Mozambique will on Dec 1-2 be holding the third of the democratic national elections it has held since the termination of its civil war in 1992. If the election proceeds successfully, as seems to be expected, this will be yet another piece of evidence of the success of the country’s whole conflict-termination experience.
I note in addition that in this election the ruling party, Frelimo, will have a new presidential candidate, Armando Guebuza, replacing Jose Chissano, who has now completed his two-term limit.
Post-conflict election risks
Can hasty, ill-planned elections actually impede democratization in post-conflict societies? You bet they can. “It is one of the perverse realities of postconflict elections that this lynchpin of the democratic process can also be its undoing,” argues Benjamin Reilly of the Australian National University in a recent book on “The U.N. Role in Promoting Democracy”
The book will be launched by its publishers– the United Nations University– in New York next Thursday. But some its main points have been previewed in an op-ed that university vice-rector Ramesh Thakur has in today’s Daily Yomiori.
Thakur writes (fairly optimistically, imho) that, “in Afghanistan, the world’s most fledgling democracy, President Hamid Karzai succeeded in legitimizing his rule through elections and preparing the ground for a longer-term peaceful system of power-sharing arrangements.” Then he asks,
- Will the same happen in Iraq in January? Hopefully, but not necessarily.
An election by itself cannot resolve deep seated problems, particularly in a society deeply traumatized by conflict. According to a new U.N. University study of experience in several countries, ill-timed or poorly designed elections in volatile situations can be quite dangerous. They risk producing the very opposite of the intended outcome, fuelling chaos and reversing progress toward democracy. They can exacerbate existing tensions, result in support for extremists or encourage patterns of voting that reflect wartime allegiances.
He notes that,
Neo-Nazis in Israel
Sometimes, when you’re running a well-funded colonial venture, you have to put up with having the most disturbing kinds of riff-raff queueing up to take part… But I suppose from the point of view of some Israelis, just so long as the riff-raff in question aren’t, ahem, actually Palestinians seeking to return to their ancestral homes and homeland, then you’d be prepared to put up with them?
But Russian anti-Semites being given help to immigrate to Israel?? Now that’s what I call a story… And Lucy Ash of BBC radio gives an interesting glimpse into it at the end of this piece, which was first aired yesterday.
Her piece is a broad look at what’s been happening to the numbers of the Russian Jews (and non-Jews) who have migrated to Israel in a huge wave since the fall of the Soviet Union. While she leads with some reporting about the high numbers of recent Russian immigrants to Israel who have been “returning” to their earlier homeland, it was this part, lower down in the story, that caught my eye:
- Zalman Gilichensky, a teacher from Jerusalem, claimed that people with very distant Jewish roots and even anti-Semites are being encouraged to move to Israel.
He said he has evidence of more than 500 outbreaks of anti-Semitism over the past year and he has set up a website to monitor them.
The incidents include swastika graffiti on the walls of synagogues, and verbal and physical abuse.
“The only way to stop these attacks is to change our immigration policy,” Mr Gilichensky said. “It does not bother me that some non Jews come here.
“But I cannot see why we are importing people who hate our guts. Would-be immigrants should have to prove they know something of our history and respect our customs.
“But the government has done its best to sweep all this anti-Semitism under the carpet because these attacks are so damaging to the image of Israel.”
Ash added that the Israeli Attorney-General has launched a criminal investigation into,
Pentagon board trashes “public diplomacy” efforts
Today, the NYT published a story by Thom Shanker in which he wrote that,
- A harshly critical report by a Pentagon advisory panel says the United States is failing in its efforts to explain the nation’s diplomatic and military actions to the Muslim world, but it warns that no public relations plan or information operation can defend America from flawed policies.
The advisory panel in question was a “Strategic Communications Task Force” appointed by the Defense Science Board. (I think the DSB is the descendant of the historic DARPA agency, which gave the world the internet.)
So I rushed on over to the DSB’s website and found the whole text of the 102-page report right there.
[Update, 11/27: For some reason, the above link doesn’t work for everyone. (It still works for me, though.) However, The Federation of American Scientists has helpfully also put the text up on their site: here. Thanks to alert reader Allen for telling us about that.]
The report was presented to the folks in OSD–to, I think, Paul Wolfowitz– back at the end of September. But I suppose nobody, including no-one I know of in the blogosphere, was paying much attention to that arcane corner of the OSD (Office of the Sec. of Defense) back then. People were mainly focused on the US elections. So it’s taken till now for this fascinating report to get the attention it needs.
I skimmed through the whole thing really quickly this afternoon. It is actually, perhaps, even a bit “better” in many ways than Shanker writes. (In other portions though it’s pretty bad: pablumy, and filled with media strategists’ jargonizing.)
So anyway, thanks to my new skills in being able to copy large chunks o’ text out of (some but not all) PDF files, here are some of the parts I found most interesting.
By the way, if you want to go to the link I gave above and read the whole thing, I’d advise you to go to Chapter 2 first, which is where the most interesting criticisms of “public diplomacy” efforts up to the present can be found.
Okay, Helena’s annotated excerpts start here:
Continue reading “Pentagon board trashes “public diplomacy” efforts”
Anguish in ICRC over Iraq
The Swiss daily Le Temps yesterday (11/24) had an
article (purchase reqd) about the dilemmas the International Committee of the Red Cross
has been facing in Iraq. The piece is by Richard Werly, one of the few
Swiss journos who have been able to work in Iraq in recent weeks.
Ominously, the piece is titled, “After two weeks of fighting, Falludjah
is still closed to the ICRC convoys”.
Alert JWN readers will of course be aware that the ICRC is not “just another”
international humanitarian aid organization, but it’s the international body
that is charged by the world’s governments with guarding the integrity of,
and supervising the implementation of, nearly the whole body of the international
“laws of war” — Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, etc etc.
So when the ICRC gets systematically stymied in its work, this is a serious development in international affairs, and could mark a continuation of the desire of many in the Pentagon to “roll back” the entire structure of the laws of war.
(My big thanks to the JWN reader who supplied the translation here.)
Here’s how Werly starts:
Can the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) still
work in Iraq? The question comes back more bluntly after the bloody battle
of Falludjah, the Sunni insurgents’ stronghold retaken by the US Marines
and their Iraqi allies. Two weeks after the assault was launched on the 8th
of November and while sporadic fightings are still going on, neither a crew
nor a humanitarian convoy of the ICRC have been able to enter in this city
of about 200 000 inhabitants…
Author of the Palestinian “democracy hurdle”?
Today’s WaPo has an intriguing article by Dana Milbank in which he writes that just nine days after Bush’s re-election he had a special meeting in the White House with Natan Sharansky… Or, as Milbank describes him, “an Israeli politician so hawkish that he has accused Ariel Sharon of being soft on the Palestinians.”
Sharansky has apparently recently co-authored a book called “The Case for Democracy”, which argues that nothing should be given to the Palestinians at all until they have established a full democracy. (Under conditions of foreign military occupation?? Exactly how are they supposed to do that, again?) His publisher got copies of the galleys to Prez Bush, who was so impressed that he (a) invited Sharansky over and (b) incorporated most of his ideas into the policy toward the Palestinians that he outlined at the joint press conference with Blair.
As Milbank writes,
- Sharansky made waves this spring when he rallied with Jewish settlers to oppose the Likud prime minister’s plan for a unilateral pullout from Gaza — a plan that Bush had endorsed. Sharansky, head of a Russian immigrant political party, said Sharon’s plan, though supported by a number of Likud hard-liners, would be “encouraging more terror.” A figure who has previously railed against the “illusions of Oslo” and described that famous accord as “one-sided concessions,” Sharansky resigned in 2000 from Ehud Barak’s government over the Labor prime minister’s plan to attend a peace summit in Washington.
“He’s been suffering in the political wilderness in Israel with these ideas for some time,” [his co-author Ron] Dermer said of [Sharansky]. But when it came to Bush, Dermer said, “I didn’t see a lot of daylight between them.”
This whole idea that a nation must be fully democratic before it can allowed its independence is quite bizarre, and quite a-historical. Did the US colonists have a full range of their own fully democratic institutions before they fought for and won their independence from the British Crown? Of course not! It took them 13 more years, as I recall, to work out the details of the US Constitution.
In the modern (i.e. post-WW2) era, no other nation has been obliged to “prove” its democratic credentials before being given independence… Of course, a working democracy is a very desirable thing. But to make it a precondition for national independence? That is the bizarre thing.
Anyway, I could write a bunch about this whole cart-before-horse idea, but I have to go… Just finally, though, I’d note that the tired old proposition that “democracies don’t launch wars against other nations” is palpable nonsense in the present era.
Syria-2
(From Damascus. Written Tuesday evening.) As I started writing this, the plaintive quarter
tones of the evening call to prayer were reverberating from the minaret very
near to us. Now, that one’s stopped and I can hear other ones coming
thinly from other minarets around town. On Saturday, when we had dinner
at a restaurant up on Jebel Kassioun looking down on the city, we could see
many of its minarets picked out with green neon lighting: little green spears
sticking up from a broad, spreading carpet of orange street lights and lit-up
homes.
From ground-level I’ve seen some of the churches that have blue lighting
for the crosses topping them. Sunday evening we wandered around the shadowed
streets of the Old City’s Christian Quarter and heard the broad tones of
heavy church bells. Church bells on a cold and rainy Sunday evening…
that reminds me of so many poignant things about my childhood.
Election news- Palestine
Election plans for both Palestine and Iraq are in the news. In Iraq, they are being planned with a view to the possible withdrawal of the occupation forces– certainly, a total withdrawal is what the vast majority of Iraqis want to see ensue after them.
In Palestine, it is less clear what will ensue from the elections scheduled for January 9. Clearly, the consensus among Palestinians for a total withdrawal of the forces occupying their country is even stronger than the consensus among Iraqis in that regard. But the Israelis are not about to simply do that, election or no election.
Here, by the way, is the column I had in Monday’s CSM on the Palestinian election issue. I argue there that the “diaspora” Palestinians– that is, those millions of Palestinian refugees whom Israel still prevents from returning even to the area of the future Palestinian state– should be represented in the upcoming elections…
I have to say that, regrettably, it ain’t going to happen. Well, not this time, anyway.
Many, many contacts are going on now in preparation for the Palestinian elections, which are solely for the position of ‘chairman’ (or ‘president’) of the Oslo-decreed ‘Palestinian authority’. Which doesn’t actually have much, if any, real authority. But will be heading the negotiations with the Israelis from here on out.
Each of the major Palestinian groups/blocs will be presenting its candidate, and several ‘independents’ have announced their candidacy too. There’s a possibility that Fateh will nominate Marwan Barghouthi, who’s in jail in Israel serving five life terms. He could then become a Mandela-like icon figure. Interesting…
- Update: They ended up choosing Abu Mazen… However, Marwan’s cousin Dr Mustapha Barghouthi is mentioned as a possibility for the “leftist” candidate…
Syria-1 (and Lebanon)
(Written Sunday) This morning we visited the
1,300-year-old Omayyad Mosque. We saw a 1,000-year-old Islamic madrasa
(school) and a stunning 250-year-old palace and nearby khan (a
merchant’s lodging- and meeting-house). We walked along the Street
Called Straight. I shopped a little in the broad, cavernous Souq al-Hamidieh,
and Bill took some photos… Having thus reimmersed ourselves in the busy rhythms
of Damascus’s Old City, a couple of taxi rides and a quick change of clothes
later we were sitting with Syria’s Minister of Expatriate Affairs, the feminist
former litterateuse Bouthaina Shaaban.
It was a short, informal discussion. Dr. Shaaban is going to Geneva
tomorrow to take part in a meeting on “women and peace”, but she slotted
us into her schedule at the last minute. I last saw her– even more
briefly– when I was in Damascus in December 2002. This time, I asked how
the atmosphere had been in Damascus back in May or June of last year when
the Americans, fresh from having vanquished Saddam’s regime in Iraq, was
making very belligerent noises about Syria. “We were never afraid,”
she said. “What could we do? We are are here, and we’ll stay
here.”
She said she thought Foreign Minister Farouq Shara would be going to the
“summit” on Iraqi reconstruction that starts tomorrow in Sharm al-Shaikh,
Egypt. She said she hoped the summit could help to find a way to make
elections happen in Iraq, and that Iraq’s neighboring states– all of whom
will be represented at the meeting– could play a role in that…
Yet more on Kevin Sites
Kevin has written an open letter to the Marines in the unit he was working with Fallujah. Here is an excerpt: