Well, my article in Foreign Policy on international war-crimes courts has been getting a gratifying amount of attention. My intention in publishing it was, after all, to open up the discussion on this topic to include the previously under-heard point of view that questions or even criticises the general social utility of such courts…
This Thursday, I’m doing a call-in show on the topic on the San Francisco-based radio station KALW-FM. It’s an NPR affiliate there. It runs from 1-2 p.m. Eastern Time, so I guess that’s 10-11 a.m. Pacific Time.
Tune on in, Bay Area readers. And call in with all your questions.
How many times can I mention JWN in one hour, I wonder?
Also, FP just sent me a bunch of letters that they’ll be running in response to my article in, I think, their next issue. Seven letters including only one that’s supportive of my argument. Of the six critics, five are law professors. Vested interests, anyone? Okay, I know this is not totally a valid case for me to make– I realise that these people are also voicing some substantive criticisms of my argument that need to be addressed… And indeed, will be, since FP are giving me a princely 400 words to come back at ’em…
Good. Maybe I could stir things up a bit by mentioning Ramesh Thakur’s term “judicial colonialism” in there, somewhere?
So I see that one of these letters is from David Scheffer, now a law prof, previously Pres. Clinton’s “Special Ambassador for War Crimes Affairs”. Actually, it was hearing David talk about the criminal prosecutions program in post-genocide Rwanda that got me started on that whole entire research project and now soon-to-be book on Transitional Justice.
I remember it as though it were yesterday. It was September 2000, at a conference the Hilton Humanitarian Foundation was holding in Geneva, where David and I were both speakers. I heard him say something like, “Well, the Rwandan government’s plan to prosecute all the perpetrators of the genocide is going ahead very well indeed. We’re most pleased with their diligence. However, there is a bit of a backlog there, with currently around 135,000 suspects in jail and awaiting trial… And so far, unfortunately, the government has very little capacity to try them, so some of them have been there for more than five years already without having the chance to get into a courtroom… ”
And I thought, Oh my G-d, that’s huge! Especially given that the whole population of the country was then somewhere under 8 million. So I came away from the conference determined to start looking into it… and… and…
So when do I get to write the mega-long piece about Palestinian politics that I’ve promised to Deb Chasman at Boston review, you may ask?
Erm… maybe on the 6-hour train-ride going up to NYC this Sunday? Alternatively, I could reframe the piece from being mega-long to being short, sharp, and elegantly composed? Nah. That sounds even harder… Don’t worry, I’ll think of something… (Maybe blogging less could be an option?)
Palestinian polls, etc.
As part of the research for the big piece I’m writing this week on Palestine, I’ve found a couple of good portals to Palestinian polling and other info. This is a portal from Hanan Ashrawi’s Miftah Center, that strives to aggregate data from all the Palestinian polling centers. It doesn’t totally succeed, because it doesn’t (yet?) include this poll, conducted March 9-11 by the An-Najah National University Center for Opinion Polls and Survey Studies, which has some interesting data…
Of course, the Palestinian pollsters all came in for huge criticism recently for not having forecast the Hamas victory in the January elections. Dr. Nabil Kukali of the Beit Sahour-based PCPO tried to address this issue in this early-February report. I didn’t find totally convincing his claim there that the range of degrees of support that the opinion pollsters had found for Hamasshortly before the election, which were between 29% and 35%, “which lies … on the tolerated edge of the margin of error.” Hamas’s final tally was 44% (of the national vote.) H’mmm.
But still, it was brave and honest of Kukali to try to reflect publicly on the problem, which is more than I’ve seen any of the others do.
I have addressed what I call the “person with the clipboard problem” in doing any opinion surveying, e.g. here, before. In addition, I believe cold-call-type, individualized opinion surveying has many more pitfalls than its practicioners generally admit. (For example, I nearly always refuse to participate, as a matter of principle and personal privacy, in any telephone-based opinion surveys. Call me ornery if you want. But if there’s another chunk of people out there like me in this respect, as I’m sure there is, what does this do to the “validity” of such polls?) So I think we’d all do well to take such polls with more than a few grains of salt… What one can perhaps discern from them is trends, at best. (Even if the trend in question is merely one of resistance to poll-answering?)
But I digress.
Another interesting site I found in the course of this small research is Zajel, a useful looking news aggregator produced by the An-Najah University public relations department. Given the fact that, as Jonathan has told us, in the new Hamas-dominated cabinet, “At least four of the 24 ministers are drawn from the Najah faculty,” the contents of this site– which looks to be well maintained– could give us a window into what is on the minds of people within Najah’s general milieu.
Fabulous local peace demo today
The Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice held a fabulous peace demonstration today. We gathered outside Thomas Jefferson’s Rotunda bulding at the north end of the University of Virginia “Grounds” and then walked the 2/3 mile along Main Street to the downtown. There were about 250 of us. (My friend David Slezak sat by the side of the road and counted us.)
I had found an old collection of our peace signs in the back of my garage. They augmented the ones we use every week on our Thursday peace vigil– and we also had some really snappy new “Wage Peace” yard signs that CCPJ is selling/distributing. It was kind of poignant to see some of the old signs that expressed horror over the fact that the number of US dead had reached “1,000.”
When we got downtown, our numbers swelled a bit more. Bill Anderson, the President of CCPJ, gave a great speech. Then a dozen members of the C’ville Women’s Choir sang some really moving a capella numbers. There was a bit more singing; a man from the local Native-American community spoke a bit, and that was about it.
My friend Sarah reminded us that at the peace demo this time last year there were 55 participants.
I have to say it feels so great to me, after a big trip like the one I made to Israel and Palestine, to come back home– home to Bill-the-spouse and the dog; home to the Charlottesville Friends Meeting (Quakers); and home to all my buddies in CCPJ.
The one notable problem in today’s peace demo, though, was the near-total absence of University of Virginia undergrads. There were a few grad students, but just about none of the younger students. What a pity… We had some great younger kids, though. A couple of them held up home-made signs saying “Bush is stinky.” I think our oldest participant was Jay Worrall, a stalwart of the local movements for social justice, inter-racial reconciliation, and peace who turned 90 earlier this month. (Jay is also a beloved member of our Quaker Meeting.)
Will there still be US troops in Iraq a year from now? I regret to say that I expect so. But if there are, then you can bet that CCPJ will be organizing another march.
ICC “gets” its first man
I just wrote a post over at Transitional Justice Forum about the ICC get its hands on its first indictee. He is Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I raise a question there as to whether the timing of this is in some way a reaction to the fiascos of (1) the death of Milosevic and (2)the continuing deterioration of Saddam’s trial in Baghdad, both of which developments have started to show that the broad “project” of using high-profile war-crimes trials to try to help heal grave political conflict has not been as successful as many in the human-rights movement previously hoped…
I’ll be doing an hour-long call-in show on this issue, on some west-coast (US) -based radio station, later this week. Heck, I should probably get some more details about that so I can invite you all to tune in… All this is connected to the article I have on international war-crimes trials in the current issue of Foreign Policy.
Btw, I have now found a late-proof PDF version of this article and have posted it into the archive here, with a link on the JWN sidebar. (Readers should simply ignore the meaningless Latin, which is used there as a space-holder… Also, the blank spaces on the pages, which are where the mag’s ads go.)
So now you can comment on the FP piece, here– or on my post on the ICC, over there at TJF.
Marking this anniversary
One of the best ways to mark the third anniversary of this war: go read this, by Riverbend.
Another good way to do so, given the many organic links between the Iraq war and the Palestinian-Israeli situation: go read Laila’s description of the noose of Israel’s punitive economic siege tightening around Gaza.
Thank G-d for the blogosphere, which brings us these fresh, un-mediated voices of people– including talented observers and writers who are women— who are living in zones of conflict and stress.
The other thing I’m going to do today to mark the war anniversary, is take part in our local pro-peace march here in C’ville.
Zahhar as FM: it’s official
Here‘s Jazeera English’s report on the new PA cabinet list. Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar is, as was earlier predicted, the new Foreign Minister-designate. Which makes my recent interview with him all the more relevant.
Jazeera tells us that Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister-designate, told a joint news conference on Sunday that:
- “I met Brother Abu Mazen (Abbas) and officially submitted to him the list of the cabinet”…
“The president is going to study the make-up of the government and its programme,” he said, adding that the atmosphere of the meeting had been “positive”.
The 24-member cabinet includes one woman and one Christian.
I wish Hamas had done a bit better on both those counts. Of course, the fact that the US and Israel mounted threats and other forms of pressure against many non-Hamas parties and individuals, in an attempt to have them not join a Hamas-led government, means that Haniya and Co. probably didn’t have a whole lot of qualified female or Christian ministrables to choose from.
Note: these transliterations of the names as used here are probably not definitive. Some of them look very weird to me. Including I am still convinced that Zahhar needs two “h”s.
Iraq war launch on trial in Britain
Three years into the US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Blair government’s decision to join the invasion effort is on trial in an obscure courtroom in Aldershot, west of London.
The actual case is a military-law prosecution of a New Zealand-born RAF medic called Malcolm Kendall-Smith, who is being tried for refusing to be deployed on a further tour to Iraq (which would be his third.) The charge is that he’s “refusing to obey a lawful command”. His defense is that the order to deploy is not lawful because– as new papers recently revealed in Britain seem to indicate– the original order to launch the war in which he’s being asked to participate was itself not lawful.
The dedicated NZ journo Jon R. Stephenson had a piece in today’s Sunday Star-Times describing the case, which continues.
Kendall-Smith’s case is particularly interesting to me because there was another New Zealander, 90 years ago, who took exemplary and extremely brave actions in pursuit of his desire to be treated as a conscientious objector to all war. He was Archibald Baxter, a Christianity-inspired pacifist who was subjected to the most horrendous punishments and abuses by the New Zealand Army, which refused to recognize anyone’s right to be a Conscientious Objector (CO) at the time.
Including, they sent Baxter to the front in France, completely against his will; and when he refused orders there to wear a uniform they gave him “Field Punishment Number 1” (I think it was), which essentially involved tying him nearly naked to a pole in a yard for a number of days, in a snowstorm.
Like Kendall-Smith, Baxter came from Dunedin in the South Island. Here‘s a link to info about Baxter’s very moving memoir.
… So I’m pretty sure that Kendall-Smith won’t face any punishment as brutal as that one. Indeed, according to this piece in The Independent, former SAS soldier Ben Griffin, who recently resigned because of his objections to the war, “had expected to face a court martial for his refusal to serve– but instead was discharged with a glowing testimonial.”
Does Kendall-Smith’s defense have any chance of succeeding? It seems doubtful. But I wish the trial were getting more coverage in the MSM in both the UK and the US. Here, though, is a fairly full report from today’s Independent.
Interview with Zahhar
AP is
reporting
today that Mahmoud Zahhar, one of the co-founders of Hamas, “most likely will be named foreign minister, according to a preliminary
list of Cabinet ministers given to The Associated Press by officials in Hamas
and the PFLP.”
So I thought I should quickly write up the interview I conducted with Dr.
Zahhar in his mosque-side Gaza home, after the end of evening prayers on
March 6. In it, he oozed self-confidence, and a determination that
the Hamas government would not be making the kinds of concessions to Israel
and the west that were what, in the view of many Hamas supporters, had
led Mahmoud Abbas’s Fateh Party into such a non-productive and humiliating
dead end.
Zahhar described a Hamas program that for the next two years would focus
on rebuilding the Palestinians’ own society as much as possible, while quite possibly redirecting Gaza’s economic links away from Israel
and towards Egypt, and that would not necessarily involve any negotiations at all
with Israel. At one point, when I asked if Hamas could do anything
to help reassure Israelis, he answered flatly, “They should be scared,
because whenever they felt a sense of security they felt it would be okay
to make aggressions… When they felt insecurity, was when they withdrew.
And that was a big victory for us.”
We sat in a large, ground-floor reception room, near a corner in which stood
two large flags: the green Hamas flag and the four-colored flag of Palestine.
An aide brought us first coffee, then tea, from a small kitchen at
the far end of the room.
Next to the kitchen I could see, incongruously, a small, beat-up Japanese
sedan parked in an indoor garage that was not walled off from the reception
room at all. At one point, Zahhar pointed to it. “That’s
my car,” he said. “Did you see the expensive cars that the Fateh leaders
drive?” Later, he said, “The people saw the sacrifice that the Hamas
leaders made for the people’s interest.” He himself lost his son, Khaled,
who was killed, along with a Zahhar bodyguard, when Israeli F-16s dropped
an 1,100-pound bomb on his home in September 2003. That bombing was ordered
the day after Hamas suicide bombers killed 15 young people– including a
number of soldiers– at two locations inside Israel.
Zahhar was at the door of his home when the big bomb dropped. He, his
wife, and one of their daughters were among those injured in the bombing.
He speaks English well. (I think he received some of his training as
a physician in Britain.) We exchanged greetings, and I asked how he
was. He sounded happy and confident as he responded, “I feel good today.”
He referred to some far-reaching constitutional and administrative
changes that the lame-duck, Fateh-dominated Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) enacted February 13, just before it dissolved and made way for the new PLC, elected January 25, in which Hamas held 74 of the 132 seats.
He said,
Tom Fox’s last journey
Susan (Dancewater) over at Today in Iraq has posted the text of an email she got from Doug Pritchard, the Toronto-based co-director of the Christian Peacemaker teams, about Tom’s last journey.
Did you know that CPT still has an active (remaining) team in Iraq, which as of mid-February had seven members? You can read about some of their activities here.
Anyway, here’s Doug’s email:
- The U.S. Embassy arranged for Beth Pyles, a member of the CPT Iraq team, to travel to Anaconda, and she was able to keep vigil with Tom for the next 36 hours until his departure. Meanwhile, CPT’ers Rich Meyer and Anne Montgomery traveled to Dover [air-force base in Delaware, US, to which the bodies of deceased US soldiers are sent], and have been in the vicinity since 5 p.m. Mar. 11, keeping vigil and awaiting Tom’s arrival. Pyles was present on the tarmac at Anaconda as Tom’s coffin was loaded onto the plane for Dover. She reported that his coffin was draped in a U.S. flag. This is unusual for a civilian, but Tom may not have been uncomfortable with this since he had always called his nation to live out the high ideals which it professed. Iraqi detainees who die in US custody are also transported to Dover for autopsies and forensics. On this plane, right beside Tom’s coffin, was the coffin of an Iraqi detainee. So Tom accompanied an Iraqi detainee in death, just as he had done so often in life.
At Tom’s departure, Pyles read out from the Gospel of John, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it” (1:5). In honour of Tom’s Iraqi companion, she spoke the words called out repeatedly from the mosques of Baghdad during the Shock and Awe bombing campaign in March 2003, “allah akhbar” (God is greater). She concluded the sending with words from the Jewish scriptures, “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21).
Dawn broke. The contingent of Puerto Rican soldiers nearby saluted. The plane taxied away. Venus, the morning star, shone brightly overhead as the night faded away. Godspeed you, Tom, on your final journey home to your family and friends.
Trouble in Fatehland
Oops, I knew the Israeli raid on the Jericho jail was a major humiliation for Abu Mazen, but now AP is reporting that several officials in his own Fateh Party are calling on him to resign because of it.
The report says:
- During a meeting of senior Fatah officials Thursday evening, several suggested to Abbas that he resign and dissolve the Palestinian Authority, said Taysir Nasrallah, a senior Fatah activist from the West Bank city of Nablus.
Were the Palestinian government to be dissolved, Israel would be forced to step in as an occupying power and assume direct responsibility for the Palestinians. A dissolution of the Palestinian Authority also would render the victory of the Islamic militant Hamas in January parliament elections meaningless.
Well, who knows how this will turn out? Personally, I doubt strongly if Abu Mazen will do this. But if he did, would Hamas then be in a position of trying to preserve the PA?