Syrian crackdown, conference canceled

I got a sad email this morning, from a staff assistant at a reform-oriented organization in Damascus called the Tharwa Project. Just ten days ago, Dr. Samer al-Ladkany, the assistant director of Tharwa, had invited me to participate in a big conference Tharwa was organizing in Damascus under the title “”Recognizing the Multicultural Society for Successful Democratic Transitions.” Ladkany was inviting me to speak about some aspects of South Africa’s historic transition from minority-based rule to full democracy, and naturally I was pretty excited at the prospect of doing so. After all, in Syria power has for many decades now been quite disproportionately concentrated in the hands of the Alawite community that makes up roughly 11% of the national population– and it desperately needs to find a peaceful way to transition to a fully inclusive, accountable, and rights-respecting form of national rule…
In today’s email, the staff assistant wrote:

    I must ask you to put everything on hold for right now. I am very sorry, but we are having some problems here in Damascus. I am not completely sure what is going on, but I went to work today, just to find out that we have been closed down…permanently. The worst part is, I have not been able to contact the director here in Damascus.

I guess that would be Ladkany. The “big boss” at Tharwa– the organization’s founder, Ammar Abdel-Hamid– left Syria for the US around a month ago, after being warned by the security services that he should do so.
I am still hoping that ways can be found to urge Bashar al-Asad’s regime to– as I put it in this JWN post a couple of weeks ago–

    “do a Frederik De Klerk” — that is, to find ways to repair the broken fabric within his own country by opening up serious political negotiations with his political opponents from the country’s majority population.

Obviously, right now, the prospects for that happening look significantly bleaker.
The latest move against the Tharwa Project in Damascus was, sadly, fairly predictable. Last Thursday, Pres. Asad made a strongly nationalist speech in which he came out swinging against Washington, and against the Washington-pushed activities of UN investigator detlev Mehlis. Al-Hayat’s Ibrahim Hamidi interpreted what was happening as Asad “preparing Syria for the probable imposition of international sanctions.” (As reported here.)
Then on Saturday, the mukhabarat (security services) arrested Kamal Labwani, a Syrian democracy activist who had just returned to his country from the US. While in the US, Labwani met in the White House with with U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor J. D. Crouch. He also did an interview for the (US government-operated) al-Hurra TV and other media outlets.
So it definitely looks as if the regime is in a defiant, hunkering-down mode. I think that’s a great pity. The well-connected and Damascus-based Syria expert Josh Landis has written on his blog, “Syrians will put up with sanctions lite if the government moves ahead purposefully with internal reform designed to free the economy.” I largely agree with that assessment. I also think that– like the international isolation that South Africa’s apartheid regime faced in the late 1980s– Syria’s growing international isolation today might well act to help persuade people at the heart of the regime that wide-ranging internal political reform is not only a good tactic, but also, a necessary policy if the interests of their nation and their sub-national community are to be preserved.
Josh does add, it is true, “Of course, it is hard to do this when being isolated.” I would add to that, that it would be extremely hard for the Syrian regime to open up the political space that is needed for reform when it is not only the subject of very hostile intent from the USA, but also in an actual and unresolved state of war with Israel.
Well, I have a lot of other thoughts about this whole subject. I should also, probably, take the opportunity of either writing something here on JWN, or writing something new in al-Hayat, to set down some of the things I would have said at the conference in damascus, if it were held.
Yes, there is much that is parallel between the experiences of the voteless majority in South Africa under apartheid and the powerless majority in Syria under the Asads. But there are also several signal differences. One is the seeming absence of any inclusive and highly disciplined opposition party on the model of the ANC. Actually, I’m not sure if the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood might reach some of the necessary criteria (though a problem there regarding “inclusivity”.) As for the secular-liberalizing opposition networks, they all seem to me to be dominated by prima donnas and individualists. In the latter category, I’m afraid I would probably have to include the Syrian liberalizer who’s best known in Washington DC– Ammar Abdel-Hamid, the founder of the Tharwa Project…. In his blog, Abdel-Hamid has called for the opposition to build “networks, networks, networks”. (Calling for the creation of single, disciplined party or front organization would, I think, be more effective.) But even regarding “networks” he doesn’t actually seem to be very respectful of the other people who might be in such a network. In this recent post he summarily dismissed “the Syrian opposition” as being “weak and idiotic.”
Altogether, a story that is tragic at many, many levels.
Most important, now, though: What can we do to try to ensure the safety of Samer Ladkany?

Eric Marliere on the French riots

    Ace JWN commenter Christiane tells us that
    Le Courrier International
    has an interesting interview with a sociologist specializing in the life
    of the suburbs here. She even sent us a translation.

    Thanks so much, Christiane! I am really glad to have something fresh, interesting, and well-informed to put up here– especially because I have been really busy leading a real life these past couple of days. Too complex to write about here, but I’ve had many experiences that I can reflect on, over time. So without further ado…

Interview:


Religion has nothing to do with the (French) riots

To sociologist
Eric Marlière, a researcher at
the CESDIP1)
and the author,
among other books, of Young in the suburbs, diversity of biographies or
common fate?2), there is no relationship between the riots
shaking the suburbs and the fact that the young men belong to the Muslim
culture.


Q. On many occasions, these past days, in the
European media notably, we could read that the riots having burst in the
suburbs are mainly the fact of small groups of young Muslims who in this
way want to fight their personal jihad against the hated symbols of the secular
Republic. Is that true ?


A. We can’t say that.
The violences are sparked by social motives, not by religious ones, even
if many of the youth launching them are effectively
of North African origin and thus we can suppose – because there are no statistics
on this matter – that they are of Muslim religion. They are sons of immigrated
workers, frustrated by the impossibility to become workers one day by turn,
because of a social exclusion lasting twenty-thrirty years, because of discriminations
and of the racism they are suffering every days
. The fact that they are Muslims is absolutely unimportant. That’s not the
question.


Q. What kind of role are the religious Muslim authorities playing in the
riots ?


A. The
clerics tend to stay aside of the violences, they don’t take part in them,
they don’t enter in the political debate. Even the most extremists, a tiny
minority, are keeping a low profile these days, and anyway, they are marginalized
by the most part of the the Muslim population. Sometimes, the local political
leaders may ask the imams for an intervention, but they mainly want them
to use their moral authority in order to calm the youths
and to remember them that Islam condemns violence and anarchy, like
other monotheists religions.


Q. What is the youths’ profile ?


A. They aren’t thugs. The discontent is also expressed by young graduates
who would like to enter in the active life but don’t succeed because the
doors of the employement world stay closed to them. These youths
 share a deep feeling of economic injustice, which crystallizes in
the riots. They feel socially insecure in
France
, as if they were an internal enemy in their own country. That’s why I think
that we aren’t facing an ethnic conflict, but a social conflict, animated
by youths of the working classes who have no future
perspectives.


Gian Paolo Accardo

__________________________


Notes


1)
http://www.cesdip.org/
The CESDIP, Centre de recherches sociologiques
sur le droit et les institutions pénales (aka Center of sociological research
about law and penal institutions) is a public academic institute engaged
both in academic teaching and research.


2) Eric Marlière « Jeunes en cité,
diversité des trajectoires ou destin commun ? » (L’Harmattan, 2005)
http://tinyurl.com/9h32q

Jordan and regional geopolitics

Jordan, location of Wednesday’s very lethal bombings at three hotels, is in many ways a highly improbable country. It was created in the post-WW-1 carve-up of that part of the previous Ottoman Empire– primarily to be given as a sort of “consolation prize” to a branch of the Hashemite family that had previously been offered thet part of western Saudi Arabia that contains the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina…
But wouldn’t you know it, the warrior-dynast Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud insisted on staying on in that part of the Arabian peninsula. Insisted it belonged to his family, not anyone else’s. (And certainly that it wasn’t for the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas to give it away to anyone else.). So the Hashemites were left to wander like Moses in the desert…
But not for very long. The Brits rapidly installed one Hashemite leader in “Transjordan”, as it was then called, and they tried to install another in Damascus. But the French weren’t having any of that, so that one was shuttled over and recycled into Iraq, instead…
You get the picture? Behind a rhetoric that intermittently talked about the need for the “self-determination” of local Arab populations– as against their earlier rule by Istanbul– the British Colonial Office chappies (and uber-chapette Gertrude Bell) were busy playing “musical kings” all around the region… “And when the music stops you all stay where you are.”
Layered onto that, of course, was the (gasp!) imperial rivalry between the British and French. Did you ever look at a “political map” of this region and wonder why (1) so many of the borders between the states there are perfectly straight lines, or (2) why there’s a funny squarish tab of “Jordan” that extends east-north-east a little bit, up to join Iraq? All that is the result of intense negotiations– between the British and the French. (Self-determination? Well, I guess it depends what the meaning of “self” is.)
As for that tab that links Jordan to Iraq, the explanation for that is quite simple. It’s called an oil pipeline. If you drive along that long, extremely boring desert road there you pass through places with the quaint “names” of H-2, H-3, H-4, etc… Pumping stations that became way-stations and then ragged little towns.
Well, in the late 1990s, the Project for a New American Century and other pro-Likud neocons started pushing for their own, more recent version of Middle Eastern “musical kings”. This was the approach sometimes known as “Everybody Move Over One” (see, e.g., here.) Under EMOO, Israel would get to keep the West Bank. The Palestinians– who have been squeezed very hard in the West Bank since 1967 and have long constituted a numerical majority in Jordan– would “get” Jordan. And the Hashemites would play another round of musical kings and “get” Iraq.
Except it hasn’t really worked out that way yet, has it? Instead, what we seem to be seeing in the region is the unfolding of an EMOO theory that– like all the indigenous writing systems of this region– moves from right to left, rather than left to right. The Iranians– who didn’t even really feature in EMOO-Mark 1– have majorly extended their influence westward into Iraq. That has squeezed the Sunni Arabs of Iraq… And now, using the network of linkages that’s always existed between western Iraq and Jordan, the chaos and violence from Iraq have been bleeding over into Jordan, too.
No, I am not saying that this means that in the near future the Palestinians will suddenly be able to push westward back against the Likud and establish their own power in the West Bank. But I do think we can draw a few broader and more general lessons from what has been happening:

Continue reading “Jordan and regional geopolitics”

Jordan (and again, Iraq)

Do I need to write anything here to note how grotesque the thinking was of the people who organized and undertook suicide bombings against the three hotels in Jordan yesterday.
In at least one of the hotels, most of the people were killed were participants in a wedding feast. It is widely known in all the Arab countries that have big US-franchised hotels that one principal use of the ballrooms in such hotels is for wedding parties held by well-heeled (and sometimes not so well-heeled) members of the local community. Why bomb them? Why bomb civilian targets at all?
If the “grievance” of the bombers is with members of the local business or political community who might be profiting from the war in Iraq, there would be so many better ways of organizaing against that phenomenon. Through mass, nonviolent social action to force political change at the national level, for example…
But killing participants in a wedding feast? That is simply inhumane.
59 people died in those three bombings.
And today in Iraq, bombers killed 42 people at a restaurant… troops found 27 decomposing bodies near the Iranian border… and the US military proudly announced it had killed 37 “insurgents”.
Visiting British Foreign Minister Jack Straw was quoted as saying, “This is a very exciting time to visit Iraq.”
Tasteless? I’d say.

Saddam trial: more questions

On Tuesday, Adil Mohammad Abbas Zubeidi, one of the defense lawyers working at the Iraqi Special tribunal (IST) that’s trying Saddam Hussein and eight of his top henchmen, was gunned down in Baghdad and killed. Another defense lawyer, Thamer Hamoud al-Khuzaie, was also shot in the incident, but he escaped death and was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.
Zubeidi was the second of the the 13 defense lawyers to be killed in less than a month.
Tuesday’s incident raised yet again the key question as to whether a “fair trial” can be held for Saddam and his top associates in the anarchic and death-stalked city that is Baghdad today. Richard Goldstone, who was the first Chief Prosecutor of the Int’l Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was quoted by AP as saying, “It is just impossible to have a public trial if you can’t guarantee the safety of witnesses, judges or defense counsel.” ICTY, you may recall, has been sited in The Hague since its founding in 1993.
US-based legal specialists who have been watching– and in at least one case, also advising– the people running the Saddam trial now have their own blog. It’s called Grotian Moment: The Saddam Hussein Trial Blog. (The reference there is to Hugo Grotius, 1583-1645, an early-modern philosopher whose work formed a foundation for many of the principles of present-day international law– and of European imperialism, too, by the way.)
So anyway, on Tuesday, the GM blog’s Michael Scharf– a law prof who has also worked as a key advisor for the IST– wrote a post on the blog asking, “Are the Murders of Defense Counsel going to derail the trial?” and answering his own question… “No.”
Scharf makes this amazing “blame the victim” argument:

    the defense attorneys in part brought this tragic situation upon themselves when they elected to have their faces and identities broadcast during the first day of the trial, and when they subsequently refused to accept the Iraqi Government and U.S. military’s offers of security. Now they are seeking to exploit the tragic — but not unforeseeable — murders of their colleagues in an attempt to derail the proceedings….

Well, that’s not quite as bad as the Iraqi PM’s spokesman Laith Kubba, who according to that Newsday piece linked to at the top of this post,

    suggested that Hussein’s own supporters might have killed the attorneys to disrupt the trial. “We know that Saddam and his followers are ready to do anything … to block the work of the court,” he said.

Scharf concludes his blog post with this:

    I think that the judges will end up dealing with this problem by requiring the defense counsel to accept US military protection. If the defense lawyers continue to refuse to do so and to boycott the trial, the judges may tell them that as duly appointed defense counsel, they are officers of the court, and have a responsibility to accept the security and continue to participate in the trial, or they can face sanctions such as fines, imprisonment, and disbarment, and they can be replaced by court-appointed defense counsel who will not play these kinds of high-risk games in an effort to disrupt the proceedings.

His piece there on the GM blog is twinned with one from his colleague Laura Dickinson, who makes the case for moving the trial out of Iraq, even if only temporarily.
Of course, as I have argued both here and over on the Transitional Justice Forum blog a number of times (like, here), the whole question of holding the trial inside Iraq at this time is intensely political. It can’t be divorced from entanglement with the controversies swirling around the political-legal status of the US troop presence in Iraq, or from those around the status of the Iraqi transitional authorities that were created through a US-designed mechanism.
The IST’s “founding myth” is that it is an Iraqi court, and indeed that it plays a special role in defining the nature of the new independent state of Iraq. (What it notably doesn’t seem to establish very well is the important principle of the indpendence of the judiciary from the executive power.) John Burns wrote in the NYT yesterday, about the proposal to relocate the trials outside of Iraq,

    That proposal has been repeatedly rejected by Iraqi officials, and by American Justice Department lawyers who advise them, who have said holding the trial in Iraq is a test of Iraq’s sovereignty and of progress toward responsible government after the horrors of the Hussein era.

Note that use of the term “advise”.
Burns’s report was relatively good though. He described the arguments made by the defense lawyers more fairly than many other US reporters. For example,

    Reporters who went to the Shaab district of Baghdad after the killing [on Oct. 19] of the first lawyer, Mr. Janabi, found witnesses who said they had heard some of the men who stormed Mr. Janabi’s office saying they were from the Interior Ministry. Mr. Janabi’s body turned up shortly afterward on wasteland nearby, with gunshot wounds to the head.
    “I got a phone call from Thamir al-Khuzaie,” Mr. Dulaimi [that is, saddam’s own main lawyer] said, “and he told me that the car carrying the men who sprayed them with bullets today was followed by a police car. Thamir said the police car picked both of them up after the shooting, and took them to the American hospital.
    “It only goes to show how cleverly they coordinate these attacks. It is the Interior Ministry that has offered to provide us with protection against these attacks, but it is the ministry itself that is planning the killings.”

Burns is not so good, though, it seems to me, in doing any investigative reporting into who it actually is that controls all of the levers of power in this court’s proceedings. Who has physical control of the evidence? Who controls the IT systems? Who has physical custody of the prisoners? We really need to know how truly “Iraqi” this court is– or, how American.
Anyway, it seems to me at this point there is no way to foresee any satisfactory end to the question of “What will happen to Saddam Hussein?” The trial is supposed to resume on November 28. One scenario is that that will happen, the judges will rush through the Dujail case, announce a death sentence, and shortly afterwards Saddam will be executed. Other scenarios could have the case dragging on for a lot, lot longer, and possibly even disintegrating into increasing chaos over time.
One thing seems certain: this will not be the kind of clean-cut, “exemplary” legal proceeding with which one would like to see a newly democratic Iraq inaugurated.

CSM column on France (and Europe)

It’s been a really busy week. Monday, I had a deadline for my CSM column for this week. I started out writing something about the Middle East, and at around 11:30 a.m. realized I’d far prefer to be writing about the riots in France. So that’s what I did. It’s in today’s paper. (Also, here.)
Tuesday, I had to work on the editor’s suggestions for revisions of a piece I have in the January-February issue of Foreign Policy magazine. FP is a classy mag published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I haven’t published there since, oh my gosh, 1983. So this is a nice thing to do. The piece is basically a wrap-up of some of the big conclusions of my book on Transitional Justice in Africa. The darn thing is, though, that originally it was meant to be in the current (Nov.-Dec.) issue. So I went final on the text sometime in August. And actually, quite a bit has happened since then– especially regarding the International criminal Court (ICC) which issued its first indictments last month.
Well, I guess I’m glad they delayed running the piece by two months. They did it to accommodate late-breaking hurricane-related items. At least this way, my piece will also address these “pioneering” ICC indictments. But trying to give it, basically, three months’ worth of updating was more work than I expected.
Most of which concerns Uganda, by the way. If you want to find out more, read this post I put up on the Transitional Justice Forum blog last week.
Anyway, that’s a good part of why I’ve been feeling busy this week. Couple of other reasons, too.
And then, so much has been happening in the world this week! Where to start? Ahmad? Judy? Jordan? Syria? Iraq? Palestine? Cheney? Torture?
I guess one definite trend I’m seeing is the retrenchment of Blair’s political power inside the UK system, and that of Cheney’s power in this country. It’s slow. But it looks steady. Let’s see how broad we can make the agenda of the current “re-thinking”…

Dems win in Virginia, New Jersey

Our fine Commonwealth of Virginia was one of two states in which the governorship was being contested in today’s elections… and the Democratic candidate won! Great news! Especially since his GOP opponent had specially brought Bush into the state yesterday to try to give his campaign a last-minute boost.
Heh-heh-heh!
The winner is Tim Kaine, who’s currently the Lieutenant-Governor, and before that was Mayor of Richmond. Kaine is probably a little more progressive than the present (also Dem) governor, Mark Warner, who campaigned hard for him. The outcome is good for a number of reasons. Better to have a Democratic governor than yet another of the stream of incompetent GOP governors who preceded Mark Warner. (There’s a one-term limit on the governorship here.) Also it showed that Bush has bad electoral karma here, while Mark Warner’s seems to be good…
In New Jersey, the only other state where there was a gubernatorial race, the Dems also won… And Schwarzenegger did pretty poorly with his special “Initiatives” over in Califormia.
Here in Virginia, our Lieutenant-Governor candidate, Leslie Byrne, also won. Maybe it’s time we had a woman governor here!

    Update Wed. 10:2 a.m.: from the latest WaPo listing it seems that Byrne got defeated 51-49% while the race for state Attorney-General is still too close to call. The Dem candidate for that one is our local State Senator here, Creigh deeds.

I made the eight-minute walk along to our local polling station this afternoon. What a pleasant experience. My friend Liz Kutchai was staffing the Dems’ table near the door. She gave me some advice about the one electoral issue I wasn’t sure about. (Whether one should support or oppose the proposal for an elected school board in the city.) As we stood there, our Sherriff– an African-American woman called Cornelia Johnson– came up looking very spiffy in her brown uniform. Cornelia was up for re-election today, but stood unopposed. Mitch Van Yahres, who has just stepped down after many years as our delegate in the Virginia House of Delegates, was also there.
The Virginia legislature sits on a strange schedule: something like four weeks one year and six weeks the next year — that is, holding the longer sessions the year they consider the budget. The sessions are held in January and February. I think the idea is that people can be both farmers and legislators… But most of them nowadays are lawyers.
This Saturday we’re having the annual conference of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty here in town. Mitch has always been a stalwart opponent of the death penalty– but in a definite minority on the issue, in Richmond.
It’s a funny old situation here in this state. The Republicans have a pretty strong lock on both houses of the state legislature, but now we’ll be having the second Democratic governor in a row. Party politics in this country really is a strange beast, which I’m still struggling to understand…

Meyer’s memoirs

I wish I’d been in London to grab the first copies of the Guardian’s version of Sir Christopher Meyer’s memoirs. Sure, I know I could have gotten them on-line just as fast– or faster. But still, there’s something delicious about ink on paper.
Here is the Guardian’s portal to the serialization.
I think it’s unprecedented for a recently retired British ambassador to publish such a frank memoir about his recent service. I seem to recall that the Blair government tried to prevent publication of the whole book (which isn’t out yet, I don’t think.) But here, anyway, are the first parts of the serialization.
The main highlight so far is the considered judgment of this seasoned diplomat that Blair had potential leverage with Bush that he could have used to win a better war plan– but that Blair failed to use it.
This, from one of yesterday’s excerpts:

    By the early autumn of 2002, despite Blair’s earlier expressions of unconditional support, Britain should have made its participation in any war dependent on a fully worked-out plan, agreed by both sides, for the rehabilitation of Iraq after Saddam’s demise.
    This would have been the appropriate quid pro quo for Blair’s display of “cojones”. We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise, but the ace up our sleeves was that America did not want to go it alone. Had Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise. Unfortunately, and unavoidably, at precisely this moment, political energy in London had become consumed by a titanic struggle to keep public opinion, parliament and the Labour party onside for war. There was little energy left in No 10 to think about the aftermath. Since Downing Street drove Iraq policy, efforts made by the Foreign Office to engage with the Americans on the subject came to nothing.

He then suggests clearly that the “diplomatic” advice Blair was getting from the Foreign Office was crowded out in Balir’s mind by the more “seductive” kinds of info he was getting from his military and intel people…

    The more interesting question is whether No 10, relying heavily – maybe too heavily – on the views of these military and intelligence advisers, as a consequence underestimated its political leverage and ability to affect the course of events. I believe the US and the UK would have stood a better chance of going to war in good order had they planned the campaign not for the spring of 2003, but the autumn – the next spell of cool weather in Iraq.
    Besides giving more time to prepare for the aftermath of war, a more deliberate timetable might have made it possible to reach agreement on a second UN resolution. Once that happened, Saddam would have known the game was up. It might have sufficiently ratcheted up the pressure to lead to a coup against him or his flight into exile.
    I never interpreted the French refusal to accept the draft of a second resolution as a refusal for ever and a day. In diplomacy, you never say never. Talking to me in private, French officials accuse America and Britain of deliberately exaggerating France’s position to justify going to war without further UN cover. We will know the full truth only when the archives are opened.
    Crucially, a slower timetable for war would have avoided that frantic search for a “smoking gun” between December 2002 and the outbreak of war. By going down that road, the Americans and British shifted the burden of proof from Saddam to themselves. We had to show that he was guilty. This turned out to be a strategic error, which to this day, in the absence of WMD, continues cruelly to torment Blair and Bush.
    It was precisely these pressures which led to the mistakes and misjudgments of the two British dossiers on Saddam’s WMD.
    Enormous controversy surrounds the intelligence on which Blair and Bush relied. I saw a great deal of intelligence material in 2002, and I was myself persuaded that Iraq had WMD.
    There is nothing of which I am aware that Blair said publicly about the intelligence for which he did not have cover either from the joint intelligence committee (JIC) or from its chairman, John Scarlett. If either succumbed to political pressure, that is another story.
    Had I been in Alastair Campbell’s place, I too would have wanted as categorical a public depiction of Saddam’s threat as possible. Equally I would have expected the JIC to be rigorous in telling me how far I could go.
    Tony Blair chose to take his stand against Saddam and alongside Bush from the highest of high moral ground. It is the definitive riposte to the idea that Blair was merely the president’s poodle, seduced though he and his team always appeared to be by the proximity and glamour of American power.But the high moral ground, and the pure white flame of unconditional support to an ally in service of an idea, have their disadvantages.
    They place your destiny in the hands of the ally. They fly above the tangled history of Sunni, Shia and Kurd. They discourage descent into the dull detail of tough and necessary bargaining: meat and drink to Margaret Thatcher, but, so it seemed, uncongenial to Tony Blair.

Well, lots more to read and reflect on there. But I need to run.

Incarceration in Africa

The New York Times had an excellent, fairly long piece of reporting today on the situation in many (or most?) of the prisons in Africa. (Also here.) Michael Wines, who wrote it, focuses much of his attention on the situation in one prison in Lilongwe, Malawi– his dateline. But the article also has some other more general info about the terrible state of people caught in the carceral system elsewhere in Africa:

    This is life in Malawi’s high-security prisons, Dickens in the tropics, places of cruel, but hardly unusual punishment. Prosecutors, judges, even prison wardens agree that conditions are unbearable, confinements intolerably long, justice scandalously uneven.
    But by African standards, Malawi is not the worst place to do time. For many of Africa’s one million prison inmates, conditions are equally unspeakable – or more so.
    The inhumanity of African prisons is a shame that hides in plain sight. Black Beach Prison in Equatorial Guinea is notorious for torture. Food is so scarce in Zambia’s jails that gangs wield it as an instrument of power. Congo’s prisons have housed children as young as 8. Kenyan prisoners perish from easily curable diseases like gastroenteritis.
    When the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights last visited the Central African Republic’s prisons in 2000, it heard that officers had deemed 50 prisoners incorrigible. Then, dispensing with trials, they executed them.
    Even the African Commission’s special representative for inmates has not visited an African prison in 18 months. There is no money, said the representative, Vera Chirwa, a democracy activist who herself spent 12 years in Malawi jails under a dictatorship.
    “The conditions are almost the same,” Ms. Chirwa said. “In Malawi, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in almost every country I have visited. I’ve been to France, and I’ve seen the prisons there. In Africa, they would be hotels.”

Anyone who’s ever read Foucault should understand there’s an intimate connection between “modernity” and the practice of large-scale incarceration. Incarceration, I would add, is an extremely expensive option for societies to choose. In the classic model of it, prisoners are totally removed from society and therefore have to be fed, housed, and clothed by the government. Because they are removed from productive labor, and becauise they are generally able-bodied men of breadwinning age, the incarceration of one individual can result in up to ten family members losing their main means of support… Large-scale incarceration has bad enough longterm social and economic effects in a country like the US, where there are currently more than two million people incarcerated, and a further million employed in guarding them. Imagine what a burden a policy of incarceration places on a very low-income country in Africa…
I first started reflecting deeply on this subject about five years ago, when I learned that in Rwanda, the main policy the government had chosen in order to deal with the aftermath of the 1994 genocide had been one of detaining and incarcerating suspects– and that at that point more than 130,000 of that country’s 7.5 million or so people were still, six years after the end of the genocide, festering in their prisons with only a tiny number of them ever having seen the inside of a courtroom. (If you want to read my really long Boston Review article on that subject, you can find it here.)
When I was working on that article– and later, when I went to Rwanda to check out the situation for myself– I became very impressed with the work being done in several African countries by a small NGO called Penal Reform International. Michael Wines quotes the Malawi-based regional director of Penal Reform International, Marie-Dominique Parent, as saying: “Most African governments spend little on justice, and what little is spent goes mostly to the police and courts… Prisons are at the bottom of the heap.”
He also notes this very disturbing relationship:

    Paradoxically, democracy’s advent has catalyzed the problems of Africa’s prisons. Freedom has permitted lawlessness, newly empowered citizens have demanded order – and governments have delivered.
    Malawi’s prison population has more than doubled since the dictatorship ended in 1994. But its justice system is so badly broken that it is hard to know where to begin repairs…

So what is the answer? To urge governments in Africa to spend more on their prisons and court systems? Or to urge them to find alternatives to incarceration as the main “punishment of choice” in their societies.
I would say: both. But especially, given that the prison systems in most of those countries are in such a rudimentary and inhumane condition, western aid donors should be looking to explore and support the upgrading of the widest possible kinds of alternatives. I mean, there is no particular reason that “modernity” always has to come fully equipped with large prison systems, is there? And at least, in Africa, in most countries there are still some fairly robust indigenous justice and conflict-resolution mechanisms that could be conserved, modernized, and upgraded.
… Anyway, I’m glad that Michael Wines wrote that piece, and that the NYT gave it such a lot of space. So often, liberals in the US think that all that’s needed for people in low-income countries is that we should export all our own kinds of instituions there and then everything would be great. But at the same time we here in the US know that there are a lot of things terribly wrong with our own, ultra-punitive criminal-justice system. So why on earth would we want to export that to anyone? What we should do instead is proactively go out to identify, and seek to strengthen, a whole range of alternatives.

Riots in France persisting

The anger-fueled rioting in the banlieues (suburbs) around Paris and some other big cities in France has gone on every evening for the past ten days now. It seems very diffuse and ill organized and looks really tragic. Who knows at this point if it will harden into some recognizable and lasting social movement supported by the marginalized, mainly immigrant-origin families stuffed into the banlieues?
One of the friends who came to our place for dinner last night commented that while the US news broadcasts he’d seen all tended to focus on the fact that most of those rioters have been Muslim, the BBC had given a lot more stress to the fact that the anger came out of the “housing estates”– that is, to give a socioeconomic interpretation to what was happening.
Here on JWN commenter David made some reference to “the Paris intifada”. That launched an interesting discussion, which didn’t really belong on that post and should anyway have its own post, so I’ll reproduce it at the end of this post.
I’ll just note here that the anger of this generation of mainly French-born young adults from immigrant-origin families seems largely parallel to the anger of their counterparts in the immigrant-origin communities in Britain– though in France, the anger has not yet spawned a violent, Qaeda-linked underground like the one that killed 55 people in the London Underground in July.
Here in the US, members of the “white”-dominated political elite are slowly coming to grips with the idea that the country’s self-image and actual practice of social interactions needs to change to incorporate the facts of the growing empowerment of African-American and other non-white citizens, and the growing empowerment and increasing numbers of Hispanic-cultured citizens, in particular. I see it as a pretty exciting, challenging and open-ended process.
In Europe, the pressing facts of demographic change have been quite a lot slower to become reflected in the self-image and social practice of the “indigenous” and dominant white majorities. I’m not sure whether the proportion of non-“white” residents is noticeably higher in the UK and France than it is in other European countries. But it is certainly interesting that it is in those two countries– the two that maintained the largest overseas empires for so long, and that for so long even defined themselves by reference to their worldwide imperial role– that the children and grandchildren of the formerly colonized have been most bold in staking their claim to equal rights with the indigenes of the metropolis.
Bill the spouse, who has done a lot of research on the modern history of North Africa, suggests that many of the young people now rioting in the banlieues of France may well be the children and grandchildren of the harkis, the Algerian indigenese who had been impressed into the French colonial forces and who, when De Gaulle finally took the French forces out of Algeria, were allowed to retreat with them rather than face the wrath of the FLN.
As anyone who has ever read Fanon will recall, one special feature of French imperialism was the conceit that the French cultural administrators spread within their various colonies that the indigenous people could actually become “French”, if only they could learn the language of Racine and Voltaire with enough flair and become sufficiently au courant with all the latest in Parisian literary thinking. (My ex-spouse, who grew up Lebanese and went to a number of French-run schools in Lebanon, vividly recalls all the pupils being taken out of school on quatorze juillet and given little French flags to wave in the streets as they shouted “Vive la France!”)
So you could see how Algerians or other North Africans who had fought for France against the FLN, then fled to France, and had been raised with this idea that they and their families could actually, seamlessly become French, might find the reality of the situation once arrived there fairly disappointing…. the kind of disappointment that might easily harden over a further generation or two, if most of the members of that community remained on the economic, social, and political margins.
… Social change ain’t easy. Our small city of Charlottesville here in Virginia is nowadays sometimes called by its detractors the “People’s Republic of Charlottesville”. That’s because we have a strongly Democratic-dominated city administration, a general commitment (not always well implemented) to support the full empowerment of the 50% of the city’s residents who are African-Americans, a strong-ish peace movement, and a general commitment to decent, generous, liberal values.
Back in the 1950s, however, the whitefolks who dominated the city council voted to close the city schools rather than accede to the federal government’s demand that the seperate white and black school systems in the city should be integrated. The whitefolks just couldn’t see their sons and daughters getting any benefit– or even, being safe!– if they sat down in the same classrooms with Black kids. The city’s changed a lot– in its self-image, aspriation, and practice–since then. Not enough, I might say. But certainly, significantly.
Are there forces in the “indigenous” white communities in France and the UK who, jointly with immigrant-origin leaders, can spearhead some analogous moves towards far greater inclusivity? I hope so. Certainly, I hope the streets of Europe never ring again to the cries of race-hatred that dominated so many of them back in the 1930s…
Anyway, here are what Christiane (who’s Swiss) and Hammurabi wrote earlier in response to david’s comment about a Paris “intifada”:
Christiane:
Concerning the riots in Paris which are now spreading in other provincial cities, I don’t understand why you call them Intifada. No-one in France name them so, not even the participants, at least I didn’t hear it.
What we have in France has nothing to do with terrorism; it’s a wide social movement which is caused by joblessness and exclusion.
They have much more to do with the right wing policies a la neocons which were imposed on France by Chirac and above all by Sarkozy : many many funds were cut in social programs aimed at integration, while more resources were put on repression. Sarkozy developped a theory of “zero tolerance” which has produced the opposite results.
After an incident (which isn’t yet completely clear but for the fact that two young people who took refuge in an electric transformator died electrocuted – with or without the police chasing them, that is the question) the whole leftover suburbs went in flames. At first they responded to Sarkozy’s provocation, because he named them thugs to be cleaned away. But sure enough if the whole suburbs are now burning since a week, it is for other serious social reasons. Since 1968, I haven’t seen such an important social movement. Hundreds of cars are burned out. And also a police station, some schools and many public busses.
Beside the many social workers and mediators trying to cool the spirits, there are two different groups pushing to the riots : the gangs and drugs dealers holding the different suburbs, who fight to extend their territories and also perhaps, some Islamist activists.
It is not impossible that Islamist movements try to organize this social movement. But it isn’t the only force around. And Muslim movements come with different flavors. I hope that this movement will cause the fall of Sarkozy. It is well possible, because he has been so irresponsible in his provocations. On the other hand when elections take place after riots, people tend rather to vote for the right parties, for the restoration of order.
Hammurabi:
au contraire…Sarkozy understands the need to coopt the Le Pens on the far right (by taking a strong law and order position and on illegal immigration) while making the French citizens from North Africa stakeholders rather than seething “outsiders”…that is why in the home of egalite and French “grandeur”, he favors meaningful affirmative action policies… “I think some people accumulate so many handicaps that if the state does not help them, they have no chance of making it,” he explained. Europeans pride themselves on their commitment to multiculturalism but in practice there is far less of the melting pot diversity that serves as a safety valve on the other side of the Atlantic. He also favors public financing of mosques in the land of banned head scarves.
With high unemployment, an aging nativist population and an increasingly alienated and growing Muslim population, France – like many European countries – faces a demographic challenge not just to funding its generous pension and other social programs but to help prevent Islamic extremists from exploiting the situation.
… [Back to HC] Thanks so much for those contributions. Everyone is warmly invited to continue this conversation here.