Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 324 – Info, analysis, discussion

Transition? What transition?

Update note, Monday a.m.– I wrote the following Sunday evening, before news came in that they’d brought the transition ‘ceremony’ forward. Most of the post still stands, except that where I’d speculated on a large-ish, TV-clip-friendly ceremony what they had ended up in a small back room, far from public view, for all the world like a drug deal or an illicit sexual liaison… Oh, and the flag on view–they had no space to ‘haul it up’– was the Saddam-era one… Read on…

Today, the counter on the CPA’s inimitable website breathlessly tells us, “4 days to a Sovereign Iraq©”. (Oops, how did that copyright symbol sneak in there?) If you go to this page on the CPA site, however, you’ll get a good idea of just how circumscribed that “sovereignty” will be.
That’s the page where they list and have (often non-functioning) “links” to the text of some 12 CPA “Regulations”; some 99 (and counting… ) “Orders”; 17 “Memoranda”; and a dozen or so “Public notices”.
It’s the “Orders” that are really important these days. You could call ’em diktats. You could call ’em edicts. You could call ’em fatwas. But “orders” is a fine, descriptive word. And that page even tells us about their status:

Orders are binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people that create penal consequences or have a direct bearing on the way Iraqis are regulated, including changes to Iraqi law.

Baghdad fashion maven Paul Bremer has promulgated no fewer than 18 of these 99 orders since the beginning of May, and may well be promulgating additional ones even as I write.
“Penal consequences.” Sounds bad. And it could indeed be pretty bad, especially if anyone’s hoping for anything that might look like real sovereignty to be happening come July 1.
(That reminds me. I know from growing up in the UK that when a foreign country is “given” its independence there’s supposed to be a flag-raising ceremony. Have they figured out yet which flag they’re going to raise in Baghdad, come Thursday? Will it be the ridiculous, made-in-Washington “design” featuring the two suggestive blue stripes that Bremer came up with some weeks ago? Will it be Iraq’s traditional national flag, the red, white, and black stripes with the three green stars? Will it be Saddam’s adaption of that, that had “Allahu” and “Akbar” scrawled between the stars? Or perhaps, this?)
But anyway, I’ve been thinking some about flimsy, totally stage-managed “independence-granting” events that take place under circumstances of military occupation… The fate of the Palestinian Authority, created as a result of just such an event in the 1990s, immediately came to mind…

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ICTR’s lengthy processes

In this article in a recent issue of Boston Review, I gave a bird’s-eye view of how painfully lengthy and long-drawn-out the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) have been.
I recalled that Rebecca West, reporting on the Nuremberg Trials as they entered their eleventh month, wrote that, “the courtroom was a citadel of boredom. Every person within its walk was in the grip of extreme tedium.” But Nuremberg, I suggested had nothing on the ICTR! For at Nuremberg, the entire trial, covering all 22 defendants, took only ten months and ten days.
Well, ICTR has recently (June 17th) completed the trial of its 21st defendant, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi. ICTR has been in existence for 9 years and 7 months (= 115 months).
In three of those cases, the defendants copped a plea bargain. For the 18 contested cases, the average length of each trial was 29.1 months. (Yawn, yawn!)
By the way, that’s counting only the time taken by the trial of first instance. Most or all of those convicted by the court in Arusha, Tanzania then pursue their appeals to the joint ICTR/ICTY Appeals court, sited in The Hague.
The court’s incredible foot-dragging is actually even worse than that:

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Israel and the BBC

You’ve probably read a lot from time to time about various pro-Israeli organizations slamming the BBC for being “anti-Israel”. Well now, the Mass Media Unit at Glasgow University, in Scotland, has published a new study that shows that, in the case of BBC One news and ITV News–the two major t.v. news organizations in the UK–just the opposite is the case.
The press release announcing the release of the study says:

The study suggests that television news on the Israel/Palestinian conflict confuses viewers and substantially features Israeli government views. Israelis are quoted and speak in interviews over twice as much as Palestinians and there are major differences in the language used to describe the two sides. This operates in favours of the Israelis and influences how viewers understand the conflict.

Focusing on the two channels’ new programing since the start of the current intifada, the researchers, “examined around 200 news programmes and interviewed and questioned over 800 people.”
Why am I not surprised by the findings? perhaps because I have worked in the Anglo-Saxon media for so long and have certainly seen the chilling effect that “silencing” organizations like FLAME, CAMERA, etc have had on nearly all the major media outlets here in the US, and only slightly less so in Britain. I certainly appreciate the fact that the Christian Science Monitor, being owned by a church rather than subject to the pressures of advertisers, has been ready to keep my columns running for all this time; though I know that they have come under great pressure for doing so.
I’d love it if the Glasgow Media Unit would turn their same methodology onto the major t.v. news outlets here in the US. I am sure the results would be even more depressing.
Anyway, here, in digest form, were their major findings on the British t.v. news programs:

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What war does to womens’ and girls’ lives

Yesterday, a truly amazing piece of reporting by the WaPo‘s Ariana Eunjung Cha told the story of a 23-year-old mother of two in Baghdad, widowed by last year’s war, who has turned to prostitution in an attempt to buy necessities for her kids, her brothers, and the rest of her family.
The piece is so well-written, and so painful. Bill the spouse immediately questioned why the paper only ran it in the “Style” section, which seems totally to trivialize it. I agree.
One of my main reactions, after “wow” at the reporting and a great gaping sadness at the content of the story, was to be really, really glad that there is a strong enough presence of women in the “corps” of foreign correspondents that a piece like this gets done. (As opposed to men foreign correspondents, a goodly number of whom in the bad old days when I was out there as a hack would actually frequent women working in that sector as a matter of course; and who certainly would seldom have either wanted to do a great story like Cha’s, or been in a position of the right kind of intimacy to be able to do it.)
Cha credits Shereen Jerjes, presumably a female Iraqi stringer, with contributing to the work on the report. And a female photojournalist called Andrea Bruce Woodall has an incredible series of photos there on the young woman’s life, as well– including one, of her just at the start of a sexually intimate encounter with a man, that Woodall apparently took from inside a closet in the woman’s bedroom.
I want to come back to this question of the new role that empowered women journalists can make in the way we all understand the costs that war imposes on women and families, and on journalism in general, later.
But while I’m here in the realm of reporting (by women) on post-war prostituion tragedies, I can’t avoid linking to this truly outrageous story from a refugee camp in the DRC, where Kate Holt reports on the lives of young-teenage Congolese girls forced into prostitution by the war there, and who their johns there are:

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Actualités importantes rwando-congolaises

Et maintenant, des nouvelles assez bonnes venantes du sommet d’Abuja… Selon ce bulletin de l’agence AFP,

Muraho, Rwanda! (Hello, Rwanda!)

This week, I have been seriously back into writing my Rwanda material up for my book on Violence and its Legacies. I think it’s a lucky week to be doing this, because today, President Paul Kagame officially opened the “real” start of the work of the country’s gacaca court system. (That’s “ga-cha-cha”, for an English speaker.)
This story from Hirondelle News Agency gives a very good, succinct explanation of how the gacaca courts will work.
If you’re really interested in the gacaca courts, you should look at this September 2003 report, the latest in a series of very well-researched studies produced by Penal Reform International. (It’s long!)
For an exploration of some of the theoretical issues involved in the Kigali government’s attempts to deal with the sequelae of the genocide, you can look at this Boston Review article of mine, that ran a couple of years ago.
The gacaca courts are special organs of “popular justice” whose job is to deal with the more than 100,000 residents of the country who are accused of having taken a low- to mid-level part in the 1994 genocide. Their operation is certainly not without its problems–this is putting it mildly!–but establishing them has been the best way Kagame’s government could devise for dealing with that huge number of suspects. Many of the suspects have been detained in the country’s badly overcrowded prison system for eight or nine years by now without having had any chance of having the allegations against them tested in a judicial proceeding.
In the PRI study, the researchers identified the following big challenges that emerged during the lengthy “pilot” phase of the gacaca courts:

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Saudi instability, contd.

I am not the only person judging (as I did in this recent post) that Saudi Arabia may well be on the verge of a major breakdown. Today, during a meeting of many other Middle East specialists whom I respect, I heard serious discussion of planning for the contingency of a “civil war” in the Kingdom.
Well done, George W. Bush!! (Irony alert there.) Within just the past 18 months your policies have transformed Iraq into a land of brigandage and rampant insecurity, and a place of refuge for many terrorists and other criminals; and your inattention to what’s been going on in Saudi Arabia means there’s a growing chance that it will now go the same way, too.
I am not actually a supporter of any nation having military bases outside its own borders. (Or inside, come to that: look at demilitarized Costa Rica. But that’s a different story.) But I do note that for many years right through to 2003, the Kingdom’s major defense posture depended heavily on the presence of some 7,000-10,000 US military people.
In April 2003, Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, still cock-a-hoop in the wake of the “victory” in Iraq, announced it would withdraw nearly all the US military from Saudi. According to this April 30, 2003 report in the Chicago Tribune:

[!!, ~HC]

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Virginia native killed in Iraq

This report from Abingdon, Virginia, a great little town in the Appalachian southwest of the state.

Thanks to Yankeedoodle of Today in Iraq for the attention he pays to presenting the state-by-state reports on US casualties.

How Hiiiiiigh can you go?

I admit I’m really enjoying seeing this whole war-crimes prosecution unfolding regarding the Abu Ghraib guards.
As I predicted, the first bunch of indictees there who are actually (unlike Sivits) contesting their cases, are building a defense of “I was following orders”. Quite rightly, the Nuremberg Principles spell out that–in any situation where, as in the case of the Abu Ghraib guards, the individuals concerned have the possibility of exercizing moral choice— the “following orders” claim cannot provide a complete defense. But it can still, certainly, be a relavant factor in any trial of a person lower down the chain of command…
And along the way there, we’ll get more and more and more information about just how high up the chain of command the orders and directives encouraging those cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatments came from.
This could all last for months– especially if further indictments, further and further up the chain of command, get handed out. As they certainly should. Given what we already know, from the leaked memos, from the record of Geoffrey Miller being transferred from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib, etc., etc., this whole detainee-abuse issue is going to be bubbling and rattling away there on a front- or medium burner, news-wise, right through next November 2.
Excellent.
I’ve just been reading through the WaPo‘s piece on the bundle of documents that the the White House, Justice Dept etc released today on detainee-treatment issues…

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Israelis in Iraq

I have been shocked–“shocked!”– to read in Sy Hersh’s latest piece in the New Yorker that Israelis, including Mossad operatives, have been all over Iraqi Kurdistan in the past 18 months.
Look, it’s always been perfectly clear that this whole administration is completely riddled with Israeli infiltration at every decisionmaking and operational level. I always simply assumed the US occupation forces throughout the whole of Iraq were just a continuation of that picture.
And indeed, when I was in DC last week, an old friend of mine who is retired from but still well connected to high US diplomatic and military circles confirmed to me that, “Yes, the Israelis have been all over Iraq ever since the start of the occupation… And certainly, they’ve been advising the ‘interrogation’ systems inside all the prisons there.”
In Sy’s piece, he tries to portray what he’s writing as something breathlessly new and unknown. (Prime example right there in the first graf: “In July 2003 … Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters, who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. ” Duh. Everyone could see that the border was quite unprotected, and being raversed at will by all sorts of people from Iran. But the Bushites simply didn’t want to send in the manpower–American, or anyone else’s–that it would have taken to seal it.)

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