, I want to add in a note about my own frustration with all these reports of “so many hundreds, or thousands, of schools having been rebuilt by the US and coalition forces”.
Before the US assault on the country, just about all those schools were functioning. (Iraq is not Afghanistan, after all. Males and females have both been well educated for a couple of generations there.) A small number of the schools got damaged during the fighting of March-April last year– but the much larger number were ransacked and damaged during the looting that followed the US “victory”. Preventing any such looting was wholly the responsibility of the occupying forces: one they notably failed to exercise.
So for the US spokespeople to crow about how many schools etc they have renovated, and to make it seem like some kind of an achievement, is getting things backways on. That damage should never have been allowed in the first place. Rumsfeld should have planned properly for the post-combat phase. But he failed to. It is quite dishonest of him and his minions to claim any “credit” for having renovated a proportion of those ransacked classrooms in the months since then.
It’s like trying to claim “credit” for having (partially) stopped beating one’s wife…

Zelikow’s commission to interrogate– Zelikow!

And talking of hometown Charlottesville news, here was ambitious hometown boy Philip D. Zelikow in a front-page story in the New York Times yesterday.
Zelikow– in addition to being the Director of U.Va.’s Miller Center of Public Affairs– is also the executive director of the official government panel of enquiry into the 9/11 disaster.
But he has also become a focus of enquiry for the commission since back in Dec 2000-January 2001 he was a leading member of incoming “President” George W. Bush’s transition team.
One of the issues the panel is investigating is the question of the degree of priority (or lack of priority) that the Bush national-security team gave to the terrorism/Al-Qaeda threat in the months leading up to September 11.
Of course, the revelations in the about-to-be-published book by former counter-terrorism boss Richard A. Clarke will also provide a lot of evidence on this point. (Clarke’s tenure as White House counter-terror coordinator spanned the Clinton and GWB administrations.)
What has been revealed from Clarke’s book so far has been pretty damning to the Bush team. See, e.g., this story.
Clarke is due to testify before the 9/11 commission on Tuesday. Also expected up Tuesday or Wednesday, according to yesterday’s NYT story, will be Clinton administration luminaries like Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and Sandy Berger. The Times reports that they

    say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation– and how the new administration was slow to act.
    They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush’s national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice’s deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.

Well, well, well.
Do you think that panel member Philip Zelikow may have to recuse himself because of his close relationship with potential interrogee Philip Zelikow?
Maybe he should ask Justice Scalia for an opinion on this tricky issue…
Anyway, the week ahead promises to be an interesting one for the panel.

A very sad anniversary

Sorry I haven’t been posting much recently… I was really busy last week, and then today got hit by exhaustion.
Yesterday, I took part in our hometown commemoration of the first anniversary of the start of the US-Iraq war. It was a march along a busy part of Route 29, preceded at one end by a one-hour vigil at a busy intersection, and followed at the other by a silent vigil on “the Lawn” of Thomas Jefferson’s famous University of Virginia.
The events were organized by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice, which has a great new website.
So in the morning, I was thinking, “What kind of sign shall I carry?” I mulled over a few slogans I could write. Then I opened the WaPo, and there were two whole pages of small ID pictures of US servicemen and women who had been killed over the past two-and-a-half months, with bare biographic details.
There was my sign!
I tore out the two pages, got two large pieces of poster board and wrote at the top of each: “Mourning ALL the victims of this war, including… ” and then I taped one of the WaPo pages onto the rest of the board. It seemed to say just what I wanted it to. I looked quickly online for some “symbolic” photos of the vastly greater numbers of Iraqi war dead, but couldn’t find anything satisfactory. Anyway, I thought the wording indicated my concern for their deaths, too.
So I was standing aat the first vigil holding up one of these signs, and a woman I didn’t know came up to me, looked at it carefully, then pointed to one of the pictures and said, “That’s my brother-in-law.”
It was very moving. We talked a bit. She had come up to Charlottesville from Durham, NC, to take part in the march– a multi-hour drive. I urged her to carry the sign with her brother-in-law’s picture on it, since I had another one I could carry, anyway; and she did.
For the first vigil, and then as we walked south down Route 29, some of the placards invited passing motorists to “Honk for peace”. We got a significantly higher proportion of honks than I have ever heard before.
I think the unpopularity of this war has been increasing fairly rapidly since the beginning of this year. I consider that to be cautiously good news.
But at what a cost, what a tragic cost!
Also, I’d like to see a big increase not just in the unpopularity of this war, but also in the unpopularity of the whole idea of using force and coercion in international relations. Let’s hope that that happens, too.

Sad, isolationist harrumphing escalates…

Well, here we are again. All that nasty little current of isolationist, xenophobic hate-speech that we heard in the US in the run-up to Bush’s invasion of Iraq– remember the “Axis of Weasel”?–is now coming out again inside the country’s culture in response to the Spanish people’s anti-Aznar vote last Sunday.
And Tom Friedman is leading the charge.
I might have said Dennis Hastert, except I was talking about the national “culture”.
Tom’s piece today– the headline for which, Axis of Appeasement picks up on a concept he features prominently in the text– contrasts starkly with this other view expressed on the same page by Maureen Dowd. Maureen picked up on Hastert’s unbelievable mean-spirited diatribe against the Spanish voters for having chosen to, as he put it, “in a sense, appease terrorists.” She commented:

    The Republicans prefer to paint our old ally as craven rather than accept the Spanish people’s judgment– which most had held since before the war– that the Iraq takeover had nothing to do with the war on terror.

Later, she describes Bush as having given a “Beavis and Butthead” snigger during a short media opportunity with the visiting Dutch Prime Minister. And she writes:

    Now that he hasn’t found any weapons, Mr. Bush says the war was worth it so Iraqis could experience democracy. But when our allies engage in democracy, some Republicans mock them as lily-livered.

You have to admit, she has a point.
Meanwhile, back in Friedman-ville, that particular caped superhero writes:

    Spain is planning to do something crazy: to try to appease radical evil by pulling Spain’s troops out of Iraq– even though those troops are now supporting the first democracy-building project ever in the Arab world.

Okay, Tom, take a deep breath and repeat after me:

Continue reading “Sad, isolationist harrumphing escalates…”

New CSM column out today

Here is my latest CSM column, out today. The editors there put a good headline on it: Movement controls stunt Palestinian lives – and democracy.
I mentioned in there that I’d been part of a group that convened in late 2002 to look at the prospects for a new Palestinian election. That effort had been launched by some well-meaning folks at American University in Washington, DC, and at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies. But it got absolutely nowhere. The Israeli government never showed itself ready for a minute to allow the kind of conditions (freedom of movement and expression; general public security) that would allow an open, fair, and credible election to take place in the occupied territories.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone— maybe that great advocate of democracy now sitting in the White House?–could persuade Prime Minister Sharon that that would be the right thing to do?
Of course, Pres. Bush might have a little bit of a credibility problem of his own if he pressed someone else running a military occupation to allow free and fair elections in the occupied territories…. Especially after the pathetic attempt his own administration made last November to circumvent the approach of free and fair elections in Iraq. (Click ‘Rube Goldberg’ in the Search box here.)
But still, there is now some hope that the people of Iraq will be able to hold free and fair elections, under some kind of U.N. auspices, some time around the end of this year.
Actually, the Bush administration seems, belatedly, to have come to the recognition that such an arrangement– elections to produce (hopefully) a credible, legitimate Iraqi leadership, plus the essential ingredient of UN auspices–may be the best bet it has to be able to draw down the US’s own treacherous over-exposure inside Iraq, and to allow the US forces to be taken out in something approaching good order.
So why wouldn’t the Bushies urge their Israeli friends to do something similar in Gaza and the West Bank? Could it be that they understand that Sharon really does not want to pull Israel’s control mechanisms, and its troops and settlers, totally out of those areas? And perhaps, too, that they actually sympathize with Sharon’s preferences in that regard?
So much for democracy.