Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 296 – Info, analysis, discussion

Faiza’s view of elections

I’ve been running around so much recently that I hadn’t checked Faiza’s blog for a while. I should have. Last Friday she posted this, about the elections. She’s as wise as usual.
She was writing from Amman, where she’s been for three weeks or so now, doing some business but also taking a break from the uncertainties inside Iraq.
Anyway, without further ado, over to Faiza:

Continue reading “Faiza’s view of elections”

Question time in Iraq…

(1) Why has Iyad Allawi been acting as though he has already won the election?
(2) Why did George Bush call Allawi to “congratulate” him on the election?
(3) Why did Iraqi journalists covering the election in Baghdad and Amara get beaten up and otherwise harrassed by Iraqi security forces?
(4) Why did some polling stations report they did not get enough–or in some cases, any– ballot sheets in time for the elections, and what can be done about such irregularities?
(5) How do we feel about reports that at least some voters voted only because they thought things were still the same as in Saddam’s day, when people were badly punished for not “voting”?
(6) Why is the counting expected to take “up to ten days”, and will there be a credibly reliable and clearly documented chain of custody for all the ballot papers from the time of voting until then?
(7) Will the announced “losers” of the election have good reason to trust the integrity of the whole process, and therefore to explain to their followers that they should concede power (and patronage, and potential oil mega-$$) gracefully to the “winners”?
(8) Does anyone have any reason to believe that this election will have results much different from the much-lauded (in the US) 1967 poll in Vietnam? (Thanks to NeoDude for that link).
… Just asking.

Iraqi elections and American mirrors

It will probably be some time before it’s possible to get a good, rounded picture of what happened during today’s elections in Iraq. It will likely take the Iraqi Independent Elecoral Commission many days to provide its “count” of the vote, which would include a figure for the turnout.
But even then, given the lack of any independent observing, many questions may well remain about whether people can generally trust what the Commission reports…
I watched ABC News’s World News Sunday tonight. Peter Jennings was there in a safari jacket, reporting from somewhere in Baghdad’s Green Zone, I think. A high proportion of ABC’s reporting had a cheerleading, distinctly editorializing tone to it. On their website they feature this piece by AP writer Sally Buzbee, which starts out:

Iraqis embraced democracy in large numbers Sunday, standing in long lines to vote in defiance of mortar attacks, suicide bombers and boycott calls…

Look, I don’t want to impugn the courage that many Iraqi voters showed as they went to the polls today. But I’m not sure that “embracing democracy” was the only– or perhaps, even, the main– thing they were doing as they went there. “Responding to an ayatollah’s command” might equally well, or even better, describe the motivations of a high proportion of the voters.
After all, simply casting a vote is not the essence of democracy. (They got to do that numerous times, under Saddam.) The essence of democracy surely lies in acting from a deep commitment to using deliberation and negotiation to resolve differences, rather than violence; and an equally deep commitment to ensuring the rights of all members of society, including (especially) those with whom one disagrees.
Maybe the people who went to the polls today in Iraq will show those characteristics. I sincerely hope so. But they did not necessarily show them today, simply by going to the voting places.
I think quite a lot of US media outlets have used Buzbee’s piece. Some have used an alternative offering from AP that doesn’t have her cheerleading tone but, more soberly, gives a series of snapshots, from six different parts of the country. Most of the snapshots were penned by people with Arab or Kurdish names.
For his part, George W. Bush saw no need to be either judicious or sober in coming out with his expression of jubilation at the “resounding success” that he claimed the election represented.
Back in October, at the time of the Afghan election, I wrote here that:

I understand that there are many, many people in the international community who desperately want the inauguration of decent electoral demnocracy in Afghanistan and Iraq to be successful. I am myself one of them. But I fear there may be some people who are so deeply invested in the success of these elections–even though, in Afghanistan, they seemed to be held on terms very vulnerable to US manipulation–that they are prepared to overlook what in other circumstances they might clearly recognize as fatal flaws in the system.

The same is even more true today. Let’s wait and see how credible the rest of this current voting process looks, and what results it generates, before we make any judgments about its worth.
Even more to the point, let’s see whether the election leads to the emergence of an Iraqi leadership that is truly prepared to stand up to US power– and how the Bush administration peole will deal with that.
The Bushies have already drawn one key, defiant line in the sand. Brad Graham and Peter Baker reported in the WaPo today that,

ruled out creating a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq

So much for all the President’s earlier averrals that he would “withdraw the troops from Iraq, if asked.”

UNU conference on Transitional Justice

Time was, there was a nearly wall-to-wall constituency among western human-rights
advocates and other liberals for the viewpoint that any country transitioning
into democracy or out of massiveoy violent conflict should be the subject
of war-crimes trials. That was back in the mid-1990s, after the UN Security
Council had successfully set up the ad-hoc international tribunals for former-Yugoslavia
(early 1993) and Rwanda (late 1994), and people in the international h.r.
movement were well on their way to achieving their goal of establishing a
permanent International Criminal Court.

I was an enthusiastic part of that constituency. (I’ve been an Amnesty
International member for– nearly– ever, and have sat on Human Rights Watch’s
Middle East advisory committee since 1992.) But starting in late 2000, I was
one of the first people in the h.r. movement to start to raise serious questions
about whether this passion for extensive war-crimes prosecutions actually
served the human rights and interests of peole in societies trying to recover from
violent conflict.

For some of my early writings on this topic, see
this
short June 2001 piece in the London-based magazine Prospect, or
this
longer piece on the Rwanda Tribunal and the Nuremberg precedent, that ran
in Boston Review in April/May 2002.

For quite a while there, I felt that my position was extremely lonely. After
all, in the US, when I started to question the wisdom of the pro- war crimes
courts position that put me in the company of folks like the Republican
Party anti-ICC forces and assorted isolationists, “Christian Nation” freaks,
and other Manifest Destiny cheerleaders in general.

And on the “other side”, cheering on the various war crimes courts and shouting
for ever more courts and more prosecutions, were most of the people I most
admire and affiliate myself with in the world. Oh well, I thought through
the issues again and again and again, and set about trying to build and test
the empirical basis for my position by pursuing my research on three conflict-terminating
countries in Africa that all adopted very different approaches to the atrocity-response
challenge.

I was delighted last fall when Ramesh Thakur, the Vice-Rector of the United
Nations University invited me to take make a presentation at a conference
that the UNU held this past week, in New York, on the theme of “The Rule of
Law and Transitional Justice: the Way Forward?” Also speaking there
were Ralph Zacklin, the Assistant UN Secretary-General for Legal Affairs;
Bill Schabas, a distinguished Canadian legal scholar who has published widely
on the law of genocide and war crimes and has helped set up a number of UN-backed
tribunals in recent years; Gerald Gahima, the former Attorney-General of Rwanda;
and various other luminaries in the field.

Delighted, but also quite a bit trepidatious. I had thought that my view
of the lack of utility–or even, on many occasions, the disutility– of war
crimes prosecutions as a way to help conflict-terminating societies address
the legacies of recently past atrocities would be very much the position of
an “outlier” in a room largely full of people dedicated to pushing forward
the prosecutions policy.

Well, maybe I should spend more time in New York. It turned out that
my views were not so much those of an outlier. The proceedings of the
discussion were generally off the record. But I was really happy to
learn how much some of the reservations that I had been expressing are also
now shared by people whom formerly I would have identified as being much
more strongly in the pro-prosecutions camp. These included both Schabas and
Gahima. At several points, conference participants made comments that
indicated that they really do “get” a number of points I have been making
repeatedly over the past four years, such as that:

atrocity commission is in many cases very closely associated with
the incidence of bitter political conflict; therefore, an atrocity-suppression
strategy must include finding a sustainable and rights-respecting termination
of those conflicts
in the conflict-termination process it is the politics and diplomacy
of that process that is the key to its success; therefore, any “transitional
justice” or “rule of law” strategies adopted in those circumstances should
be subordinated to, and be a part of, that politics and diplomacy; such strategies
should always be pursued within a clear and pro-peacemaking political context
it is the residents of the conflict-torn territories themselves who
should be considered as the primary “stakeholders” or “constituency” for
any TJ/RL interventions; therefore, the desires and interests of other actors
in the international community should be subordinated to the needs of the
local-level stakeholders

But let me back up a little, and describe a couple of the most interesting
other things I got out of the conference…

Continue reading “UNU conference on Transitional Justice”

Hamas victories, Gaza municipals

Another round of important Middle Eastern elections was held Thursday– the municipal elections in Gaza’s 25 cities, towns, and villages.
The Palestinian population of Gaza is about 1.3 million, with 80% of those people being refugees from inside Israel (or, the descendants of those original refugees from 1948, who also have refugee status and burning but still unaddressed claims against Israel basedon that. They did get to vote on Thursday.)
Hamas won 78 of the 118 seats being contested, according to this story in yesterday’s WaPo, which also spelled out that Hamas won control of seven of the ten “towns” (for which, read “towns or cities”) being contested.
The movement’s victories in Gaza follow the ones they registered in a few West Bank jurisdictions on December 23, as I posted about here.
That WaPo piece, by John Ward Anderson, is worth reading because it gives a broad but fairly well informed assessment of the meaning of the elections. The New York Times did not mention them until today, when their reporter Steven Erlanger did so in a very dismissive and classically “orientalist” way.
First of all, Erlanger only writes about the Strip having “towns and villages”, though Gaza City is very evidently a city. (Okay, Anderson did that, too.) But it’s a sort of typically orientalist/colonialist thing to do to down-grade the designators used for population centers. Many of what the Israelis call “villages” in the occupied territories or Lebanon have far greater populations than what the Israelis call “towns” inside Israel.
But instead of making his own independent assessment of the importance of the vote, or quoting one of the many very well informed Palestinian commentators on it, Erlanger’s first comment on the vote came from– you guessed it,

a senior Israeli military official [who] said the results were not especially important, given the influence of local clans that supported slates of candidates. The vote had more to do with local issues than national policy, the official said.

And then, Erlanger did nothing to challenge, balance, or even qualify that assessment, leaving it standing as the most authoritative “analysis” he provided. All he did was add a little “local color” in the form of a quote from a Palestinian “housewife”.
Lazy journalism, or bias? Most likely, a bit of both.
The idea that in any analogous conflict, one would present the “analysis” of “a senior military official” of one of the contending powers on the internal politics of the other power to be in any way objective or authorittative would be outrageous. (Oops, it happens all the time in US reporting on Iraq. But in all cases, it’s more significant for what it tells us about the way the quoted official is trying to “spin” the situation than for what is actually happening inside the community being commented on.)
Note the reference to “clans”, which is a way of downgrading and dismissing the importance of the Palestinians’ internal political processes that the Israelis have used non-stop since 1948…
Regardless of all that spin, the internal politics really are interesting. Hamas is emerging more and more as a smart and well organized political force.
I am really glad that I have my big article on Lebanon’s Hizbullah in the works at Boston Review, since one of the reasons I wrote it was to look at Hizbullah’s political strategy as a possible predictor for what either Hamas and the Shiite parties in Iraq might do.
At this point, Hizbullah’s record seems a much better predictor for Hamas than for the Shiite parties.
Alert readers may say, “Yes, Helena, but isn’t Hamas Sunni?” Yes, indeed it is. But the coordination between it and Hizbullah has been notably strong ever since, in December 1992, Yitzhak Rabin unwittingly sent about 400 cadres from Hamas to study at “Hizbullah University” in the bare hills of South Lebanon.
That has to be one of the great ironies of history. Rabin had recently been elected PM, and he was determined– five years into the first intifada– to “teach the Palestinian militants a lesson”. (Have we heard that before?) So what he did, in a midnight raid, was round up more than 400 Palestinian militants, including many Hamas cadres, from their homes and seek to deport them all summarily to Lebanon…

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Ghaith’s photo essay for the BBC

The BBC website has a good little photo essay about Iraqis’ views of the election. It’s been compiled by Raed’s friend Ghaith, which gives me a lot of confidence.
Alongside it, they have another burst of the sort of highly mediated, “blog”-like thing they did once before from Iraq. This one has some interesting material. But a disproportionate number of the (invited) “contributors” are expats–whether “contractors”, whatever that means, or at least one US military person. They don’t really seem to know much about Iraq.
So while the “blog” is a little bit interesting, it’s not nearly as interesting as Ghaith’s photo essay.
There’s a place for good journalism. There’s a place for (real) blogs. But fake blogs– h’mmm.

Kennedy gives withdrawal movement new traction

I only just got the chance to read the excellent speech that Senator Kennedy gave last night, on Iraq. It was well argued and well framed.
Much of the press commentary focused on the fact that this was the first time a U.S. Senator called clearly for a US withdrawal from Iraq. But the way he framed his argument was more nuanced, and better grounded, than that:

“Transitional” elections: Iraq and South Africa

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the successful staging of democratic elections in various spots around the world became the act of political ritual that came to symbolize the transition of whole nations from authoritarianism to democratic self-rule. In South Africa, the successful staging of the April 1994 election symbolized not just that, but also an amazingly peaceable transition from white-exclusivist colonial rule to a one-person-one-vote democracy in a situation in which the non-White South Africans outnumbered the “Whites” by about seven to one.
Iraq is not South Africa.
As I think I’ve written here before, there is one key similarity between SA-94 and what ought to be happening inside Iraq at this point: that is, a handover of the main reins of power from a previously ruling minority group to members of the majority group– hopefully, with good guarantees from continued democratic and tolerant interaction between all citizens.
But in South Africa, the negotiations over how that should occur happened before the elections. They also happened without the intrusive, massively violent, and polarizing presence of a gigantic foreign occupying army.
Yes, the SA “Defence” Forces under the apartheid regime were a terrible and grossly abusive blight on the lives of most South Africans. But at least all the people in those armed forces, from Defence Minister Magnus Malan down to the legions of coerced black “askaris” who worked under the control of the SADF were members of South African society who had a stake in the success of the transition to majority rule.
The same is notably not true of the US troop presence in Iraq.
I have expressed the hope in the past that the presence of the US forces would lead to a unifying– in opposition to that presence— of many of the different strands inside Iraqi society. Last April, that seemed about to be taking place– that was when there were anti-US battles raging in both Fallujah and Najaf and much of the rest of the Shiite south.
After that, the US occupation forces managed to “pacify”– imperfectly, but sufficiently– the mainstream of the Shiites. They did that using a very wily combination of both carrots and sticks. One of the main “carrots” was the promise made to Sistani back in April that the Constitution-writing body would indeed be elected, not appointed; and that was the origin of the elections planned for this Sunday.
(Sistani wanted to have them much sooner. But the Americans wanted to stall– I wonder why? They claimed it “would not be fair” to use the old ration-card rolls as an electoral roll, and that time was needed to constitute a new roll. Guess what? They never did that, and are going along with the suggestion Sistani had originaly made… So they could have had the elections in May if they’d wanted, and skipped out on all the past nine months of killing and violence.)
Then, the Americans prepared their massive– and, as they hoped, “decisive”– assault against the Sunni militant base in Fallujah.
I was really sad to see so many Shiite political figures supporting that assault. Moqtada Sadr, to his credit, never did.
I mean, I know that just about all the different strands of Shiite society have been hit very hard indeed by terrorist attacks from people alleged to be in or around the groups directed by the extremely shadowy– and possibly apocryphal?– Abu Musaeb al-Zarkawi. But still, the tacit or on occasion overt support that some Shiite leaders gave to the assault on Fallujah gave the US occupation planners a huge opportunity to try to deepen the Shiite-Sunnite wedge and even present the US forces as somehow “protecting” the Shiites’ safety and interests.
Oh well, soon enough we will see what effects the upcoming “elections” might have.
At many levels, they seem almost irrelevant. We know that their conduct will be deeply flawed– and also, that we won’t even be able to tell how deeply flawed they are, because of the total lack of transparency in all steps of their conduct.
The “main” contest that seems to be shaping up is that for “first place”, between the Allawist list and the Sistanist list. How different are the leading figures on these two lists? I used to think, significantly different– at least on the issue of how they would propose to deal with the US troop presence.
Now, I am not so sure. Trudy Rubin had an important piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday– sorry, I don’t have the link– in which she reported on recent conversations she’d had with many leaders of the Sistanist list:

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Hallelujah!

This, from AP:

Israel has stopped targeting Palestinian militants for death, according to Israeli security officials, fulfilling a key Palestinian demand for a truce to end four years of violence.

The whole of that story is really interesting. It includes an account of a phone interview that Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal gave to an AP reporter in Beirut today. (Which mentions some of the main points I noted in my previous post here.)
Security coordination in Gaza is going ahead, and Saeb Erakat has said that he and some Sharon aides have started preliminary discussions about setting up a Sharon-Abu Mazen meeting.
The Israeli irredentists are also organizing to “resist” being evacuated from Gaza and the four small West Bank settlements on Sharon’s “first to evacuate” list.

Mashaal’s interview

Here is my translation of the interview that Hayat’s Ghassan Charbel recently conducted with Hamas secretary-general Khaled Mashaal. (And here is the link to the Arabic original.)
Mashaal’s word is the definitive word at this point, regarding the movement’s political position.
What he says here accords closely with the reported Hamas position paper that I wrote about (and linked to) here, on January 19.
Inb particular, in the interview Mashaal talks about the importance of “realizing true [Palestinian] sovereignty over the areas from which the [Israeli] occupation withdraws” — without spelling out whether or not he means the occupation of 1967.
On the crucial issue of a truce, he is reported as saying:

There is talk about a calming, but about a conditional calming until the time that the occupation becomes committed to defined terms, the most important of which are the ending of all forms of aggression and attack and assassinations and killing, and the release of all the Palestinian prisoners. And in the event that the enemy should comply with these terms we in Hamas and also the other forces of the resistance, in general terms, we would be ready to deal positively with the issue of calming or a provisional truce.

I find another aspect of what he says also extremely interesting. This is the way he talks about Hamas’s political relations with the PLO.
People who don’t know much about Palestinian history probably need to understand that there’s a huge depth of animosity between Hamas and the PLO that goes back a long way, and was certainly exacerbated greatly by many actions that Yasser Arafat took.
So long as Arafat was alive, he didn’t want Hamas included anywhere at all in Palestinian decisionmaking structures– and they hated and distrusted him him greatly, in return. Back in 2003, Abu Mazen did try to bring them into an expanded leadership structure during his short-lived term as PM, and won their preliminary agreement to the move. But Arafat nixed it totally, which was a good part of the reason that Abu Mazen resigned. (Read some reflections on what happened then in this piece I published in BR last spring.)
But then, Arafat died….
Now, Abu Mazen has a much better shot than he did 18 months ago at bringing Hamas into the leadership. I believe they trust him much more than they ever did Arafat.
Two aspects of what Mashaal says in this regard are particularly interesting:

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