Hague court Appeals Chamber releases Blaskic

The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has rapped one of the court’s main Trial Chambers sharply over the knuckles by overturning 16 of the 19 counts of the Trial Chamber’s earlier conviction of Croatian General Tihomir Blaskic.
July 29, the Appeals Chamber rendered these findings, and reduced Blaskic’s sentence from 45 years to nine years. Since Blaskic has already served eight years and four months, and has been what the court described as a “model prisoner”, he was later in the day released.
The summary that the Appeals Chamber issued of its finding makes clear its view that the Trial Chamber had committed several significant errors of law as well as errors of fact in reaching its earlier judgment. Regarding “fact”, in the four years since the Trial Chamber reached its judgment, substantial new evidence has come to light that has tended to exonerate Blaskic. But the Appeals Chamber made clear that on each of the T.C.’s earlier judgments it had considered errors of law before it even started considering errors of fact; and where the errors of law were on their own substantial enough to lead to overturning the T.C.’s judgment, then the A.C. did not even consider the issues of fact.
It is evidently a good thing, from the rule-of-law viewpoint, that defendants at the international criminal tribunals have access to a well-constituted appeals procedure. However, the fact that the Appeals Chamber can overturn so many of the T.C.’s judgments merely on matters of law, rather than on matters of (newly adduced) fact seems to me fairly troubling. It would be great if the judges at the two different levels could get their acts a bit better together regarding what constitutes sound legal argument on all or most of these cases. And then, just consider what this whole process must have cost: the process of trying Blaskic on all these 19 counts, and then the subsequent process of overturning 16 of those convictions….

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Getting ‘traction’ in Iraq

On a number of occasions, including in this July 2003 JWN post, I’ve reflected on the “slippery” nature of the Iraq question.
Nowadays, the problem of the lack of traction in the country is at a new level of criticality–and in two different though linked dimensions.
In the security dimension, the current plan of the eager-to-withdraw occupiers is that new Iraqi security forces will be rapidly trained up so that they can police most of the country, as the occupiers withdraw ever further into out-of-sight cantonments.
But how do you even start to assemble Iraqi security people in the required numbers if you can’t even assure security for those Iraqis willing to come forward and enlist?
You need a traction point. It doesn’t appear to be there.
And then, in the political dimension, there’s a similar lack-of-traction problem, as shown by the failure of Allawi’s present “transitional” administration to meet the deadline for convening the first precursor body, that will then choose a second precursor body, to help organize an election, that will choose the Constitution-writing body, that will the lay out the rules for (sometime along the way there in the distant future) actually exercizing sovereign self-government of the country…
A big lack-of-traction problem there, too.
And of course these two dimensions are linked. How can you convene any of the national-level precursor bodies if the country is still wracked by inssecurity? And on the other hand, how can you ever get a national representative enlistment into the security forces if great chunks of the national population feel alienated politically from the occupier-backed regime?
Some people might call these chicken-and-egg problems. But with all the complexity in Iraq these days it looks like what you’d have with this metaphor is a massive omelette made with ground-up chicken feet, gristle, and beaks, garnished with bloody chicken feathers…. Not easy to find any way out of such a morass…
However, if you look at these as lack-of-traction problems, it’s just possible that–once you can find a more solid point from which to intervene–then enough traction can be provided slowly to start unraveling all aspects of the problem.

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Democrats pull punches on Iraq, Palestine

I’m coming near the end of a 24-hour, drop-by appearance in my home town, playing hooky from residential conference some 50 miles away. Thursday afternoon I went to a small-group presentation on the 9/11 Commission’s work, given by its Executive Director Phil Zelikow. Then I got to watch the Democratic Convention on C-SPAN, including John Kerry’s 55-minute “acceptance” speech…
A couple of themes emerged as common to both experiences: themes that show us just how eager Kerry and the rest of the Dems are these days not to lay themselves open to any charges that at a time when the country is at “war” they are openly attacking or criticizing the Prez on matters of significance.
Especially regarding foreign policy.
Thus, at a time when everyone realizes that the main issue is Iraq, Kerry is not telling us anything specific at all about what he would do there that is different from what the current Prez is already doing– except, perhaps, “internationalize” it a bit more (though heaven knows, Bush has been trying to do that, as well, without too much success).
And at a time when just about everyone in the US with two synapses to rub together in their brains realizes that the Bush administration’s fawning embrace of Sharon’s agenda in Palestine has been building huge resentment of US policy throughout the more-vital-than-ever Muslim world, and boosting recruitment for the Islamist extremist groups considerably– not a word from Kerry or any of the rest of the Dems that would indicate even a chink of light between them and Bush/Sharon on Palestine.
Similarly in the work of the 9/11 Commission…

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Bantustans: South Africa and Palestine

How quickly the world forgets. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the apartheid government in South Africa pushed forward its plan to create “Bantu homelands” within South Africa which would:

    (a) be small, territorially non-contiguous, and located in some of the country’s most unfertile regions, and
    (b) be totally under the control of the Pretoria government in practice, even though four of the ten homelands were given a nominal “independence”. (Note the importance of the fact that no significant outside powers–except Israel!–ever gave formal recognition to this “independence”.)

What did the map of all of South Africa with the ten tiny homelands inside it look like? It looked like this. Maps of the Bantustans are so hard to come by these days that it took me a while to find that one: it came from vol. 7 of the TRC’s report, p.935.
When you look at that map, remember that the Black African population of South Africa at the time was more than 75% of the total. No wonder the vast majority of the country’s people rose up to oppose that system, and replaced it with a unitary system of one-person-one-vote democracy.
So here, now, are some maps that show what has been happning to the occupied Palestinian territories during the 37 years of Israel’s military occupation:
First up, this very clear map from the Foundation for Middle East Peace that shows the “leopard spots” of limited self-government in the occupied West Bank that the Palestinians were allowed under the post-Oslo “peace process” of 1993-2000.
Then, we have this map of the situation in Gaza as of last October. It comes from the UN’s Office for the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs. If you click on the link for the large version there, you can see clearly just how much of the surface-area of Gaza is now off-limits to the Palestinians, because of the Israeli settlements and various “security” needs. And oh, the Israeli “security roads” just happen to cut the “Palestinian” parts of Gaza into four non-contiguous chunks.
There are a few other things worth remembering in this picture…

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Go, Jimmy!

Kudos to Jimmy Carter for mentioning the need for an Arab-Israeli peace process in his speech
at the Democratic Convention last night. In all the general US political rhetoric about “what needs to be done to combat the threat from Islamic extremism”, this item is all too frequently completely ignored.
And that’s been happening inside the Democratic Party as much as elsewhere, with Kerry’s platform and rhetoric apparently even trying to outbid Bush in lauding Ariel Sharon and all his schemes.
But there was dear Jimmy Carter last night, saying this:

    The United States has alienated its allies, dismayed its friends, and inadvertently gratified its enemies by proclaiming a confused and disturbing strategy of ‘pre-emptive’ war. With our allies disunited, the world resenting us, and the Middle East ablaze, we need John Kerry to restore life to the global war against terrorism.
    In the meantime, the Middle East peace process has come to a screeching halt for the first time since Israel became a nation. All former presidents, Democratic and Republican, have attempted to secure a comprehensive peace for Israel with hope and justice for the Palestinians. The achievements of Camp David a quarter century ago and the more recent progress made by President Bill Clinton are now in peril.
    Instead, violence has gripped the Holy Land, with the region increasingly swept by anti-American passions. Elsewhere, North Korea’s nuclear menace – a threat more real and immediate than any posed by Saddam Hussein – has been allowed to advance unheeded…

What was really interesting to see, on the televised version of the speech last night, was the high degree of support that Carter got from the audience–for this portion of the speech as for all his utterances.
I really do believe that there are many people in the Democratic Party and elsewhere throughout the country who realize that something is terribly out-of-whack in the US’s current radical tilt toward Sharon and his policies– and also, that this pro-Sharon tilt is linked to the strong antipathy expressed to toward US policies in Muslim societies throughout the world.
The American people are not stupid. It’s often the case, though, that they don’t quite know how to start talking about these issues without sounding anti-Semitic… And of course, the extremist Likud supporters who have positioned themselves in various “watchdog” roles around the country are always ready to leap onto someone expressing, say, criticism of this Israeli government’s policies and denounce her or him as “anti-Semitic”….

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Allawi’s blond beasts

I don’t think I’m an anti-white racist… But am I the only person who’s a bit perplexed by all the repeated pictures of Iyad Allawi, the ‘prime minister’ of the supposedly ‘independent’ transitional government of Iraq always appearing in public being very publicly guarded by a squad of very Aryan-looking and heavily armed blond beasts? Is this, I wonder, quite the image that he wants to project?

South Africa, the microcosm

I’ve thought for a while–and I don’t think I’ve blogged about this before, though I may be wrong there–that you can look at South Africa as a microcosm of the whole world. Specifically, you can look at the behavior of the US of A with respect to the rest of the world like the behavior of the Whites in apartheid-era South Africa with regard to the rest of their (non-White) compatriots.
You can see how it goes: the hegemonic group, despite its definitely minority status, thinks not only (a) that it can ‘speak for’ and control the majority, but also that (b) there are good reasons why this should be so: reasons based in the realm of ethics, ‘Manifest Destiny’, superior values, ‘Christian civilization’, or whatever; and no, sheer naked force is just incidental to the whole equation.
Except that of course it’s not. Force, and the ability to control and intimidate (another word for ‘terrorize’) the majority lie at the heart of any attempt by a minority to exercize control.

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Washington, Iraq, Darfur…

I’ve been working so hard on my book about violence in Africa that I haven’t had time to blog much these past few days. The list I keep of “things I should blog about” has grown alarmingly long…
So to read some of my quick reflections about recent world events, click the “Continue reading” link below…

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Riverbend on women in Iraq

Last August, there burst into the blogosphere a shining new light by the name of Riverbend. In her very first post, August 17, 2003, she told us:

    A little bit about myself: I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway.

Since there is, understandably, quite a lot of interest these days in what has happened to Iraq’s women before, during, and since the US/UK invasion, I thought it would be good for JWN readers to do some good reading of the great blog that Riv provided us with between then and mid-June. (Some of us are quite worried about what has happened to Riv since then… Please, if anyone knows, tell me. meanwhile, do join us in beaming some good thoughts her way…)
Maybe the best thing you could do, if you have a bit of time and access to a good web connection, is to go cruise in River’s blog yourself.
However, in case you don’t have those great commodities, Adela of Abundance Alliance has helped us all by picking out some of the posts in which Riv comments and reflects most perinently on the situation of women in Iraq.
By August 23, Riv was giving us a first really great overview of women’s situation in post-invasion Iraq. In this post, titled We’ve only just begun, she wrote:

    Females can no longer leave their homes alone. Each time I go out, E. and either a father, uncle or cousin has to accompany me. It feels like we’ve gone back 50 years ever since the beginning of the occupation. A woman, or girl, out alone, risks anything from insults to abduction. An outing has to be arranged at least an hour beforehand. I state that I need to buy something or have to visit someone. Two males have to be procured (preferably large) and ‘safety arrangements’ must be made in this total state of lawlessness. And always the question: “But do you have to go out and buy it? Can’t I get it for you?” No you can’t, because the kilo of eggplant I absolutely have to select with my own hands is just an excuse to see the light of day and walk down a street. The situation is incredibly frustrating to females who work or go to college.
    Before the war, around 50% of the college students were females, and over 50% of the working force was composed of women. Not so anymore. We are seeing an increase of fundamentalism in Iraq which is terrifying.
    For example, before the war, I would estimate (roughly) that about 55% of females in Baghdad wore a hijab- or headscarf. Hijabs do not signify fundamentalism. That is far from the case- although I, myself, don’t wear one, I have family and friends who do. The point is that, before, it didn’t really matter. It was *my* business whether I wore one or not- not the business of some fundamentalist on the street.
    For those who don’t know (and I have discovered they are many more than I thought), a hijab only covers the hair and neck. The whole face shows and some women even wear it Grace Kelley style with a few locks of hair coming out of the front. A ‘burqa’ on the other hand, like the ones worn in Afghanistan, covers the whole head- hair, face and all.
    I am female and Muslim. Before the occupation, I more or less dressed the way I wanted to. I lived in jeans and cotton pants and comfortable shirts. Now, I don’t dare leave the house in pants. A long skirt and loose shirt (preferably with long sleeves) has become necessary. A girl wearing jeans risks being attacked, abducted or insulted by fundamentalists who have been… liberated!
    Fathers and mothers are keeping their daughters stashed safe at home. That’s why you see so few females in the streets (especially after 4 pm). Others are making their daughters, wives and sisters wear a hijab. Not to oppress them, but to protect them.
    I lost my job for a similar reason. I’ll explain the whole depressing affair in another post. Girls are being made to quit college and school. My 14-year-old cousin (a straight-A student) is going to have to repeat the year because her parents decided to keep her home ever since the occupation. Why? Because the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq overtook an office next to her school and opened up a special ‘bureau’.
    Men in black turbans (M.I.B.T.s as opposed to M.I.B.s) and dubious, shady figures dressed in black, head to foot, stand around the gates of the bureau in clusters, scanning the girls and teachers entering the secondary school. The dark, frowning figures stand ogling, leering and sometimes jeering at the ones not wearing a hijab or whose skirts aren’t long enough. In some areas, girls risk being attacked with acid if their clothes aren’t ‘proper’…

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New neocon group gets egg on face

It was clearly meant to be an impressive launch… Tuesday, Senators Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl had an op-ed in the WaPo where they announced the launch of the third incarnation of a high-level, militaristic lobbying group called the Committee on the Present Danger. Wednesday, the relaunched CPD took full-age ads in the WaPo and the NYT— and maybe elsewhere, too?– laying out their manifesto.
It terrifyingly identified the “present danger” facing the “American people” as coming from “radical Islamists” and “rogue regimes”… (Are you scared yet?)
Later Wednesday, however, the CPD’s managing director, Peter Hannaford, had to step down after journo-blogger Laura Rozen had revealed that he once represented Austrian neo-Nazi Jorg Haidar in Washington. (See also this.)
Egg on face. Great. May the banana skin of history continue to lie just under the shoes of these dangerous people!
Great work, Laura.
We should note that CPD-2, the previous incarnation of this organization, was one of the main incubators of today’s well-organized network of neo-cons. If you want a concise history of CPD-1 and CPD-2, this is one good place to start– though the info there hasn’t been updated since July 1989.
Of course, shortly after July 1989 the Soviet Union, which had been the focus of CPD-1 and CPD-2’s agitation, collapsed completely. Many of the CPD-2 people, who were well embedded in the two Reagan administrations, and fairly well represented in the Bush-1 administration, subsequently claimed credit for that.
But hey, we can’t have a militarized republic, and the taxpayers agreeing to divert huge proportions of public monies from essential social needs at home to the maintenance of a massive military abroad, without having another “present danger”, can we?
Reading through the list of people–in addition to Hannaford!– who are on CPD-3 is an interesting, if faintly depressing, exercise…

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