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I hadn’t seen this elsewhere yet. IWPR’s very well connected Kamran Karadaghi is reporting that:

Ibrahim Al-Ja

I’ve had two different pieces about Lebanon and “what does it all mean?” come out in recent days.
I wrote this one, Decoding Lebanon, for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the organization that lobbies in Washington around the concerns of US Quakers (and our friends in the peace-and-justice movement.)
This one, Lebanon’s fine example– so far, is in today’s Christian Science Monitor.
The FCNL piece is longer. It is more tightly focused on Lebanon than the CSM one, and gives much more detail about the nature of Hizbullah, Lebanon’s quirky electoral system, etc. I think a person might handily download it and print it to share with friends in your congregation or other community group who are slightly intrigued by what’s been going on in Lebanon but don’t know much at all about the country.
Tell me what you think.
(I’m doing another one for FCNL on broader issues of democratization in the Middle East.)

Read Marine’s Girl again, especially if you haven’t read this post, that she put up at 11 a.m. Tuesday. It’s a follow-on ICQ with her guy, from the one I linked to Monday.
Yesterday I was in Washington DC for the day. I have such strongly negative feelings about the policies that come out of that place, and their effects on ordinary people inside and (especially) outside the USA, that I almost have to force myself to go back there.
It turned out okay yesterday, because I was with some really, really nice people, doing wonderful things. Both in the afternoon, when I was discussing some possible professional projects, and in the evening when some dear friends from the 15 years I lived there hosted a small dinner for Bill and me.
I drove back home late last night. This morning I discovered a really nasty spam attack on the Comments boards here– lots of really vile porn, all over many recent Comments boards. So this a.m. I had to spend more than an hour deleting all those comments.
It makes me wonder even more what the point of this blog is. I suppose increased clarity on this will come, sometime.
Anyway, I can tell you that MG’s blog is truly a gift to the world. Lew, commenting here on the MG post I linked to on Monday, wrote, “I don’t think it’s real”.
Lew, I think MG is as “real” as it gets. I’ve been reading her wonderful reflections on life, and her ICQ’s with her guy, since ways before some really officious Marines Gunnery Sargeant harrassed her (on alleged “national security” grounds) into taking her whole blog down, back in November 2003. What was interesting then was that some higher ups in the Marines JAG division, or some other place relatively powerful like that within the Marines Corps, explicitly supported her right to continue doing just what she had been doing in the blogosphere. And so she has.
So please, all of you, if you have time, go on over to her blog and read the latest. (Why not leave her a nice comforting message there too, seeing as she’s fighting her own battles with cancer??)
If you really don’t have time to do that, at least be aware of this very important portion of her most recent ICQ record:

Continue reading “Read MG again”

I can’t pretend to have gathered anything like a satisfactory picture of
the forces at work in today’s Iran from a visit that lasted only 60 hours
and was anyway not designed primarily to be any kind of a “journalistic” enquiry.
Still, I’m really glad I got the chance to go there. I had some
intriguing glimpses into a few small slivers of the country’s life; and I
met some really interesting people. If (or rather, when) I go
back there, I’ll try to prepare for the trip more systematically, and it
won’t be so much like jumping in at the deep end. This little trip
I’ve just had feels more like an appetite-whetter.

From my one previous trip to Teheran, to do a “quickie” piece on the story
of mounting unrest there, for the London Sunday Times back in 1977,
I remember mainly the monochrome, yellowy-gray coloration of the city; the
complexity of the political story there; and the difficulty of covering it.
I didn’t leave the capital. I forget who exactly I talked to that time–
it was the “usual suspects”: some government people, some local journalists,
some professors, some diplomats… I certainly didn’t feel I had anything
like the same kind of the story there that I had, at that time, in Beirut
or Cairo, or even Amman.

This time, the city was exactly the same color as it was 27 years ago. The Alborz Mountains that ring the north side of it were capped with snow, but their view was obscured by a miasma of yellow-ish pollution, just as I remembered.

Most of the city slopes down from the north to the south, and beside the strees there are open water-runways down which gurgled plentiful runoff from the snow.

We
spent a lot of time driving around the city, or more accurately sitting in the
traffic jams that plague it today, just as they did in 1977. It seems
that nowadays it has a metro, though we didn’t ride on it. (I gather
it has sex-segregated cars.) There also seemed to be an extensive municipal
bus system; and in all the buses that I saw, women had to ride at the back.
Lots of things are sex-segregated in Iran that wouldn’t be in most western
countries: for example, there were completely separate security-check lines
for men and women at the airport.

I’m writing this on the flight back to the US, having had a plane-change
in De Gaulle airport in Paris. As I got onto this plane, I was picked
out of the line filing through the jetway and subjected to a very thorough
and very intimate pat-down– by a woman- but right there in the jetway with
everyone walking right past. It felt a little humiliating, yes.

On the other hand, in Iran, I also saw men and women working alongside
each other in a number of different service occupations. There were
women and men immigration officers staffing the desks in the airport. (The
female officers wore loose black chadors over baggy dark-green uniforms.)
Women and men were working together behind the counter in the “fast-food”
restaurant we went to Thursday. At a more formal restaurant we went
to in Teheran Tuesday, there was a female “host”, and women were running
the cash registers, though all the waiters were male…

Continue reading “Notes on Iran”

So! We’re off early tomorrow. We got our visas yesterday, and our tickets today. We have tickets to Teheran for tomorrow and shall then somehow find a flight to Mashhad where our conference (“Islam and Democracy”) starts on Wednesday morning. The whole trip will be incredibly rushed– we might have to leave Mashhad on Thurs. evening to catch our flight back here, Friday… Oh well, it should be interesting.
I haven’t been to Iran since the 1978-79 revolution. A whole generation has grown up there since then…
Btw, I was just surfing the BBC website. They have a new, experimental, “hosted” blog-type thing there, with contributors from Iraq. It went up on their site today and will run in the first instance for two weeks.
So far, the contributors (all of whom have been invited to contribute by the Beeb, I think) include five Iraqis, one British contractor and one US army lieutenant.
It struck me as a little stilted. Certainly it lacks the intimacy, verve, and passion of Faiza’s blog, and those run by her sons, etc. The US army guy, Bryan Suites, comes across as incredibly Chief Wiggles-y, and the British contractor tells us only that he works, “for an international company in the International or Green Zone in Baghdad.” So what is his business, exaactly? The Iraqi contributors all tell us what they do. Even Suites does. But not “Stuart Ritchie”. Whoever he is.
A quick glance at what’s up there so far revealed a few interesting descriptions of things. But I think I’ll stick with the real blogs by Iraqis that I’ve been reading up till now.
Zeyad, over at Healing Iraq, had an interesting post up on November 20. (Actually, it’s the most recent one he has up there, as of now.) He was describing, in very vivid and factual terms, how the rash of attacks that plagued Baghdad around then felt to him and his family.
At the end, he noted:

One can’t help but notice that the clerics who usually incite holy wars in Iraq against the US occupation on the expense of Iraqis are based in countries allied to the US such as Qatar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. On the other hand, you have Sheikh Salah Al-Din Kuftaro, son of Sheikh Ahmed Kuftaro, the late Grand Mufti of Syria, publicly denouncing the behaviour of Iraqi insurgents yesterday during Friday prayers at the Kuftaro mosque in Damascus. He described them as the “present day Kharijites” and their actions as “unislamic”.

That’s a really interesting observation.
Kuftaro was the Sheikh we went to visit in Damascus last week, as described in the second half of this JWN post.

I’m a bit behind the curve here– but I found this interesting story about photog Kevin Sites in yesterday’s NYT. It quoted Sites as saying that:

he had received hate mail and threats since the broadcast, in edited form, on the initial NBC News report. A comment section on a Web site he maintains has been shut down because of death threats.

Death threats?? Because of what? Because he was doing his job?
I certainly hope all the law enforcement agencies in the US and elsewhere are conducting extensive investigations into who made those terroristic threats, and that those people will be dealt with with all the power of the law.

Update: They could start by checking out the authors of some of the comments posted here.

Robert F. Worth, the author of the NYT piece, adds: “Mr. Sites has maintained a low profile since emerging from the fighting in Falluja, avoiding the area where other reporters on the base are billeted.” I wonder what kind of solidarity–or possibly its opposite?– they have been offering him?
Kevin does have his own blog. He’s a freelancer, working on contract for NBC. The footage from the mosque was, of course, produced as part of a “pool report”, which meant that access to all of it had to be equal to all pool members.
His blog has written posts and photos. On Nov. 10th, he was already in (or near) Fallujah. He wrote ,

The Marines are operating with liberal rules of engagement.
“Everything to the west is weapons free,” radios Staff Sgt. Sam Mortimer of Seattle, Washington. Weapons Free means the marines can shoot whatever they see — it’s all considered hostile.

He also wrote:

Continue reading “More on Kevin Sites”

I wrote here Sunday about my concerns that the US-dominated order in Afghanistan might essentially steal the Afghan elections on Karzai’s behalf… Also, that many outsiders now working in Afghanistan might be,

so deeply invested in the success of these elections … that they are prepared to overlook what in other circumstances they might clearly recognize as fatal flaws in the system.

Last night the BBC had this interesting story on their website:

Afghanistan’s leading human rights body has criticised the United Nations for the way it has set up its investigation panel into irregularities during the recent presidential election, saying it is not independent…
[T]he UN has decided not to appoint any Afghans to the panel.
That decision raises “a number of concerns” about its independence, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).

The author of the piece, the Beeb’s Andrew North reporting from Kabul, added that,

The senior spokesman of the AIHRC, Nader Naderi, argues that many of the problems with the election are being blamed on “international staff and organisations”, not on Afghans.
Yet it is all foreign nationals who will be on the panel.
“We recommended an Afghan expert from our commission to build confidence in this process,” says Mr Naderi, a position also supported by European Union officials in Kabul.
But he says this was rejected.

I noted in that earlier JWN post that,

Continue reading “Afghan elections, part 2”

In keeping with my “Helena eases herself back into Beirut gradually” approach
to my current existence I’ve been… okay, easing myself back into things
here pretty gradually. That has involved calling a few folks here– but slowly;
reading the Daily Star-IHT combo that’s sold here daily; lying around
reading a bunch of things not about Beirut; buying and trying
to read substantial parts of Al-Hayat every day (we had to buy an entirely
new Hans Wehr dictionary, since we left both of our existing copies of it
at home, by mistake); running every other day as usual; but most of all,
walking, walking, walking round the city trying to relearn it through the
soles of my feet and all my other senses.

Of course the big story here is the status of Lebanese-Syrian relations,
especially in view of the Security Council’s recent resolution (1559) that
called for a speedy Syrian withdrawal from the country, and the allied strong
push by the Syrians to get the parliament here to prolong the term of President
Emile Lahoud for a further three years after it expires in, I believe, late
November.

Poor old Lebanon, eh? Always the football for one or the other (or
both) of its two, much more powerful neighbors’ realpolitik. In
the current circumstances, Syria is still evidently majorly spooked by having
the US army poised along its 450-mile eastern border (the one with Iraq),
while it still has the IDF perched on the slopes of Jebel al-Sheikh (Mount
Hermon), overlooking Damascus itself. So the idea that international
pressure might force it also to open up its satrapy, Lebanon, to the probable
infiltration of solidly pro-western forces… at a time when plenty of people
in the Bush administration are still loudly baying for regime change in Syria…
Well, you can imagine how spooked the Syrian regime folks must be by
all that.

I haven’t been to Syria since late 2002, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.
It was an interesting and fairly disquieting visit. (Read about it here.)

So anyway, for our afternoon hike today, I dragged Bill around some of my
old haunts in town. Beirut is a city that is perpetually in the midst
of an extreme makeover. Okay, quite a lot less extreme today than in,
say, the summer of 1982, when Sharon’s army was bombing the bejeesus out of
it. You can still see many traces of Israeli-invasion and just plain
civil-war fighting, even on very posh-looking streets. In addition what
you see are the fruits of many years, now, of hectic building and rebuilding efforts– and the combined results of 60-plus years of an extremely laissez-faire approach
to governance in this country that means there are almost no shady, refreshing
public spaces in the whole city– except the Corniche, as I mentioned here Tuesday, which can be refreshing
but is certainly not shady (or quiet)…

Continue reading “Beirut, Part 2”

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s Afghanistan page is always worth a visit. Right now, they have this sad piece of reporting there:

The sudden collapse of the western part of Kabul’s state-run Jamhoriat hospital on July 26, which was being renovated by the Chinese company, Complant, has heightened concern about the numerous construction projects in the country. At least six Afghans were killed in the collapse and more than 30 others were injured, including 2 Chinese workers. At least 30 people are still reported missing.

Click here for the rest of the story…

I’ve been working so hard on my book about violence in Africa that I haven’t had time to blog much these past few days. The list I keep of “things I should blog about” has grown alarmingly long…
So to read some of my quick reflections about recent world events, click the “Continue reading” link below…

Continue reading “Washington, Iraq, Darfur…”