A really great article by Nora Bustany in the April 22 WaPo about a group of Lebanese former fighters working together to promote reconciliation.
They were brought together by Initiatives of Change, a non-governmental organization formerly known as the Moral Rearmament Association.
I know that the MRA played an important role in facilitating quiet, behind-the-scenes contacts between French and German opinion leaders after WW2. I hadn’t caught up with their recent work. It looks really interesting.
I can’t write more now (rushing for plane to Philadelphia) but I just note that I’ve been writing quite a bit about a similar initiative– that has gotten former foes to work together doing joint peace-promotion efforts in a Mozambican context– here, here, and in my continuing book-writing project.
Iraq open thread #2
I’m in a real rush today. There was an interesting article in toway’s WaPo by Ann Scott Tyson (embedded). It gave a clear picture of how the US forces have almost zero control of the terrain, just 25 miles out of downotwn Baghdad. (Okay, so there are huge areas of Baghdad itself where they have no control, either.)
I found this portion, where a US Army captain commanding a small position at the south of the “Triangle of Death” is describing his situation to a visiting colonel, particularly interesting:
- Capt. Ryan Seagreaves, of Allentown, Pa., told McMaster that he needed engineers to reinforce and expand his austere base so that there would be room for more Iraqi forces. He said he also needed dirt to fill protective barriers. Iraqi contractors are so terrified to work in the area that a convoy of 10 earth-filled dump trucks recently refused to travel south to McMaster’s base. One driver fainted when told the destination, he said.
Traditionally, when officers in modern armies needed more “dirt” to fortify their position, they would either dig it up themselves or be supplied by their logistics people with military earth-moving equipment to get the job done… Now, they are reliant on outside “contractors” to do even this basic job?
When the British Army suffered terrible losses and strategic setbacks in Iraq back in 1916-17, it was precisely because of completely insufficient logistic support for their forward positions. And yet, in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld blithely thought he could ignore the lessons of history (and all the good advice the uniformed military had tried to give him), and decided to go ahead and conquer Iraq with an ultra-“lean” attacking force, anyway.
The US forces– but also, to a much greater extent, the Iraqi people— have been suffering the chaotic, disastrous consequences of that decision ever since.
I’ve been thinking of trying to write a broad strategic survey of what’s been happening with the war, but I absolutely need to continue concentrating on my Africa book.
So while I do that, I’ll leave the comments thread here for y’all to put in additional news about Iraq.
Iraq: parliamentarian humiliated by US soldiers
This, from AP’s Thomas Wagner a couple of hourse ago:
- in the National Assembly, lawmaker Fattah al-Sheik stood and cried as he described being stopped at a checkpoint on the way to work Tuesday. He claimed an American soldier kicked his car, mocked the legislature, handcuffed him and held him by the neck.
“What happened to me represents an insult to the whole National Assembly that was elected by the Iraqi people. This shows that the democracy we are enjoying is fake,” al-Sheik said. “Through such incidents, the U.S. Army tries to show that it is the real controlling power in the country, not the new Iraqi government.”
Al-Sheik’s small party has been linked to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who led uprisings against the U.S.-led coalition in 2004…
The U.S. military said its initial investigation indicated that in the morning, al-Sheik got into an altercation with a coalition translator at the checkpoint. U.S. soldiers tried to separate them and “briefly held on to the legislator,” while preventing another member of al-Sheik’s party from getting out of his vehicle, a military statement said.
“We have the highest respect for all members of the Transitional National Assembly. Their safety and security is critically important,” U.S. Brig. Gen. Karl R. Horst said in the statement. “We regret this incident occurred and are conducting a thorough investigation.”
[Right. And we’ll hear the results of this “investigation” when? Actually, most of the basic facts about what happened could be “discovered” and reported on publicly just about immediately… Like, were handcuffs in fact used? Was the legislature in fact mocked? Let the US military get the whole truth out, right away. There is no need for any kind of a lengthy, time-wasting “investigation” on this: just the truth, and with due speed.]
During a one-hour adjournment to protest al-Sheik’s treatment, lawmaker Salam al-Maliki read an assembly statement demanding an apology from the U.S. Embassy and the prosecution of the soldier who allegedly mistreated the legislator.
Hajim al-Hassani, the parliament speaker, said: “We reject any sign of disrespect directed at lawmakers.”
So if an out-of-control soldier on a checkpoint treats an elected Iraqi lawmaker this way, how do you think they treat the rest of the Iraqi people?
“We have a pope”
So today, the western media have breathlessly broken into all their news bulletins to say that the cry of “habemus papum” (We have a pope) has gone up from the Vatican.
Like that’s news? Like, the 120 or however many aging male cardinals were going to sit around forever and not come to agreement on which of their number would become pope?
But when, I wonder will we hear the joyous cry from Baghdad that “We have a democratically accountable government”?? (Do you think it would sound better in Latin? My dear late father, a Latin-and-Greek teacher, would be ashamed of how unable I feel right now, several languages later, to compose this simple phrase in Latin…)
This new Pope sounds incredibly Dick Cheney-ish, don’t you think? The guy was put in charge of a high-level political “search” process that ended up discovering that the best candidate for the job in question was indeed…. himself???
Just thinking about this whole process makes me unbelievably glad I’m a member of a faith community (the Quakers) that doesn’t believe in the “anointing” of some people to be spiritual “leaders” while others– including, in the case of the Catholics, all the females on God’s earth– get stuck in the role of merely doing what they’re told.
I’ve been wondering, too, if the cardinals who think that they might, just might, get appointed pope at the next “conclave” spend much time along the way picking out their future papal “names”… How long do you think this Cardinal Ratzinger has been practicing signing his name “Benedict”??
But back to my main point. Ratzinger/”Benedict” was “elected” today, and will be installed as Pope on Sunday. Five days. In Iraq, the UIA list was elected to head the National Assembly back on January 30th, and huge numbers of factors have since intervened– including, most recently, the desperately obstructive maneuverings of long-time CIA cat’s-paw Iyad Allawi; not to mention Don Rumsfeld– to prevent that list from even forming its government, let alone taking over any of the reins of real power in Iraq.
79 days, and still counting. It makes even the Vatican look like a model of efficiency.
Miqati’s cabinet, Lebanon
Lebanon’s latest PM-designate Najib Miqati has now named his government. The new government’s main role will be to steer the country through its much-needed parliamentary elections, which should take place before the term of the current parliament ends May 31.
Miqati, who is apparently a mild-mannered guy with links to most parts of Lebanon’s political spectrum, has named a much smaller government than usual– only 14 members instead of the usual 30 or so. (The 30 figure had become traditional as a way of getting all the extremely intricate balancing of this tiny Armenian church sect versus that Greek Orthodox church sect versus that Druze sect, etc, etc, exactly “right”… It had nothing at all to do with actually delivering a decent level of government service to citizens on an accountable basis– much more to do with divvying up the national patronage cake among its greedy claimants.)
Organizing the elections–which still also requires passage by the existing parliament of a new election law, which has to happen each time in Lebanon!– will be in the hands of new Interior Minister Hassan Sabei, a retired General Security officer who’s considered close to the Hariri family.
My dear old friend Ghassan Salameh, who had previously served in a Hariri-led government as Culture Minister, comes back as Minister for Higher Education and Culture, both.
Ghassan served as political advisor to Lakhdar Ibrahimi when Lakhdar was the UN’s representative in Iraq in mid and late 2003. In November 2003, Ghassan delivered this interesting presentation on the Iraq situation to a gathering in London. In it, he urged the international community to transform the US military presence in Iraq into a truly multinational force operating under a UN mandate. He urged the occupying power to go slow on privatization of the Iraqi economy, and to work hard on trying to engage all of Iraq’s neighbors cooperatively in the project of reconstruction…
But I guess for the next few weeks, at least, Ghassan will be busy primarily on Lebanese political issues.
I strongly hope that Miqati and his team, and the whole of the present Lebanese parliament can succeed in having an election that is free and fair, and effectively insulated from all outside influence; that its results are accepted as legitimate by the vast majority of Lebanese; and that it generates a parliament and a new government who see their first duty as being to serve Lebanon’s citizenry rather than line their own (or anyone else’s) pockets.
If this latter outcome is won, that would truly be a first for Lebanon.
(If you haven’t yet seen my big Boston Review article on Hizbullah and Lebanon, you can find some good background material there on the role Hizbullah has played in Lebanese electoral politics over the past 13 years.)
Uganda: healing or judging?
This is an extremely informative and inspiring article in today’s NYT about the use of traditional healing ceremonies to reconcile conflict-torn communities in northern Uganda.
Reporter Marc Lacey reports from Gulu, in northern Uganda, that,
- two very different systems – one based on Western notions of justice, the other on a deep African tradition of forgiveness – are clashing in their response to one of this continent’s most bizarre and brutal guerrilla wars, a conflict that has raged for 18 years in the rugged terrain along Uganda’s border with Sudan.
The fighting features rebels who call themselves the Lord’s Resistance Army and who speak earnestly of the import of the Ten Commandments, but who routinely hack up civilians who get in their way. To add to their numbers, the rebels abduct children in the night, brainwash them in the bush, indoctrinate them by forcing them to kill, and then turn them – 20,000 over the last two decades – into the next wave of ferocious fighters seeking to topple the government. Girls as young as 12 are assigned as rebel commanders’ wives. Anyone who does not toe the line is brutally killed.
The international court [that is, the Hague-based ICC], invited to investigate the war by President Yoweri Museveni, has announced it is close to issuing arrest warrants for rebel leaders including, no doubt, Joseph Kony, the self-styled spiritualist calling the shots. But some war victims are urging the international court to back off. They say the local people will suffer if the rebel command feels cornered. They recommend giving forgiveness more of a chance, using an age-old ceremony involving raw eggs.
“When we talk of arrest warrants it sounds so simple,” said David Onen Acana II, the chief of the Acholi, the dominant tribe in the war-riven north, who traveled to The Hague recently to make his objections known. “But an arrest warrant doesn’t mean the war will end.”
No, indeed it does not.
Uganda is not, alas, one of the countries I’m writing about in my current book project, which deals precisely with this issue of the relationship between “judging/prosecutorial” approaches to dealing with the legacies of atrocious conflict and alternative, amnesty-based and more “healing”-oriented approaches.
One of my key “cases” is that of Mozambique, where the local people used a very similar, healing-based approach drawing on many indigenous (that is, pre-colonial) healing traditions to deal with the legacies of the equally ghastly violence that occurred during the 1977-92 civil war there.
The Mozambicans concluded their peace agreement, with Italian and UN backing, in October 1992. That was just before the UN created the first of the ad-hoc war-crimes courts of the modern age– the one for former Yugoslavia, called ICTY.
After the creation of ICTY, and the parallel ad-hoc tribunal for Rwanda– ICTR– activists in the western-based human rights movement got the idea that creating war-crimes courts to deal with the legacies of atrocious violence was definitely the best thing to do… In 1998 they secured the passage of the “Rome Treaty”, which established a permanent International Criminal Court, ICC, which came into effect in 2002.
Since then it has been much harder for people seeking a negotiated end to atrocity-laden conflicts to succeed, because one of the key “incentives” peace-seekers had in pre-ICC situations– that of offering amnesty to former wrongdoers– had been almost completely taken away from them by the creation of the ICC.
Luckily, though, last week a delegation of 24 Ugandan men and women representing four different social groupings in northern Uganda visited ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to discuss the situation there and their concerns about the effects of a reckless issuing of indictments.
Back in July last year, Moreno-Ocampo had announced that he had formally “found” that there was sufficient evidence of atrocities in northern Uganda that he had decided to open a formal judicial investigation into the situation. This kind of “investigation” could normally be expected to lead to the issuing of indictments, though none has been issued– for Uganda or anywhere else– by Moreno-Ocampo yet.
The joint statement issued at the end of last week’s meeting between the delegates from northern Uganda and Moreno-Ocampo made the following points:
Detentions / Hostage-taking
There have recently been a bunch of news reports about alleged Sunni extremists in Iraq having taken hostage “up to 100” (though no-one really seems to know the real number) Shiite Muslim residents of the town of Madain, south of Baghdad.
This hostage-taking is really a scary, scary phenomenon.
I remember how similar cross-sectarian hostage-taking was a big feature of the early years of the civil war in Lebanon. The agony both of those who are taken hostage and of family members left behind, who have no idea at all about the whereabouts, life/death status, or health situation of their loved ones (and always tend to fear the worst), is hard to convey to people who have never encountered such a happening.
Such actions should all be ended! Immediately!!
But what, at the end of the day, is the moral difference between such hostage-taking and the practice of the US and Allawist forces up to now, of taking massive numbers of Iraqi “insurgents” as detainees and holding them– often in undisclosed locations– for weeks and months without trial?
As I noted in this JWN post April 11, as of then some 14,400 Iraqis were being held without trial, by the US forces or the Allawist-Iraqi forces. Of those, roughly 6,500 were being held by the “Iraqi” forces, just a handful by the Brits, and nearly 8,000 by the US forces.
Shame!
Imagine the anguish of an Iraqi mother whose son or spouse has been picked up in such a raid and taken away– with no real thought of a trial in mind for him– to some distant US-run detention center. The location, life/death status, and health situation may well also be kept secret from the detainees’ family members for many long weeks or months. And we know that terrible mistreatment goes on in these places of detention and indeed– in the case of US detention centers– that non-trivial numbers of inmates have died as a result of their treatment there.
Someone explain to me how this is any different from hostage-taking?
In such situations of mass detentions without trial (Iraq, Palestine, Guantanamo, elsewhere), it is a completely natural demand from members of the targeted community that the people detained without trial should be freed. Simply freed. Unless credible charges of criminal wrongdoing are brought against them, in which case that should happen with due speed, in a duly constituted court of law.
But the powers that hold these “hostage” detainees are often, actually, seeking to use them as a bargaining chip, and to “win” something politically for their release. Or, they are seeking to use them to try to brainwash them, with the hope that by breaking the will of these numerous individuals they can break the will of the opposition movement with which they are assumed to be aligned.
Both such uses of hostages– indeed, the very act of hostage-taking itself– are quite forbidden under international law.
Does this prevent the US and Israel from continuing the practice? No, it does not.
The demand voiced by various opposition forces in Iraq for the release of all those detainnes against whom credible criminal charges cannot be brought is a basic one. New Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has said he’s interested in providing an amnesty for all insurgents who don’t have the blood of Iraq civilians (or, perhaps, Iraqi security forces) on their hands.
What’s to stop him just following through, immediately, on that offer? I think that as President he probably has the authority to free all the Iraqis held by his forces who have not been convicted of or charged with any crime. He also, certainly, has the moral authority to demand, flat out, that the “guest forces” now present in his country release all the Iraqi detainees that they’re holding as well.
So what about it, Uncle Jalal? What’s to stop you doing this? Turn yourself into a truly Iraqi national figure by demanding the freeing of your compatriots from the foreigners’ hands.
If at the same time you’ve been successful in winning the freedom of the hostages from Madain (however many they are), then you would end up with a lot more political legitimacy nationwide than you now have.
And solid democratic principles like “no imprisonment without trial” would meanwhile be strongly reinforced…
Marla Ruzicka, RIP
Marla Ruzicka was an extremely compassionate and talented person who sought constantly to understand, chart, and publicize the steep human costs of war. Any war. Including in Iraq.
At the end of 2003, working with Raed Jarrar and other Iraqis, she helped produce the first systematic Iraq-wide survey of casualties attrobutable to the war the US launched upon the country in March 2003. The results were published here.
Now Marla herself has joined the casualty list. Raed reports that he has been informed that Marla was killed in a car crash in Baghdad Saturday night.
Raed posts this email he got from Justin Alexander:
- Dear friends & collegues of Marla,
Sometime between 3-6pm Baghdad time Marla died in a car crash. My current information is poor, but the accident may have happened on the Baghdad Airport road as she travelled to visit an Iraqi kid injured by a bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent victims of this conflict.
A US military convoy was involved in the event, but it is not clear at this stage in what way precisely.
I have no information on the whereabouts or health of her collegue Faiz who I believe was with her in the car.
I believe it is important that Marla be commemorated and that her work continue. In the short term I hope her friends will be able to identify and help those Iraqis she was in the process of assisting.
[…]
Marla was one innocent victim of conflict among millions, but I believe her work over the last two years has made a unique impact in highlighting and helping these people often forgotten as “collatoral damage”.
It is true that Marla was “one innocent victim of war among millions”. Still, if we can stop and remember her, and celebrate the incredible gifts she gave to humanity, we can also perhaps imagine that each and every one of those other millions killed by war opver recent years– Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, West Africa… — was a person with equal gifts, equal human warmth, equal God-given potential.
RIP, Marla Ruzicka. RIP, all the victims of war.
This is a good profile of Marla that ran in the WaPo last August.
This is a letter she wrote to the editor of the NYT just in February.
What can we do to commemorate Marla?
Selling ‘democracy’ in Iraq
Faiza of “A family in Baghdad” has her most recent post now up on her blog in English. Go read it. It’s about her experience at some kind of “democracy in Iraq” conference to which she’d been invited. It was hosted by some US organizations, which she doesn’t name but they probably included the US taxpayer-funded “U.S. National Endowment for Democracy” etc etc.
The conference was in Amman. Many women traveled to it from Iraq, though Faiza has been living in Amman for a few weeks now.
She and apparently many of the other Iraqi women at the conference were not happy with the “brain wash” they felt they were being exposed to there. I’d give you excerpts but regret I don’t have the time.
Kurdistan/Kosovo
The Institute for War & Peace Reporting’s Iraq projects have sadly been in real trouble recently. I don’t know if all their good participants and trainees got snapped up to work for deep-pocket western media people? If so, that’s a real shame, because the project, which produces articles in Arabic and Kurdish editions as well as in English, has always looked poised to make a serious contribution to the development of independent journalism inside Iraq.
However, their projects in the Balkans have been continuing in great shape. I have long been interested in the issue of Kosovo, both in itself and as one of the primary locations for the experiment many western neo-cons and neo-liberals have been undertaking in remaking the world in the way they would like to see it.
Primarily (in Kosovo as in Kurdistan) by nibbling away at the national territory of a nation-state whose leaders they have seriously disagreed with, while making all kinds of promises to the people of the nibbled-away area.
I should recall that unlike many of my friends in the western “human rights” movement I opposed NATO’s war for Kosovo in 1999 and have seen no reason at all since then to revisit the judgment I made on that.
In Kosovo in 1999 as in Iraq four years later, in the lead-up to the war there were people from an internationally mandated monitoring organization on the ground inside the territory up to the point of the western powers declaring the war; and that monitoring presence was doing a fairly good (though not perfect) job of preventing/reducing the evil it was supposed to be monitoring. Then, in both cases, Washington decided it wanted to go to war; the moniotoring presence was then rapidly pulled out; and the situation that subsequently unfolded in Kosovo was then the perpetration of precisely those exact great wrongs that NATO had claimed all along it was seeking to prevent! (In Iraq, after the pullout of the UNMOVIC monitors, the proliferation of weapons–though not of WMDs, since there were none– similarly started precisely after the pull-out of UNMOVIC and the start of the US war.)
Well, all that is now history. What of Kosovo today– a territory that has received fantastically great gobs of western aid and many western promises that everyone’s lives there would be improved by the eviction of the Yugoslav troops and their replacement by NATO?
We could pick up the story, viw IWPR’s reporting, back in mid-March of this year, when former Kosovo PM Ramush Haradinaj turned himself in to the International Copurt (ICTY) in The Hague where he faced 37 counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war:
- The indictment against him, released to the public on March 10, throws into sharp relief the image he has successfully nurtured in Kosovo in recent years as a respectable statesman and champion of independence for the protectorate