Category: Global affairs

Great news from President Bush, who has decided to increase tenfold, to $350 million, the amount of aid his administration will be giving to survivors of the Indian ocean tsunami.
We probably shouldn’t let up in our efforts to persuade the Prez to re-order his priorities towards global neighborliness and away from the waging of war (principally); but away the staging of extravagant parties, as well.
But still, it’s important to recognize that the guy has now made a dramatic change in his approach. Thank you, President Bush.
So, what other welcome changes of heart and of policy might we expect in the year ahead? Here are some of my dreams:

** That the Palestinian elections of January 9 go off well, and that inside both the Israeli and Palestinian communities the desire for a realistic but generous peace starts to mount, unstoppably.
I’ve been writing a bit recently about the incredible peace movement that existed in Israel in the early 1980s, and then about the Israeli “Four Mothers” peace movement that persuaded the Israeli government to pull its military clear out of Lebanon in May 2000. Where are these Israeli peace movements today? The concessions and momentum can’t all come from the Palestinian side.
Let’s hope we see a joyful re-emergence of the pro-peace forces from both sides of the line in the months ahead. But realistically, the Israeli peaceniks are much better placed to turn the tide of history and decisionmaking these days than their Palestinian counterparts. History surely calls on them to do so.
** That the Iraqi elections of January 30 go off “sufficiently” peaceably, and “sufficiently” fairly— with the criteria for fairness there being principally that the Sistanist (UIA) list be declared the winner, rather than Allawi’s list– and then, that the results are not subject to endless, divisive contestation…

Continue reading “New year, new possibilities”

The Red Cross is now saying that more than 100,000 of our fellow humans may have died already in the Indian Ocean tsunami. In the days ahead many more scores– perhaps hundreds– of thousands may die unless vital water-purification, medical, and other urgent relief supplies can reach them.
In the months and years ahead entire communities along those damaged coastlines may be wiped out unless solid, long-term reconstruction efforts can be organized.
President Bush has thus far pledged just $35 million of US funds to help meet these needs.
That compares with the more than $250 million per day that his administration is spending on waging a destructive quagmire of a war in Iraq.
Or, with the $30 million to $40 million that AP estimates his January 19 inauguration party will cost.
We could start creating our own little “tsunami” of protest at these outrageous priorities. My friend Jean Newsom– whose spouse, David, was formerly the US Ambassador to Indonesia– suggests that Bush’s inaugural festivities could be canceled and the sums saved sent immediately to help the relief effort.
I invite you to join me in calling the White House– +1-202-456-1414– and voicing this excellent suggestion to the comment-takers there. While you’re about it you might also urge the President to call for a humanitarian ceasefire in all the conflicts in Asia— and yes, that includes Iraq– so the world community can focus on the massive logistical, relief, and rebuilding challenges around the Indian Ocean.
If you’re a US citizen, you can also urge these policies on your representives in the U.S. Congress. If you don’t know how to contact them, go to this webpage, punch in your zipcode, and get all the info there.
If you want to make a useful donation to the relief effort– from the US or anywhere else– or want more info about it, go to this great site, which has truly multinational info, available in a number of languages…

Continue reading “Relief, not parties!”

Such terrifying pictures and information coming out regarding yesterday’s Indian Ocean tsunami. They remind me of the urgency of us all starting to think and act like a single world community. The BBC has been reporting– so far– some 23,000 people known to have been killed. But the numbers are certainly rising.
So many people killed; their families bereaved. So many more badly injured. So many more again left homeless or otherwise vulnerable to the rapid spread of disease. So many hundreds of thousands of families’ and communities’ lives ruptured forever.
Human beings have incredible resilience. But if we were all, truly, a single human family, wouldn’t the leaders of the rich countries all now set aside their pursuit of marginal advantage here or there and say, “Yes! This where we can all pull together to make a difference!”
Instead of which, the Bush administration has announced it will contribute just $15 million worth of aid to the relief effort. A tragically small amount. And this, just a week after it marked the approach of Christmas by saying it would anyway be cutting back on huge amounts of emergency aid previously earmarked for the world’s poorest nations…
All this, while it continues to spend more than $250 million each day on waging the war in Iraq.
It’s obscene.
Why can’t the world’s leaders call an Asia-wide ceasefire– a ceasefire of all the conflicts now going on in the Asia-Pacific region, including those in Iraq, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere? Let’s call in the UN to regulate and resolve all those conflicts; and concentrate meanwhile on delivering all the longterm development aid that the storm-hit communities will need over the next five years.
I think that’s what a true “family” would do, don’t you?

Continue reading “Tragedy in Asia”

I’ve thought for a while–and I don’t think I’ve blogged about this before, though I may be wrong there–that you can look at South Africa as a microcosm of the whole world. Specifically, you can look at the behavior of the US of A with respect to the rest of the world like the behavior of the Whites in apartheid-era South Africa with regard to the rest of their (non-White) compatriots.
You can see how it goes: the hegemonic group, despite its definitely minority status, thinks not only (a) that it can ‘speak for’ and control the majority, but also that (b) there are good reasons why this should be so: reasons based in the realm of ethics, ‘Manifest Destiny’, superior values, ‘Christian civilization’, or whatever; and no, sheer naked force is just incidental to the whole equation.
Except that of course it’s not. Force, and the ability to control and intimidate (another word for ‘terrorize’) the majority lie at the heart of any attempt by a minority to exercize control.

Continue reading “South Africa, the microcosm”

I’ve been at this conference on atrocious violence (“Why neighbors kill”) at the University of Western Ontario. I came mainly because the subject –which is fairly heavily focused on genocide and crimes against humanity–is very compelling to me. And also, because two of the other invited guests, the clinical psycvhologist Erwin Staub from UMass, Amherst, and the Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf are both definitely worth listening to.
And they certainly did not disappoint. (I hope I can write more about what they said, later.)
I was invited to the conference by Richard Vernon of UWO’s Center on Nationalism and Ethnic Relations. But I hadn’t realized that it was being co-sponsored by the Dept. of Psychology here– a fact that led to half or more of the presentations being given by various social psychologists, all of them I think from North America or the U.K.
Fair enough. I learned a lot about the way these social psychologists view and explain the world. They have some interesting insights into the motivations and behaviors of the people they study– a large proportion of whom, it turns out, are their own students. They do also conduct some ‘field’ studies. But these are overwhelmingly conducted within their own societies. I think the only ‘data’ presented in the mind-numbing succession of Power Point displays to which we were subjected that came from societies in which there have, actually, in recent history been widespread atrocities were one each from Northern Ireland and former-Yugoslavia.
(I’m leaving to one side, for now, the atrocities committed in the US detention facilities around the world, though they are not totally unrelated to the topic at hand.)
One of the phenomena that these psychologists plumbed in some depth is the tendency some humans have to “other” people from other social groups, and the way that “othering” can lead to stereotyping, prejudice, hate, etc…
I must confess, though, that I heard a certain–probably quite unintentional–amount of “othering” going on in some of the meta-discussions of the conference: namely, “othering” all those poor benighted people from war-torn and generally low-income countries who are unfortunate enough or misguided enough to get themselves into atrocity-enacting situations.

Continue reading “Western ethno-psychology confronts atrocities”

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”

JWN reader Maria, from Madrid, has posted a very moving Comment on last night’s post.
Please, everyone read it.
Dear Maria, thanks for connecting with us and describing that wonderful interpersonal solidarity as you did, on what must have been such a terrible day for you.
… It is not only Spanish people who feel they were all on that train. I feel I was, too.
I have only been in Madrid once. I’m almost certain I rode the trains there. It was March 1993. I had been in Cuenca helping to organize the first-ever meeting between human-rights activists from Israel, Arab countries, Palestine, and Turkey. The meeting was very, very moving. (Cuenca had been a center for the Spanish Inquisition, a fact that kind of helped bring all our participants together.)
Afterwards, I had a day or two to unwind in Madrid. I went of course to see Picasso’s Guerníca. I stood in front of it crying. Tears literally poured down my chest.
My friend Sylvia Escobar, who’d helped to organize the meeting, had told us how Picasso had said he’d allow the painting to return to Spain only after Spain became democratic– and how its return in 1981 had given so many Spanish people the confirmation that this was really at last happening…
It took 44 years for Picasso’s hopeful dream to be fulfilled. But it happened.
Maria, we are all with you, your family, and your community.

How ghastly, how world-shattering for Madrilenos today’s multiple bomb attacks were.
It is still quite unclear if these were Basque radicals, or Islamist extermists, or some new coalition between those forces.
What struck me on the BBC TV news tonight, after all the grisly footage and anguished interviewees in Madrid, were scenes of a massive silent gathering of people in downtown Bilbao. They looked so thoughtful, so sad. In their just silent getting-together, they seemed clearly to be repudiating those in their midst who might have (as I assume they judged) committed those outrages.
If it was indeed Basques who did it, and if that repudiation in Basque-land was really so widespread, then surely some Basque people will start to give some tips or leads to the police.

This is all part of my theory of fighting terrorism by changing the minds of those who condone terrorism. But I don’t want to jump on any “bandwagon” of the horrific events of today in order to propound a theory. I truly want to let the horror and the sadness just stand, and be silent. Being silent together on occasion is something we Quakers find very powerful.

Happy International Women’s Day to all my women and men readers!
This is truly a good day to think about the position of women in society– in all societies, and in the world.
I’m reading the UN’s Human Development Report for 2001, the most recent issue that I have to hand. On “Gender Empowerment Issues” the US is ranked 10th, behind–in rank order–Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Canada, New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany, and Australia. Personally, I find that being behind Australia, with what I think of as its macho culture, and Germany, with its echoes of Kinder, Küche, Kirche, fairly shocking. (UK = #16.)
But more to the point, I urge all of you to head on over to Yvette Lopez’s great blog, “A Taste of Africa”, and read this March 7th post. In it, Yvette, a Filipina community organizer who’s doing some skill-sharing in Somaliland with Somali counterparts, describes some of the planning for International Women’s Day that she got involved in with a women’s group in Gabiley District.
Ya know, I’ve always enjoyed reading Yvette’s blog, and I have a link to it up on my Main page here on JWN. But today, reading that post, I thought, Wow, Yvette is not only an extraordinary, spunky, and inspiring individual– she also has a real talent as an engaging and vivid writer in English.
(Yvette, how many languages do you speak?)
So head on over there, and leave her and her Somali friends a Comment! I’m going to.

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…

Continue reading “U.S. foreign policy: time for a clear alternative”