Category: HC’s travels, general

We’re in Amsterdam at nearly the end of our fabulous summer trip. It was good to start in Venice and end here. Both cities have a lot in common. Not only the reclaimed-from-the-swamps aspect of them– leaving them both laced with such a great network of canals. But also the role each city played back at the beginning of the European Ascendancy.
That was kind of why it felt appropriate for me to be writing in the CSM this week about the European / North Atlantic Ascendancy coming near its end.
On Thursday and Friday, in The Hague, I was able to conduct some really excellent interviews. These were with:

— the Chief Prosecutor of the new ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo (from Argentina),
— the Deputy President of the Int’l Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, Judge Kevin Parker (from Australia), and
— one of the judges on the Appeals Bench opf the ICC, Judge Navanethen Pillay (from South Africa.)

I found all of them to be intelligent, very sympathetic people who have evidently thought very deeply about the roles of their respective institutions within the emerging international society. All of them had (I think) previously read the article I had recently in Foreign Policy, which was quite critical of the role of their courts. So honestly, I was prepared for some of them to be a bit defensive and close-mouthed. But they weren’t at all. On the contrary. They all seemed really happy to grapple with the tough issue that I raised in that article; and they all seemed to have thought very deeply about these issues themselves, beforehand. Much more deeply, I would say, than most of the chorus of international court boosters in the western human rights movement, some of whom seem to have little idea about the gravity of very basic rights issues in soecieties reeling from war and atrocity.
So anyway, that was all good– and it provides a great basis for the visit to Uganda, which I’ll embark on tomorrow, from Schipol airport.
… Yesterday, we went to the Rijksmuseum here. I last visited it in 1995, when I came to Amsterdam (and also The Hague) on a short visit with my daughter Lorna, then aged 10, and my father, James Cobban, then aged 85. I think it was the last significant trip we made with JM before he passed away in 1999. He loved Amsterdam! I have great memories of him jumping on and off trams like a teenager, and just drinking everything in. (“What’s that funny smell?” he asked at one point as we walked past some kind of a joint joint. “H’mm, haven’t a clue,” I said, insouciantly.)
Anyway, most of the Rijksmuseum is currently closed for renovation. But what they have open is an unbelievably rich and well-presented collection of just about 200 of their greatest treasures. (It’s also the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth this year, so Amsterdam is celebrating that, too.)
In the show, they had one room on the theme of “Global Expansion”, which just perfectly showcased the contribution that the Netherlands’ global empire-building activities made to its rise as a prosperous and self-confident European power.
I just get this sense in so many places in Europe now. Especially after I read Hugh Thomas’s masterly history of the global slave trade.
Thursday afternoon,when we were still in The Hague, we went to the Mauritshuis, which has always been one of my very favorite art museums. That is, until I learned from Hugh Thomas that Prince Maurits had made the vast bulk of his fortune purely from the profits of trading in enslaved African persons… Yes, it does affect how I look at the institution– if not, necessarily, at the art within it.
I guess I just came away from those experiences in the Mauritshuis and the Rijksmuseum with this very vivid sense of how much of the European Ascendancy in world affairs had actually been funded and underpinned through imperial rapine, their maintenance of tight control over international trade flows, and the deep involvement of so many European powers in the intercontinental (and particularly transatlantic) transport and trading of millions of enslaved persons.
And meantime, there were all these brutal Dutch (and other) colonial profit-takers and slave-traders commissioning the most wonderful artists back at home in Amsterdam to produce these wonderfully delicate portrayals of the settled and serene domestic life they were able to maintain at home… Hard to all think through. I’m still feeling the dissonance rather viscerally.

I’ve just spent a week in northern Italy on a long-planned
vacation trip with Bill the spouse.  Because I’d been so busy, he
ended up doing most of the planning for it– which is just fine by me
as we enjoy doing just about the same things when we’re on
vacation.  Right now, I’m writing this while hurtling on a train
from Mantova to Milano.  I love trains, and think that living in a
place with a robust train network is a really civilized way to live.

When we’re in Milano, Bill has reservations for us to see Leonardo’s
‘Last Supper’ (recently restored, and needs advance booking.) We have
seen so much incredible late Medieval and Renaissance art in the past
week that my head is almost spinning.  We’ve been in Venice,
Padua, Verona, Vicenza, and Mantua, and in each place we’ve hiked
“religiously” from church to church to church to museum to palazzo to
duomo to church, to see and experience as many great works of art and
as many wonders of Romanesque and Renaissance architecture as we
could.  A big part of the charm of all this for me is also seeing
how human and livable the traditional European concept of urban living
still is….  To the extent that in all these cities, having a car
becomes almost a burden.  Certainly, the cities have all created
extensive pedestrian-only zones, which makes walking around them a
whole lot easier and more attractive a proposition than it wold
otherwise be.  Venice, of course, is almost entirely pedestrian-
(and boat-) only, which is the nec
plus ultra of car-free living…

While we’ve been on the trip I’ve been deliberately trying to take a
vacation from political and conflict-related news.  I
have, however, been trying to gain an appreciation of the roots of the
European Ascendancy in world affairs.  Northern Italy and the
Netherlands– which we’re going to later– are two good places to do
this.  There was a whole long period, after all, in which Venice
was the dominant power in the whole East Mediterranean and controlled
most of the trade routes between Europe and Asia.  It did that
after amassing huge naval power, which it was able to pay for from a
combination of the surplus of northern Italiy’s hefty agricultural and
early manufacturing production and creative financing– since the
northen Italians virtually created the modern kind of banking system.

Continue reading “Birthplace of the European Ascendancy”

Well, guess who I’ve been hanging out with in Gaza these past couple of days…
If you guessed Ismail Haniyeh, well yes, you could be right. (Did you see this bellicose statement from Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, warning that Haniyeh is “not immune” from being assassinated? Or this, from Olmert saying Haniyeh should fear for his life if Hamas militants resume their attacks on Israel?)
If you guessed Dr. Mahgmoud Zahhar, you could be right.
And if you guessed Leila el-Haddad, the talented author of “Raising Yousuf” and the Gaza correspondent of the Al-Jazeera English-language website, you’d be right, too.
It’s been a huge pleasure getting to know Leila a bit. She’s the same age as my son, which is fun. She’s also a plucky mom-journalist trying to juggle a zillion things. She’s a Palestinian from Gaza, got a BA from Duke University and an MA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She could be working here as a journalist along with her spouse and child except that–
Her spouse is a Palestinian originally from Haifa, who was born in the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in Lebanon just three months before the Israeli-backed Flangist forces stormed the camp in 1976. He carries the travel document that the Lebanese government gives to Palestinian residents of Lebanon. And guess what–
The Palestinians don’t have the right to control who comes in and out of Gaza. Even after the withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from the Strip: Israel still gets to detrmine that. So Leila’s Palestinian husband is among that majority of Palestinians who are actually forbidden from coming to Gaza. He can’t even come under “family reunification.”
So anyway, she’s working here. He’s actually doing a medical residency in the States. They have a long-distance commuter marriage. Luckily she has a great set of parents who have recently retired– both of them were phsyicians– and she and her two-year-old, Yousuf, live with them.
What I love about her blog is her sense of connectedness to the society here.

Yesterday morning I wrote a long piece for Salon– putting in a lot more of my Dore Gold material along with the Dr. Mahmoud Ramahi material and a bunch of background stuff. I didn’t have time for lunch as I had to get out my hotel room there in East Jerusalem; anyway I was writing up a storm. Once I was done I got a cab across a Jerusalem swathed in a real storm, a dust-storm of fine yellow-grey dust, over to the massive new Central Bus Station and came down here to Tel Aviv..
I have to say Israel’s system of inter-city and intra-city buses is a real national asset: frequent, comfortable buses, well driven, with the schedules and routes all well posted; a good system for prepayment; busy, apparently safe terminals in the major cities, and designated bus lanes in most city centers to speed the buses along… On nearly every score it makes the national transit “system” in the US look totally pathetic.
… About 50 minutes after leaving Jeruslaem the bus rolled into the sixth level of the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station… I hauled my bag down two floors and got a #4 bus which brought me to the door of my hotel here near the ocean.
Then I got a call from my handler at the Government Press Office, telling me my application for a foreign press card had been turned down. Turned down! He claimed that the Boston Review, which had been sponsoring the application, “didn’t meet the guidelines” for their department because it comes out only bimonthly and therefore doesn’t count as “news” media.
He sounded really nervous throughout the whole conversation…
So then I sent an email to my editor at the CSM. She got on the case and I think it’s being handled… Keep your fingers crossed.
… This morning I had meetings with two really nice, really smart Israeli guys whom I’ve known for many years. Each meeting was set up in a cafe in a different shopping mall in a different part of North Tel Aviv. Driving out to these meetings– especiaslly the first one–was unbelievable! Mile upon mile upon mile of enormous, extremely lavish-looking apartment buildings and cranes hanging over the horizon at every aspect building yet more of the same.
Who on earth can afford to live in all these super-luxury apartments? What companies have the capital to invest in such mammoth-sized projects? This country has become so unbelievably wealthy since Yasser Arafat’s conclusion of the Oslo Accords with them in 1993 opened the door to much wider trade and investment relations with Europe and (especially) the “tiger” economies of East Asia! But for the poor old Palestinians themselves, meanwhile, Oslo brought almost nothing but further land-exprorpriations, further represssion, the deliberate fragmentation by the Israelis of much of the West Bank, continued economic dependence, insult, injury, and and penury…

Continue reading “Tel Aviv etc.”

I am still waiting for my Israeli press card to come through! This is a pain, as I can’t get to Gaza without it. But tomorrow I’m going down to Tel Aviv to talk to some folks there.
Shoot, I also have lots of great material for a great post about “Sunday morning in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.” But I only have time for the very short version here: Big disappointment. No transcendental music. No services at all in any of the church’s heavily contested nooks, crannies, or broader open spaces– even though I was there for a good part of the morning. Only the old game of fleece-the-tourist continued apace. Though several of the church’s soaring domes and cleverly contrived stone staircases could be described as beautiful, still, to my plain Quaker sense of esthetics the odor of idolatry far outweighed the faint whiff of sanctity. As I said: big disappointment.
(Once, I went there and there were some Armenian monks chanting on a hidden high mezzanine. That was lovely. None today.)

Guess who.

The blogosphere is a pretty amazing place. I’ve been at the annual (or actually not-quite-annual) conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, here in Geneva. The IISS is a venerable organization, headquartered in London, that is not nearly as “international” as it sounds– it’s overwhelmingly made up of people who are white and male…
Anyway, I was going to write up some of my notes from today’s sessions. The first plenary had former US Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter and the former conservative Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt. I wanted to check up on Bildt’s resume. So I Googled him. And wouldn’t you know he’s been writing his own blog since February!
It looks as though there’s some pretty interesting stuff there. It’s interesting to find someone who’s such a high-level mover and shaker as Bildt writing a blog. You can find there this comment about Paul Volcker’s recent report into the UN Oil-for-food scandal:

You can not avoid the conclusion that what the massive Volcker Report investigation has found does not amount to much. In one case, Mr Savan clearly violated UN ethics rule, bu whether anything illegal was done remains to be clarified.
It is worth nothing, [I think he means ‘noting’?] that the Volcker Report fails to mention the very large amount of Oil-for-Food money that was transferred to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and for which there has been no accounting whatsover.

Then, if you go over to Bildt’s website, you can find a photo of him looking fairly dapper and also a link to the text of the address he gave here in Geneva this morning…
So I didn’t actually have to take notes during his speech at all!
He spoke of,

rather a substantial and undoubtedly worrying decline in both the hard powers of the United States and the soft powers of the European Union.
American military power is seriously bogged down in the marshes, back alleys and deserts of Mesopotamia. And it is likely to remain so for some considerable time to come. No one will say it openly, but everyone knows that the world