Category: Writing and publishing

The column I wrote earlier this week on New Zealand is in today’s Christian Science Monitor. They cut it pretty drastically and I see now there’s a little bit of infelicitous copy-editing in there. Basically, though, the editors did a pretty good job.
It probably wasn’t fair to cram into just the one small column all I had to say about the country. I wish I’d laid out and explored the reasons’s for the country’s general trend toward non-belligerency and a respect for “fairness” quite a bit more. Also, I didn’t even mention the upcoming elections and the things some of my NZ friends said about the roots of the dissatsifaction with PM Helen Clark.
Well, that’s all the things I didn’t say in the piece. You can go read it and comment on the things I did say.

Saturday was a big day. At 6 a.m., in northern California, my beloved mother-in-law DQ passed away, just one day short of her 98th birthday. She was an amazing woman with great values and huge energy, talent, and heart. She was an educator for most of her life, working in various different contexts, and she co-raised two great kids.
Luckily both of them were with her in her last hours. Bill and I are planning to go back to California in a few weeks to take part in the small memorial being planned for Granny in L.A.. She had lived in West L.A. for most of her long life.
Saturday, too, I finally finished my book about Africa. The last chapter was such a daunting task– one that I’ve been facing (or not facing) since last September. The challenge was to bring together and then analyze the “findings” of all the three case studies presented in the body of the book. No small task. It is always extraordinarily hard to “refine” and organize one’s thoughts– which for me, certainly, as y’all might have noticed, do tend to take off into a number of (I think) interesting parenthetical excursi– into a single linear narrative.
I think I’ve done a fairly decent job on that chapter, now. But I’m fairly tired, and I’m grieving.
Granny had seen so many things in her life. The establishment of the New Deal, and then more recently its dismantlement. The establishment of the UN, with its attendant hopes of the ending of the use of force in international affairs, and then more recently the major attempts to dismantle the UN as a functioning organization and to discredit the goal of the ending of war.
I think that so far, our generation of US citizens has done a truly lousy job of stewarding the heritage of good governance, domestically and in internatinal affairs, that Granny’s generation bequeathed to us. We have to take some major responsibility for getting things back on track.
My own mother died when I was a child. (Which was why DQ became a particularly important presence in my life.) My Dad died in 1999. So now, there are no more wise elders in the family whose stories and wisdom we can draw on. Our generation is “it”.
This is very scary.
Luckily, in our family and many others that I know of, the younger generation coming along also has great values and great energy. So the longterm trend could be good.
But how do we get to a world of real human equality and non-reliance on the use of force? What an enormous question.

So just in case any of you is sitting there thinking, “I wonder how Helena’s getting on with finishing her long-awaited (!) book on violence and conflict termination in Africa?”….
The answer today is “surely, but slowly.” Some days it’s “slowly, but surely.” Some days it’s just slowly. And then, some days it’s AAAAAAARGH!! Like the day back in– was it February?– when I realized that all the writing I’d done for the previous 5-6 weeks needed to be set aside.
So at least we haven’t had another of those recently. (She wipes metaphorical sweat off her brow, in relief.)
Actually, that was about three months ago. Those months have been, in general, pretty worthwhile for the project although the work has often felt like a hard slog… And meanwhile I’ve had to set so many other things aside!
But I do have a commitment to getting this book done in as timely a fashion as I can. I need to get this (pretty darn’ good) draft done before May 18, because that evening I’m heading over to Harrisonburg, VA, to spend ten days teaching a course at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University.
This chapter I’ve been working on so hard all this year (also, last fall) is the one that draws together the lessons from all three of the “case-studies” that I have previously explained to the reader in such exquisite and compelling detail. That is: Rwanda, South Africa, and Mozambique. I have some really, really wonderful interview and other field-research material from all three countries. I really need to get the book out soon before it all becomes hopelessly out of date!
This present chapter is Chapter 11. So far, it’s already pretty long, at 11,600 or more words, and I’m probably around 70% of the way through it. That’s okay. Maybe once I’ve done a good draft of it I’ll find I can handily split it into two chapters. Or maybe it’ll just BE long. I think the longest single piece of sustained narrative I’ve ever written was my first draft of the first Rwanda piece I wrote for Boston Review. This one. I’m not sure how long the edited version of that turned out to be– it got quite majorly developed as a text along the way (cuttings, expansions, and revisions). Anyway, I think the first draft was 14,000 words and it was, imho, quite readable if not (perhaps) extraordinarily easily so.
Anyway, on the present draft of the present book, chapter 1-10 add up to 88,000 words. So I’m almost exactly at what I consider to be the ideal length for a book: 100,000 words.
Why am I putting all this on the blog? I don’t know. I just felt like doing something different here tonight; and worrying about finishing this book as well as I can is the main thing on my mind right now.
I also thought I’d share a little bit from near the top of Ch.11 with y’all. Feel free to comment or not on the following as you please:

Continue reading “Africa book, chapter 11 (again)”

The article on Hizbullah that I worked on over the Christmas holiday weeks has finally come out. It’s in the April-May issue of Boston Review.
Knowing that the text would look a little outdated by the time it came out, I’d begged the copy editor to put a date at the bottom of the piece, which I think is a very classy way of “signing off”. To no avail. For your information I signed off on that text on March 18th or so.
I also asked ’em to put a reference to JWN in my tag-line (the two-line piece of biographical identifier they use there.) Again, no dice. Oh well, next time.
Anyway, I don’t mean to carp. I always love working with the folks at BR. Josh Cohen, one of the Editors, is a brillant and widely published theoretician of democracy who has also been the chair of the departments of both Politics and Philosophy at MIT. Deb Chasman, the other Editor, is another really great person to work with. Working with super-competent editors is a real joy. (Yes, even when they cut one-third of the my original draft out “for length reasons”…) There aren’t many great editors out there– people who really work with a writer to hone the meaning of the words, the balance of the sentence structure, the flow of the meta-narrative, and the broad thrust of the argument.
Josh Friedman, the Managing Editor, was also good to work with. (Even though he did cut out my footnotes completely. My footnotes! Imagine!)
Well, in case any of you wants to delve into my footnotes, I’m going to upload the last footnoted version I have on my desktop– from February 12. That was two days before Rafiq Hariri was killed, so it underwent a bit of updating between then and March 18th. But if you’re a footnote sleuth as I am, you might enjoy some of these ones. Here it is.

I was, I think, one of the first, back in February, to point out that the complicated system put in place in Iraq by Paul Bremer’s bizarre and almost unilaterally imposed Transitional Administrative Law was seriously hampering the ability of Iraq’s elected leaders to form a government. Then on March 2, I started the “Democracy denied in Iraq” watch on the main sidebar of this blog.
It seems to be only recently that the mainstream US media and other bloggers like Juan Cole have noticed that this delay is indeed, in itself, an issue.
Does anyone cite or give credit to my earlier work on this?
Or, come to that, on the whole issue–now much remarked-upon in the US MSM and blogosphere– of the disgraceful absence of women’s voices from the op-ed pages of major US newspapers.
I wrote about that, and started my “Women getting WaPo-ed” watch back on Dec 21. I wrote about it a bit more in January, including Jan. 3rd.
Do I get any mentions, any citations, any respect for my pioneering work on that issue, either?
Hah! (That was a snort of disgust.)
Some respect, “guys”, please!
(I actually first posted this rant on JWN yesterday. But commenter Dick Durata suggested– wisely– that I should have made it a separate post. So here it is.)

I have a column in Thursday’s CSM. It’s titled Time to end US cotton subsidies, and it celebrates the recent WTO ruling in favor of Brazil and against the US on the issue of the illegal US subsidies to cotton farmers.
This is an issue I’ve been following for quite a while. If the US ends these subsidies, then hundreds of thousands of cotton farmers in low-income places around the world can start to raise their crops again, in the knowledge that the prices they can get will no longer be artifcially depressed by the $4.8 billiob a year the US taxpayers have been forced to pay to a relative handful of American farmers, many of them by no means poorly off.
Good for President Lula da Silva of Brazil, who brought the case!
And now, let’s look at all the other national-producer subsidies and the many other ways in which the terms of trade in the global market are stacked against people in low-income countries…

I’ve been working hard at making myself get my Africa book finished. Since I also have a life (okay, this may come as a surprise to some blog-readers), this means I need to cut back on blogging a bit.
Who knows, maybe I’ll blog more about Africa or post some other interesting tidbits on JWN along the way? Right now, though, I have nine already drafted chapters of the book to re-wrestle with and then about three more to write. It’s high-order concentration that’s needed here, not lots of distractions like blogging.
Especially not blogging about the Middle East.
I figured there will still be a big story in the ME even after the Africa book gets done.

Today’s CSM has my column on post-Hariri Lebanon. It’s titled: Can real peace take root in Lebanon?
Let’s hope so! There have been some encouraging signs, as noted in the column.
Today, I see that Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Walid Muallem made a statement to reporters promising further “withdrawals” of Syrian forces from central and western Lebanon, back to the eastern part of the country bordering Syria (and very close indeed to downtown Damascus).
In that story I linked to there, by AP’s Albert Aji, the reporter noted that Muallem’s statement use of the term “withdrawal” was the first time that term– rather than “redeployment” has been used by Syria regarding troop movements in Lebanon.
Aji noted, however, that the promised withdrawal would not be complete; and also that Muallem did not specify a timetable for it.
I was somewhat reassured, back at the end of last year, when Syria’s President Asad put Muallem, a wise veteran diplomat, onto the Lebanese “case”. Muallem was Syria’s key diplomatic point-person throughout most of the Israeli-Syrian peace diplomacy that occurred 1991-1996.
Those negotiations were always overshadowed in the media by the much “flashier” (and ultimately also unsuccessful) negotiations on the Israeli-Palestinian track. But everyone in the west who is nowadays so eager to jump on a mindlessly ideological anti-Syrian bandwagon seems to have forgotten that throughout that five-year period in the mid-1990s– and later, right up to Asad Pere’s fated encounter with Prez Clinton, in Geneva, in May 2000– Syria and Israel came literally within a whisker of concluding a final peace accord.
Essentially, the nature of that deal was “full peace and normalization” for “full withdrawal” of Israel’s occupation forces and settlers from the Golan. Rabin and Peres were both prepared to do that. (Read all about the negotiations in my 2000 book on the topic from the U.S. Institute of Peace Press.) But when the swaggeringly over-confident Ehud Barak thought he could get the first half of the “grand bargain” for something significantly less than full withdrawal, the whole deal fell apart.
Syria participated creatively, flexibly, and in good faith in those negotiations (which was more than you could say of Israel under, for example, Netanyahu or Sharon.) And Syria has always, since 2000, expressed its readiness to resume the final-status talks with Israel… Walid Muallem has meanwhile been a quiet, steady voice in the Syrian elite arguing as to why those negotiations have been in the country’s best longterm interest.
… So I was cautiously optimistic when Walid was given (an undefined amount of) responsibility for Syria’s “Lebanon file”, back in November or so. The Syrians had previously made a really disastrous mistake in Lebanon by needlessly ramming the extension of President Lahoud’s term through the Lebanese parliament.
I hope Damascus has figured out how to pursue a wiser course now. Let’s watch and see.

Well, you know that in some places around the world, women’s rights, interests, and voice have been getting progressively devalued over recent years (while in others they’ve been becoming progressively more valued.)
In Iraq, I am afraid that women’s interests are about to be rolled back by the incoming regime.
And in Washington DC, women’s voices have almost certainly been rolled back a lot over the past 10-15 years.
Today, “Valentine’s Day”, I’m sad to report to you the final findings of the “Women getting WaPo-ed” count that I’ve been maintaining for the past eight weeks.
Today, the WGW count finally tells us that the men who run the most influential newspaper in the most important city in the world value women’s voices precisely one-ninth as much as they value men’s voices.
That is, as of today, the WGW count stands at exactly 10%. Over the past eight weeks, precisely 26 of the 260 authored pieces on the Washington Post‘s op-ed pages have been authored by women. (And I’ve been “generous” in assigning to the women’s score genders that weren’t easy to assign.)
I note that people in the west frequently get conniptions when they learn that in some Islamic codes of law, a man’s testimony in court “counts” for as much as that of two women.
But how many conniptions do we hear from Washingtonians when they contemplate the gross gender imbalance on the Op-Ed page of their daily paper? Nine men’s voices for every woman’s voice that gets published?
What is all that about???
It is my strong belief, moreover, that the gender imbalance on the WaPo’s op-ed pages has gotten worse over the past 10-15 years, not better. I don’t have any figures for that, but if any of you readers has some figures from the past, please send ’em on over!
At least, now, I’ve established what I hope will be an absolute rock-bottom base-line for the WGW count. I’m sincerely hoping the count will only go up from here? Maybe I’ll run it again some time in the future.
But for now, the Valentine’s Day message that the men who run the WaPo are sending to the women they encounter in their professional life seems to be this:

Hey, suckers! We’re happy to advertise to you, write gossip columns about you, have you do the leg-work in a number of our reporting assignments… But treat your opinions as something worth paying attention to?
Fuggedaboutit, suckers!
Just keep buying the skimpy lingerie we peddle to you all over our main pages and shut up!”

And Happy Valentine’s Day to you, too, guys!

Really interesting things are happening all over the world. The North Koreans have announced they have nuclear weapons… The Iraqi election commission has announced yet more problems in ballot-counting, necessitating yet further delay in releasing the results. (Do I smell a fish? Is Negrocontre desperately searching around for which UIA leader will take his dollar and become his humble servant?)… The situation in Gaza looks poised on a knife-edge… (By the way, here is my column from today’s CSM.) … All kinds of revelations are coming out about yet more heinous misdeeds in the US global gulag… A few score thousand Saudi men got the chance to go vote in highly constrained local elections…
As I said, a lot happening, about which I wish I were blogging.
Instead of which I am sitting at my desk having a really upsetting writing crisis. Long and short: none of the work I’ve done on my book in the past month is worth saving.
Aaaaaaaaaargh!
I won’t bore you with the details. All I’ll say is that– though none of what I’ve drafted will end up in the book, it is not totally wasted. From two points of view. First, everything I write helps me organize my thoughts and draws me, hopefully, to greater understanding and wisdom. (Blah, blah, blah.) That one is also known as the “mulch theory.”
And secondly, it ain’t wasted because nowadays I get to post it on the blog! And so, dear readers, sometime in the near future you can look forward to not one but two drafts of “Helena’s definitive accounting of the history of international atrocities law”! And my short draft of the history of truth commissions!
I bet you can’t wait. Right?