Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 303 – Info, analysis, discussion

‘Cleaning up’ in Fallujah

In connection with military operations, there are two distinct kinds of “cleaning up” that go on. One is the “mopping up” operations that the advancing armies themselves do to secure the areas they’ve taken (a phase that can segue over into “ethnic cleansing”.) Personally I hate all these uses of household-management terminology in connection with what is almost always a very brutal phase of the fighting.
And then, there’s the real “cleaning up” that needs to be done in the battlefield, once the armies have finished their business.
A small team from the ICRC was able to get into Fallujah yesterday– many days after the hostilities there supposedly ended. According to a Reuters report from Geneva, on Friday morning ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal,

expressed concern about civilians in Falluja, where sewage is flowing in the streets and hundreds of bodies apparently lie in a warehouse since a U.S. assault.

I don’t know if there are still bodies in the streets in Fallujah. I imagine there are still, certainly, bodies in many of the destroyed or not-destroyed houses that US troops have busted into over the past month.
Dahr Jamail has an extraordinary, and extremely upsetting, album of photos of bodies in Fallujah. Absolutely sit down and say a prayer before you look at it.
Here’s what he says about these photos:

Two weeks ago someone was allowed into Fallujah by the military to help bury bodies. They were allowed to take photographs of 75 bodies, in order to show pictures to relatives so that they might be identified before they were buried. These pictures are from a book of these photos. They are being circulated publicly around small villages near Fallujah where many refugees are staying.

There are 58 photos. I haven’t looked at them all yet. The first one is titled “Dead boy holding a white surrender flag”, and it goes on from there. Some of the bodies appear to be in houses, some in streets. Quite a number have had the flesh of the extremities already eaten by dogs. At least one of the pics shows a body with the feet sawn off by something (possibly a tank?)

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Shi-ite-led list unveiled

At a press conference in Baghdad a couple of hours ago Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi Shi-ite pol (and former nuclear scientist) who was tipped for the “interim PM” post that Allawi finally got last June, unveiled the electoral list of the United Iraqi Alliance, that he and Ayatollah Sistani have worked at putting together.
Reuters and AP both have reports on Shahristani’s press conference. They are significantly different, so I just decided to archive both accounts together.
JWN readers are no doubt aware that the election is for a constitutional assembly – cum- parliament that will have 275 members, one-third of whom must be women. There’s a single-constituency, p.r. system for voting, similar to Israel’s. In other words, voters vote for a single party (or coalition) list, and then the seats are divided among the lists according to how many votes each receives. Obviously, it’s better for a candidate to be placed near the top of the relevant list as he or she then gets a better chance of being voted in.
So a lot of the jockeying in list-formation goes on around the position of each named candidate on the list. I think each of the lists presented has to have a woman in each third place.
The UIA list presented by Shahristani today contains the names of 228 candidates, indicating that its architects are hoping to win as many as that number of seats in the assembly.
On the crucial issue of Moqtada al-Sadr’s relationship with this list, the Reuters and AP accounts differ significantly. AP reported that,

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CSM column on Syria

Today’s CSM has the column I wrote for them about (and from) Syria.
Again, I’m not really happy with the title they chose. Plus, in the CSM’s own version of the piece, they annoyingly misspelled my name.
I’m generally, though not completely, happy with the way the text came out. I wrote it really fast, on Tuesday, while battling jetlag and continuing to pester Air France for news of our four lost bags.
(Three of the bags got delivered yesterday evening, completely gone-through by Customs and repacked in a shockingly shoddy way. The fourth one was “impounded” by Customs for a while, but an officer in the Customs office at Philadelphia Int’l Airport assured Bill yesterday that it was being released back to Air France for onward delivery to us. Right, so now I’m expecting another three-day wait from AF’s less-than-efficient baggage-forwarding service… Why d’you think it got impounded? Maybe something to do with the nice sticky candy from Qom, Iran that was in there? Or the book in Arabic on the history of Hizbullah? I guess we’ll have to wait and see what contents it still has when it gets here…)
On a broader note, what with having now published a bunch these past few weeks about Palestinians, Syria, and– still to come!– Iran, and then Lebanon’s Hizbullah, do you think I’ll make it onto CAMERA’s watchlist of individual journos??

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Jordan; Iraqi exile ballots; Orwell

Tuesday, that well-known “democrat” Jordan’s King Abdullah (not!) railed vociferously against Iranian influence in the upcoming Iraqi elections. Yesterday (or so), the Iraqi newspaper Ad-dustour reported that

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has decided to make the Jordanian capital Amman the place to sort out the absentee ballots of Iraqi expatriate voters. Hence, ballot boxes will be transported to Amman for this purpose.

I got this latter nugget of news from today’s email feed from IWPR’s “Iraqi Press Monitor”. For some reason they haven’t posted today’s IPM content on their website yet. I guess it’ll happen soon.
My question is, “Why should anyone particularly trust this process of conveying all the Iraqi exiles’ votes to Amman and then counting them there?”
Btw, I’m finding it frustratingly difficult to find precise info on how, exactly, the promised provisions for including Iraqi exiles in the voting process will actually be implemented– apart from the above.
For example, in how many different places around the world can they cast their votes? (In South Africa’s landmark 1994 election, exiles could vote through their local SA consulates.) What are the rules for determining their eligibility? Roughly how many people might we be talking about?
Anyone who could point me to any answers there, please do so…

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CSM column on Shatila

With all my travels I failed to post anything here before now about the column I had in the CSM November 29, under the title Revisiting the gritty symbol of Palestinian survival – Shatila.
Well, I wouldn’t have given it that title since the whole way the story was written was so that the name of the camp wouldn’t be disclosed till about one-third the way down.
Ever since the column came out, the near-rabid “watchdog” group CAMERA has been snapping at the heels of my editors at the CSM, focusing on where I described the terrible 1982 massacre in the camp as “Israeli-orchestrated”.
The CSM is one of 14 “print media” outlets that CAMERA has on its watchlist, according to this page on their website. They also have a lengthy watchlist of individual journos, too. Shucks, I didn’t make that one!
You can get a good idea of how this operation, CAMERA, works if you check their website out a bit. For example, on one page there they have a so-called Dictionary of Bias.
I suppose their intent in calling it that is to show their “activists” how to identify what CAMERA judges to be anti-Israeli bias? But what they recommend there, in terms of “acceptable” terminology, would embody a high degree of pro-Likud bias… So yes, you could indeed say it is a “Dictionary of Bias”.
(See in particular what they have to say about the terms “occupied territories”, “settlements”, etc… )
Oh well. I think my editors are trying to fight the good fight. At least, I hope so.

“Calm” in Palestine?

Today, both the NYT and the WaPo had short reports of yesterday’s incident in Gaza in which a Hamas unit apparently lured an Israeli unit into an ambush and one Israeli soldier was killed.
In both reports, this incident was presented as an out-of-the-blue operation undertaken by Hamas that broke what was reported as (NYT) “a relatively calm spell that had followed Mr. Arafat’s death”, or (WaPo) “three weeks of relative calm in Gaza “.
Relative calm???
Who the heck do they think they’re kidding?
Check, for example, this report from the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which tells us that during the week of Nov 25 – Dec 1:

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Notes on Iran

I can’t pretend to have gathered anything like a satisfactory picture of
the forces at work in today’s Iran from a visit that lasted only 60 hours
and was anyway not designed primarily to be any kind of a “journalistic” enquiry.
Still, I’m really glad I got the chance to go there. I had some
intriguing glimpses into a few small slivers of the country’s life; and I
met some really interesting people. If (or rather, when) I go
back there, I’ll try to prepare for the trip more systematically, and it
won’t be so much like jumping in at the deep end. This little trip
I’ve just had feels more like an appetite-whetter.

From my one previous trip to Teheran, to do a “quickie” piece on the story
of mounting unrest there, for the London Sunday Times back in 1977,
I remember mainly the monochrome, yellowy-gray coloration of the city; the
complexity of the political story there; and the difficulty of covering it.
I didn’t leave the capital. I forget who exactly I talked to that time–
it was the “usual suspects”: some government people, some local journalists,
some professors, some diplomats… I certainly didn’t feel I had anything
like the same kind of the story there that I had, at that time, in Beirut
or Cairo, or even Amman.

This time, the city was exactly the same color as it was 27 years ago. The Alborz Mountains that ring the north side of it were capped with snow, but their view was obscured by a miasma of yellow-ish pollution, just as I remembered.

Most of the city slopes down from the north to the south, and beside the strees there are open water-runways down which gurgled plentiful runoff from the snow.

We
spent a lot of time driving around the city, or more accurately sitting in the
traffic jams that plague it today, just as they did in 1977. It seems
that nowadays it has a metro, though we didn’t ride on it. (I gather
it has sex-segregated cars.) There also seemed to be an extensive municipal
bus system; and in all the buses that I saw, women had to ride at the back.
Lots of things are sex-segregated in Iran that wouldn’t be in most western
countries: for example, there were completely separate security-check lines
for men and women at the airport.

I’m writing this on the flight back to the US, having had a plane-change
in De Gaulle airport in Paris. As I got onto this plane, I was picked
out of the line filing through the jetway and subjected to a very thorough
and very intimate pat-down– by a woman- but right there in the jetway with
everyone walking right past. It felt a little humiliating, yes.

On the other hand, in Iran, I also saw men and women working alongside
each other in a number of different service occupations. There were
women and men immigration officers staffing the desks in the airport. (The
female officers wore loose black chadors over baggy dark-green uniforms.)
Women and men were working together behind the counter in the “fast-food”
restaurant we went to Thursday. At a more formal restaurant we went
to in Teheran Tuesday, there was a female “host”, and women were running
the cash registers, though all the waiters were male…

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Meanwhile, in the gulag

Attentive reader Christiane has been following some of the news stories about developments in the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo cases. Since she figured that I was out of touch while in Iran (and Syria), she compiled a collection of some of the most significant of these stories.

Thanks so much, Christiane! These look like really valuable references to have here on the blog.

So the following is a lightly edited version of what she sent:

Meanwhile, somethings seems to be moving concerning the situation of prisoners,
both in Abu Ghraib or in Guantanamo. Here are 11 links:

1) On the 30th of November the NYTimes reported
on a leaked ICRC Report concerning the Guantanamo prisoners. (Also,
here.)

Usually the ICRC reports are kept secret (it’s a well established policy of
the ICRC; in exchange they are granted access to the prisons and can make
suggestions in order to improve the detention conditions.They also denounce
what breaches the Convention and try to negotiate their end).

It is a good sign that some one in the administration leaked these reports.
Maybe the government will eventually have to do something about it.

2) On December 1 the NYT carried this
editorial on the subject, calling for an intervention in the Congress
“who should make the actual government more accountable”. (Also here.)…

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Inconveniences of travel

It’s Monday morning in Philadelphia. We flew (back) here yesterday from Beirut, transiting through Paris-Charles de Gaulle. None of the four bags we checked made the connection. Grrr.
We met the college student daughter who’s been so kindly looking after my car, had a nice dinner with her, then checked into an overpriced hotel before the drive home. Toilet blocked. Grrr.
Oh well, it’s still pretty amazing that a person could travel so broadly and have such great experiences and interactions as I have over the past couple months. I am hugely aware and appreciative of that fact. My Auntie Katie, who raised me, was a very accomplished woman, a pioneer in elementary education. And she never in her life traveled outside England– not even to Scotland or Wales…

Islam and Democracy discussion

On Thursday, I was honored to participate in a long round-table discussion on “Religion and Democracy” that was co-sponsored by Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran and the center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington, DC. The session I was part of was held in a conference room at the Education Ministry in Teheran.

What follows here is a description of the substance of some of the most striking presentations made at the conference by Iranian participants. Please note that this account is a copy of what I wrote toward the end of this earlier JWN post. But I wanted to put this description up as a post on its own so that interested readers can join in a description on the Comments board that is limited purely to the substance of what I described there.

What follows also includes some of my own immediate reflections on what I heard.

If you want to read a bit about the fascinating back-story behind the holding of the conference, then go to that earlier post.

The participants in the Teheran session included CSID President Abdel-Aziz Sachedina, a distinguished professor of Islamic studies at the University of Virginia; Abdelkarim Soroush, a political philosopher who works in Germany now, but was previously at Princeton, Harvard, etc; Mohsen Kadivar, a tall, gentle-looking figure in mullah’s robes who teaches at Tarbiat Modares University in Teheran; Forough Jahanbakhsh, who teaches at Queen’s University in Toronto (and was the only other female participant); Ali Paya, a professor in Teheran who chaired the sessions and did much of the translating; and around a dozen others.

(Kadivar has his own website which certainly looks worth a lengthy visit. It has a good section in English, and one in Arabic, as well as all the Farsi material. In the Bio info in the English-language section, you can read that “Kadivar was arrested for the first time in May 1978 ? the last year of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi Shah’s reign in Iran… 20 years later, the unconstitutional Cleric Court of Iran found him guilty of campaigning against the Islamic Republic because of the statements he had made in an interview with the banned Khordad Daily … [and] he was sentenced to spend 18 months in Evin Prison, Tehran, and was released on July 17, 2000. He is still campaigning for the reform of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”)

The proceedings were all bilingual, with the presentations given in either
English or Farsi and then afterwards rendered orally into the other language.
Here, I’m relying mainly on the notes I took during the session, though
I’ll also refer to the abstracts of the presentations distributed by the
conference organizers… Longer versions of the presentations will later
be published as a book, though I believe some of them may be available before
that on the CSID’s website.

Now, read more about Thursday’s session…

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