RICHARD PERLE, VIEWED FROM AFRICA:

RICHARD PERLE, VIEWED FROM AFRICA: Sitting around waiting in the the ICTR press office earlier this week, I pisked up a copy of The East African. UN Public Affairs Officer Straton Musonera, who hails from Rwanda, saw what I was looking at. “Did you see that?” he asked, outraged. It was a syndicated article by Richard Perle titled something like, “The UN has no place in the New World Order.”
Well yes, I had scanned through the piece, and had been disgusted by some of the Prince of Darkness’s more aggressive arguments against the UN.
“Richard Perle!” I said. “What can you expect?”
“You know him?” Straton asked. “So who is he?”
I pointed to the tagline at the bottom of the piece. “Look, it says here: ‘a member of the Pentagon’s defense Policy Board.’ Well, of course till a couple of weeks ago he was the Chairman of the DPB. But he’s still very influential.”
“You mean, he’s actually an official? I thought he was just some journalist. My God!”
Oh yes, Straton. And he’s not just some low-ranking paper-pusher, either. He is part of the small group of policy advisors who are driving the administration’s present policies….
Honestly, how can we, as Americans, defend having such a malevolent figure as Perle enjoy such influence over our government’s policy? Okay, okay, I know I should probably describe him as “misguided” rather than “malevolent”… But still, my general point stands.
Note in this regard, too, that if any group of people should feel abandoned or betrayed by the UN, it should be survivors of the Rwandan genocide, like Straton and his friends. Their “case” against the UN has even in recent weeks been vociferously articulated by several high-ranking members of the US administration.
But even though the Rwandan genocide survivors have a huge and quite understandable criticism to make regarding the UN’s failure to stop the genocide in 1994, still, most of them are quite realistic enough to see that the UN plays a vital role in the world today: one that their nation, like all other small nations, relies on.
So Richard Perle’s arguments against the UN may play well to that part of the US electorate that has long distrusted the organization, and that feels that the US can get along quite well without it. But I think it would very hard to sell his arguments in most other parts of the world. And that even includes, as far as I can see, in Rwanda.

A NIGHT ON THE TOWN IN ARUSHA:

A NIGHT ON THE TOWN IN ARUSHA: Tonight is my last evening in Arusha. Gabi Gabiro, who works for Hirondelle Press Agency here, a couple of his friends, and I were going out to dinner. I’d been kind of looking forward to this, since I’ve eaten dinner in my hotel, the Impala, every night since I got here. So Gabi picks a place, we go there straight from a late-ish evening working at the ICTR– and as restaurants go, this place was a huge disappointment. Food very, very late and individual dishes ranging from the passable to the atrocious.
(I don’t think I’m dissing Gabi to mention this, since we all mentioned it and commented on it at length over the dinner itself.)
It made me wish I’d invited them all here. I’ve now sampled three of the Impala’s four restaurants– the Chinese, the Italian, and the Indian. And the Indian food here is excellent! Last night I had a chicken and spinach curry that had a lot of ginger in it– and I ordered it on what they call Kashmiri rice. They always bring pappadums and an array of chutneys “on the house” at the beginning. Also a small salad. And after the curry, I had a marsala tea. Fabulous.
Oh dear, makes me sad just to think I could have had that again, tonight. Still, the conversation we had tonight was fun and relaxing and made the outing worthwhile.
Another good feature of Impala food is the home-baked breads they serve at breakfast. What with breads, curries, and no running, maybe it’s time I leave town before I put on lots of weight.
Of course, at dinner tonight, Gabi and his friends all laughed when I said I was leaving on Air Tanzania tomorrow, since apparently AT got taken over not long ago by South African Airways, and SA companies seem generally renowned around here for aggressive asset-stripping.

EDITORIAL NOTE: I’ve been filing

EDITORIAL NOTE: I’ve been filing recently from Arusha, Tanzania. There follow some fairly lengthy posts.
To read about my “cultural tourism” experience in a Masai village, just scroll down to the very next post..
If you want to read my thoughts about last week’s “fall” of Baghdad, click here.
To read my detailed description of ‘AN INTERNATIONAL COURTROOM IN AFRICA’, click here.
I’m planning to post a lot of material as my travels continue for the month ahead. Many of the posts will be lengthy. Some might not seem as riveting to you as they are to me. Some may still be on war-in-Iraq issues. But I should imagine that an increasing number will be on what I’m discovering on my 5-week research trip in Africa. (For more details on the project of which this trip is a part, click here.)
Hey, I might even post on something completely different!
I am not yet certain whether I can keep the JWN Index up-to-date while I’m traveling. But bear with me. I’ll try to find ways to make useful internal links, like the ones above. And I’ll also work on having the Index be up-to-date and helpful.
Jambo from Tanzania!

VISITING WITH THE MASAI

VISITING WITH THE MASAI: Since I’m here in Arusha alone, I was looking for a good day-hike I could sign up with for yesterday, Sunday. Luckily, in the Tanzania Tourism Board office in town I found something much better: a “cultural tourism program” in the nearby Masai (Wa-arusha) village of Ilkiding’a.. What’s more, on the brochure it said there was an option to walk to the starting point from the city. So I signed up.
The TTB person said my guide would come and pick me up from the hotel. I was waiting to see if someone in full-scale red-and-blue Masai robes–perhaps with the elaborately braided and decorated hair that I had seen on several Masai men around town– would walk into the hotel lobby. But no. Jeremiah, when he came, was wearing jeans, tee-shirt, and sneakers. The main thing that stood out about him was his loping, loose-limbed walk.
I should have realised: these people really know how to walk. They do it, after all, nearly all the time: up and down the foothills of Mount Meru where their villages lie, and where wheeled vehicles only rarely penetrate.
So Jeremiah and I set off at a brisk clip from the hotel, through some peri-urban areas around Arusha. Then, from the main Nairobi-Moshi highway, we took what looked like an insignificant back alley which took us to the main track leading up to the group of villages of which Ilkiding’a is a part. Nearly all the other traffic on this precipitously rutted track was pedestrians. Sometimes a bicycle would come by, or we would see a car painstakingly navigating a dusty way between the potholes.
But a LOT of people were walking to and fro. It being Sunday, many of them were dressed in some form of best clothing, carrying well-worn Bibles as they made their way to or from church. Three or four times, as we walked along, we passed tiny churches that seemed uplifted by the multi-part singing that came forth from within.
Jeremiah seemed to know a lot of people. I was really glad he was with me. If people shouted over some comment about the “muzungU” (that was me, the only white woman anywhere in sight), he would goodnaturedly shout back something about “m’africa” (an African person). And to the many calls of “how are you?” or “good morning?” that came– mainly from small children– he would often take turns with me in shouting back an appropriate English-language response.
As we loped along, I had also been trying to get him to teach me some words in his mother-tongue(which is wa-arusha, not Swahili; English is his third language.) However, I proved myself a truly really lousy learner. My ear was definitely NOT in tune. He taught me two ways to say “How are you?” in wa-arusha, and told me that they were gendered. But whether gendered according to the speaker or the addressee I couldn’t entirely fathom. So when someone said “takweniya” (“How are you?”) to me, I was generally supposed to say “Ee-ko” back to them. But I often couldn’t even hear when they “takweniya”, along with everything else they might be saying. So then Jeremiah had to prompt me on the “ee-ko” bit, which always caused great merriment all round. Two of the people who seemed to get the most laughter out of this performance were two fully regalia-ed Masai men who walked a little but of the way up to Ilkiding’a with us.
The track took us slowly up above the town and through a couple of villages. The terrain here was all intensely cultivated. Coffee bushes I saw for the first time ever. There were maize fields, cabbage fields, beans, tomatoes and other crops. Generally, though, the track was shielded (and shaded) with high hedges of woven thorns, and many different kinds of trees.
At a certain point, Jeremiah announced that we had crossed into his village. It would now be possible– after asking permission each time– to take photos. “People worried about camera,” J. had explained earlier. But from here on, people had been exposed to the “cultural tourism program”. Not only had their worries about cameras been somewhat allayed. But also, as it would turn out later, the parents of all the kids in Ilkiding’a were on alert to teach the kids not to harrass the muzungi. (Given the way whitefolks have, in the not-too-distant past, treated the indigenous people of this part of the world, I would say a certain amount of residual resentment would be more than understandable. That was why I was really happy that the CTP allowed me to have this lightly-mediated experience with some Wa-arusha in their own environment.)
There was still a bit more walking till we reached the starting point, however. Ilkiding’a is not a compact village. Far from it. The people of the village live in a number of hamlets scattered over the foothills here: In each, there are from around six to more than 20 boma’s, with a boma being a fenced household compound belonging usually to a man, and housing however many wives he has, and their children. Jeremiah, who is 29, told me that his late father had had, I think, six wives. He himself has only one.
The main form of shelter within the boma is a sturdy round hut with a heavy thatch of straw. The hut, around 20 feet in diameter, is built from thick wood staves planted close together in the ground, and plastered with a pink-brown mud plaster. Each wife has her own hut for herself, her children and animals. There are separate, smaller huts for cooking.
We walked quickly past Jeremiah’s boma. His wife wasn’t there, but his 5-year-old daughter Lucy waved from the door.
Jeremiah’s two cows lowed at us from behind the hut. They are a legacy from the life-plan he had had a lot earlier, of sticking with the traditional Masai men’s heavy focus on livestock-raising. He had followed that life-plan until he was about 15. But then his dad died, and at that point an elder brother who had been put into a school by an uncle intervened, and put Jeremiah himself into a school. So he started doing book-learning only at that point. And he never thereafter pursued the traditional Masai men’s (and women’s) forms of personal beautification such as splitting the ear-lobes and letting the lower loop dangle down to hold heavy pieces of beaded finery; or various forms of scarification on the face and arms that I saw; or putting the long, intricate braids and metal decorations into their hair… He said he’d tried to put piercings through the top-back of his ear-lobes, such as many Masai people have. (This allows them to have pretty beaded ear-decorations that dangle down the back of their ears quite fetchingly.) But he’d even given up on that after a while. Now, the only apparently non-‘western’ thing about his looks and grooming was a bead-covered belt such as I’ve seen several urban Africans wear– as a sort of ‘legacy’ thing, I guess.
Soon we came to his mother’s boma; and shortly after that to the CTP “starting point”, which was a little thatched shelter looking out over the next hill. His mother had laid out some beadwork here, and I bought a couple of items.
Then, after about 3 minutes sitting down, we started the “real” program…. For the next four hours we walked practically nonstop up and down hills that seemed to get steepr each time. Mainly, we were walking along narrow paths that cut across beautifully cultivated fields– of cabbage, maize, beans, or tomatoes– or where the land was steeper, across lush green pastures. All the cultivating that I saw being done– and this was tough, back-breaking work– was being done by women and girls. With their checkered Masai cloths knotted over one shoulder and tied around their waists, they would hoist those hoes over their shoulders and over and over again– thwack, thwack, thwack– and tilll that dark-covered, well-irrigated soil.
The herding was being done by young boys. I have to say I didn’t see any adult men actually DOING any work unless you count Jeremiah’s guiding (which can’t have been easy for him), or the handful of men we saw on the track who were leading cows to or from the market.
Well, there were men selling in the market, too. I’ll come to that later.
One of the main things I was looking forward to on the tour was the promised meeting with the traditional healer. I’m actually very interested in learning about all non-western views on the question of violence. So I had imagined myself having a wonderfully revealing discussion on the cosmology and ontology of violence with a wise Masai elder… until it slowly dawned on me that what with Jeremiah’s very limited English and my far, far more limited ability to communicate in either wa-arusha or Swahili, this conversation would probably have many of the same bizarre qualities as the (twice-interpreted) discussion on the same topic that I’d attempted with a Mozambican traditional healer, in Maputo, two years ago.
Anyway, once we had climbed the enormous hill to the boma of the Ilkiding’a traditional healer, he was out. Darn it.
I should note that I found the visit to the “traditional” knife-maker a little disappointing, too.
Masai men like to walk around with a specifically-shaped kind of knife, carried in a particular kind of pink-stained scabbard, hanging form their belts. The brochure promised a visit to the knifemaker. Turns out the knifemaker in question buys regular-style, Chinese-made agricultural machetes (pangas) from someplace, and then essentially cuts them down to the dimensions favored by the Masai; then he makes the scabbard. Somehow it didn’t seem like the “timeless handicraft” passed down from “many generations” that I had been expecting. (I guess that’s the problem with my naive, essentialist view of culture. Oh well.)
But those disappointments were tiny, compared with the exhilaration– I can only call it that– of having this great new hiking-plus-cultural adventure with my new friend, Jeremiah. It really did feel great to be able to walk with him around his home environs, and to have him pay such close attention to trying to help me understand everything I saw. The inside of the huts that I visited, and how the space there is used. The “maize stores” high up in the trees. (Someone climbs the tree and sits on a likely branch. A colleague on the ground tosses up each corn-cob with its streamer-like wrapping; and then the streamers are somehow tied over the branch, one and then the next, till hundreds of corn-cobs are tied up there in a huge clump, secure from any animal predators…. And we’re talking sometimes maybe 40 or more feet high.) So many things to learn about!
Along the way, Jeremiah and I decide that, since we have no traditional healer visit, we’ll have time to go to the “Masai market” late in the afternoon. He promises that it’ll be interesting. But it seems he’s also fairly eager to go there himself.
At one point, as the afternoon hours wear on, we walk along an extremely steep-sided ravine to see the waterfall at the end of it. The streams and rivers here generally gush plentifully down from deep inside Mount Meru. Jeremiah does explain one ritual the traditional helaer leads, at a specific tree, to beg the power-that-be for rain in times of drought. As he explains, it involves four calabashes being reverently placed by the tree, each containing various things; and then the name of Jesus being invoked. “Jesus?” I ask. “What is his role in all this?” “Well, they just say ‘Jesus’,” Jeremiah explains. “They don’t say the word Christ. That would not be right.”
But that explanation came later. We were there, at the bottom of the ravine. It was nearly 2 p.m. We’d been walking nearly nonstop for five-and-a-half hours. “Up here,” said Jeremiah. And he led me just about vertically up the mud-covered, many-hundred-feet-high bank of the ravine. I knew if I missed my footing even once, I would slip back straight to the bottom. Amazingly– I don’t know how– I made it. “We reach!” Jeremiah told me exultantly as we emerged into the pasture above. And indeed we had: we’d reached exactly back to the “starting point.”
“You hungry,” he said matter-of-factly. And yes, by then it was a burningly evident matter of fact. His mother brought four covered pots of food and I wolfed down a huge plateful. There was a traditional dish (I think) of beans and maize. There were rice, potatoes boiled in a tasty broth, and some cooked greens. I was beyond ethnography and failed to ask the name of a single dish. Eating seemed more ways important at that point.
We sat, ate, and visited for about an hour. But then it was time to leave if we wanted to catch the market. Jeremiah, his CTP “coordinator” Eliakim, and I had a short discussion of how much it would cost for J & I to get a “transport” to the market, and then back to Arusha. So then J and I walked the 20 minutes or so to the “stand” for the “transport”. There were no vehicles there, and seemed little prospect of any coming; so we decided to walk down to the market instead.
It was a good experience. (1) It’s the way that most of the Masai people get around. So as we walked along those tracks, there was a constant stream of other folks walking to and from the market. (2) It was mainly downhill.
Do I need to note the observation that when there were things to be carried, it was nearly always the women and girls who did that? A girl skipping along with a hoe balanced on her head; a Masai woman with a baby tied on her back and a huge woven basket on her head; teenage girls elegantly carrying huge, heavy heads of bananas on their heads… The main time that I saw men and boys helping withe conveying goods was where there was either a bicycle, or some kind of a hand-barow involved. I’m not saying those jobs weren’t hard, too. They were. But a lot more sheer weight of stuff was getting carried by women and girls than ended up being pushed along by guys.
Jeremiah’s estimate that it would take “about 40 minutes more” to get to the market proved remarkably accurate.
When we got there it was vast! It spread out all over the creekside settlement of Ngarantoni. It was all open-air; and most of it was quite unshaded. Jeremiah led me through various sections: the used-clothing section; the used-shoe section; along a little back-alley to the fabric section– many red-and-blue Masai wraps, but many batik-style wraps in other bright hues as well; the basket section; the fresh-produce section; a row of women selling baked goods; the meat section; the beans section… on and on and on. Buyers and sellers tiumbling over each other in the dust. A man improbably trying to drive five cows through the crush in the middle of the market– one with viciously long horns. People yelling their wares. Friends greeting other. Buyers haggling. Sellers pleading for custom… A dizzying maelstrom. And not another mazungu to be seen anywhere.
We emerged breathless on the other side. Jeremiah had said I should NOT take pictures here– we were no longer in “the program” here. I hadn’t bought anything either. I wouldn’t have minded looking at the baskets, or some of the baked goods. But there was no leisurely buying and enjoying the atmosphere here: these people, who hold the market here twice a week, were all here strictly for business.
My main achievement as we emerged was not to have lost Jeremiah. His was, I think, to have said hi to around three dozen of his friends, and as far as I could figure to have repaid a few of his financial debts along the way.
We emerged onto a paved road. Actually, according to my map it looks like the Nairobi Road, just several miles further along it by now.
“You want the livestock market?” Jeremiah asked.
Another whole market?? “Where?” I asked, weakly. He pointed to a cloud of dust somewhere over near the horizon. “There!”
“I think not. Perhaps we go back to my hotel?”
Haha! Easier said than done… What I got included in my “extra” of the trip to the market was my first two rides in Tanzanian dalla-dallas — the ones that took us back to the Impala Hotel. A dalla-dalla, as I was to learn from the inside, is a totally overstuffed Japanese passenger van that is plied at breakneck speed along a fixed route by a team of at least two people: one to drive it, and the other one or two to hang out of the sliding door on the pasenger side and drum up business along the route.
In the first of the two dalla-dallas that we rode, J and I ended up scrunched backwards onto a four-inch bench placed in right behind the front seat. (That one lost all power for a worrying ten minutes too, somewhere along the road, until on about the eighth attempt it got pushed back into life.) The second dalla-dalla was remarkable for the fact that once the seats had all filled up, the passenger side jockey pushed up a huge section of the roof on double hinges and then proceeded to cram in additional passengers who traveled standing, with their heads and shoulders stuck out the top of the van…
So I certainly ended up getting more than I’d bargained for, cultural-experience-wise, with the Ilkiding’a Cultural Tourism Program. I am totally grateful to Jeremiah, his mom, Eliakim, and all the other people who make such a great set of experiences available to a total stranger who happen to walk into the Tanzania Tourism Board office looking for an interesting day-hike. Sure, the Ilkiding’a folks could work out some of those small wrinkles in the program. (I want my traditional healer!!!) But all-in-all it seemed like a fabulous program that helped this ignorant muzungu to see beyond the mere “exoticism” of the Masai people and to initiate a respectful interaction with some actual Masai persons.
The TTB actually has a number of different cultural tourism programs that they offer. I have some brochures for this one. But the brochure says you can get more info from www.tourismtanzania.org .
Ashinali! Amani!

AN INTERNATIONAL COURTROOM IN AFRICA:

AN INTERNATIONAL COURTROOM IN AFRICA: The Arusha International Conference Center is a sprawling concatenation of three or four large, 1960s-style white concrete buildings netsled into the northeast side of the city of Arusha. The vegetation here is lush. Splendidly blossomed jacaranda trees, dense palm trees, and lots of other Africa varieties that I’m incapable of naming, form a lush canopy over many of the packed-earth sidewalks around town. Market women in gaily colored wraps stand at the street corners with lush baskets of mangos, pineapples, and tiny sweet bananas. It rained this morning: a swift, dense drencher that swept down from Mount Mero, the massive volcanic mountain, slightly shorter sister of nearby Kilimanjaro, that guards the city to the north. Then, shortly after the drencher, I heard cocks crowing and a distant Muslim call to prayer before I drifted back to sleep.
The Conference Center was built to be the headquarters of an attempt at an East African Union that failed. Now, some of its wings house offices for the follow-on Commission for East African Cooperation (between Tanzania, where we are, and Kenya and Uganda which both lie close to Arusha to the north.) Given its pleasant and well placed location, the Arusha Conference Center has also been used to host several significant inter-African peace negotiations over the decades. Most recently, a South-African-brokered peace agreement for Burundi has been negotiated here.
In 1993, Arusha was the site of the signing of the famous “Arusha Accord”, which aimed at bringing internal peace to Rwanda– a country that neighbors Tanzania to the east. But that agreement failed, destroyed in the maelstrom of genocidal violence that swept Rwanda in 1994. Later that year, a UN Security Council driven largely by guilt over its failure to prevent or bring an end to the genocide, decided considerably after the event that it would at least establish an international court to try leading perpetrators of the genocide. And it decided to locate the court in– Arusha. To be precise, in some unused portions of the Arusha International Conference Center.
Blue-uniformed UN guards now control one gate into the Conference Center. The first day I was here, I got myself a “Researcher” pass from the court’s security division. Today, I swipe it like an old-timer and walk into the dimly cavernous lobby. I poke my head into the untidy-as-usual press center and say hi to Gabi Gabiro, a friend-of-a-friend who’s worked here for three years as a correspondent fotr the Hirondelle News Agency. I walk up some concrete stairs to a walkway that takes me across to another building. Waiting at the elevator are other people coming, as I am, to one of the three courtrooms run by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). But others awaiting the elevator are going up to other floors where the East African Commission or other bodies work. It seems a fairly chaotic situation.
I’m headed for the fourth floor, where in ICTR Courtroom 1 three defendants are now in Day 229 (I kid you not– that’s two-twenty-nine!) of what is called the “media trial”. These are people accused of having masterminded some of the hate-filled, anti-Tutsi speech that filled, in particular, one radio station and one magazine before and during the genocide, and therefore of having helped to incite the genocide, as well as to have conspired in its organization. (Under the Genocide Convention of 1948, inciting or conspiring with others to commit genocide is as much punishable as actually committing it.)
This is a most amazing courtroom. Whoever figured out how to fit a courtroom into this available space took a long, low-ceilinged room and sliced it into half lengthways, with disconcerting result that the “public gallery” runs nearly right along the length of the space, with three very long rows of chairs facing toward the “action”. And the “action” itself is similarly strung out along the other side of the room, behind bullet-proof glass– about 50 or more feet from left to right as I peer in.
From our side of the glass, the different, and visually segmented portions of the courtroom look like exhibits in an indoor zoo.
Tucked in at the extreme left-hand end in there we have the three defendants, three men in shirtsleeves or somber western-style garb sitting generally bored behind their desk in the “back” of this side of the courtroom, with UN guards on each side of them. (The public, I note, can barely see the defendants at all; and I’m not sure whether the judges can see them either. I believe, along with the British philosopher of punishment Tony Duff, that a criminal court proceeding should centrally be an authoritative communication between the Bench–on behalf of society– and the defendant. Hard to see how that can happen here.)
In front of the defendants (reading this scene from left to right) are two rows of desks for their attorneys– six or eight places in all. All those people are facing to the right (as I look at it.) Then, we come to the two rows of people who are facing “forward”, that is, toward the public gallery. Furthest from us, and raised maybe eight inches higher than the rest of the courtroom, is, in central position, the Bench. Three judges– a Norwegian man, a South-African Indian woman (the Presiding Judge here, and also President of the entire ICTR venture), and a Sri Lankan man. All are resplendent in the red-satin-faced judges’ robes that someone back in 1994 or so designed for the judges in ICTR’s more famous sister court, the court for former-Yugoslavia that’s located in the Hague. Behind the judges hangs a UN flag. They are flanked by court reporters and clerks. The general decor in the courtroom is Scandinavian/functional: light-colored wood furnishings, white walls, blue chair-seats and carpet.
In front of the judges, officers of the court’s central administration, the Registry, sit at another row of desks, also facing us. The Registry officials, like all the attorneys for both defense and prosecution, all wear big ballooning black robes elaborately tailored with pin-tucks and little buttons, over which they wear the apparently mandatory French-style white tucked jabots. (Sort of an eight-inch-long white thing that hangs out over the robe at the throat, and is secured–sometimes haphazardly– with velcro at the back of the neck. This whole get-up is another cultural import from the Hague.) One of the defense lawyers, the British QC Diana Ellis, wears atop her dark-brown hair the small-size powdered wig that is a mark of her exalted judicial status back home.
Talk about rituals and regalia!
And then, between the Registry officials and us is the present witness. With her back to us. We actually look at the Bench “over the witness’s shoulder”, so to speak. Many of the witnesses who come here are “protected”, which means that their true identity is a closely guarded secret of the court. They are referred to in public only by randomly assigned letters; and inside the courtroom their identity is hidden from the public gallery by heavy curtains which can be drawn around the witness’s desk. Today’s witness, however, is a defense witness– an interesting woman who is herself a defendant in the Rwandan court system where since she’s accused of the highest category of genocide-related crimes she almost certainly faces the prospect of a death penalty. Death penalties are not allowed here, in this genteel, European-style court.
Her name is Valerie Bemeriki. She was, Gabi tells me, a “real celebrity” in Rwanda during the genocide era, when she was a much-listened-to announcer on Radio/Tele Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM, the main hate radio).
Now, she appears like a dumpy, slightly physically disabled older woman whose bright-colored clothing and generally defiant mien cannot make up for the fact that she looks scared and frequently slightly confused. (I can tell you what her facial expressions convey because her face, like those of all others who speak in the court– but notably NOT those of the defendants unless they’re speaking– is shown to us on a closed-circuit video system whose operation is, I imagine, supposed to compensate for the lack of direct lines-of-sight inside the courtroom. Each of the main participants in the drama in front of us has a 15- or 17-inch video screen in front of her or him. Though these screens are fairly thin, still, they contribute along with many other factors, to blocking our ability to watch the actions and interactions of the participants directly. We in the public gallery have three high screens placed along gallery that show us the simultaneous feed. But still, that’s no substitute for being able to see for ourselves what’s going on, since on the screens we can only see the one view that someone–who?– has chosen to show us. On occasion, this is a shot of a written document, which means that we don’t get to see people’s faces at all.)
Bemeriki and the chief defense lawyer who had called her, Jean-Marie Biju-Duval from France, are the only two actors today whose main language is French. Actually, to be fair, French is probably Bemeriki’s second language, with Kinyarwanda being her first. But she has chosen to speak here and to interact with the court in French, though Kinyarwanda would also– like English– have been a option in this trilingual court. I should have mentioned earlier that everything that goes on inside this courtroom is pursued with and through simultaneous interpretation. So in addition to wearing funny European-style robes, all the participants (including us, the “representatives” of the public!) also wear headsets for the interpretation.
We get a fairly intimate direct view of the back of the witness’s legs swinging down from her chair .
Over to the left of her is a row of desks that now stand empty. But on a shelf above them are placed a number of large box files whose main effect is further to block our ability to see anything.
Our lines of sight are, in general, abysmal. The floor level of our gallery is about six inches lower than the floor of the courtroom. Bunched around Witness Bemeriki are the drawn-back curtains that– for a “protected” witness– would have blocked her identity from our view. Now, hanging there, all they do is further obstruct our view. And to the right of the witness’s desk is a huge cart laden with two layers of additional bulky and quite opaque box-files and–to add insult to injury for the long-suffering “public”– the back of a water cooler that, inside the “active” part of the courtroom, has been pushed up against the glass to yet further obstruct our view.
It’s as though the designers and users of this courtroom basically have contempt for the “public” that comes to view its proceedings. As though they didn’t care much at all about justice “being seen to be done” here…
(Sorry about that. It was the carelessly positioned water-cooler that really broke the camel’s back on this issue for me.)
And, moving right along further to the right, we have the two rows of the prosecuting attorneys’ desks, now facing inward to the left. Up to bat today from one of these desks is Simone Monasebian, a US lawyer who seems to be practicing here all the tricks of an aggressive district attorney in some jurisdiction in the US. She is cross-examining Witness Bemeriki, and thus is allowed to ask leading questions. She’s a physically impressive woman whose shoulder-length dark hair straggles out untidily from under her headset. “Isn’t it true that… ” she presses the witnesses. Or she’ll make a lengthy statement and then pounce forward at the end with a defiant “What say you, Mme. Bemeriki?”
Of course, the fact that all these theatrics have to go through interpretation means that there is always a slight time-lag between question and answer. In addition, several times throughout the morning the interpreter’s weary voice comes onto everyone’s headsets pleading with Monasebian to please slow down. The whole interaction has a slightly spaced-out, unreal, one might even say doped-up quality.
The distance between the two banks of attorneys must be about 30 or 40 feet. When a defesne lawyer stands up to challenge something the prosecutor is saying, the two of them face each across this distance (rather than both of them facing the judge), and the poor judges have to swing their heads from side to side like a person watching tennis.
I guess I’ll just finish the physical description here by recording the presence, furthest to the right, and also behind glass, of the three interpreters’ booths. We cannot see their faces directly. Every so often, when the video feed gives us a full-face shot of Monasebian strutting her New-York-courtroom stuff (“Enough already!” she says with theatrically produced exasperation at one point), we can see the blurred face of the interpreter in the booth behind her. Oh, and another of the strange effects of the whole interpretation thing– in addition to the time lag — is that when Bemeriki is interpreted into English for the Anglophones among us, the voice that does this is a definitely gruff male voice.
As I sit here, I switch my headset between the French-language and the English-language feeds. In addition to what’s coming in on everyone’s headsets, there is also a simple loudspeaker in our gallery–as presumably inside the accoustically-challenged courtroom itself– that gives the verbatim version of what’s being said, whether it’s in English, French, or– presumably–Kinyarwanda. So it’s quite possible to listen with one ear to what’s being said in, say, English, on the loudspeaker, and also to what the interpreter is saying, in French, on the headset. Or vice versa.
I can tell you that though the interpreters seem to be doing a generally good job–and under grueling, day-after-day circumstances!–the interpretation is still far from perfect. An oral interpretation is NOT a word-for-word translation. I know that. But it is supposed to be a faithful interpretation of what is heard. And what I heard during the four or more hours I was in the courtroom so far was that the interpretation on several occasions seemed to present an utterance of very different meaning–sometimes, almost directly contradictory meaning– to that of the original.
This seemed to be particularly the case with the extremely long, convoluted, and rapidly-spoken questions being asked by Monasebian, which the English-to-French interpreter frequently seemed to have enormous–and quite understandable– difficulty rendering for the witness. Small wonder that the witness so often responded to these questions with blank looks of confusion. On numerous occasions, the increasingly frustrated Chief Judge, Navanethem Pillay, would intervene and re-ask the witness her own version of an extremely lengthy, convoluted Monasebian question. And on those occasions, the witness generally very quickly gave a simple and direct answer….
Well, I don’t have time, here, to go any further with my critique of the whole mis-en-scene of ICTR Courtroom Number 1. I note that I have only so far seen a few hours of what is an extremely long-running production. This trial of three accused inciters and organizers of the genocide opened here in Arusha in October 2000. It might be worth trying to figure out how much this trial alone has cost, so far– these attorneys aren’t cheap, I can tell you, and neither is the rest of this entire complex court system.
So far, ICTR’s nine judges have pronounced judgments on eleven accused men (one acquittal and ten convictions). The amount of money the UN and other, supplementary donors have spent on establishing and then running this court over the past eight years clearly exceeds a billion dollars, most likely by some hundreds of millions of bucks. As to whether the effort has been worth it– that’s what I’m still here to find out.
Meantime, tomorrow, Sunday, I’m going to take me a hike to some Masai (Wa-arusha) villages up the slopes of Mount Meru, and get myself more thoroughly back to Africa.

THOUGHTS ON THE FALL OF BAGHDAD:

THOUGHTS ON THE FALL OF BAGHDAD: The war is not yet finished. Securing the peace has still even to begin. I think we can attribute the tragic mayhem we presently see in Baghdad and the other Iraqi cities to two main factors:
(1) The legacy of 30-plus years of Baathist authoritarianism, that resulted in the total repression of Iraqi civil society and a serious, longterm degradation of public and even personal morals throughout the country. In a place where children are routinely encouraged by the regime to spy on and report on any suspect political tendencies amongst their teachers, parents, and neighbors– and this has been the case there for nearly two generations now– basic social trust, and the ability to sustain it, are the real casualties; and
(2) Bombs Away Don Rumsfeld’s brilliant “strategy” of moving extremely fast to take out the power-center of the regime, with little thought given to how to consolidate public safety in the rear of the advancing forces.
With regard to the second of these factors, there is a clear and evident contrast with, for example, the situation during the advance of the (Western) Allied armies during WW2. My father, James Cobban, was a Major in British Military Intelligence during that war. In June 1944, he crossed into Normandy a few days after D-Day. He and a colleague then undertook a detailed evaluation of the effectiveness of the “beach organization” that their unit had been planning, for the British sector of the Normandy beach, throughout the previous months. Their clear thought was that Allied forces continuing to island-hop in the Pacific toward the heart of Japan could benefit from this evaluation.
But then, he and his British colleagues, and the Americans with whom they were then–as now–working so closely, immediately turned their attention forward: to how to rule post-victory Germany. Governance of France and Belgium, where the Allied front-line was advancing slowly eastward throughout the rest of 1944, were, I think, left mainly to their own respective national anti-Nazi organizations to plan for. But clearly, ruling post-Nazi Germany would be a task for the major Allied forces. And luckily– as it turned out– they had time to make some fairly solid plans.
The approach the US and Britain adopted, which was informed by the visionary wisdom of US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, was basically that of rehabilitating German society on a tolerant, democratic basis. (It stood in stark contrast to the strongly punitive approach the Allies had tried at the end of WW1, which, as many of them understood, had later helped to incubate Hitlerism.) And the Americans committed themselves to providing the long-term investment of men and finances needed to bring that project to fruition.
Thank God they did–in West Germany, and in post-victory Japan.
On Europe’s eastern front, things were far more chaotic. As the Russians advanced westward, racing to get to Berlin before the Americans, they left in their wake vast areas of absolutely untamed chaos. Plus, the Russians themselves had suffered so hugely during earlier stages of the war– with some ten million Russians killed during the Nazis’ earlier advance into Russia– that they were little inclined to “tame” any of the forces of anti-German vengefulness that were loosed in their wake…
It is worth remembering that in the months after the Russian advance, some eight million ethnic Germans were summarily ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe. (That was the number of the ethnic-German refugees who survived that violent upheaval and made it, somehow, to the relative safety of the US-British zone. One can surmise that further hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans– perhaps millions of them– never made it that far but were slaughtered along the way. It was an ugly, vengeful process. Yes, those families had lived a life of some privilege in Eastern Europe during the years of the Nazi occupation there. But no, they did not deserve to be driven out of their homes like cattle and summarily stripped of all their possessions along the way.)
Now, who knows what is going to happen in Iraq? The fact of the present mayhem behind US-UK lines cannot be wished away, however much Bombs-Away Don desires to do so. It will have lasting as well as immediate political consequences.
Based on my experience of having lived in Lebanon during the first six years of the civil war there, I would say that whoever inside Iraq can manage to sustain the kinds of effective social organizations that are capable of providing public order there will de-facto end up in control of those areas where they are able to do this. People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order.
The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so. (“Eeeegh! Nation-building! Not for us!”) And the Americans’ non-reponsiveness to the urgent and urgently-expressed need of Iraqis for public order will certainly not go un-noticed. And that includes Bombs-Away Don’s public attitude of condoning–almost celebrating!–the looters at their work.
In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order. But if they do so, we cannot tell yet what the reaction of the Turks and other neighboring powers will be. And it’s not even certain that inter-Kurdish rivalries may not break out again. The same rivalries that crippled the Kurdish areas 1991-96… So, still some big uncertainties there.
In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need. Under Saddam, the Shi-ite religious hierarchy was subject to all the same kinds of repression and control as, say, the Russian orthodox church under Stalin. But still, the outline of Shi-ite religious hierarchies remained. So has some form of strong Shi-ite self-identification of the 60-plus-percent of Iraqis who are Shi-ites. Plus, they have exile-based organizations just across the border in Iran, and an Iranian government that will be very supportive of them, even if in an extremely manipulative way.
I saw on CNN Friday that a Shi-ite cleric filmed in Baghdad gave a sermon that seemed to echo very closely some recent statements made by Iranian President Khamanei. To the effect that, while they were glad that Saddam had been toppled, still they knew the US forces had only come in on a pretext of searching for weapons of mass destruction, but that their real motives remained suspect and their plans should be resisted….
So my conclusion is that because the peace in Iraq is still far from being won– or even, yet, pursued– by the dominant US part of the US-UK coalition, the war itself is still far from being over. There will be huge challenges, alignments, and realignments of different locally based powers ahead; and many of these shifts of power may be accompanied by further recourse to violence. ( The Iraqi exile politicans are like a froth that dances on the top of this beer. They may have an impact– but only insasmuch as they have or quickly find a real base among the locally-rooted forces.)
We in the global anti-war movement need, I think, to keep our focus clear. We can quickly rejoice that Saddam is no longer in power. But in a real sense, now, Saddam is not the issue. (I can even unite with Bombs-Away Don on that.) The issue is the wellbeing of and longterm prospects for Iraq’s 24 million people. How on earth can they be saved from falling into chronic, extremely atrocious and destabilizing, Lebanon-like disorder??
It is clear to me that the further use of aggressive violence is not going to bring this about. As we have already seen, the massive violence applied to Iraq by the US-UK forces has already brought forth torrents of follow-on violence from within that deeply-scarred society. Our emphasis has to be on continuing to urge everyone involved to use the many nonviolent means that remain in order to resolve the remaining issues of serious disagreement.
Thank God we still have the UN! For all its flaws, and for all the battering it took at the hands of US arrogance last month, it is still there as an institution that we or any of the parties involved inside Iraq can call on to help to negotiate an exit out of the present, extremely anti-humane state of chaos inside Iraq.
People living, like Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld, in tidy, secure western countries where by and large the maintenance of public order is not even an issue really do not, in my humble opinion, understand how central that one, socially-generated “commodity” is to the wellbeing of actual humans.
Can the presence of the US forces inside Iraq contribute to the provision of public order? Certainly, it is their responsibility to do so, under the 4th Geneva Convention. (And the fact that, in their “race” toward Baghdad, they apparently failed to make any effective plans at all to secure public order in the areas behind their lines could possibly even be described as a “grave breach” of Geneva-4; that is, a war crime.)
By the same token, if they cannot provide public order then they should just get out of the country, rather than staying, possibly compounding the problem of insecurity by their presence, and by their continuing presence preventing anyone else from doing the job.
Can we see a democratic, tolerant, and self-governing Iraq emerge from all this? No, this goal still, sadly, sadly, seems far away. I guess we need to continue to hope, pray, and work hard for it to come about.
But the central message remains: Violence still cannot solve problems successfully, in Iraq or anywhere else.

INSIDE SOUTHERN IRAQ

INSIDE SOUTHERN IRAQ: Ghanim Alnajjar is a Kuwaiti professor, long-time human-rights activist, and indeed the UN Secretary-General’s Special representative for Human Rights in Somalia and Somaliland. He is also an old friend of mine with whom I was recently put back in touch by Yvette, author of the ‘Jaded in Africa’ blog (see link to it, at right.)
Ghanim has a particular perspective on Iraq, and on the rights situation there. In the waning days of the 1991 Gulf War, he was one of the thousands of Kuwaitis who were taken captive, as civilian hostages, by the Iraqis. He was one of the lucky ones who made it out alive– and he has always been very active on behalf of those who so far have not managed to do so. (And may never do?)
Earlier today, Thursday, Ghanim penned the following account of his recent humanitarian mission into South Iraq, which gives a great and sobering snapshot of the situation there. He’s given me permission to run it in JWN:
I have just been back from a humanitarian mission from the southern part of Iraq. There are few points which need to raised in this regard. Being not a journalist –with due respect– but someone who knows this area of the world very well, having many individuals or whole families as friends, I had a chance to have in depth conversations with tens of individuals from different backgrounds, some of them I knew before and the majority I did not know. Some of these quick thoughts are as follows:
1)The resistance: There was no resistance as such. If there was serious resistance, the allied forces would have faced serious difficulty. Most of the people just stood back and watched, waiting for the conclusion of the conflict.
2)Why did the army fail: Most of the enlisted army did not think of the war as their fight, some said to me, many of them are extremely patriotic, it was Saddam’s fight. “we are tired of Saddam’s fights”. Those professional soldiers and officers said they simply changed their clothes and deserted.
3)Why they did not rise up: the memory of the 1991 was present in their mind. Even with the apparent collapse of authority of Saddam’s, they just could not trust the US anymore. They needed to see a proof that he left altogether to beleive it. Many people are happy but they did not feel this is the right time for celeberation. They rose up before and were cheated. The US struck a deal with Saddam, and they were the victims after they beleived George Bush sr in 1991. I was joking with three Iraqi doctors in a hospital, telling them some new Kuwaiti jokes about “God may save him” referring to Saddam, they laughed and told me that they have more jokes about him more than I can take. When I asked them to tell me some, they smiled and said, not now, honestly we are not sure. Tens of similar incidents proved the point of fear which played the major role in cooling any potential uprising.
4)Why they did not leave: why there were no refugees, was the reason coercion? No, it was a widespread belief that this war will be over sooner than the world could believe, provided that the allies were serious, not like the 1991 case. This was a mistake in analysis.
5)How about the US?: what is expected towards the US, is it appreciation, suspicion, love , hate,? There is a mixture of suspicion and a-wait-and-see attitude. The general tendency is suspicion more than any other consideration, thanks to the US ill advised behaviour in 1991. There is hope everywhere needing to be warmed up. The current living conditions play some part in causing this attitude.
6)How about the future Iraqi government: It should be noted here that the grave mistake would be to appoint any one of the Iraqi exiles opposition figures for the immediate administration. There will be a negative reaction to such an appointment. I was glad to hear recently that the tendency is going in this direction in the south. I am glad to hear also that a CIA report said something on those lines, finally , the CIA got it right.
There are other points but these are some quick ones which I wanted to share…
The only sad part in this regard are the civilian casualties, which is partially why I hate wars no matter how politically justified it is.

GALA DAY FOR THE RESEARCH PROJECT

GALA DAY FOR THE RESEARCH PROJECT: I’ve been working on this research project, that looks at the effectiveness, as viewed 8 – 10 years later, of the widely varying policies that each of Rwanda, S. Africa, and Mozambique dopted in the early-to-mid 1990s, for nearly 30 months now. Today was truly a gala day for my enquiry. I had substantial amounts of time with three people key to understanding the Rwanda portion of the puzzle.
The first of these was Alison Des Forges, an American researcher who is truly a world-class expert on Rwanda– as well as a person who’s been called as ‘expert witness’ in a number of trials before the ICTR. I approached her in the public gallery of Courtroom 1 at the end of the morning’s proceedings, and she immediately agreed to go have lunch with me.
I’ve been playing an international game of telephone tag w/ Alison for two years or more now! Last year, we had an interaction in print, after she and Ken Roth, the Exec. Director of Human Rights Watch, wrote a fairly sharp criticism of the piece I had in Boston Review about post-genocide policies in Rwanda. (You can access that article through one of the links on the right of this weblog.)
Anyway, we had a really good discussion. I went back into the courtroom, and soon enough one of my very, very helpful contacts at the court came in to say that my application to interview Carla del Ponte had just turned up trumps. Carla, as you may know, is the Swiss legal eagle who’s the Chief prosecutor for both UICTR and its companion court for former-Yugoslavia, ICTY. I told her when I met her, at four this afternoon, that I last saw her in June 2001– from distance– when I was at ICTY the very day that she got custody of Slobodan Milosevic, and she’d given a fairly victorious press conference to celebrate the fact.
Then finally, a request that I’d made to speak to one of the defense lawyers came through; so this evening I had a great, one-hour-plus discussion with Diana Ellis, QC, a British barrister who’s on the defense team whose performance I’d been watching in Courtroom 1 these past two days. Diana voiced her trenchant criticisms of the ICTR process, which she sees as a clear example of “victor’s justice” (and she gave me many examples of bias against the defense teams that seemed to back up this conclusion. She also said that her three-year experience of working on Ferdinand Habimana’s defense team at the court had really soured her on the idea she had earlier had, that the ICC might be a great development in international affairs, given that she saw the distinct possibility that many of the problems she had identified at the ICTR would be exported wholesale to the ICC.
So, three widely varying points of view there. But all expressed in an extremely articulate and convinced way. Later it’ll be time for me to go in detail through the extensive notes that I took, and to make finely-tuned judgments. For now, I’m just acting like a sponge and gathering as much material as I can.
Have you noticed something, meanwhile, about the three people I described here? They are all of one gender… Are we talking, then, about a progressive feminization of international affairs? I would wish! But there are some portions of it where women are now coming to form some kind of a critical mass, and I find this really interesting to see (and, I suppose, to be a part of.)

REMEMBERING GENOCIDE:

REMEMBERING GENOCIDE: Early April 1994 was the time when that year’s terrible genocide in Rwanda was started. It then continued for a further 100 days, in the course of which around a million of the country’s seven million people were killed. In a very hands-on way.
Every year recently, inside Rwanda, the government has devoted the first week of April to genocide remembrance, and the observation of this solemn commemoration has started to spread a little outside the country.
I’m here in Arusha, Tanzania, the city where the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which was the UN’s main (ex post facto) response to the Rwandan genocide. Friends who work at the ICTR note that April 7– the day when the commemorations inside Rwanda come to a peak– passed in the Court with no word about it being uttered by the various international judges and lawyers who work busily there, developing the “professional field” of international criminal law with what sometimes seems like scant heed being paid to the actual who were affected by the genocide.
But this evening, a local, mainly-Rwandan church had organized a commemorative service– and the guest/speaker of honor was Adama Dieng, the Registrar of the ICTR, which was a lovely gesture, much appreciated by the other participants.
The commemoration turned out, actually, to be mainly a very Pentecostal-style chuservice, with lots of great singing and clapping. I had seen and participated in several such services when I was in Rwanda last year. The evangelical Christians seem to have made hundreds of thousands– maybe millions– of serious converts in the country, after the Catholic hierarchy was so compromised by its involvement w/ the genocide.
Anyway, many of the evangelical-style modes of worship seem to have a strongly healing, cathartic effect on people whose whole universe was torn apart by the genocide. Inside Rwanda, in many congregations, Tutsis and Hutus worship and work alongside each other in such churches. (And that includes inside the local Quaker “churches”, which is what they call them there: Eglises des Amis.)
Our commemoration here was held in a cavernously vast, ill-lit barn of a church building. One of the people I was with said that the joyful singing seemed a bit out of place on such an occasion. But I think it was really more the way these people– many, many of them direct survivors of the genocide– have chosen to reconstruct some meaning in their lives. There were, anyway, some solemn words from a pastor– who reassured people that though things may have seemed bleak, “at least God knows what’s going on.” Also that what had happened, “had exposed the continued workings of evil in the world.”
The bulk of the day before that, I had spent at the ICTR, watching highly paid international lawyers quibble over tiny sub-details in an extremely complex case. I was reminded, of course, of the comments made by both Rebecca West, at Nuremburg, and by Hannah Arendt, during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, that such trials dealing with major atrocity can easily end up being extremely legalistic, not to mention just plain boring.
Apparently, though, I’d arrived at a “good” day, drama-wise, in the trial of some of the media people involved in whipping up race-hate in Rwanda. On the witness stand was a well-known Rwandan radio announcer called Valerie Beremiki who was appearing as a witness for the defense of an accused radio-company official The wrinkle here being that Valerie herself is on trial inside the Rwandan justice system, where as a top suspect she may well be subject to the death penalty. So the South African judge was every so often at pains to remind the very robust cross-examining lawyer that Valeries had good reason to avoid self-incrimination…
Anyway, more on the court later. I haven’t seen much of Arusha, though it seems like a great place. I came in through Kilimanjaro International Airport, drove past the mountain to get here, and noted a number of Masai young men riding around on bikes in their beautiful red cloaks, bearing their herding sticks crosswise across the handle-bars…