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?
More on truth commissions
Jonathan and I are having a pretty interesting discussion down here on the topic of “what makes a ‘truth’ commission?” Stop on by, everybody, and share your views, too.
I’ve done a bit more work on the chart I’ve been compiling about the general phenomenon of truth commissions. Actually, while doing that, I’ve learned a lot more interesting things about the range of truth commissions that have operated around the world in the past 30 years.
For example, the t.c. established in Timor Leste (East Timor) in 2001 is titled the “Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor”. “Reception” there refers to receiving the perpetrators of (at least) small crimes back into their communities, in line with local cultural norms. Here is the Commission’s officially stated purpose.
I would love to learn more about the East Timor Commission’s whole process, which was apparently designed in line with national cultural norms there.
Their process was certainly designed to incorporate much more intentional reconciliation/ peacebuilding than the South African TRC. For example, former “perpetrators” of politically motivated acts of violence were expected to make a full confession (as at the SA TRC)– but then beyond that, a committee including local “elders” of the community would preside over a Community Reconciliation hearing which would come up with a “Community Reconciliation Act” (or acts) that this person would have to perform.
In SA, by contrast, the perps were not obligated to take part in any kind of a “reconciliation” process, or even to apologize or express remorse to their erstwhile victims. Production of a narrative that the Amnesty Committee considered to be fully truthful was enough to bring the perps full amnesty.
This little extract from the East Timor Commission’s “Update” for December 2003 and January 2004 gives a flavor of what was going on there:
Thinking about Rwanda with Harvey Weinstein
I don’t know how many of you recall the three posts (1, 2, and 3) I put up in mid-January in which I wrote about Eric Stover and Harvey Weinstein’s new book “My Neighbor, My Enemy; Justice and community in the aftermath of mass atrocity”?
Well, ain’t the world-wide web a wonderful thing? Sunday evening, I got a really interesting email from Harvey, in which he gently challenged a couple of things I’d said there.
(I had a similar experience not long ago when the Israeli researcher and writer Daniel Sobelman, whose work I mentioned when I posted here about Hizbullah, in December, likewise got in touch with me. There, without even a challenge. Yes, the WWW truly is remarkable.)
Anyway, back to Harvey M. Weinstein, who you might remember is a psychologist and a clinical professor in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Okay, I can’t totally remember how much detail about his professional credentials I put into those earlier posts. But take it from me he’s one heck of a smart, well-informed, compassionate, and visionary guy.
His email gave me, as they say, “pause for considerable thought”. So I went back and re-read the chapter in the book that I’d voiced some criticism of in light of his comments to me, and got back to him. That was Chapter 10, an important chapter in which he and two co-researchers present the results of a 2,000-person attitudes survey that they had a big team conduct, in 2002, in a four significantly distinct kinds of locations around Rwanda.
I wrote my criticisms in the 2nd of those three posts linked to above.
Here is our correspondence this week:
Continue reading “Thinking about Rwanda with Harvey Weinstein”
Two years and counting…
Well, no-one sent me any cards but yesterday was actually JWN’s second blogiversary.
Silly me, I meant to post about it yesterday. It’s not hard to remember. Two of my three actual, biological kids have birthdays this week as well.
Now I’ve kind of learned to drive this machine, does anyone have any ideas where I should take it?
Peacemakers??? Maybe…
I just wrote a CSM column today, coming out Thursday. As I worked through it, I came to this amazing conclusion. How about if a stable peace between Israelis and Palestinians ends up getting made this year between an Israeli coalition headed by Sharon and a Palestinian coalition dominated by Hamas? (And under the sponsorship of, George W. Bush?)
Okay, let’s leave aside Bush for the present. Just think of the other two. Would that be a reciprocal “Nixon to China” move, or what?
(On the other hand, maybe for Mao, receiving Nixon was equally much of an ideological breakthrough? )
As I say in my column– the best folks to make peace with are, after all, your present enemies….
Remembering the “devouring”
With all the news coverage recently of the 60th anniversary of the Allied liberation of Auschwitz there was, as predictable, pitifully little mention of the 500,000 Roma people (Gypsies) who were killed in the Holocaust– some 21,000 of whom were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The Romani word for the genocide/Holocaust that their people suffered at the hands of the Nazis is porraimos, the “devouring”.
I’ve been re-reading Isabel Fonseca’s outstanding 1995 book, “Bury me standing: The Gypsies and their journey”. The whole of Chapter 7 is about the “devouring”.
Of Auschwitz-Birkenau she writes:
- The site of the Zigeunerlager, or Gypsy camp, is marked on the wall map in the arched entrance to the vast pitch of Birkenau. It was in the row of barracks farthest from the main gates, which meant that the Gypsies had a good view of both the gas chambers and the crematoria. Apart from a few crumbling brick chimneys, there is nothing left of the thirty-eight-barrack Gypsy camp. (p.254)
The whole chapter makes very, very tough reading. Josef Mengele was particularly interested in performing his vile experiments on Gypsies. The stories of Gypsy suffering in the camps– told mainly by Jewish or Polish survivors, for there were pitifully few among the Gypsies themselves–are all extremely upsetting.
- Mieczyslaw Janka, a Polish survivor, remembers the Gypsy family camp next to the hospital at Birkenau. “The Gypsy men would accompany our singing while their women danced. For this we would throw them bits of onion and cigarettes. One night the Gypsies were taken away and burned.” Outsiders’ recollections of the Zigeunerlager, cut off as always from other inmates, were often of sounds–we heard them (they would say), their singing, their playing, their crying, their moans and screams, and then, “one night,” their silence. That night was August 2, 1944. (p.266)
Fonseca, who is herself Jewish, soberly charts the many ways in which the suffering of the Roma has been ignored or minimalized in mainstream narratives of the Holocaust in the west. For example, she writes this about the 65-member U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, founded in 1979:
The IDF and the settlers
An important piece by Gideon Levy in Sunday’s Ha’Aretz paints the sorry history of the IDF’s very close relationship with many segments of Israel’s settler society, including settler extremists.
He writes about the close and overlapping organizational links between the IDF’s Central Command–responsible for the West Bank– and “Yesha”, the “state within a state” coordinating body that the West Bank settlers have established:
- The IDF has accompanied the settlement enterprise from the start, back when the big lie about the “security value” of the settlements was still prevalent. Some of the first settlements sprang forth from within IDF bases, a distorted phenomenon in itself, and the boundary is sometimes blurred to this day. In Beit El, for example, IDF barracks abut the settlers’ residences, illustrating the lack of a border between Yesha and the IDF. The security deployment in the territories is also a dangerous mix of the army and militias, battalion commanders and security coordinators (a job settlers perform, armed by the IDF), and it is unclear who is subordinate to whom. The commanders of what is conventionally referred to as an “apolitical” army realize that their promotion is sometimes influenced by lobbying from the Yesha council. In recent years, this symbiosis has reached new peaks. There are even cases in which settlers stand with soldiers at checkpoints and decide who will or will not pass.
Parts of the map of checkpoints and bypass roads, conditions of closure and encirclement, as well as sections of the separation fence’s route, were dictated by the leaders of Yesha and designed only to meet their wishes. The settlers demanded a pointless checkpoint between Ofra and Shilo, in the Hermiya valley, and they got it – until seven soldiers and three civilians were killed there in March 2002 and the checkpoint was dismantled. Hardly a day goes by without a meeting between senior IDF officers and the settlers. A growing number of IDF commanders in the field are residents of the territories. A large part of the IDF’s activities are coordinated with the most violent and unruly group in Israeli society…
Truth commissions in context
I’m at the analytical place in my book on strategies that three African countries used to address the legacies of recently-past conflicts where I want to try to put the whole, 15-plus-year phenomenon of truth commissions into some kind of comprehensible political context.
My earlier hypothesis was that the whole TC phenomenon grew up in a mainly European-cultured context (European-cultured elites in Latin America; actual Europeans in east and central Europe), and that originally they were deployed mainly in the context of a fairly well infrastructured society making a marked transition from authoritarian rule to democracy… But that then, over time– and especially after the notable prominence of the South African TRC!– lots of people in very different circumstances around the world got it into their heads that hey, this looks like a good mechanism, let’s try it!
Especially since the Ford Foundation and various other massive US-based foundations have put lots of real mega-$$ into various projects around the world that sought to emulate the SA TRC.
I’m not against the deployment of TRCs. (Far better than deploying troops, cruise missiles, or armies of international prosecutors into recent or continuing war zones, don’t you think?) I just want to look at the developments over time in the way this mechanism has been used, and perhaps to start an assessment of what it has achieved and what it hasn’t achieved.
One of the ironies of the whole international “fame” of the SA TRC was that, as far as I can understand it, the whole thing came about as a result of a rushed and rather messy political compromise that was forced onto the ANC right in the middle of the holding of SA’s landmark, four-day-long 1994 elections…
Basically, the security forces went up to the ANC negotiators and said, “H’mm, nice little elections you’ve got going there. Wouldn’t it be a pity if we found we couldn’t hold back the White hotheads from disrupting them for you, huh? Oh, and by the way, we really still do need some amnesty for our people in the event this democratization thing should work out. How about it, huh?”
Later, with huge help from Archbishop Tutu, the whole TRC venture got packaged as– and actually, in many ways, became– this “visionary”, wonderful, spirit-led process that everyone throughout the world worshiped and wanted to emulate. History’s a funny thing, eh?
… So anyway, I thought I should try to compile all the basic info I would need to make a judgment about the political contexts in which TCs have been used in various places around the world, and see if some trends emerg over time. Here’s the chart I made today.
Comments? Suggestions?
Meanwhile in Palestine and Israel
I went to hear Dennis Ross giving a presentation today. Dennis was the person who was in charge of the Palestinian-Israeli “file” for the first Prez Bush, and then for two terms of President Clinton. He is a fairly hard-headed person who pursues a manipulative and paternalistic approach to peacemaking, but I have to admit that a personal level I like the guy. When I was researching my book on the Syrian-Israeli peace talks of 1991-96, he was very helpful and gave me an intelligent and thoughtful interview for the project.
It was the way he talked about the Iranian nuclear program that provoked me into the thoughts that I blogged about here. But mainly, I’ve been thinking about what he said about the current opportunities in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.
He was quite clear in arguing that this time around, unlike in 2003, the US should absolutely not let Abu Mazen down. “We have an enormous stake in having Abu Mazen show that his way ‘works’,” he said at one point. I agree.
Well, there were many parts of what Dennis said that I quite agreed with. But there were other aspects that, in different circumstances I would definitely have challenged. For example, he talked about the need to have some kind of a monitoring mechanism for any hudna (ceasefire) if it is to work– but was talking solely in terms of having a US institution do the monitoring.
Hey, what about the Quartet, Dennis?
Well, he did mention the possibility of the “Multi-National” Force now in Sinai having a role in some of the monitoring. But that force is nearly 100% American at this point.
Also, he said that, “Just about everybody knows what the shape of a workable deal looks like: it looks much like the Clinton Plan of late 2000.”
Well, yes, maybe…. But as he noted, Prez Bush is not on board that approach yet. Plus, even if he were, he would still need to have a clear strategy for how to bring Sharon (or another Israeli leader) around to it as well. Or even, how bring the Israelis to comply with Bush’s own baby, the ‘Road Map’, for starters. Dennis didn’t mention any of those real challenges…
Nuclear disarmament: a reminder
President Bush and Condi Rice have been stepping up their rhetoric against Iran, accusing the regime there of being undemocratic (true) and of harboring ambitions to acquire a nuclear arsenal (unknowable).
I think it’s time to go back and give the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) a good, close reading, and to think a lot harder about what role we want nuclear arsenals to play in our world. The treaty is still, of course, in force.
First then, its text. To be precise, Article 6, to which the US like all other parties to the treaty is subject:
- Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.
What does the wording of this article tell us about the kind of role that people back in 1968, when the treaty was signed, wanted to see nuclear weapons playing in world affairs?
And what role, actually, do we want to see nuclear weapons play today?