Internal politics in Palestine

Hamas did not give Abu Mazen anything of a honeymoon after his electoral win last week, but instead mounted (along with Jihad and the Aqsa Brigades) the operations at the Karnei crossing point, which killed six Israelis, including two truck drivers and four crossing-administrators. Then this week Hamas launched the attack against Shin Bet agents staffing a checkpoint deep inside Gaza, killing one of them.
But still, it seems the tide on both sides of the national divide there in Israel/Palestine is shifting toward the possibility of some de-escalation. Indeed, despite Sharon’s big announcement of a decision last week that he would not open talks with Abu Mazen because of the Karnei attack, tonight there was a meeting at the Erez checkpoint between high-level security delegations from both sides.
Abu Mazen has thus far laid a lot of stress on “cleaning up the internal house” of intra-Palestinian politics. A very wise move indeed, given the (sometimes deadly) internal chaos that had over recent years increasingly become the norm in relations even inside Fateh– and that had actually left Fateh with little time or energy to wage any kind of internal political battle against any other forces inside Palestinian society. (Let alone against Israel.)
Abu Mazen has also laid stress on resolving intra-Palestinian issues through negotiation and other peaceful means, rather than through force– though force is certainly what the Israelis and Americans have been urging him to use against the militant forces inside Palestinian society.
My sense of what’s happening in Palestinian politics right now is that most Palestinians are quite happy to see the schisms emerging inside Israeli society over the issue of the planned withdrawal from Gaza, and are fairly determined not to let similar schisms tear their own already very vulnerable society apart. I have to note that for all the many, many attempts the Israelis have made over the years to cultivate some form of a Buthelezi-like “third force” figure inside Palestinian society, they have never to this day succeeded in that.
(Anyone out there remember the name Mustafa Dudeen? He was the “great white hope” of the Begin administration, circa 1981.) Arafat, for his all his many, many flaws was never prepared to become a Palestinian Quisling– despite all the vitriol that Edward Said launched his way (from the safety and comfort of Edward’s perch at Columbia University). And Abu Mazen certainly is no Quisling, either.
Anyway, Abu Mazen’s first job is to try to fashion some kind of a working administration out of the organizational chaos and anarchy he has inherited from Arafat. According to this piece from occupied Jerusalem in Thursday’s Al-Hayat, Abu Mazen has said that, “the ‘reform file’ for the PA contains four principal headlines, which are the security organs, the administration, the economy, and the judiciary.”
Well, that should all be heard as good news by democracy-lovers all around the world. It might also come as good news for Hamas, which has also– just like Hizbullah in Lebanon– taken increasingly in recent years to promoting its cause under the general banner of “good governance.”
In recent days, Hamas reportedly presented a document to all the other Palestinian factions which was their suggested draft for a “Document of Palestinian Dignity”, which basically lays out ground-rules for how they want the different Palestinian factions to relate to each other.
It’s long on general principles and short on specific details, but one of the really significant things in it is the degree to which it avoids airy-fairy, specifically religious rhetoric or references and the degree to which it really does use the language of general good governance.
Look, for example, at numbers 4, 5, and 6 in the second part of their listing (“internal relations”):

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Politics in Iraq and Palestine/Israel

Things are really starting to heat up in the election campaign in Iraq, while in Palestine and Israel there’s a lot of complex “pre-negotiation” politics going on on both sides of the national divide.
In Iraq, at one level, there is of course the continuing campaign against the election, being waged violently by (mainly) Sunni Islamists (Salafists) and some former Baathists, but with a fairly high degree of popular support from a Sunni population stunned and upset by the violence that the US and the Allawists launched against Fallujah and a number of their other cities.
But in addition, there is evidently a mounting campaign within the group of leaders and political forces who are contesting the election: and primarily between Allawi and the Sistani-supported United Iraqi Alliance.
Allawi seemed to wake up pretty late to the fact that he needed to contest this election politically and not just thru the application of massive violence, which is what he tried to do (Baathist-style) thru the end of 2004.
Now, suddenly he’s offering all kinds of goodies to the Iraqi people, including scholarships for their children to go abroad and study just about anything they want!
He also tried to tell the UIA people that they couldn’t use Sistani’s image on their election propaganda. But to no avail.
Then yesterday, Allawi’s people announced that on election day no vehicles “except government vehicles” will be allowed to travel on Iraq’s roads. Since there have also been many allegations that his people inside the transitional government that he heads have been abusing their positions in order to boost his election campaign, the travel ban strikes me as a very dangerous and unfair proposal, though it was announced on so-called “security” grounds.
So how are the UIA people and other contenders in the election supposed to conduct their election-day activities if they’re not allowed to drive?
Where is the outrage over this issue in the US media?
Whoever can credibly claim “victory” in the Jan 30 election gets to do two things:

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War’s effects on communities (contd.)

Last Friday I wrote
a post

here about the remarkable study that two Croatian psychology professors
conducted into what happened to cross-ethnic personal friendships in Vukovar
under the pressure of war, violence, and mounting inter-group polarization.

I meant to mention there, once again, two extraordinary memoirs of life during
civil wars that came out in the early 1990s. One was
Beirut Fragments
, by Palestinian writer Jean Said Makdisi, and the other
The Balkan Express
, by Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic. Both these authors are female,
and parents, and really gifted at conveying the terrible tensions and strains
involved in trying to keep oneself sane and one’s family intact, during the
horrors and social and infrastructural breakdown that wars inflict on civilian
societies.

War from the point of view of “targets”, or “consumers”, you might rightly
say.

As opposed to, “war from the point of view of the armchair generals, or plucky
young (male) officers”, which is how people who’ve never actually experienced
war inside their own societies generally get to “learn” about it.

If you want to read a review article I wrote about these two books, ways back in 1993, you can find it
here
. Here’s how it starts:

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Martin Luther King, Jr., on war

It’s a public holiday here today in the United States: the official “birthday” of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the great civil
rights leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and was assassinated in 1968.

If Dr. King had not been killed, he would have turned 85 on January 15.

Throughout the mid-1980s, I remember my two elder kids, who attended a public
elementary school in Washington, DC, would every year, just before the holiday,
start bringing home worksheets with an image of Dr King to color. And
endlessly, they would study Dr. King’s most famous oration: the
“I have a dream”

speech that he delivered from the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March
on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

If you’ve never read the whole text, it’s definitely worth doing so. Near
the end, he mounts to a rhetorical crescendo with this theme:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live
out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men are created equal.”

… I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where
they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of
their character.

I have a dream…

I’m not quite sure what President Bush is planning to do today to mark Dr. King’s birthday. What I’d like him to do is take out a tape-player and listen very carefully indeed to another of Dr. King’s great
orations: the sermon
titled variously
“Beyond Vietnam– A Time to Break the Silence”

, or more simply, “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam”. This one was delivered
in April 1967, at a meeting at Riverside Church in New York City.

Through that link there, you can apparently even download an MP3 audio version
of the sermon. It is certainly worth listening to. Dr. King was great and powerful preacher. But if you can’t read or listen to the whole of the sermon, at least spend
a little time pondering two portions of it.

The first is his response to those working alongside him in the civil rights
movement who argued that coming out openly against the war in Vietnam could
well divert the national focus from the civil rights struggle and harm that
struggle in other ways as well. His response was this:

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Al-Hayat reporting on Iraqi elections

I’m just quickly working my way through the top of an article in Sunday’s Al-Hayat (Jan. 16th). It’s titled, “The fear of a Sunni boycott hangs over the election campaign and the ‘Ansar al-Sunna’ is responsible for the kidnaping of 15 Guardsman [ING]”.
The dateline is, “Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, London, Al-Hayat” Here’s the top of the piece:

    The fear of a Sunni boycott of the Iraqi elections hangs over the information campaigns that the candidates have launched. And while the Minister of the Economy and member of SCIRI Adel Abdel-Mahdi stressed that the participation of 40-50 percent of the Sunnis is enough to make the elections legitimate, Ahmad Chalabi said that, “A handful of terrorists will not prevent the Iraqis from voting.” And the former National Security Advisor Muwaffaq Rubaiee stressed that, “There is no goal to establish an Islamic state along Iranian lines.”
    And Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in a joint communique issued at the end of the visit of the [Saudi] second deputy prime minister, and Minister of defense and Aircraft, Prince Sultan ibn Abdel-Aziz to Abu Dhabi,expressed their hope that all Iraqis would take part in the political process.
    On the security front, the ‘Army of the Ansar [partisans] of the Sunna’ announced its responsibility for the kidnapping of 15 members of the National Guard; and 17 bodies were discovered south of Baghdad; and meanwhile an American helicopter was damaged during clashes with armed men in Mosul, but no casualties have been announced.
    In Baghdad, the parties and [political] forces intensified their electoral activities, and the head of the ‘Constitutional Monarchy Movement’, Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, toured a number of schools while the Prime Minister Iyad Allawi visited Tikrit; and speakers for the ‘United Iraqi Alliance’ list which is supported by the Shiite Marja Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani held a press conference, under a large picture of the Shiite Marja Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani: the speakers included the leader of the National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, and the leader of SCIRI, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, and the head of the Daawa Party, Ibrahim Jaafari…

Just before I post this and run off, I note that a couple of days ago Allawi had announced that no-one should use “religious symbols” in their campaigning– and that, yes, indeed, that included pictures of religious figures like Sistani. So I guess he does not get to control everything in this election, after all..

Friendships ripped by ethnic war

I wrote here, on Wednesday, about my disappointment in one chapter of My Neighbor, My enemy, the book I’ve been reading about “justice and community” in the aftermath of atrocious violence in Rwanda and former-Yugoslavia. I’ve now finished the book, and want to set the record straight by saying that the book as a whole– bar that one chapter (Ch.10) which had some serious methodological flaws in it, as I’d described– is a really fascinating read and a great contribution to human understanding.
Chapter 14, “Trust and betrayal in war” by two Croatian psychology profs, Dean Ajdukovic and Dinka Corkalo, is outstanding; and Ch. 12 is pretty good, too.
What I love about Ajdukovoc and Corkalo’s work is the granularity of their descriptions and the deep sense of humanity that informs the whole chapter.
What they did was, using a “snowball sampling” method in the deeply troubled Croatian city of Vukovar, they conducted in-depth interviews with 48 long-time residents of the city, from both the ethnic-Serbian and the ethnic-Croatian communities there. Their interviewees had to have a couple of characteristics in common: they had to be people who had once had friends from the ‘other’ ethnic group, and they had to have had the experience that these relationships had been severed or seriously threatened since the terrible fighting that engulfed the city in 1991. The interviews were carried out in 2002.
The material they present in this chapter is achingly sad, and illustrates in vivid detail what can happen once the frenzy of violence takes hold of a place…

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CSM column on democratization

Here is the column I have in today’s Christian Science Monitor.
It’s titled (not by me) “Democracy– after the vote” and tries to make the point that a commitment to “democracy” involves a lot more than simply sponsoring the holding of a single, (perhaps) technically fair, nationwide election. What I argue there is,

    It is uncertain whether Iraq’s vote can be held as scheduled, given the breadth of the insurgency. But even if it is held, neither that election nor the one in Palestine will assure the rights of the voters unless Iraqis and Palestinians also rapidly win their national independence. In addition, during the process of transferring sovereignty, the US (and Israel) need to convey – and also model – two of the key “big ideas” behind any true theory of democracy: the need to resolve differences through discussion, rather than violence; and a complete respect for the rights of others, including – crucially – those with whom we disagree.
    If the Palestinians and Iraqis do not speedily win national independence, then elections held to “interim” bodies will have little meaning. But worse, democracy itself can get a bad name…

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How Casey’s mom feels about the WMDs news

    Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in the war and who left a comment on the Comments board here recently, just sent me the following letter:

Dear Friends,
Everyday there are fresh lies and fresh confirmation of the lies coming out of DC…I can tell you it is so hurtful to us families that more people aren’t standing up to bring our children home from the lie and quaqmire that is Iraq…I feel like I should have a daily column called: Who lied today?
Bush told us that Iraq had WMD’S and they were getting ready to use them on us at any minute. Condi Rice told us that we should attack Iraq immediately…and don’t let the “smoking gun” be a “mushroom cloud.” Rumsfeld and Powell showed us where the weapons were buried…Guess what? THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANY WMD’S AND THEY WEREN’T GOING TO HAVE THEM FOR AT LEAST A DECADE. The United States was in no threat from Iraq…and Osama Bin Laden is free to plot against our troops in Iraq and against the innocent Iraqi people and Al Qaeda grows stronger every day because of our Administration’s reckless, ignorant, and arrogant policies in Iraq.
Would it have hurt the Bushies and the rest of the war mongerers to wait a few months to confirm that Iraq HAD NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION before they pre-emptiviely attacked, invaded, and occupied a country that posed no credible threat to the USA? Would Casey, 1358 other brave Americans and thousands and thousands of Iraqis still be alive?…I think so and that is another stab in my heart and in my back.
Please write to your Congress Person and your Senators to stand up and do what is right…Barbara Boxer did it for the Ohio debacle….yes it is important that we have transparent and credible elections…BUT IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT TO BRING OUR TROOPS HOME FROM THIS NEEDLESS WAR. It is so important to support our troops by getting them the hell out of there….let Iraqis rebuild their own country…with money and supplies that we give them…bring the war profiteers home too and let the Iraqis have their jobs back.
Contacting the Congress
Love and Peace
Cindy

The trials of Rwanda

Filip Reyntjens, a very expert scholar of international law who is also an expert on Rwandan history, has now sent a letter to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda saying he will suspend all cooperation with the court’s Office of the Prosecutor until it takes steps to indict members of the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) who are accused of human rights abuses.
Reyntjens, who teaches at the University of Antwerp, played an important role in the prosecution’s work as recently as last September when he testified in the court against Theoneste Bagosora, accused of being the most important mastermind behind the nationwide organization of the 1994 genocide. (Reyntjens did, however, say in that tesgimony that Bagosora’s co-accused, Gratien Kabiligi, had played no part in organizing the killings.)
According to the Fondation Hirondelle report linked to above, Reyntjens sent a letter to ICTR Chief prosecutor Hassan Jallow in which he wrote that,

    failure by the ICTR to prosecute alleged perpetrators of the abuses was “meting out victor’s justice” and risked becoming “part of the problem and not the solution”.
    He said that it was his knowledge that the “special investigative team” of the ICTR had gathered “compelling evidence on a number of massacres committed by the RPF in 1994”.
    “These crimes fall squarely within the mandate of the ICTR, they are well documented, testimonial and material proof is available, and the identity of RPF suspects is known”, he wrote.
    He added that that in not pursuing the RPF, the tribunal “fails to meet another stated objective, namely to ‘contribute to the process of national reconciliation and the restoration and maintenance of peace’.”

    “While I remain committed to the cause which is at the heart of the mandate of the ICTR, on ethical grounds I cannot any longer be involved in this process. I shall, therefore, not be able to co-operate with the OTP unless and until the first RPF suspect is indicted”, threatened the lawyer-cum-historian.

Reyntjens was one of the people I interviewed in connection with my Violence and its Legacies project, back in 2001. (You can read some excerpts from our conversation here.)
His reference to “contributing to national reconciliation” comes from the November 1994 Security Council resolution that established the ICTR.
I’ve been trying to get another bearing on the extent to which the ICTR has succeeded in that regard by doing more reading in the Stover and Weinstein book, “My neighbor, my enemy” that I wrote briefly about here on Sunday.
Though much of the book has been really interesting and helpful, I’ve been a little disappointed in Ch.10, which presents the results of a 2,000-respondent opinion survey carried out in four different areas of Rwanda in February 2002 in order to describe “Attitudes toward accountability and reconciliation in Rwanda.”
One of my main problems with the design (and therefore, imho, the “reliability”) of the survey is that– in a country where the caste (or “ethnic”) divide between Hutus and Tutsis is still extremely sensitive and important– they report using a team of 26 Rwandan interviewers who were “nearly evenly divided in terms of ethnicity and gender.”(p.208). This, in a situation in which some 85% of the respondents could– if the sample is to be at all nationally representative– be expected to be Hutus…

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Read MG again

Read Marine’s Girl again, especially if you haven’t read this post, that she put up at 11 a.m. Tuesday. It’s a follow-on ICQ with her guy, from the one I linked to Monday.
Yesterday I was in Washington DC for the day. I have such strongly negative feelings about the policies that come out of that place, and their effects on ordinary people inside and (especially) outside the USA, that I almost have to force myself to go back there.
It turned out okay yesterday, because I was with some really, really nice people, doing wonderful things. Both in the afternoon, when I was discussing some possible professional projects, and in the evening when some dear friends from the 15 years I lived there hosted a small dinner for Bill and me.
I drove back home late last night. This morning I discovered a really nasty spam attack on the Comments boards here– lots of really vile porn, all over many recent Comments boards. So this a.m. I had to spend more than an hour deleting all those comments.
It makes me wonder even more what the point of this blog is. I suppose increased clarity on this will come, sometime.
Anyway, I can tell you that MG’s blog is truly a gift to the world. Lew, commenting here on the MG post I linked to on Monday, wrote, “I don’t think it’s real”.
Lew, I think MG is as “real” as it gets. I’ve been reading her wonderful reflections on life, and her ICQ’s with her guy, since ways before some really officious Marines Gunnery Sargeant harrassed her (on alleged “national security” grounds) into taking her whole blog down, back in November 2003. What was interesting then was that some higher ups in the Marines JAG division, or some other place relatively powerful like that within the Marines Corps, explicitly supported her right to continue doing just what she had been doing in the blogosphere. And so she has.
So please, all of you, if you have time, go on over to her blog and read the latest. (Why not leave her a nice comforting message there too, seeing as she’s fighting her own battles with cancer??)
If you really don’t have time to do that, at least be aware of this very important portion of her most recent ICQ record:

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