Category: Writing and publishing

Three on Africa

In a fit of hyper-productivity I just put three posts on Transitional Justice issues in sub-Saharan Africa up onto the Transitional Justice Forum blog.
They are on Uganda, Sudan (including Darfur), and Charles Taylor and the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
The last of those is heavily based on the JWN post I had on the topic last week. The other two contain considerably more new material. Read especially Moses Okello’s great commentary from Kampala on the ICC and Northern Uganda.
Comments should go over there rather than here.

Reconciliation, from Africa to the Middle East

Actually, the reason that I received a paper copy of the latest issue of the Palestine-Israel Journal, which I
have just written about on JWN here, is that
it has a review of my latest book, Amnesty
after Atrocity?: Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes. 
Since the book hasn’t actually received many reviews yet– though it
got some great pre-publication blurbs, that are printed on the back
cover– I wanted to write something here on JWN about this one… Okay,
I’ll admit: Especially, because this is a very favorable review! 
The reviewer, Sol Gittleman, seemed to really “get” what I was trying
to do with the book, which is always a good experience for any author
to have.

Gittleman is a former provost of Tufts University in Medford, Mass.,
and currently holds a University Chair there.  He twinned his
review of my book with another, of a book called Bridging the Divide: Peacebuilding in the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which is co-authored by my old
friend Edy Kaufman along with Walid Salem and Juliette Verhoeven..

Gittleman starts his review by writing: “It takes a very special kind
of courage to continue pressing toward reconciliation in the face of
overwhelming odds… ”  Then he writes appreciatively about
Kaufman et al’s book before he comes to my book.  Which is where he says
(okay, here is where I blush):

Helena Cobban is a first-rate
journalist who has observed the transition from anarchy to justice and
reconciliation all over the world. [Actually
a bit of an exaggeration there; but in many places, yes.
~HC]  She has no axes to grind. Her analysis of the post-war
responses to the horrors of South African apartheid, genocide in Rwanda
and the brutal armed insurgency in Mozambique are moving, but marked
completely by a reality developed over years in reporting on humanity’s
capacity for brutality…

In each of the three case studies, Cobban asks the difficult
questions…

He gives more details about the topics  the book covers, and my
reflections on them there.  Then he concludes the review by
writing

Here we have two serious studies that
hold up at least the possibility of peace on Earth, good will toward
humanity.  If their goals and aspirations were fulfilled, it would
mean, paradoxically, the end of civilization as we have known it. [I take it that is written with some irony??] 
Good luck to all of us in these perilous times.

So, a big thanks to you for that, Sol Gittleman… And here, by the way, is a nice, easy-to-download JPEG version of the
book’s cover:

AAA-cover-smaller.JPGAnyway, I’m really happy this review appeared where it did– that
is, in a journal that is seriously read and referred to by many people
in the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking community– and in the way it
did: Namely, alongside consideration of a book on the challenges of
peacebuilding in the Israeli-Palestinian context.  When I launched
into the research that became this book, I knew I was venturing out
into some geographical terrain in sub-Saharan Africa that was almost
completely new to me.  But I found the topic of how people emerging from
very hard- (and roughly) fought conflict could ever possibly overcome
the many wounds from the past to be a riveting one, and it was one that I
had often wrestled with during my earlier engagement with various
citizen-diplomacy peacemaking efforts in the Middle East.

When the “flavor of the month” (okay, decade) in the international
human-rights movement increasingly, throughout the 1990s, became to
consider that every conflict that came to an end should be accompanied
by– or even, God help us, preceded by– some form of war-crimes
trials, I was already very skeptical.  How could that ever happen
in the context that I knew best, that of the Palestinian-Israeli context?  Goodness, when the
Palestinian and Israeli leadership do finally manage to get together
and conclude a final peace
agreement, as I sincerely hope they do before too many more years have passed, how would one ever start in the context of that, to unravel
the many long chains of responsibility for the very many
thousands of dead and harmed on either side of the national
divide?  And if one ever attempted to launch such a process– in
the accusatory way that criminal prosecutions always, of necessity,
assume– what effects would that have on the prospects of maintaining
and building the peace thus with such difficulty won?

I honestly couldn’t see it as being helpful.

In 2001, when my friend the Lebanese lawyer Chibli Mallat worked with
some survivors of the 1982 massacres in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps to bring a prosecution against Israeli PM Ariel Sharon–
and under Belgium’s extremely bizarre law allowing for “universal”
(i.e. completely extra-territorial) jurisdiction– a part of me
applauded the effort from the sidelines.  But an even larger part
of me asked, “How on earth is this
going to help bring Sharon to where he needs to be: Namely, sitting
down in an authoritative, final-peace negotiation with the Palestinian
leaders?”  I mean, really: How will it help the Palestinian and
Israeli people to escape from the yoke of war, occupation, pervasive
insecurity, death, and destruction if this one man, Ariel Sharon, ends
up in the dock as a defendant?

Later, as my research on the Africa book continued, I met and interviewed some people
in Mozambique who had committed and organized acts of anti-humane
terror that dwarfed many times over any of the bad actions that
Israelis have ever committed against Palestinians, or Palestinians
against Israelis.  (If you don’t believe me, go back and read some
of the reports on the kinds of tortures, mutilations, and other
terrioble abuses that the fighters from Renamo, in particular,
committed during the 15-year civil war there.)  But here’s the
thing: By the time I met these men, who had been the highest military leaders of Renamo, in Maputo in 2003, they had been
completely reintegrated into national society.  Very nearly all
Mozambicans had judged at the end of that terrible war that the only
way they could move forward
as a country was to put all the pain, ugliness, loss, grief, and
blame from the war era very firmly behind them…

So yes, I do still think that the big lessons that I learned from my
work on the book have huge relevance in the Middle East. 
Including, of course, in Iraq, where surely we have all now seen the
debacle and the horrendously peace-threatening tensions that resulted
from the knee-jerk application of the prosecutorial strategy in the
case of the Saddam trial.

Anyway, if you JWN readers have not yet read (and preferably also
bought!) my book, I hope you do so… I hope, too, that wherever you live
in the world and whatever parts of the world you are concerned about,
reading the book might help you to think more deeply about what it
really takes to make and build sustainable peace processes in
conflict-wracked parts of the world.  (My hint in this regard:
Western-based rights activists have not yet found all the answers…)

Changes ahead at the CSM

This note in today’s Christian Science Monitor informs the world of something that I learned of only on Sunday, namely that at the end of June all five other regular CSM columnists and I are to be given the axe.
It has all been (and felt) rather sudden, especially since for some months I’d been talking to Josh Burek, my editor there, about doing more columns for them than hitherto. Or more precisely, about reverting to my original arrangement with them, which was for two columns per month.
So the column I write for the CSM next week will be the last in a series dating back 17 years. Maybe it’s a good time for a break. Time to look at many other options. I can’t help feeling regretful, though, since the Monitor has been a good paper to work with and for. Back in the 1970s, veteran Monitor foreign-news journos Geoffrey Godsell and Joe Harsch taught me a tremendous amount about both the news business and the value of investing time trying to seek out “the story behind the story”, or the “bigger picture” behind the epiphenomena that make it to the news pages of most other, more competition-driven, major news media.
In our conversation Sunday, Josh said he’d continue to welcome my contributions to the paper’s Opinion pages. Good. I’m looking at a number of other options, as well.
This change has come at a slightly complex time for me. Right now I’m in the Rocky Mountains, having driven 1,660 miles here from Virginia over the past four days along with my daughter Lorna, who’s on her way to take up a job in Los Angeles. Thursday I’m flying back to DC to complete on the purchase of a small apartment that Bill and I will use as a pied-a-terre when we’re in the nation’s capital. I am planning to spend a lot more time in DC over the months ahead. It feels like a good time to do this.
Anyway, that road-trip explains the sparseness of my recent posting here. I’ll resume my normal rhythm as soon as I can.

CSM column on Syria

Here is the column I had in the CSM today. (It is also here.) The editors put this title on it: The time is ripe for the US to engage Syria on Mideast issues; Damascus seems willing to work with the US on the Arab-Israeli conflict and Iraq.
The timing is actually great, since Saturday will see the 12-party conference in Baghdad involving the ambassadors of Syria, Iran, all Iraq’s other neighbors, Iraq, the US, and the other permanent members of the security Council.
By the way, I also have a piece in Le Monde Diplo this month. But I don’t think you can read it online… It’s about Gen. Petraeus.
Dedicated readers of JWN will find most of the material in both these articles fairly familiar, since as you might have guessed I use the blog to archive my notes and interviews and to try out ideas in general.

JWN celebrates 4th blogiversary

Gosh, has it been four years already? And who knows, one day I might even figure out what I want to do with this blog…
I sometimes look up from the keyboard long enough to wonder whether it’s all been worthwhile in any meaningful way. Has it made any real difference in the world? Is there perhaps a more effective use I could make of the non-trivial amounts of time I spend doing this?
On the other hand, writing always helps me think more clearly… Plus, with this blog format and the way the comments-board discussions have developed here, I feel I’ve created a very worthwhile forum for cooperative learning. I’ve long been convinced that learning is a fundamentally social activity, and the way we have created new funds of knowledge through our discussions here has underscored that point for me many times.
The blog would feel to me like a very different place indeed if we didn’t have all the great comments discussions here. Yes, it’s true they sometimes get a bit raucous, ill-focused, or non-courteous. But I have learned a tremendous amount from contributions made by so many of the commenters here.
So the first thing I want to do today is say a big thank you to all the commenters! (Particularly the ones who keep inside the courtesy guidelines– whether they agree with me, or not.)
And secondly, for nostalgia’s sake, I just want to go back to my inaugural post here, February 6, 2003. Here it is, in its entirety (and with all my crappy original formating):

    I listened to Colin Powell’s presentation at the U.N. yesterday, read the text carefully. I was sad for so many reasons. Let me count the ways:
    (1) Sad to see this good person beating the drums of war.
    (2) Sad to think of the war that his presentation–and his having agreed to play this role– has brought us that much closer to.
    (3) Sad, actually, to read the content and see how thin and tenuous his case was. It seemed like an insult to the intelligence of listeners– especially, the recycling of the tired old ‘aluminum tubes’ business. Mohamed el-Baradei laid that one to rest a while ago, saying the tubes in question actually could not be helpfully used for nuclear fuel production. So why did Powell drag that one in?? It seems like an insult to Baradei and the rest of us.
    Look, I know better than many other people how terribly Saddam has behaved in the past– and most likely, he’s still behaving that way. But if containment worked for Joe Stalin, why on earth would we imagine it can’t work for this regime, whose raw power is a thousand times smaller than Stalin’s??
    Feb 4th, I went to see ‘Bowling for Columbine’. (Okay, I was late getting around to it.) But it was good to see it the night before Powell’s speech. I think Mike Moore got it just about right. There’s a huge industry out there dedicated to whipping up the fearfulness of Americans; and that keeps U.S. citizens opting for huge military expenditures, tough police and incarceration, etc– at the expense of the basic social programs which would make our community healthier and safer.

The posts I put up over the six weeks that followed there– that is, until the outbreak of war– make pretty poignant reading, too, imho.
Then, in the column I published February 13, 2003 for the CSM, I took apart the claim Powell had made in that UN speech about the links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda… I note that in Fiasco, the book Tom Ricks recently published about the launching and early years of the US war in Iraq, he says that back in February 2003 Colin Powell was broadly successful in persuading all US commentators of the validity of the arguments he made at the UN.
He wasn’t. He never persuaded me; and I was able to write about the flaws in his case both here at JWN and also in CSM. So why didn’t Tom Ricks mention that? Was he not looking– or did he read what I wrote at the time but discount it all for some reason?
I guess I should ask him when I get the chance.
Anyway, that’s for another day. For today, I am just really glad that the internet and this great, easy-to-use blogging software have allowed us all to have such a great global conversation here at JWN.
Long may the conversation continue.

Day of Shame: Five years of Guantanamo

Jan. 11 is the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first group of prisoners at Guantanamo.
Some of those original 20 men are still there today, having been through almost unbelievable travails and abuses. None face the prospect of anything like a fair trial, and most are expected never to have any trial at all. Yet unlike prisoners-of-war who are held under the conditions defined in international law they cannot even expect to return to their homes at the end of any duly defined war. (And they are held in conditions far, far worse than the minimum standards established for POWs under international law.)
Now, there are some 395 men still in Gitmo. The vast majority of them have been there between two-and-a-half years and five years. Just 14 men were added to the rolls there last September, having been flown in from a secret CIA pirson or prisons elsewhere.
My column in Thursday’s CSM is on Guantanamo. You can find it here (or here.)
It concludes:

    Guantánamo is… a major moral challenge for the American people. We need to find a way to close this camp of shame and shine a light on the abuses committed there so that they’re never repeated.
    The detainees against whom there is solid evidence should be tried, and if found guilty , incarcerated. Let’s see and fully examine all the evidence. The rest should be released and given help for their rehabilitation after their years of dehumanizing detention.
    Will the new Congress take up this task? I certainly hope so.

I know that much of the US media Thursday will be busy dissecting Bush’s speech. I am really, really glad I decided to focus on Gunatanamo.
Does anyone want to see my collection of Guantanamo-related URLs on Delicious? It’s here.

New site to read and discuss the ISG report

The Institute for the Future of the Book and Lapham’s Quarterly, which is edited by former Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham, have established a new website that will enable a broad web-based discussion of the report of the Iraq Study Group.
If you go to the site you’ll find the main navigation bar along the top. The greenish buttons there have drop-down menus through which you can access the entire published text of the report, including its appendices. I find navigating through the report’s text using these links considerably easier than navigtaing through it as a PDF file… So that’s already one advantage. But the further innovation that the folks at IF:Book have added is to put a “comments” pane right there on the page alongside the main text, with the possibility of having comments keyed to either individual paragraphs or whole sections of the text.
They see this, rightly, as allowing a whole new role for a text such as a book text, and thus for the entire social role of books.
I’m pretty excited about this. I’m also very happy to keep up a sustained and serious public discussion of the ISG report– especially in light of the attempts of the neocons and others to sweep it under the table or dismiss it as “long ago discredited” (Krauthammer, etc.) Therefore, as you can see when you go there, I’ve been one of the first commenters there; and I am eager to see the project take off as fast as possible.
I believe– and certainly hope– they’ll be opening it to comments from the public very soon, and I’ll let you know when that happens. (Frankly, it would be great if some others of the “invited” commenters they have gotten on board would do their bit to get the project rolling along… So far, there’s just M.J. Rosenberg and me… )
Anyway, head on over there. If you have comments about the project and leave them here I’m sure the folks at IF:Book will read and react to them.