Mashaal presses Arafat for ‘calm’ and ‘wisdom’

Ouch. This must have been very painful for the embattled Arafat: to have Hamas’s Damascus-based head Khaled Mashaal urging him to restore calm and act wisely.
Th AP’s Muhammed Daraghmeh has a sort of catch-all piece out of Ramallah this evening listing all kinds of people and institutions–including the elected Palestinian legislature– that are urging Arafat to accept Abu Alaa’s resignation. And then halfway down, we have this:

    The Syria-based head of the Hamas militant movement, Khaled Mashaal, telephoned Arafat Wednesday to urge him to restore calm.
    Mashaal, whose organization has a wide following in Gaza, called for “a wise leadership handling to get out of this turmoil and for resorting to dialogue'” to resolve Palestinian differences, said a Hamas statement.
    Hamas has sat quietly for the past week while factions of Arafat’s Fatah movement and his security forces sank deeper into violent rivalry.

Wouldn’t you have loved to have heard that conversation?
As I noted in this article in the April-May Boston Review, Hamas is the best organized and one of the best-respected and most popular political organizations in the Gaza Strip.
Last year, when Abu Mazen was PM, he urged Arafat to bring Hamas into the government as a follow-on to its agreement to participate in the ceasefire against Israel. Arafat refused. I think most of all he just hates that the Hamas people don’t kowtow to him as most of the people in his own entourage do. Plus, they are generally well-respected for not being corrupt, and raise trenchant criticisms of the corruption in his entourage. And compared with his lot–the wildly chaotic, many-faceted Fateh– they are a model of solid, serious, effective internal organization. Even with many of their leaders wiped out by Israel’s fiendish campaign of assassinations.
Well, here we are again: one year and many hundred Palestinian (and Israeli) casualties later.
I read the report about Mashaal’s call to YA as signifying both (a) that he’s making an overture that could well signal a willingness to open coalition talks, and (b) that he’s doing so from a position of apparent political self-confidence and strength. There’s something rather elder-statesman-ly, perhaps even fatherlike and/or patronizing, about what he is reported to have said to Arafat.
That’s what must have hurt.
Oh, did I mention that Hamas is on the U.S. government’s list of Terrorist Organizations?

Women and reform in the Arab world

Another great issue of the Carnegie Endowment’s Arab Reform Bulletin this month. This one’s a special issue on Women and Reform. Almost all of the (relatively short) contributions in it are informative and well argued.
I particularly enjoyed the contributions by Marina Ottaway, Avoiding the Women’s Rights Trap, and Diane Singerman, Women and Strategies for Change: An Egyptian Model.
In her solidly argued piece, Marina first of all lays out all the well-known reasons why struggling for women’s rights is an essential part of struggling for democratic reform. But she introduces this note of caution:

    It is true that a country will never be fully democratic while it discriminates against half its population. It is equally true that the real obstacle to democracy in Arab countries today is not discrimination against women, but the fact that the entire population has only limited political rights. The unchecked power of Arab presidents, kings, sheiks, and emirs, and the absence or weakness of institutions that could limit that power, are the real problem. Parliaments tend to be docile, often dominated by the ruling party or by handpicked appointees. Judiciaries are rarely independent. Islamists dominate the best-organized opposition groups. Giving women the vote or training women to run for office does nothing to address these core issues. The problem is not to give women the same rights as men, but to reform political systems so that the entire population can enjoy fully the civil and political rights recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that most Arab countries have signed but do not respect…

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Disposing of torture victims

If you’re someone who does really bad torture, then there are times when you just can’t let the “evidence” of what you have done to another human being survive–evidence, that is, in the form of a surviving person who can ‘tell’ others what happened to her/him, either verbally or through bodily ‘inscriptions’.
So what do you do?
I’ve been reading the Report that South Africa’s TRC presented to the government back in 1998. In Volume 2 there’s a whole grisly section on the exhumations that the TRC undertook in 1997 of prisoners tortured to death by the apartheid regime.
For example, the first one was of the body of Phila Portia Ndwandwe, an ANC fighter of unknown age… In its dry way, the report says (p.545):

    Durban Security Branch members abducted her from Swaziland [in 1988]. She was not prepared to co-operate with the police. They state that they did not have admissible evidence to prosecute here and that they could not release her, so they killed her and buried her on the Elandskop farm.

One of the TRC Commissioners noted that the people who killed her said she had been held naked and interrogated in a small concrete chamber near the burial place, for some time before her death. Then:

    When we exhumed her, she was on her back in a foetal position… and had a single bullet wound to the top of her head, indicating that she had been kneeling or squatting when she was killed. Her pelvis was clothed in a plastic packet, fashioned into a pair of panties indicating an attempt to protect her modesty.

Aaaah, I won’t go on. Page after page of it.
In most of those cases, the “goal” of the torturing had been either (1) to get information or (2) to “turn” the victim so he or she would become a double-agent for the benefit of the apartheid regime.
And in Abu Ghraib…

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Ground-level reports from inside Iraq

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting has put some very good pieces up in the past couple of days.
In its Iraq collection, it has this story from an un-named IWPR trainee who was taken to a training camp for a group calling itself the ‘Iraqi Resistance’. He (she?) writes:

    A photograph of Saddam Hussein and his two sons hung on one wall, while the other displayed an old Iraqi flag and a sword.
    This insurgent leader identified himself as a former intelligence officer who transferred to the paramilitary Saddam Fidayeen organisation before the war last year.
    He explained his movement’s goal, “If we do not hold authority in Iraq, then we will allow no one else to hold authority.”

That latter statement seems to sum up the thinking behind a lot of what’s been going on in Iraq in the past few weeks: a campaign to try to make the country “ungovernable”, pure and simple.
The piece has a lot of other interesting tidbits, too.
This story, about the claimed finding of the body of former Iraqi president Abdel-Karim Qassam, and popular reactions to it, is somethng I hadn’t seen elsewhere.
Their Iraqi Press Monitor for July 19 refers to a story in Adalah that quotes Special tribunal chief Salim Chalabi as saying that two former Saddam henchmen–including former Foreign Minister Tarek Aziz–have agreed to testify against Saddam. Interesting. I hadn’t seen a reference to that anyplace else.
In IWPR’s Balkans collection, there’s a good think-piece by their editor in The Hague, Rachel Taylor, asking “Was Milosevic Charge Sheet Too Ambitious?”
Taylor recounts the whole history of how the three cases against Slobo–for Croatia, forBosnia, for Kosovo–all got joined into one. She quotes some people who have supported handling the case that way, and some who now criticize the stragey. For example:

    Marieke Wierda, senior associate at the International Center for Transitional Justice and a former law clerk to Judge May, told IWPR that having one massive case is a ‘high stakes’ approach, because “if the accused is deemed unfit or dies during the case, then you are left with nothing”.
    On the other hand, she said, if the prosecutors had gone forward with the Kosovo indictment first, they “could have had a conviction on Kosovo under their belts by now”.

Taylor also quotes Richard Dicker, head of Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program, thus:

    In the end, he said, people’s hopes for what such a trial can accomplish may just have been too high.
    “Going forward, it is important that we have realistic expectations about the trial process and what is going to come out,” he explained. “Prosecutors should focus on a limited set of charges, or counts, for which the proof is strongest even though important incidents may not be included.
    “The trials shouldn’t attempt to be a history book.”

The latest stories on Afghanistan on the IWPR site are worth reading, too.

Arafat: Planless in Gaza

One of the scary things about the current Palestinian nationalist movement is the degree to which the sheer personal vanity of one stubborn old man has succeeded in paralyzing nearly the entire (secular) part of the national movement for more than four years now.
Why does Yasser Arafat continue to cling to the trappings (if absolutely none of the realities) of political power so long after the failure of the strategy he spearheaded in the 1990s was so vividly demonstrated?
That’s one good question. It’s easy to answer. Vanity is enough of an answer, buttressed perhaps in this case by the degree of self-delusion he has succeeded in engendering throughout the decades, along the lines of la Palestine, c’est moi.
And of course, Sharon and Bush have known how to play on this vanity like a fine violin: they know full well that every time they attack him, or reject the claims he makes to represent the Palestinian people, that he’ll wrap himself ever tighter in the shroud of la Palestine, c’est moi-ism. It has never so far failed to work!
(Maybe it’s due to fail soon though?)
But here’s another question, even tougher to answer than the first one. Why have the Palestinian people put up for so long, in this era that is so critical for their cause, with Yasser Arafat and his absurd and very damaging claims to “represent” them?
Yes, I know, I know all the very heavy national-ideological baggage about the “historical” role he played in the national movement. (I even wrote some of that history myself.)
But just because a person played a historical role in a national movement doesn’t mean he continues to be asset to that movement in every succeeding era.
I’ve been following the guy’s career very closely for 30 years now. Indeed, it was July of 1974 when I left Britain for Beirut, planning to make a career as a foreign correspondent. I’d start in Beirut, I thought, and then maybe move elsewhere. As it was, the “stories” there were so gripping that I stayed for seven years, and got thoroughly bitten by the Middle-East affairs bug. The very first book I wrote (1984) was a study of the PLO.
I’ve written some fairly critical reflections on his performance over the years. But with all the latest news about Abu Alaa’s resignation and the escalating political chaos inside Gaza, I got to reflecting once again on how I would try to define YA’s shortcomings. So if I were writing the “bill of particulars” against him at this time, it might look like this:

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Language and ‘humanitarian interventions’

One more thing I’d meant to mention in the piece I posted Thursday about humanitarianism and war. This is an observation about the way that language has–certainly in the US–become bent and twisted to the extent that when people say “intervention” what they are generally understood to mean is “war”.
Thus nowadays, when people in the policy world say “humanitarian intervention”, what they very often are referring to is outright war.
How twisted is that?
And oh dear, how far we have come from the days when “humanitarian intervention” was generally understood to mean sending food, medicines, or blankets to people in need.
Here’s my proposal, to regain some control of the language and some ethics in our use of it. When we mean “war”, let’s everybody say “war”… or, if they really want to engage in a bit euphemism or jargonish euphemism, they could say “military intervention”. But let’s not ever lose sight of the fact that war is war is war– and that war can never in any sense at all be described as a humanitarian undertaking.
This way, maybe we’ll be able to retrieve and save the original, beneficent sense of the word “humanitarianism.” Wouldn’t that be worth doing?

He who lives by the sword…

I am quite unequivocally against the killing of all people. Period.
Recently, we have learned that extremists among the Israeli settlers, including some of their so-called Rabbis have been threatening to kill Ariel Sharon if he should order any evacuation of settlements from the occupied territories. (An eery echo of what happened to Rabin. Therefore, a threat to be taken seriously.)
I am totally against the killing or harming in any way of Ariel Sharon. By anyone, from whatever side.
But I have to note that in recent years Ariel Sharon has participated in and spearheaded a policy that has quite intentionally and deliberately undertaken the killing of at least another 149 of God’s children, with considerable additional deaths caused “collaterally” in those operations.

    [From B’tselem’s statistics for the period Sept. 29, 2000 through June 30, 2004: “At least 149 of the Palestinians killed were extrajudicially executed by Israel, 90 of them in assassinations carried out by the Israel Air Force and 59 of them in assassinations carried out by ground forces. In the course of these assasinations 100 additional Palestinians were killed, 90 of them minors.”]

So okay, because of that stunning and atrocious record, I admit I felt tempted to say when I heard of the threats against Sharon’s life, “Well, he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.” But that is fatalistic and inhumane. Even Sharon is capable of grace, capable of an inner transformation.
Actually, Rabin was a good example of that. From Mr. “Break their bones” in 1988 to Mr. “Oslo Accords signer” just five years later.
Yossi Alpher, an Israeli friend with whom I have discussed war and peace issues intermittently for the past 15 years, has a new article in the New-York-based Jewish weekly, Forward, about the threats against Sharon.
In it, he warns:

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Hoagie seeing sense?

The WaPo’s Jim Hoagland, for so long the uber-hawk of the inside-the-Beltway commentatariat, may at last be seeing some sense on Iraq? I live in hope…
His column today, Perception Gap in Iraq, seemed about the most sensible I’ve seen him write for a long time…
He starts off by recognizing that,

    nearly three weeks of partial sovereignty may have helped the Bush administration’s drive to reduce its political vulnerability on Iraq at home.
    Reducing that vulnerability is now the White House’s most urgent goal…
    Read through or watch Allawi’s blunt, sparse statements and you too may be impressed by how much of his message is intended to reassure his American audience, rather than Iraqis. They [I guess he means Iraqis] are more keenly aware of the huge obstacles that Allawi faces in carrying out his ambitious promises.
    To the relief of the White House, the American public and media seem to be slowly trying to tune out Iraq’s continuing violence.

Soon enough, however, his tone becomes more somber. He ends with this:

    Iraq and the world will benefit if Allawi can deliver on his promises to establish stability and democracy. Wish him well. But a dangerous gap is opening up between the determinedly upbeat pronouncements in Washington and from Allawi, and more disinterested reports from the field.
    Last Friday, Jim Krane of the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. military officers saying that Iraq’s insurgency is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not by foreign fighters. They number up to 20,000, not 5,000 as Washington briefers maintain, Krane added in his well-reported but generally overlooked dispatch.
    The point is not 5,000 vs. 20,000. The insurgency’s exact size is unknowable. The point is that enough officers in the field sense that what they see happening to their troops in Iraq is so out of sync with Washington’s version that they must rely on the press to get out a realistic message. That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.

Vietnam, anyone?
Of course, it would be strongly preferable were Hoagie to do a proper, three-star mea culpa and explain to all of us how it was he got duped by Chalabi and ended up being for so long a cheerleader for this whole grisly war. And if he then wrapped himself in sack-cloth and ashes and begged forgiveness from the families of everyone who’s been killed in it…
Well, dream on, Helena. For now, I’ll take his admission that things are looking pretty darn’ shitty out there as a good first step. “That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.” Indeed. Except that, of course, some of us “called” the strategic defeat of the US plan in Iraq quite a bit earlier than today. Like here, JWN, April 9.

The myth of ‘humanitarian’ war

The attempt by the authors of last year’s US/UK aggression against Iraq to retroactively repackage their venture as a “humanitarian” war seems almost complete. Both Bush and Blair now say in public, “Well, we may have gotten it wrong about the WMDs and Saddam’s relationship with al-Qaeda… But at least the Iraqi people are now better off than they were under Saddam.”
(Unca Dick Cheney is not, of course, even willing to concede the opening premise there. But he is not, formally at least, the president.)
This business of–whether retroactively or pro-actively–pinning a ‘humanitarian’ label on a war has undergone a bit of a revival in recent years. Remember Kosovo, 1999? Remember Bosnia, before then?
But trying to claim that any war can be ‘humanitarian’ is fundamentally dishonest. No war is ‘humanitarian’, ever. War sucks. War kills people; and by design it is a blatant attack on their most basic human rights–their rights to life, to physical security, to the pre-conditions of material and mental wellbeing. To pretend that any war serves ‘humanitarian’ aims is fundamentally to ignore those most evident facts about war–facts that too many Americans seem to have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew them.
Interlude for a seldom-pondered fact here. Almost no governments have ever launched military adventures far from their own borders without citing ‘humanitarian’ war aims… Nearly all the distant imperial conquests undertaken by European powers in past centuries were cloaked in great clouds of ‘humanitarian’ rhetoric… Perhaps this is connected to the fact that no government ever invites its people to mobilize for an ‘unjust’ or even ‘unjustified’ war? Every government, after all, likes to present itself as good, not greedy, overbearing, and grasping.
Anyway, I want to write something here about the sad history of ‘humanitarian’ war in the present era. And primarily about the kinds of outcomes we have seen, and continue to see, from the west’s most ‘humanitarian’ war in recent history, that in Kosovo…

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Slobo: ‘fit’ to be tried, contd…

Ana Uzelac of the Inst. for War & Peace Reporting had a good piece in their 9 July collection of stories about Slobo’s trial in The Hague. She was exploring the whole issue of him being declared “fit” or “unfit” to stand trial, and what the court’s options are.
It turns out that, contrary to what I wrote here last week, Slobo was not declared (globally) “unfit to stand trial”, which is sort of a different proceeding. What Judge Patrick Robinson did July 5 was merely postpone the trial, pending the defendant gaining the strength needed to proceed with his own defense… And that was done again, July 12.
If he is declared more generally “unfit” to stand trial, then the court has various options. According to Uzelac, what the judges ruled last week was that:

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