Author: Helena

April 2004: two big African decennials

For millions of people in southern and central Africa, April 1994 was a very momentous month; and the ten-year anniversary of it is coming up.
In Rwanda, at the beginning of the month, President Habyarimana’s plane was brought down, setting into train the long-planned, long-prepared horrors of the country’s anti-Tutsi genocide. During the thirteen weeks that followed, some 14% of the country’s entire population was wiped out: around 800,000-1,000,000 people killed. Eighty percent of the dead were Tutsis, the rest, Hutus who tried to shield them or otherwise to resist the hate-fueled bloodlust of the killers.
In South Africa, meanwhile, April 1994 was a month of hopes laced with great trepidation and tension as the country made the last preparations for its first-ever democratic election, scheduled for the end of the month. Everyone was wondering: Would the Inkatha Freedom Party participate, or would it try to make the country ungovernable and thereby force the postponement or cancellation of the election? And then, there was the threat of disruption from the White extremists, who also had good connections in the country’s security forces….
In South Africa, the negotiations over the terms on which the security forces would continue to provide security for the elections continued until the second or third day of the elections themselves… It came that close to not working out… In the end, the ANC and its allies had to commit to providing some form of amnesty for perpetrators of apartheid-era atrocities, in return for having the elections conducted under conditions of general (though not total) public security.

    A footnote: something similar may well also have to be negotiated with the US occupation forces in Iraq.

But back to my main story here…

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Salam/Pax survived

Salam/Pax, the cosmos’s most famous Iraqi blogger, survived the Karbala bombing, and also has written beautifully (though oh too briefly) about the whole experience of having been there for Ashoura.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Riverbend wrote a lovely and to me very heartening short post about the after-effects of the Ashoura bombings…
I meant to get the ref to her post up here earlier. Sorry about that. I seem to recall that both she and Salam have written in the past that they have “mixed”, Sunni-Shiite heritages. Maybe I’m wrong about her.
What burns me up is that in the midst of all that emotional period– Ashoura, the bombings, their aftermath, Sunnis and Shi-ites trying to figure out how to get back together again, etc– Paul Bremer was out there pursuing his inherently divisive agenda of trying to get everyone to sign off on his pointless little interim constitution.
Has he no cultural or emotional sensitivity? (Silly question.)

Why I was not sitting on the edge of my chair…

“Hot” news out of Baghdad today about the failure of the Iraqi Governing Council to sign what, it turns out, was to have been called the Transitional Administrative Law… Poignant pictures of the table all ready for the cermony with the 25 pens lined up down each side of it… The children’s choir members eagerly awaiting their turn on the stage.
I’d like to quote Macbeth:

    … it is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.

See this post from last Saturday (Feb. 28th), in which I argued that the attempt to ram through this law right now was “illegal… pointless and diversionary… and divisive.”
So let’s hope they quit banging their collective heads against that particular brick wall once and for all. Let’s hope they turn instead to the playbook so beautifully sketched out in the report that Lakhdar Brahimi presented to Kofi Annan last week.
The focus there is on how credible, legitimate elections can be organized in a country in a situation as complex as Iraq’s, in order to start to generate a credible, elected national leadership there.
That national leadership will then, at some point down the pike, deliberate on the issue of the Constitution. And on the Status of Forces Agreement (if any) with the US. And on federalism, and the role of women, and everything else.
Who gets to run the country in the meantime?

Continue reading “Why I was not sitting on the edge of my chair…”

Sam, meet Dora

Samuel Huntington, Mr. “Clash of Civilizations”, has his knickers in a twist once again. This time, it’s over the alleged “threat” that Hispanic immigrants pose to “America’s identity, value, and way of life.”
Writing the lead piece in the latest issue of Foreign Policy mag, Huntington twitters on about the fact that this wave of Hispanic immigration is unlike any other earlier waves of immigration in that it threatens to swamp the existing culture of the country. (H’mm, wonder if the native Americans feel this is so unprecedented?)
“The use of both languages [English and Spanish] could become acceptable in congressional hearings and debates and in the general conduct of government business,” he harrumphs.
He writes of the possible or probable transformation of the U.S. into a bilingual country that it, “would not only revolutionize the United States, but it would also have serious consequences for Hispanics, who will be in the United States but not of it.”
Whatever that means.
One of the few endearing things about this article is the great title that the FP team –led by Hispanic editor and publisher Moisés Naím–have put on it: “José, can you see?”
Anyway, let’s hope that Sam H either has a pre-school grandchild, or reads the Washington Post Style section as assiduously as I do. Because right there, in the lead article, is a great antidote to such fear-mongering. It’s a piece by Jennifer Frey about the enormous appeal to the pre-school and elementary-age crowd of a feisty young bilingual TV heroine called “Dora the Explorer”.
Well, I could fall for the name, for starters.
The piece is about the general Dora phenom, and it’s also about the palpable excitement at a live “Dora” show given in DC’s Warner Theater. (The “original”, Nickelodeon version of Dora is a cartoon character.) Here’s what Frey writes:

    It’s Wednesday night at the Warner Theatre, the clock hovering around the normal bedtime hour for this preschool-and-up set, and the kids are on their feet. Screaming. “Vamos a la casa! Vamos a la casa!” From the balcony, it looks like a commercial for cultural diversity — or perhaps just an ad for Benetton Kids — the crowd so multiethnic that it seems possible to map your way through the hemispheres, excited face by excited face…

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U.S. foreign policy: time for a clear alternative

Iraq, Haiti, Israel-Palestine, the world… Everywhere, the failure of the Bush team’s foreign-policy approach is quite evident.
Now, the Democratic Party has a candidate. But it is not enough for John Kerry simply to criticize Bush’s foreign-policy approach. Strikes me that to be fully persuasive Kerry also needs to get out there and promulgate a clear alternative to the Bushies’ approach.
For example:
Where the Bushies advocate untrammeled U.S. unilateralism, Kerry should advocate a thoughtful attempt not just to re-engage seriously with international institutions, but beyond that, a commitment to making those institutions inclusive and accountable to the peoples of the world– and to making them effective in resolving the problems of the world.
Where the Bushies advocate military solutions to almost every problem overseas–including those that evidently require a completely different set of tools– Kerry should advocate a robust commitment not just to pursuing non-military means to address the world’s problems, but also to building up the U.S.’s and the world’s “arsenal” of such non-military means.
A change in mindset like this would have many implications at the level of concrete policies. (We can discuss that more, later.) But what I am afraid of is that, instead of getting out there and proposing a bold and clear alternative to the Bushies’ approach, Kerry might end up just suggesting nips and tucks around the edges of the existing policies. That would, I feel, concede far too much validity to the arrogant, U.S.-uber-alles worldview that the Bushies seem to take as a given.
Yes, the U.S. is fine country, with many millions of fine people and some fine institutions and ideals. But no, imho, it is not the single pinnacle of human achievement at this point in human history. It has imperfections. On a number of important scores, other countries do a lot better. We can learn from them. We in the U.S. can gain a lot through being willing to engage in active and respectful cooperation with people from other countries, people from other cultures…

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Kerbala, Kazimiya, memories of Lebanon

I am just saddened beyond words by today’s bombings in Kerbala and Kazimiya (Baghdad).
There is something particularly sickening about people launching such horrific attacks at times of particular religious/community significance. I recall the recent dual attacks against the Iraqi Kurdish leaders during their celebration of Nowruz– and also, a couple of years ago, in Israel, the suicide bombing against the families celebrating Pesach in the Park Hotel in Netanya.
Enough! Enough!
Regarding the Nowruz bombings and the latest attacks, one can only up to this point speculate whether the same person/organization is beyond both sets of incidents, and if so who that might be. I seem to recall the Kurds had found a suspect?
This is all so eerily reminiscent for me of the early days of the Lebanese civil war in April, May, and June of 1975, which I lived through from day to day. None of us knew what was coming next.
In those days, the “tinder” for conflagration was everywhere present in terms of old resentments, etc, etc. Plus there was no effective state apparatus that could guarantee public security. (Many Lebanese people have always had a strong anti-government cast to their thinking, and the state there had been kept weak and impotent by design.) But there were definitely foreign hands stirring things up, as well. Certainly the Israelis were active, building up their ties with some of the Maronite extremists who wanted to eradicate the Palestinians’ political/military presence in Lebanon. But the Palestinians themselves, the Syrians, Iraqis, Saudis, and all other regional and world powers were also all eager to pursue their own ends inside Lebanon at that time….
That’s what happens when you don’t have a functioning state: everyone else from the neighborhood and from far beyond piles in and treats the country and its existing divisions like a football field on which they can kick around their own private grudges over the corpses of the country’s people.
So I weep for the Shi-ites, I weep for the Kurds, I weep for all Iraqis. My special hope/prayer for them all is that they can find some way, with or without the help of outside parties, to (re-)build a decent and working national compact among themselves that will provide a strong foundation for the working Iraqi state which is the only institution that, at the end of the day, can provide the continuing atmosphere of public security that all of the world’s peoples need.

Talking with an Islamist

Here’s a little fragment from my recent trip to Israel/Palestine that I wanted to share.
I was sitting with a colleague at Bir Zeit University who’d been telling me about the Islamic List having recently swept to (yet another) victory in the Student Council elections. I enquired if I could have a quick talk with one of these student leaders; and soon thereafter a very interesting young man came by.
In the course of the conversation, he expressed support for the continuation of the “martyrdom operations” (amaliyat istishhadiya), also known in the west as suicide bombings, that Hamas and Islamic Jihad resumed after the failure of last summer’s hudna (truce).
I put to him something an Israeli friend told me once, namely that when there are bombing attacks against Israeli soldiers, the general effect is to turn the Israeli public against the policies of their government, “since soldiers are seen as carrying out the policies of the government; but they are also our own sons”; whereas when there are bombing attacks against Israeli civilians, the general effect is to cause Israeli society to rally more strongly around the policies of the government…

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Bremer’s constitutional follies

The 24-member group of (mostly) blunderers who were appointed by the occupying forces to be the “Iraqi Governing Council” have been engaging in just-about-impossible contortions and ructions in their attempt to pull together an Interim Basic Law–that is, a sort of transitional constitution for their country–before the end-of-Feb deadline announced by Ayatollah Paul Bremer in November.
This effort has three major problems:

    1. It’s illegal.
    2. It’s quite pointless and diversionary.
    3. It’s unnecessarily divisive in a country that, God knows, has enough other internal divisions to deal with, too.

Need me to run thru the arguments quickly here?
Illegal? This is under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, which are quite clear on the fact that an occupying power cannot change the basic structure of governance in the territories it occupies. The IGC holds its “mandate” (such as it is) only from the occupying power. Certainly not from the people of Iraq. From that point of view, you could view it as exercising the same kind of mandate as, say, the Judenraat Councils appointed by the Nazis to run the Jewish ghettoes…

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Gender and whistleblowing: Karen K

Marine’s Girl was eager to remind us that, regarding women and whistleblowing, Karen Kwiatkowski’s name definitely needs to be near the head of the list.
I agree!
Here is a good archive of KK’s recent writings. If you haven’t read anything by or about Karen, this is a good place to start. This is a great interview with her, too.
Karen was a USAF liutenant-colonel, working on intel analysis for the Middle East in what she now calls “the five-sided asylum” before sheer disgust at the way her civilian bosses were wilfully perverting the craft of intel analysis that she quit.
So yes, she definitely belongs in JWN’s emerging “Female Whistleblower Hall of Fame.”
Any other nominations?