I wrote here, on Wednesday, about my disappointment in one chapter of My Neighbor, My enemy, the book I’ve been reading about “justice and community” in the aftermath of atrocious violence in Rwanda and former-Yugoslavia. I’ve now finished the book, and want to set the record straight by saying that the book as a whole– bar that one chapter (Ch.10) which had some serious methodological flaws in it, as I’d described– is a really fascinating read and a great contribution to human understanding.
Chapter 14, “Trust and betrayal in war” by two Croatian psychology profs, Dean Ajdukovic and Dinka Corkalo, is outstanding; and Ch. 12 is pretty good, too.
What I love about Ajdukovoc and Corkalo’s work is the granularity of their descriptions and the deep sense of humanity that informs the whole chapter.
What they did was, using a “snowball sampling” method in the deeply troubled Croatian city of Vukovar, they conducted in-depth interviews with 48 long-time residents of the city, from both the ethnic-Serbian and the ethnic-Croatian communities there. Their interviewees had to have a couple of characteristics in common: they had to be people who had once had friends from the ‘other’ ethnic group, and they had to have had the experience that these relationships had been severed or seriously threatened since the terrible fighting that engulfed the city in 1991. The interviews were carried out in 2002.
The material they present in this chapter is achingly sad, and illustrates in vivid detail what can happen once the frenzy of violence takes hold of a place…
Category: Violence/nonviolence
On the bookshelf
These past few days I’ve been transitioning back into working on my
“Violence and its Legacies” project, a.k.a. my book about Africa, and my
reading’s been starting to reflect that. (Okay, apart from my near-mandatory
lunch-time read of the WaPo “Style” section.)
First up here on my bookshelf, actually, something that has very little to
do with Africa. It’s
Loving Without Giving In; Christian Responses to Terrorism & Tyranny
by Ron Mock. Ron is a really nice person, a sharp thinker and a clear
writer, who is also an Evangelical Quaker. That’s a slightly “different”
bunch of Quakers from my lot… Let’s just say “his” lot defines themselves
as specifically Christian Evangelicals. Ron was a member of our International
Quaker Working Party on Israel and Palestine, and I really came to like him,
and admire his drafting skills while we were working together there.
So his book attempts to give a “Christian pacifist” take on how Americans
should respond to the challenge of terrorism, in particular. It’s really
great that he’s published the book– especially because he writes it, as
far as I can see, from entirely within an Evangelical Christian viewpoint.
He takes Christian scripture very seriously; tries to reconcile the
differences between the writings of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament;
and lays out very clearly the different ways that different kinds of Christians
look at war-and-peace issues before plumping firmly for a Christian pacifist
worldview.
But mainly what I like about the book is the clarity and simplicity of his
exposition, and the deep psychological truth that I see in most of what he
writes. He writes, for example, about the corrosive effect that a deep-seated
sense of grievance has on the person who holds it, as well as on society
in general. He writes about how hatred can lead people to dehumanize
their enemies. And he pleads, throughout, for people experiencing a
sense to vulnerability to continue to try to see “that of God” (as Quakers
say) even in the people whom they fear the most.
Second up, a tome from the U.N. University called
The UN Role in Promoting Democracy; Between ideals and Reality
, edited by Edward Newman and Roland Rich. This one looks really interesting.
It has some weighty theoretical chapters, which I’m still getting through.
But then, it has case studies: Namibia, Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor,
and Afghanistan. Shameless empiricist that I am, I can’t wait to get
to the case studies. Maybe I’ll skip one or two of the theoretical
chapters…
And finally, for now, a book that I’m quite enthralled by,
My Neighbor, My Enemy; Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Atrocity
, edited by Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein. (That’s not Harvey
Weinstein, half-owner of Miramax.)
This book is the fruit of a broad, multi-year project run out of UC Berkeley’s
Human Rights Center in which researchers looked at the effects on community
mental health and attitudes of various steps taken to deal with the aftermath
of atrocities in rwanda and former Yugoslavia. Well, my project is
looking (in a slightly different way) at exactly that same issue in Rwanda–
but comparing it not with former Yugoslavia but with two other cases in southern
Africa: South Africa and Mozambique…
For Margaret, and all her compatriots
Margaret, I never met you. I wish we’d had the chance to meet…
- This, from today’s Guardian, about Margaret Hassan:
Hassan was born Margaret Fitzsimmons in Ireland, where her early childhood was spent in a Dublin suburb. Later, her family moved to London, where she completed her education.
In 1961, when she was 17, she met and married Iraqi-born Tahseen Ali Hassan, who was 26 years old and studying engineering in the UK. In 1972, she moved with her new husband to Iraq, where she began working for the British Council, teaching English to Iraqis. Falling in love with the country, she learnt Arabic, converted to Islam and became an Iraqi citizen.
What me? Pollyanna?
Several people have accused me of being unrealistically Pollyanna-ish in even suggesting–as I did when I wrote my column in last Thursday’s CSM— that this US administration might be interested in working toward a timely, free, and fair election Iraq… In this post, I’ll give my quick defense of that column. In a subsequent post I want to start looking at what seems to be emerging as the “Negroponte Doctrine” in Iraq, and what that mean for the country.
Okay, my defense of having written the column. My friend Jim, for example, wrote me quite laconically:”Good article. The advice is not likely to be taken, as you well know.
I wrote back to him:
- Yes, I know that because they’ve never taken my advice before! However, I do think it’s important to carry on making these arguments in public to help educate the public and to lay down clear markers along the path of this so-far tragic history. Then maybe in 20 years, after untold thousands more have been killed in and as a result of Iraq, historians can dig back thru the record and say, “well it still could have been possible to do things peacefully even as late as [Sept. 2004; or whenever]”
I think it’s also important to just keep on and on demonstrating that there are ALWAYS alternatives to the use of violence.
(In retrospect, I should have started off that reply by saying, “Yes, I ‘know ‘ that,” since I don’t actually know it with 100% certainty, at all…)
I would add to the above that I think it’s really never helpful to set off on a discussion–even if it’s with someone whose actions you deeply disagree with–by assuming that that person is inherently “bad”, or has some kind of evil or sinister motives. It’s much productive to assume (and hope) that the person is acting from what she or he considers to be the highest and most excellent of motivations, and to pursue the discussion from there.
The Bushies say they want to bring the blessings of true democracy to Iraq. Well, at one level, it doesn’t even matter whether we believe them on that, or not. But their declarations to that effect do in themselves provide an excellent starting-point for the discussion on: “Okay, if you really want democracy, what might that mean in terms of some behavior change from sides including your own? How can everyone work toward the necessary de-escalation?”
In addition, I believe that profound transformations of human character and human behavior are indeed possible. They happen every day. So I continue to live in hope that what I write might contribute to a good kind of trasnformation, however small.
My working assumption here is that by writing in the Christian Science Monitor I am able to speak to a non-trivial portion of the U.S. political elite–both those inside and those outside the reigning administration. hey, the only time I’ve ever been inside the White House, there was the CSM, folded on a side-table. And I know my pieces have frequently been included in the Pentagon’s dailu news digest service…
If I am in a position to have that discussion with people in the US political elite, then why should I waste it by impugning the motives of the folks I’m able to talk to (and can hope, however minimally, to persuade), or by calling them names?
Also, I honestly don’t see myself as an intellectually wispy, unrealistic “Pollyanna” figure, at all…
Post-9/11 wisdom and Danny Pipes’ Dad
Bullying, ideological neo-con Daniel Pipes has a father at whose ultra- (but more traditionally) conservative knee he grew up. Richard Pipes was an ultra-conservative historian of Russian history at Harvard who was extremely influential during the Reagan years. Richard Pipes was always extremely hawkish on Cold War issues…
And now, he’s being accused of seeking to “rewards” terrorists… This, because on Thursday he published an op-ed in the NYT titled “Give the Chechens a Land of Their Own”.
After making a very appropriate reference to the scale and extremely atrocious nature of the Chechen separatists’ recent terrorist action in Beslan, North Ossetia, Pipes Sr. wrote:
- In his post-Beslan speech, Mr. Putin all but linked the attack to global Islam… But the fact is, the Chechen cause and that of Al Qaeda are quite different, and demand very different approaches in combating them.
Terrorism is a means to an end: it can be employed for limited ends as well as for unlimited destructiveness. The terrorists who blew up the train station in Madrid just before the Spanish election this year had a specific goal in mind: to compel the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. The Chechen case is, in some respects, analogous. A small group of Muslim people, the Chechens have been battling their Russian conquerors for centuries.
… Because Chechnya, unlike the Ukraine or Georgia, had never enjoyed the status of a nominally independent republic under the Communists, the Chechens were denied the right to secede from the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And so they eventually resorted to terrorism for the limited objective of independence.
I was amazed, indeed delighted, when I read Pipes’s op-ed on Thursday. He was quite right to seek to take on the whole insidious, anti-political discourse of “terrorism” in the way that he calmly did there… Terrorism is a means to an end: it can be employed for limited ends as well as for unlimited destructiveness.
This is an argument that many of us on the anti-war side have been trying to make ever since 9/11. The problem with the whole discourse of “terrorism” is that term gets used indiscriminately to describe, basically, any violent act of which we disapprove.
(Remember when Nelson Mandela and the ANC were routinely denounced as “terrorists” by the apartheid government in S. Africa, which built up a whole globe-circling campaign aimed at marginalizing and combating the ANC? Until, that is, they decided to try negotiating with them. At which point, they found the ANC to be very effective negotiating partners… )
And so it still is today. Indeed, Prez Bush’s johnny-one-note stress on the “Global War on Terrorism” has drowned out nearly all the essentially political aspects of what the US government needs to be doing in the world in a chorus of “You’re either with us in the GWOT, or you’re against us!” And meanwhile, the whole rhetoric of the GWOT has provided a boon and a comfort to dictators everywhere–include Putin in that– who simply by murmuring the accusation that their opponents are “terrorists” have been able to win continued strong support from Washington in all their attempts to suppress them.
So today, the NYT carried three letters from people excoriating Pipes for what he wrote…
Hiroshima then and now
59 years ago today an American warplane dropped the world’s first “operational” atomic weapon. It was designed to detonate some 200 meters above the ground, to maximize fallout on the heavily populated Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima. Some 30 minutes prior to dropping the bomb, other American planes had dropped sensors at various points around the city so they could gauge the radiation and other effects of the big one.
200,000 Japanese people were killed by that bomb. Some fast, in the firestorm that engulfed the city. Some more slowly and agonizingly–from drinking radiation-polluted water, or from developing radiation-induced cancers.
Three days later, the U.S. military was eager to test a different bomb design. So without even giving Japan a chance to surrender, they dropped the second bomb on the equally heavily populated city of Nagasaki.
Let’s not confuse the effects of an atomic bomb–even a “primitive” form of atomic bomb like those 1945 models–with those of other forms of weapons, through too much easy talk of “weapons of ‘mass’ destruction”. Atomic weapons, like the 7,094 nuclear warheads that are in the US arsenal today, are whole orders of magnitude more deadly than the most lethal chemical or biological weapon.
Why does the US ruling elite think the country “needs” to have such a large nuclear arsenal–or indeed, any nuclear arsenal at all?
They claim they are defending “civilization”. What twisted idea of “civilization” is this that would require even one nuclear weapon to defend it?
There is another, more plausible explanation: it is that the ruling elite wants the US–with a total of just 4 percent of the world’s population!–to continue to exercise hegemony over the entire world. Under this explanation, the use of the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the prime example of the doctine of “shock and awe”, otherwise known as terrifying/terrorizing the rest of the world until it bows to Washington’s will.
Enough. Enough. Let’s start working seriously, from here on, for a truly nuclear-weapons-free world.
The Bush administration, need I add, has just about the opposite idea. Far from being ready to start stepping down the USA’s own reliance on nuclear weapons in any way, manner, or form, it is aggressively reserving for itself the right to continue to upgrade and “update” the US nuclear arsenal.
The latest indicator of this is the administration’s refusal to allow any provisions for inspections other verifiaction measures to be included in the terms of the still-under-negotiation Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty…
Paul Johnson, R.I.P.
I’ve been thinking a bit about the life, the terror-stricken captivity, and outrageous death of Paul Johnson, and certainly thinking about the grief of the loving family members he left behind him.
It is horrifying to think that people there in Saudi Arabia kidnapped him and quite arrogantly “sentenced” him to death, and then killed him, on the grounds that he allegedly did technical work on the Kingdom’s fleet of Apache helicopters.
It does not diminish these feelings I have about Johnson’s treatment to point also to the distressingly large number of Palestinian people–more than 200* of them–who have been arrogantly “sentenced” to death, and then killed, on the basis of quite unproven allegations that they were involved in planning or supporting acts of anti-Israeli killing.
Or, to point to the number of Iraqis, Afghans, and others who have been either intentionally or unintentionally killed as a result of the US forces’ excessive recourse to violence since October 2001. (For example, the 22 people killed in Fallujah, Iraq, today by a US air strike. US commander Mark Kimmitt claimed the house they targeted was used by fighters loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqaw, though the US military also admitted here was no sign Zarqawi himself was there when it was destroyed. Reuters reported from Fallujah that, “Furious Iraqis said the dead included women and children.”)
Each and every one one of these lives snuffed out was a life that carried it with the possibility–and in many cases, the actuality– of hope, grace, and love. How coarsened have we become if we cannot understand the simple fact that every human life is infinitely precious?
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…
Memories of the truce that failed
I’ve just about finished (let’s hope!) reviewing the final edit of the long piece I’ve written for Boston Review since I got back from Israel/Palestine. It should be in the upcoming issue.
Anyway, here’s one little bit of data I pulled together for the piece, that I’ve been pondering on quite a lot since. This does not attempt to be a complete description and analysis of Palestinian-initiated hudna (truce) of last year. It just presents some of the basic casualty figure for that period. You’ll have to read the BR piece to find the longer version (and a lot more, too.)
When Mahmoud Abbas became Palestinian Prime Minister in May 2003, one of
his first priorities was to persuade Hamas and Islamic Jihad to agree to
the broad Palestinian hudna vis-a-vis Israel that was required
from the Palestinians under the terms of the Road Map. By late June, he and his
main negotiator on this front, Ziad Abu Amr, had won the support of all the
Palestinian factions for a three-month truce. The truce went almost immediately into effect.
Here are the casualty figures for that period:
- Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians in Israel or the occupied territories:
May 2003–13
June–28
July–2
Ariel Sharon’s government in Israel never felt itself bound any commitment
to any kind of reciprocal ceasefire. Nevertheless, many Israelis were
extremely eager to see an easing of the tensions, particularly with the annual
tourist season about to peak. So, though Sharon reserved the right to carry
on with actions like the extrajudicial killings he ordered against suspected
Palestinian militants and the use of excessively lethal fire against demonstrators,
still, the Palestinians’ announcement and indeed enactment of the truce in
late June 2003 evidently had an effect on Israel’s behavior, too:
Violence and escalation in Palestine/Israel
I had so many things I wanted to blog about today. Mainly, a big piece I’ve been kinda planning for a few days now, connecting some dots on matters Israeli-Palestinian.
Like, looking at what it does to the thinking of Palestinians when they see that Lebanon’s Hizbollah can get around 400 Palestinian detainee/hostages released from Israel’s lockups by playing hardball with their own Israeli hostage (and the mortal remains of three other Israelis)– while on the other hand, Yasser Arafat, who has continued to support a negotiated settlement for many years now gets what from the Israelis?
Precisely nothing except continued humiliation, derision, and the destruction of the last vestiges of his PA infrastructure.
(I was going to bring in all these excellent links on this last score… )
So what message does that send to the average, very hard suffering Palestinian??
Continue reading “Violence and escalation in Palestine/Israel”