A friend from Beirut who wishes to be identified simply as "Oldtimer" sent me the following:
Just finished your good piece in CSM. It is good to see that you are somewhat optimistic on what appears to be a remarkable change in Lebanese politics, especially the breaking down of the taboo of criticising Syria. I hope it works and more than that, hope it will
continue. I am not so sure.
We are sorely lacking wise and charismatic leadership on the street and the strain is showing. We have Christian youth who have made the issue one of Geagea or Aoun. We have hardnosed Phalangists who want to open the case of slain president-elect Bashir Gemayel. We have Sunnis divided in themselves now totally rudderless. Anything close to a leader we had Walid who has been mobilizing a large segment of the Druze, but with his sectarian restraints, he has now taken refuge in Mouktara, having "seen the light." Worse, Shiites have not been brought in and some seem to have decided to coopt them by insults. Very wrong and fool-hardy.
Of course there are vast numbers of truly patriotic, angry, well-meaning Lebanese who are about to be fed up with the unorganized nature of the opposition. If these people give up, then we can forget the sea of change in Lebanese politics.
Did you hear that Patriarch Sfeir threatened to leave the opposition if they persisted with their calls of PEACEFUL INTIFADA? We need more of such a realistic and cool-headed approach.
I suppose the term SNAFU was a Lebanese creation.
My friend Judy alerted me yesterday to the fact that Marine's Girl's blog seemed to be down. Today, there is something there at her customary URL, acrossriver.blogspot.com, but it ain't her. It certainly looks as though someone has hijacked her URL.
MG had a huge problem back in November 2003, reported here, when some officious Marines gunnery sergeant threatened her and her guy with all kinds of problems if she continued publishing. On that occasion, she got some good support from wellplaced people in the Marines' officer's corps that persuaded her it was safe for to resume blogging just along the same lines she had been...
Some of the most poignant, intimate, and revealing posts on her blog have been the records of IM sessions she's had over the months with her guy, in Iraq. He's back looking after her in Michigan now. (She has a bad cancer-plus-chemo problem.)
I found a recent version of her blog's front page by hitting "Cache" on the Google listing for it. But on that cached version, none of her archives were accessible. Seems like someone has really done a job on her URL.
I'm assuming that this time she's been keeping copies of her own archives (please, MG!), so I hope she and VK (her guy-- Valiant Knight) can get it back up in some form, soon. Except that, of course, there's lots else going on in their lives right now.
How mean does a person have to be to launch an attack like this on a brave, truthful woman with a severe cancer problem and her guy who's spent maybe 18 months in Iraq already but who has come back to tend to her?
Please, JWN people, let us all know if you get hold of any news about her and/or her blog. (I emailed her an enquiry, but who knows when she'll be able to reply?)
And send her all the spiritual support you can. She, her guy, and her 10-year-old son Danny need our prayers.
Pity the poor members of the Fateh bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council, who were elected to their positions at the height of post-Oslo optimism in January 1996 and will face re-election again this summer... If you were a Fateh legislator (as the majority of the PLC members have been), how on earth would you go about defending your movement's decidedly lack-luster performance since 1996-- on practically the whole range of issues, from diplomacy to the economy, to corruption, to the failure to ensure the people even the barest modicum of personal security?
Well, if you were a Fateh legislator you'd probably be working overtime right now to position yourself as a tough defender of the people's interests, someone who is definitely not about to be duped by yet another Palestinian government made up of Arafat cronies and retreads...
So when PM Abu Alaa' put together just such another government and presented it to the PLC earlier this week-- no dice! (What a tin ear the guy has, eh?)
He tried again, yesterday, after rejigging a few names. Still no dice. It took Abu Mazen swooping in late last night to caucus with the Fateh legislators before they could all finally agree on a list.
Uber-"crony" Saeb Erakat got demoted. Nabil Shaath got shifted sideways. Dahlan did well. Surprisingly, one of the people from the earlier list who made it was Arafat nephew Nasser al-Kidwa, as new Foreign Minister. Actually, not so surprising, since by general agreement Kidwa has done a very competent job representing the PA/PLO at the UN.
Still, to me, the interesting thing was not the details of "who's up" and "who's down", as much as the deft little show of political force that Abu Mazen put on, coming in at the moment of apparent crisis and doing the political work with the legislators that Abu Alaa' had been unable or unwilling to do.
You'd think that Abu Alaa' would have been a litttle swifter about seeing the need to meet the legislators at least part-way? After all, they will all be "on trial" together, as the Fateh movement, come the PLC elections in July... and Hamas has already given them some nasty surprises in two small rounds of municipal elections since December.
It's great to see something like real national politics, with issues of re-electability and being held accountable, taking place among the Palestinians. Still, the whole process will only have real, lasting meaning if they get a truly viable chunk of land in which to conduct it. Does Abu Mazen (unlike his predecessor) have a winning strategy to win that for them? Not clear yet.
You think it's scary to have the United States occasionally barging around the world starting wars, defying international conventions, and generally acting like a rogue state?
Well, how about this: the idea that within the US administration there are rogue tentacles that go around the world doing exactly the same but almost entirely out of any centralized control system?
To me, that is even scarier.
At least, with a rogue state, you have the general idea that there's some kind of a centralized "intelligence" at work, assessing risks and trying (perhaps) to minimize the overall damage caused to the global system... Or, at the very least, that there's a single "address" to which people can go with any queries or complaints about various US actions.
But now, according to this disturbing article in today's WaPo, the Pentagon is actively promoting a plan that,
The reporters attrobute to "current and former administration officials" the news that,
In one instance, U.S. commanders tried to dispatch Special Forces soldiers into Pakistan without gaining ambassadorial approval but were rebuffed by the State Department, said two sources familiar with the event. The soldiers eventually entered Pakistan with proper clearance but were ordered out again by the ambassador for what was described as reckless behavior. "We had SF [Special Forces] guys in civilian clothes running around a hotel with grenades in their pockets," said one source involved in the incident, who opposes the Pentagon plan.
Other officials cited another case to illustrate their concern. In the past year, they said, a group of Delta Force soldiers left a bar at night in a Latin American country and shot an alleged assailant but did not inform the U.S. Embassy for several days.
But luckily,
And who knows, the Pentagon hawks may yet get the change that they seek formally approved by the president...
War with Iran or Syria, anyone?
I apologize that the blog has not been accepting comments since late Sunday night. But now, it is again!
For the first 36 hours or so, the problem was that the webhosting service was down. Then, while it was down, I started out on a big session of IP banning-- a heroic but almost useless campaign to ban the IPs used by the spambots that feed really nasty spam into the blog through the Comments and the Trackbacks.
(Meantime, the tech advisor was installing MT-Blacklist, a much more effective way to combat spam.)
Okay, closing the Comments boards to all users including bona-fide users was my fault. In an excess of zeal and a deficit of careful attention during my ban-athon Monday, I ended up "banning" a completely blank IP box, which apparently had the effect of banning all IPs from Commenting.
Well, I think that was the problem. Because half an hour ago after I discovered that blank line on my register of banned IPs and duly unbanned it, suddenly I was able to post comments onto the blog again.
Yay!
Today's CSM has my column on post-Hariri Lebanon. It's titled: Can real peace take root in Lebanon?
Let's hope so! There have been some encouraging signs, as noted in the column.
Today, I see that Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Walid Muallem made a statement to reporters promising further "withdrawals" of Syrian forces from central and western Lebanon, back to the eastern part of the country bordering Syria (and very close indeed to downtown Damascus).
In that story I linked to there, by AP's Albert Aji, the reporter noted that Muallem's statement use of the term "withdrawal" was the first time that term-- rather than "redeployment" has been used by Syria regarding troop movements in Lebanon.
Aji noted, however, that the promised withdrawal would not be complete; and also that Muallem did not specify a timetable for it.
I was somewhat reassured, back at the end of last year, when Syria's President Asad put Muallem, a wise veteran diplomat, onto the Lebanese "case". Muallem was Syria's key diplomatic point-person throughout most of the Israeli-Syrian peace diplomacy that occurred 1991-1996.
Those negotiations were always overshadowed in the media by the much "flashier" (and ultimately also unsuccessful) negotiations on the Israeli-Palestinian track. But everyone in the west who is nowadays so eager to jump on a mindlessly ideological anti-Syrian bandwagon seems to have forgotten that throughout that five-year period in the mid-1990s-- and later, right up to Asad Pere's fated encounter with Prez Clinton, in Geneva, in May 2000-- Syria and Israel came literally within a whisker of concluding a final peace accord.
Essentially, the nature of that deal was "full peace and normalization" for "full withdrawal" of Israel's occupation forces and settlers from the Golan. Rabin and Peres were both prepared to do that. (Read all about the negotiations in my 2000 book on the topic from the U.S. Institute of Peace Press.) But when the swaggeringly over-confident Ehud Barak thought he could get the first half of the "grand bargain" for something significantly less than full withdrawal, the whole deal fell apart.
Syria participated creatively, flexibly, and in good faith in those negotiations (which was more than you could say of Israel under, for example, Netanyahu or Sharon.) And Syria has always, since 2000, expressed its readiness to resume the final-status talks with Israel... Walid Muallem has meanwhile been a quiet, steady voice in the Syrian elite arguing as to why those negotiations have been in the country's best longterm interest.
... So I was cautiously optimistic when Walid was given (an undefined amount of) responsibility for Syria's "Lebanon file", back in November or so. The Syrians had previously made a really disastrous mistake in Lebanon by needlessly ramming the extension of President Lahoud's term through the Lebanese parliament.
I hope Damascus has figured out how to pursue a wiser course now. Let's watch and see.
And now, the moment you've all been waiting for... I did a quick edit on the other half of my recently junked (sob!) Chapter 11... So this is a piece titled "Notes on the development of international atrocities law since 1850". It's a companion piece to the "Notes on transitional justice" that I put up on the JWN archives last week .
In the conception of Chapter 11 that I was working with when I wrote those two segments, the present piece preceded the one on "transitional justice". I wrote both of them with reference to the rest of the book, which focuses on three conflict-exiting countries in Africa: Mozambique, South Africa, and Rwanda.
But I think that each of these short segments now stands alone okay, and I hope they provide a useful introduction to some of the issues involved.
Comments, anyone?
My dear friend Juan Cole has recently devoted quite some space on his blog to his own and others' parsings of the notorious "Transitional Administrative Law" (TAL) that desert fashion maven Jerry Bremer tried to foist onto the proud people of Iraq back in March 2004.
Well, many of us have spent time in the past parsing the 62 articles of that egregious document. I did so myself, back here and on other occasions around then, too.
But now, I ask myself, Why bother?
What was the "status" of that so-called "law", anyway?
(Answer: It was a text adopted by an "Interim Governing Council" that had been appointed by the occupying force.)
Why on earth should that have any status at all, in comparison with, for example, the will of the people?
Okay, okay, I do know that the "will of the people" is a tough concept to necessarily operationalize or get a good grasp of. It is frequently fickle; it can be capricious or disturbingly majoritarian. But discerning it and operationalizing it are, at the end of the day, what democracy and good governance are all about.
And yes, I know too that there were many, many flaws in the election that was held three and a half weeks ago now, in Iraq...
But still, despite those many evident flaws-- which included the use by members of at least one list of governmental powers and resources to try to steer the election their way; the overwhelming presence of occupation forces in many parts of the country; the intimidation campaign launched by militant anti-occupation (and militant anti-Shiite) forces; and the many, many reported irregularities or worse in the conduct of the election-- Yet, despite all those flaws, in the January 30 elections the Iraqi people spoke.
The clarity of what they said was necessarily muffled and distorted by all the flaws described right there. But still, I think we can hear a couple of clear things in what they said. Which were, for a significant majority of them, these two statements:
(2) that they reject a leader (Allawi) foisted onto them back last spring by the occupying force-- this rejection, note, came despite the fact that Allawi enjoyed all the well-known advantages of incumbency.
But if we can say that the Iraqi "people" sent those two basic messages on January 30, I think it can help us cut through a tremendous amount of currently fevered speculation.
Not only the speculation about the precise "meaning" of this or that clause of the TAL. On that one, frankly at this point after the elections, who gives a damn? At this point, after the elections, the TAL has been transformed into-- at most-- a suggestive or perhaps "first draft" type of a document.
Remember, as I had cited back in that early March 2004 JWN post of mine, that Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa that stated,
Let me repeat. Allawi had all the advantages not only during the election period but in the entire eight-month period leading up to it. And yet, the people roundly rejected his candidacy. From where is he going to cobble together a coalition to defy the will of the UIA leaders?
From nowhere.
So right now, according to the definitely Rube Goldberg-esque and anti-democratic "arrangement" prescribed by the TAL, the people elected to the Iraqi Assembly have to agree on a three-member "presidential council", by a two-thirds majority vote, and then the "presidential council" needs to come to unanimous agreement on the name of a prime minister. The PM and the Council of Ministers then need to win a simple majority vote in the assembly before they begin work.
Where is democracy in this? Where is the will of the people as expressed in the elections? Where is accountability? Where are deadlines?
It is 24 days already since the election. It took the authorities an inordinately long length of time to certify the election. And now, where is the presidential council?
But why, at this point, should anyone give a darn about that whole cumbersome contraption "prescribed" by the TAL?
I am supposing that nothing much has happened in the past eleven months that has caused Ayatollah Sistani (and his supporters) to change their views regarding the status of the TAL. We have now had the election-- an election for which Sistani has pushed and pushed ever since Day 1. So what's the holdup? Why does it seem as though some people are still eager to deny to the Sistanist list the victory that it won?
Sure, the UIA people still need to work very hard to try to craft new terms of positive engagement between Iraq's Shiite majority and its Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and other minorities. But there's every sign that they can do that. They've shown extraordinary restraint in the face of terrible, terrible anti-Shiite provocatins over the past 18 months. They've said and done many things that indicate their desire to reach out to their non-Shiite compatriots, and their understanding of some of the sensitivities involved in doing so.
So why don't the Americans just take a big step back right now from their continued, very meddlesome engagement in Iraqi politics, and let the UIA people, the Kurds, and the Sunnis all get on with what they need to do, which is to work together primarily to negotiate the terms of the country's longterm Constitution?
As for the TAL, with all its extremely complex provisions for what should be happening right now? (But also, I note, no provision at all for what should happen if it should prove impossible to get the 2/3 majority needed for the presidential council, or whatever... In other words, a deeply flawed and inadequate document... )
But who needs the "TAL" anyway? It has performed its main and most important political task, which was to define rules for the country's first post-Saddam election. Now that that has happened, maybe everyone should let "the will of the people" take over.
I only realized this morning (central Virginia time) that the server that hosts the blog was down, and apparently had been since mid-day or so yesterday.
Apologies for the interruption in service. You should now be able to post your comments. (If you're a "legitimate" commenter, that is. We've also been installing new spam-protection software here.)
I was also totally unable to post any new posts. Which prevented me from crowing about calling it, back on Feb. 13, about Ibrahim Jaafari winning the UIA's internal leadership race.
Oh go ahead, Helena, crow.
Anyway, let's hope the hosting service-- and you know who you are, guys!-- doesn't let this happen again, eh?
I just want to note, even if belatedly, the terrible human cost the Iraqi Shiites have been paying over their recent commemoration of Ashoura, in terms of the more than four-score members of their community killed by suicide bombers who seemed to be targeting the Shiites gathered for their holy rites.
This year, as last year.
I also want to note the magnificent self-restraint with which the members and leaders of the Shiite community have so far responded to thse tragedies.
My goodness, can you imagine the carnage of revenge attacks that might under other circumstances have ensued?
Condolences to so very many bereaved families. Prayers for the ability of the leaders of all of Iraq's communities to be able to find a decent and workable national entente.
(And some big questions about the responsibility of the occupying power for these continuing, gross lapses in public security.... nearly two years after the occupation started...)
JWN reader Scott H., who is part Lenni Lenape, sent along a reference to this AP story out of Oregon yesterday, which tells of yet another attempt to fence in a group of indigenous people.... In this case, the native-American students at a boarding school in Salem, Oregon:
The construction ... [resulted] in a student demonstration and letters from parents to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which ordered the $63,000 project.
"Chemawa means `happy home,' " student Jeremy Cummings told the Statesman Journal newspaper in Salem. "It doesn't make a happy home with a fence around it."
By the way, I explored that Lenni Lenape website a little bit, and found this page about the people's history which should be of special interest to US Quakers.
One of the first big groups of Quakers on this continent was the group brought over in the late 17th century by William Penn, who has a "land grant" from whichever British King it was and came over here to launch what was called the "Holy Experiment" in Quaker governance.
Quakers have prided themselves on having tried to treat the native peoles of north America fairly-- in particular, by "buying" their land from Indians for a "fair" price, etc etc. (In later centuries, Quakers also participated along with other churches in undertaking the cultural genocide of many Indians by putting their children and youths into boarding-schools where they were forbidden from speaking their people's languages. But I suppose they thought they were "doing them a favor"? Anyway, that phase came a lot later... )
So the Lenni Lenape were some of the first native peoples that Penn's colonists encountered. I guess he and the Quakers who came with him tried to treat them decently. But much or most of the land they had in "Penn"-sylvania and New Jersey was actually held in Penn's personal name, and after he died his descendants weren't nearly so attentive to trying to treat the Indians fairly.
According to the Lenape story told on that page I linked to, after William Penn's death his descendants,
Believing that their forefathers had made such an agreement the Lenape leaders agreed to let the Penns have this area walked off. They thought the whites would take a leisurely walk down an Indian path along the Delaware River. Instead, the Penns hired three of the fastest runners, and had a straight path cleared. Only one of the "walkers" was able to complete the "walk," but he went fifty-five miles.
In June 1762, the New Jersey Quaker John Woolman determined to travel from his home-farm westwards to visit some of the native Americans in the center of what is today Pennsylvania. In his journal he wrote,
By the extending of English settlements and partly by English hunters, those wild beasts they chiefly depend on for a subsistence are not so plenty as they were, and people too often, for the sake of gain, open a door for them to waste their skins and furs in purchasing a liquor which tends to the ruin of them and their families.
... I had a prospect of the English along the coast for upward of nine hundred miles where I had traveled. And the favorable situation of the English and the difficulties attending the natives in many places, and the Negroes, were open before me. And a weighty and heavenly care came over my mind, and love filled my heart toward all mankind. (p.128)
Reading John Woolman was what started drawing me to Quakerism, around 11 years ago. (You can also read what I wrote about him two years ago, here.)
Bill and I made a quick foray into Gomorrah-on-the-Potomac this weekend. A dear friend of ours was having a Big 6-0 birthday party there. Her spouse organized the party as a surprise, and amazingly it worked. One hundred people in fancy duds were all packed into one of the city's swankiest private clubs and when the birthday girl arrived we all leapt up saying "Surprise!"
I have this complex sort of love-hate relationship with Washington DC. Mainly, a lot of amazement at the toxic miasma of militarism and arrogance that marks nearly all of what passes for policy discourse there. There's a critical mass of people who work in the administration, people who work on the Hill, people who work in the (so-called) "think tanks", and very insidery "press" people... And they all talk to each other and create this massive echo chamber of likeminded people who seem sincerely to be of the belief that what they're talking about is "the world", when quite frequently it isn't at all.
On the other hand, I did live there for 15 years. I got to know hundreds of nice people, and still count many of them as my friends.
One person I've known for oh, 20 years, let's just say someone who used to be a very senior diplomat who spent the past year working in Baghdad's Green Zone, called out to me at the party last night (with a big smile): "Helena Cobban! The provocateuse!"
"Why d'you say that?" I asked once I could get closer to him.
"Because you tell the truth," he said.
So that was nice. We talked a bit longer, but the party was pretty crammed and the accoustics terrible.
I keep thinking I should try and spend a little more time in DC to catch up with some of the folks there a bit more, like him. Seven years after leaving the city, I'm maybe just about ready to go back in some way.
But heavens, no: definitely not to become any kind of "insider".
A dizzying number of different narratives are being unfolded in Lebanon these days. here are the main ones:
Track 1: The facts about the hideous killing of Rafiq Hariri
Track 2: The international "uproar" and rush to judgment
And then, the most fascinating track of all...
Track 3: The birth of an inter-sectarian, nonviolent opposition movement in Lebanon
This is such great news!
I wonder how whoever carried out the grisly deed last Monday is looking at this development? Almost certainly, whoever did it was intending to spark off further, terrible, inter-necine fighting inside Lebanon... Instead of which, we have this great and very mature response from the Lebanese opposition:
Like Walid Jumblatt, the MP and former minister whose father Kamal Bey Jumblatt was killed by the Syrians in 1977 at the time that the Syrians were doing Washington's bidding by "saving" the Falangists (Maronitist extremists) from being over-run by the Lebanese leftist and Palestinian forces.
Like Samir Frangieh, a wry, longtime Marxist intellectual who has for decades now been one of the notable voices of conscience inside the Maronite community.
Lebanese politics is notably complicated for people who don't know much about the country's extremely complex society. The twists, turns, wrinkles, and turnrounds can be confusing enough for anyone!
So Walid Bey Jumblatt is the hereditary "community head" of the Druze community inside Lebanon. As such, he has many quasi-feudal powers within Lebanon's Druze community-- -- and also, much influence among Druzes in Syria (including the Israeli-occupied Golan) and among those in Israel itself.
The Druze-- in case by chance you didn't know this?-- are a small, fairly secretive religious group that broke off from Shiite Islam in the days of Egypt's very weird Fatimid ruler Al-Hakem bi-Omrillah [sorry, make that Al-Hakem bi-Amrillah] in the 11th century. The Druze "closed" the call to convert to their sect in 1085, and have had very few converts since. The Jumblatts, interestingly enough, were some of those converts, having come over to Lebanon from somewhere in Kurdistan a few centuries after 1085.
(Read all about this in my 1985 book on Lebanon. If you can get hold of a copy. I'm actually trying to regain my rights to it, to reissue it, right now.)
So Walid Bey has this position of quasi-feudal leadership... And he is also head of Lebanon's most stable socialist party, the PSP, whose red flags you might have seen waving at Hariri's funeral.
Oh, and by the way, in a tradition not followed by many socialist parties anywhere else in the world, he also inherited his role as head of the party from his father.
His mother, May Arslan Jumblatt, is a fabulous woman-- a pioneering, chainsmoking, volubly French-speaking feminist from the "rival" Yazbecki trend in Druze feudal politics who was divorced from Kamal Bey when Walid was still small. We spent a great evening with her, Walid, and Walid's wife Nura up in the family's ancestral seat in the mountains, back in October.
Okay, and then there's Samir Frangieh, a Maronite Christian who is the second cousin of Suleiman Frangieh, the present Minister of the Interior. Suleiman F., btw, is the grandson of the generally pro-Syrian man of the same name who was President back in the 1970s. Suleiman's father Tony was killed along with, his wife, a baby daughter, and 31 supporters in an attack set by Maronitist rivals in 1978.
For details of a long list of nasty assassinations inside Lebanon since 1975, go here.
All of which history makes the emergence of a determinedly nonviolent opposition movement in the country even more notable.
(There have been some small attempts to do this before-- led mostly by women. But they never got anywhere. The men just couldn't, in those days, resist grabbing for their guns when the going got tough.)
So according to that same Daily Star report cited above, Jumblatt, Samir Frangieh, and the others declared that they intend to place all the country's parliamentary business on hold,
Speaking from Chouf MP Walid Jumblatt's residence in Clemenceau Qornet Shehwan Gathering member Samir Franjieh said: "In response to the criminal and terrorist policy of the Lebanese and Syrian authorities, the opposition declares a democratic and peaceful intifada [uprising] for independence."
The refusal to discuss the electoral law could delay this May's parliamentary elections.
Interior Minister Suleiman Franjieh was dismissive of the opposition but still took time to warn them against inciting tensions in the wake of this week's tragic events.
He said: "Should security be tampered with, the government will not stand unmoved, and the army will be given the order to act."
But despite the warning he added: "It is not worth announcing a state of emergency."
The opposition statement followed a meeting of opposition groups at Le Bristol Hotel in Beirut. Sources close to opposition leader Jumblatt said he did not attend the meeting for "security measures" after receiving what they described as "direct threats."
In his latest direct attack on President Emile Lahoud, Jumblatt said: "He should be removed from Lebanon in a Syrian truck."
He added: "They cannot assassinate the one or even two million people who support us."
Jumblatt again accused Lebanese and Syrian security services of being behind Hariri's murder. He said: "We ask for an international investigation not involving the Lebanese regime."
The attendants wore red and white ribbons in support of Lebanon's independence.
Opposition members also asked Lebanese expatriates to organize sit-ins and demonstrations in front of Lebanese embassies.
Samir Franjieh said: "We ask Lebanese expatriates' political and financial support for our cause. We demand the United Nations' support to protect the Lebanese people."
Hariri's grave in downtown Beirut has become a shrine since his burial last Wednesday and Samir Franjieh urged the Lebanese people to continue their presence and prayers there.
On Friday, hundreds of Lebanese marched from Phoenicia Inter-Continental Hotel, where Hariri was assassinated, to Gemmayzeh chanting slogans against Syria and calling for "freedom, sovereignty and independence."
Some students threatened to march "everyday at 7 p.m. until the government resigns."
Opposition members called for the formation of an "interim government as a supreme national necessity to protect the Lebanese people and ensure the immediate and complete withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon."
Not clear yet. But there is that news about Bashar having dismissed his military mukhabarat chief somewhat precipitately... Plus, there's this interesting report from AP's Zeina Karam in Damascus, who says "some Syrians" are now saying it's time to withdraw the 15,000 troops their country has in Lebanon.
She gives no further quantification for the degree of support she found for that view, and notes that,
Karam also quotes two businessmen as saying that's not a wise course... But let's see.
Regarding the pro-Syrian forces inside Lebanon, they seem generally to be acting pretty wisely, and not in an escalatory way right now. But who knows how they will be moving forward? Hard for anyone to guess.
Here is a fascinating new post from Riverbend yesterday. (Thanks to commenter Frank for alerting me to this one-- and also, its predecessor from River, which is likewise worth reading.)
River sounds a lot less personally sanguine about Iraq's prospects after the election than Faiza (cautiously) has been.
River has her own take on the Islamic dress-code issue there, which is definitely worth reading. I also really love the folksy, intimate way she's able to describe daily scenes in her life to us. She's been posting a bit more frequently, recently. Let's hope that trend continues.
Please, River!
I just want to paste in the concluding words on this recent post of hers:
There was hope of a secular Iraq, even after the occupation. That hope is fading fast.
Steve Weisman has a piece in today's NYT about both the Bush administration's recent escalation of its campaign against the Lebanese party Hizbullah, and the difficulties it has encountered in Europe as it tries to drum up support for this policy.
The piece reveals Weisman's usual close understanding of US politics and a level of misunderstanding of Middle East politics that's only too common among "well-connected insiders" in Washington DC.
Weisman sources his story to "officials and diplomats" in both the US and Europe who, "would not give their names, saying they did not want to be seen as worsening tensions between the United States and Europe on the eve of Mr. Bush's trip."
Did not want to be seen as worsening tensions? Yes, that is apparently right, because the difference of opinion between the US and most of Europe over the Hizbullah issue seems to be very deep indeed.
Of course, the fact that the sources that Weisman claims are unnamed makes his whole story rather nebulous and hard to pin down. But I don't doubt that-- because of who he is, and because his editors decided to run the story on the front page above the fold-- he had some pretty authoritative ones.
Here's what he writes:
Ah, but here's a very sly kicker from Weisman:
I wrote there, too, that the Jerusalem Post was running a piece that attributed to "PA security officials" a fear of a Hizbullah assassination attack against Abu Mazen.
Of course, so far we've not yet had any actual expressions of such a concern-- either from Abu Mazen or from security officials around him-- that haven't come out pre-filtered through (or, indeed, generated by) Israeli or American sources... So why on earth should we take all that pre-cooked hasbara seriously at all?
Why didn't Steve Weisman try to ask Abu Mazen, or someone around him, whether he actually entertains such fears about Hizbullah?
Oh, sorry, Abu Mazen's an Arab. That must mean he's a congenital liar, right? [Irony alert in this paragraph, friends.] Clearly, "Israeli and American officials" can be trusted on to know the truth about his fears and concerns much better than him...
(In that post last Saturday, I also quoted Hizbullah's deputy Secretary-General, Naim Kassem as having categorically denied to a Reuters reporter that they were trying to recruit Palestinian militants to destroy new Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts. Oh, but he's an Arab too, right?)
Okay, so I'm waiting till we have any concrete evidence at all, on any of these Israeli-generated allegations against Hizbullah, before I rush to judgment.
I guess that makes me part of the old-fashioned, "reality-based community", right?
But back to the story of how the Hizbullah issue is causing fissures between the Europeans and the Bushies...
Weisman quotes an (un-named, and unidentified even by country) European official as saying:
...
"Nothing is going to change on Hezbollah because we don't have an agreement among the member states," [a European] diplomat said. "That doesn't mean we won't get a consensus. I know the Americans are impatient, but the European Union has 25 states, and these things take time."
Britain and other countries have argued that the best way to press Hamas to drop its efforts to disrupt Middle East peace talks and to recognize Israel is to offer inducements, several officials said. But the [EU's anti-terrorist] Clearing House has not raised the question of whether to remove Hamas from the terrorist list.
Long may both those decisions stand! Long may the two organizations, each of which represents a sizeable political base, continue to see their interests being furthered more by joining the political game than by any return to violence against civilians!
But the other thing at issue is-- if both organizations stick on this course-- what on earth would happen to those great serried cohorts of charlatans in the US and Israel who have made comfy careers for themselves as "terrorism specialists"?
It is at this level of naked, often extremely sordid self-interest that the current campaign against Hizbullah may well be being generated. And certainly, the "terrorism experts" in questions have great access to the western media, and to the Bush administration.
I mean, all those "experts" are looking around themselves today and seeing that hey, maybe they won't have Hamas to kick around for too much longer... especially if it carries on being a lynchpin of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process...
So let's ramp up the campaign against Hizbullah instead, why not? And this campaign has great side-benefits not provided by a continuation of the campaign against Hamas: if these faux-expert charlatans can really get something going against Hizbullah, that could help destabilize, weaken and chip away at Syria and Iran, as well. Woo-hoo! (from their point of view.)
So to understand what's going on, I think we need to understand the weird, wild world of the whole "discourse of terrorism": a place where words can be put into Abu Mazen's mouth with no attempt to verify whether he actually said them; a place where a rigid refusal to use one's God-given powers of reason, inquisitiveness, compassion, and intelligence can be justified on the basis that "you can't possibly talk to these people, or even treat them as fellow-humans, because they're all terrorists."
Okay, pop-quiz time. Back in the 1980s, which organization in Africa was most frequently referred to by its opponents as a "terrorist group", and on that basis banned from any participation in the political process?
Did you get the answer? Yes, friends, it was the ANC... Nelson Mandela's warm and fuzzy ANC, that (nearly) all westerners nowadays like to patronize and support, and that nearly all White South Africans now claim they "secretly" supported all along... (Baloney on that last claim, by the way.)
But attitudes can and do change... And the "miracle" of real political inclusion can certainly transform even the most previously deeply anatagonistic of relationships.
So why are Condi Rice (who was probably the un-named source of much of Wesiman's story, by my reading) and the new CIA head, Porter Goss, still trying to crank up the exclusion and emonization of Hamas and especially Hizbullah?
Here are a couple of other snippets from Weisman's article:
"Here you have Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, many of them supported by Syria, trying literally to blow up the process," Ms. Rice said.
In a statement before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Porter J. Goss, the new director of central intelligence, said Hezbollah's "main focus remains Israel, but it could conduct lethal attacks against U.S. interests quickly upon a decision to do so."
Weisman again:
Maybe the US should considering trying such a simple, political approach to Hizbullah, as well?
Faiza has a good new English-language post up, containing her reflections on the post-election scene. She is still, like many thousands of Iraqis, hanging around in a neighboring country-- in her case, Jordan.
This post is something she wrote last Saturday. The whole post is definitely worth reading. But if you can't catch the whole thing, at least pay attention to what this wise woman writes about her country's immediate priorities:
This is how I see the future... improving the security condition is the first key to enter the future. Controlling the administrational corruption in the governmental system, and in other links responsible for implementing the work program for manufacturing Iraq’s new future, that is the second key... and after that, all doors shall be open easily, and safely, by the will of GOD.
The people are supposed to have elected this government, so they have the right to watch her, and question her for what promises they have fulfilled, in providing a good life for Iraqis…this is step No. 1 in the harvest of democracy. Democracy is not only voting boxes, papers, names, cameras, the press, and enthusiastic speeches. Democracy is a way of life, to be learned by people and governments, and a language of dialogue between the two sides.
I do wish Iraqis shall fare good from this new experience in their lives, and by the new faces that shall come to receive the responsibilities. Our hearts are tired, but they are still full with the hope that what is to come... shall be better than what has gone.
As for the occupation, there must be a withdrawal timetable to be scheduled during the few coming years.
I do believe in the concept that says: a hand building Iraq, and the other pushes the occupation out of it.
No, she doesn't. What she is very concerned about, though, is the issue of accountability going forward from here.
She has a great section in the post on the experiences of women in war-torn societies, reflecting on Krishna Kumar's pretty good book on that topic.
Then, there's this fascinating discussion of the veiling issue:
There is an issue that seems to make me wonder, and in doubt.
Why would some Iraqi or Arabic women debate the subject of “The Veil”, criticizing it, in the western media?
It is a critical and important issue, which should be discussed in our countries, to find out what is right from wrong. As to opening fire on the veil there, in the western newspapers, it is a kind of cowardice, and hypocrisy.
Why should I ‘tickle’ the feelings of the west, saying; you are better than us, and your culture is better?
Why don’t we discuss our subjects together, to get to a point? Like one family, which houses many different view points? Which is the wisest behavior? To spread our differences in front of the world, or to discuss them calmly, rationally, without hypocrisy, until we solve the problem, and get to a reasonable agreement.
Yes, in my opinion, a woman’s veil is needed, as a sign of respectability, and decency. I myself am wearing the veil, for some two years now, with my own, full conviction. It has never stood one day against my ambitions, or my career, nor has it influenced my personality or way of thinking, but I rather think it gave me more self confidence to move in a conservative society like ours.
The veil is connected with the nature of society, its history, culture, and a long heritage... that could not be easily ignored. But, we could discuss the style of that veil, its influence upon women, their way of thinking, their education, and their contributions in society. I do not like the veil that makes a woman looks like a tent, from top to bottom, or just like a creature from another planet, hiding from sight. The sight of a woman wearing a much exaggerated veil provokes astonishment in me, just like the sight of a woman wearing a much-revealing blouse, displaying most of her chest, half her back, and half her belly, including the belly-button. Huh... modern trends.
Both have exaggerated... And the Prophet Mohammad (The Prayers of GOD Be upon Him, and His Peace) used to say: (Do not exaggerate...and do not go astray). This is how I understand religion, and the way of life. Do not deprive the woman from the sun and day light... and do not tread with her body. Both are doing her an injustice.
This is what I think, and I would like to discuss the matter with the Muslims first, as an issue concerning us, and our lives. I do not respect those who go to the western media to take cover there, then throw stones at Muslims.
Those are tricks with other purposes in mind... And those, I do not like.
***
In our societies, girls and women wear the veil while in universities, schools, hospitals, and work offices, in public markets, streets, while driving cars, and they take their share in the public life, like men.
They join in political parties, organizations, humanitarian and social societies, and in non-governmental organizations.
I am talking about the Arab world in general... I have seen the same scenes in Baghdad, here in Amman, in Damascus, and in Cairo. Veil was never an obstacle against the woman; I rather think it was a protection point for her, in conservative societies. She might have been deprived of education, or work, if she weren't veiled.
[snip]
***
There is a phenomena much criticized by these women, and that is the increasing number of veiled woman in Iraq after the war. In the book I mentioned before there is an explanation to this phenomena...
When I was in Baghdad, I didn't comprehend that explanation clearly, it was somewhat ambiguous to me: the presence of a foreign occupation force, justifies the need for more decency for women, and to protect them from corruption. That was the idea in my mind. Then I understood the subject more from the book.
The author says; there was a clear phenomena in countries like Cambodia, who suffered from civil wars, then there were peace keeping forces from various countries, and remained for long years, and this created a class of fallen women in society (prostitutes), because of the big numbers of single men away from their countries!!
I smiled, and understood why the veil has increased among Iraqi women.
Perhaps by a personal wish, or by the parents request, (I do not like to use the words ' parent's pressure', for I do not like using such stinging expressions).
The sum of the matter is; I see in front of the women in Iraq, or in other Arabic and Islamic countries, a lot of issues worthy of debate, to open up the horizons of a shiny future for them, that could be accomplished without contradicting religion, or the veil.
Women deserve more attention, in order to guarantee an Arabic, Islamic generation equipped to face the challenges of life, and its difficulties. A generation able to create a new future, different of what we have seen, and suffered from... a shining, illuminated future, containing more truthfulness, success, and accomplishments, and an up-raising of our sad reality, to a more successful reality, with more power of influence... A reality containing work, production, and economic, political, social, and cultural developments... one that would raise our statues among countries and nations to a new reality, that we deserve...
To a place where silly talk and worthless words would be the last things in our lives, not even to listen up to, because we would be busy with fruitful work, ambitions, and successful accomplishments........
That is the future I hope , for Iraq, and all Arabic and Islamic people.
*******************
But let's hope commenters here can hold off from the sniping and rhetorical stone-throwing they sometimes like to engage in?
My own general view on the veiling issue for what it's worth is that, as a woman, I prefer dress codes that impose (or strongly urge) norms of more covering up rather than ones that impose (or strongly urge) norms of less covering up.
I really hate the objectification of women and our bodies that goes on in a lot of western culture in the supposed name of "freedom for women". I strongly resent any measures that restrict women's mobility (foot-binding, burkas, prohibitions on women driving, etc). But why should belly-button-flaunting in public (for example) be culturally any "better" than veiling in public? No reason. In fact, because it can so easily lead to the objectification of women, I think it's considerably worse...
I am totally delighted that the Israeli Knesset has voted for the bill that authorizes the compensation package for the 9,000 settlers who'll be relocated out of Gaza this summer.
Here are some details from a story filed late Wednesday by AP's Ravi Nessman:
The vote took hours as legislators decided on nearly 200 proposed amendments, soundly defeating one requiring a national referendum on the plan. Sharon has rejected such a vote as a delaying tactic.
The plan still needs to overcome several more hurdles before it can be implemented.
Sharon must pass a budget by March 31 or his government will collapse, possibly taking the withdrawal down with it, because a new election would have to be called...
The Cabinet will hold a procedural vote Sunday on the plan and will have separate votes later on each of the withdrawal's four phases.
Imagine this: You take your family to a lovely seaside villa built on somebody else's land (maybe some of the land expropriated for the Sinai settlements from my friend Freih Abu-Middain?) The government is so keen to have you move there that they give you all kinds of sweet deals on financing or renting your home, and perhaps the lovely irrigated orchards all around it. (Did you ever read Amira Hass's lovely book Drinking the sea at Gaza, where she writes about the strong salinity of the water the Gaza Palestinians have to make do with, given how much of their customary water supplies have been overdrawn by Israel and the settlements?)
... Anyway, moving right along, you're this Israeli settler, and you've been having this lovely life there. And then the government comes and tells you, sorry buddy, it's time you moved out... and they give you nearly $100,000 for every man, woman, or child in your family.
Wow!
Great work if you can get it, eh?
Nessman gives more details of how the buyout will work:
This is from Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949:
So would Americans support implanting whole communities of US citizens into a territory our army happened to be in occupation of? I think most of us would see the unfairness of that.
The Geneva Conventions were extensively re-codified and adopted in their present form in 1949, precisely in light of the gross kinds of abuses the Nazis had committed in the territory that they had brought under military occupation throughout Europe.
There is a very good reason for the limitations clearly laid out in Article 49. And every government in the world except that of Israel (what a coincidence!) considers that Gaza, the whole West Bank, and Golan are all still "occupied territory". They didn't stop being that under Oslo, as Israeli government lawyers made clear at the time... And they won't stop being technically "occupied territory"-- that is, territory in which Israel as occupying power has many continuing responsibilities for the welfare of the indigenous residents-- until a final peace treaty is signed.
Please. Let's hope that's soon.
Meanwhile, back in the Israeli debate over the Gaza withdrawal, Nessman notes the extreme, hateful kinds of threats some of the militant settlers have been making against Sharon and other architects of the pro-withdrawal movement:
"All the signs that there were then, which people pretty much ignored, are back again but much clearer," he told Army Radio. "The extreme right is saying that now war has really been declared, and in their view, in war they feel they are entitled to do anything they want."
How's that again? I can understand that maybe they're upset. But "a black day for democracy"?
Let's talk democracy in Israel/Palestine. Let's talk numbers of actual living, breathing men, women, and kids.
First, a clear majority of Jewish Israelis support this withdrawal; and according to the Steinmetz Center's opinion polling a strong majority also supports considerably deeper withdrawals in the West Bank than the ones Sharon is as yet proposing.
But that's only within the "universe" of the 5 million Jewish Israelis. Then, there are 1 million Palestinian Israelis, that is, Israeli citizens who are of indigenous Palestinian ethnicity. Then there are 3 million-plus Palestinian residents of the occupied territories. Then there are at least 4 million Palestinian refugees-- people, that is, whose claims on their ancestral homeland have not been annulled by any amount of forced migration out of it, and who therefore still have a claim on its bounteousness and resources.
Well, I guess if we're talking "democracy" these days-- and some of the weirdest people in the world seem to want to do so-- then I make that into a total of 8 million-plus ethnic Palestinians who have a claim on the land, and around 5 million Jewish Israelis.
I wonder when, at any of these different levels, "democracy" came to mean the imposition by the minority of its will upon the majority?
The Palestinians, meanwhile, have since 1974 been offering to cede their claim to the exercise of national rights over some 77% of their original homeland (though of course the Palestinian Israelis have not ceded their claims to individual civil and political rights within Israel, at all.) That Palestinian offer has met with some good response, from some Israelis. But oh no, not from the settlers, who have been the spoiled babies of Israeli politics for ways too long.
And now, they're getting paid handsomely to, in effect, "stop beating their wives."
You can guess who gets to pay that "compensation" to them, can't you? All of us suckers here in the US who've been paying for the whole illegal settlement project (in more ways than one), all along.
Okay, fair enough. Maybe. If it'll help lead to a sustainable and "fair-enough" peace. But when will we see an equivalent amount being paid from our tax $$ to help compensate and/or repatriate the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families who have been stuck in forced exile for 58 years now?
I have just done a quick revision of the portion of the book chapter that I "junked" last week that deals with the development of the "transitional justice" field since 1945. And, as promised last week, I've now uploaded that text into the JWN archives.
This text is a part of my earlier plan for Chapter 11 of the "Violence and its Legacies" book. I appended to it, in the same file there, the latest version I have of the chart I've been compiling on truth commissions (which form only a part of the broader TJ field.)
I titled the text Notes on the development of 'transitional justice' since 1945.
In it, I make some important, preliminary arguments that the changes the field has already been undergoing, at the level of practice, in the past 10-15 years need to be made more explicit in the theory; and that the theory therefore, explicitly, needs to be made much broader and more holistic.
Some people have already started to reflect seriously on the need to broaden the definition and purview of the field, and the implications of making that shift. Luckily, some of them-- Rama Mani, Bill Schabas, Gerald Gahima, etc-- were at the UNU conference I went to last month. But I do think that more work needs to be done to make this shift more explicit.
I would really love to use this thread for comments and feedback.
Today's NYTimes has an intriguing interview with Abu Mazen that's well worth reading. (I think you have to register to do so. Go thru Bugmenot.)
In digesting Abu Mazen's comments at the top of the article, reporter Steve Erlanger wrote that, "The new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said in an interview this weekend that the war with the Israelis is effectively over", a theme that was picked up in the headline.
I scanned eagerly down the text to find the exact way in which AM had worded this. But I found no actual quoted text that related to Erlanger's attention-grabbing lede. What I did find was this:
Never mind about that perplexing error, though. The AM remarks as quoted were significant enough.
He clearly signaled that his prime political focus will be on getting final-status negotiations started (and completed) as rapidly as possible:
"So it's better for us and for the Israelis to go directly to final status," he said. "I told Mr. Sharon that it's better for both sides to establish this back channel to deal with final status and go in parallel with the stages of the road map."
Erlanger evidently asked AM how Sharon had responded to the suggestion to open a back channel to work out the details on final-status issues. He reported that AM laughed, and said Sharon had not responded:
"And now he has a partner," Mr. Abbas said.
Prisoner releases have also, of course, been a big issue inside nearly every other transformational negotiation in recent decades.
Up near the top of the piece, Erlanger has a little reference to AM having said that, "The Americans were talking to him 'in a very helpful way'." I did not, however, see that expanded anywhere later in the text.
I have to say, for myself, I haven't spent any time with Abu Mazen face-to-face for many years now. But just the way he has been carrying himself in the past couple of months is extremely impressive. He suddenly seems to have significant new amounts of self-confidence. That, allied with his natural modesty and self-deprecating nature, seem to give him a relaxed way of being in which he doesn't have to be shrill and accusatory in order to be firm and get his view across.
I like the way he talked about Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in general:
Mr. Abbas said he was surprised that the armed militants, many wanted by Israel, embraced his candidacy. "All the fugitives came to me from all factions and said: 'We are for you. You were with us, and we want you to solve our problems,' " he said. They wanted real jobs in the security forces of the Palestinian Authority "and to be secure from Israeli assassination and attacks," he said. "I promised them, and now it is realized."
... Asked if Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which are labeled terrorist organizations by the United States, want what he wants, he laughed and said: "No, of course they don't want what I want! They want to come to power if they can. For that they ran in municipal elections and after that they will go" to the legislative elections. "And if they win, of course they want power. And it is their right. It is the competition" of democracy.
Asked about Hamas's recent victories in local elections in 7 of the 10 cities and villages in Gaza, Mr. Abbas said: "This is democracy. We have to congratulate Hamas and say, 'O.K., you won.' Why not?" [HC editorial here: How many other Middle Eastern leaders could be equally relaxed when talking about the strength of their political opponents?] His own mainstream Fatah faction made many mistakes, he said. The vote "is a good lesson for Fatah to realize its position toward this and that and prepare themselves for the coming elections" for Parliament on July 17.
Fatah is already working to renew itself and bring in a younger generation "in parallel" with preparations for the elections, Mr. Abbas said, including work to form a new government, expected within the next week. Some in Fatah worry that Hamas could win more a substantial share of the vote, and Mr. Abbas is negotiating a new law with Hamas about how much proportional representation, which Hamas favors, will be used to elect legislators.
Mr. Abbas argued that democracy would help tame the radicals. "Of course they should be converted into a political party," he said. "It's good for us. We're talking about national unity."
He said he was not bothered that Hamas could construe the acceptance of Israel merely as a stage toward a Palestinian state, to be followed by a renewed desire to eliminate Israel. "Whether they consider it a stage or not, they will accept an Israeli state within the 1967 borders and they declare it," he said. "For me it is not a stage; for them it is a stage - O.K."
"I don't think the Israelis have the right to say, 'No, we won't discuss it,' " he said. "We will ask them to discuss this resolution, and when we come to an agreement, on anything, of course we will accept it."
Mr. Abbas was born in Safed, in what was then British Mandate Palestine. He was 13 in 1948, during the Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel's establishment as a state. "I remember everything," he said. "It was 1948 when we have been deported from Safed to the Golan Heights to Damascus, and I remember every specific point," he said. "There was a war. We had to leave the city. The Israelis invaded the city, the Haganah at the time. We left our country."
With Safed in Israeli hands, Mr. Abbas said, he could not return until 1995, after the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization were allowed to return to the territories after the 1993 Oslo accords. He wanted to go sooner, but the mayor of Safed organized demonstrations against the visit, he said.But in 1995, "I did go back, but secretly," he said. "The Israeli ministry of interior helped me to go discreetly there." He stopped, his face suddenly softer. "I was there for 5 or 10 minutes only," he said. "I was very, very sad. I was very sad."
He looked off toward the far wall, then continued, "Every place, every quarter, every building I remember. I saw my house. But I didn't go inside."
Well, you know that in some places around the world, women's rights, interests, and voice have been getting progressively devalued over recent years (while in others they've been becoming progressively more valued.)
In Iraq, I am afraid that women's interests are about to be rolled back by the incoming regime.
And in Washington DC, women's voices have almost certainly been rolled back a lot over the past 10-15 years.
Today, "Valentine's Day", I'm sad to report to you the final findings of the "Women getting WaPo-ed" count that I've been maintaining for the past eight weeks.
Today, the WGW count finally tells us that the men who run the most influential newspaper in the most important city in the world value women's voices precisely one-ninth as much as they value men's voices.
That is, as of today, the WGW count stands at exactly 10%. Over the past eight weeks, precisely 26 of the 260 authored pieces on the Washington Post's op-ed pages have been authored by women. (And I've been "generous" in assigning to the women's score genders that weren't easy to assign.)
I note that people in the west frequently get conniptions when they learn that in some Islamic codes of law, a man's testimony in court "counts" for as much as that of two women.
But how many conniptions do we hear from Washingtonians when they contemplate the gross gender imbalance on the Op-Ed page of their daily paper? Nine men's voices for every woman's voice that gets published?
What is all that about???
It is my strong belief, moreover, that the gender imbalance on the WaPo's op-ed pages has gotten worse over the past 10-15 years, not better. I don't have any figures for that, but if any of you readers has some figures from the past, please send 'em on over!
At least, now, I've established what I hope will be an absolute rock-bottom base-line for the WGW count. I'm sincerely hoping the count will only go up from here? Maybe I'll run it again some time in the future.
But for now, the Valentine's Day message that the men who run the WaPo are sending to the women they encounter in their professional life seems to be this:
Fuggedaboutit, suckers!
Just keep buying the skimpy lingerie we peddle to you all over our main pages and shut up!"
I was just reading this story from AP, which attributed to the Iraqi Electoral Commission the same final distribution of the 275 seats in the National Assembly that AP had reported-- without attribution to the IEC-- yesterday.
Namely that the Sistanist UIA list gets 140 seats, the Kurdish list get 75, the Allawist get 40, etc etc.
However, I think that further down the list of lists there may be a question about the allocation of one seat that the IEC gave to the Sadrist list (one of three that they allocated to it), which I believe may more legitimately have gone to the Iraqi Islamic Party.
Here is my table of calculations for how I believe the seats were being (or should have been) allocated.
The easiest way to understand the counting is to read the table from left to right. First of all, the number of votes recorded for each significantly-sized list is divided by 30,750, which as I wrote yesterday is the raw "number of votes per seat". After that first distribution of seats, 256 seats have been clearly distributed. You then have two sets of votes that have not yet "contributed" to a seat: all the "remainders" from the dividing process for the bigger lists, plus all the actual votes from all the smaller lists.
Each list should, obviously, get to "keep" its own remainders (my column D). But down at the bottom of the list of lists, there are many lists that by no means of remainder-distribution at all could end up qualifying for a seat. I put that cut-off point after #13, the Iraqi Islamic Party, principally in view of the fact that the IIP clearly had gained more than half of a "seat"'s-worth of votes, and the next list on the list clearly had not.
So I then redistributed among lists 1-13 all the votes that had not been cast for any of lists 1-13, on a basis proportional to the number of votes each of those lists had originally won (my column E there).
I then added the sums of columns D and E to arrive at a total for an allocation of votes at "round 2". That was column F. Those votes were then aggregated into "seats", using the same divisor as in round 1, generating the additional seats given in column G.
But there are still remainders, and still four seats to be allocated.
At that point, I allocated those four remaining seats to the lists with the highest remainders in column H, which were lists 1, 2, 9, and 13. Of those four "lucky" lists, #13 (the IIP) had by far the highest remainder in column H. That's why I certainly would have allocated one of those four "third round" seats to the IIP.
During the IEC's whole remainder-distribution process, it notably did not give a seat to the IIP; but it apparently gave one to the Sadrist list. I really do not understand why, since I can't see any way of fairly organizing the remainder-distribution system that would have given them an extra seat there.
Plus, I repeat, the IIP had actually won more than 50% (actually, 69.4%) of the votes it would have needed to win a seat without any remainders redistributed to it, at all.
Anyway, it'll be interesting to see the IEC's explanation of its process.
(P.S. It feels so good to be scrying vote-tallying processes in Iraq rather than body counts.)
Former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri and at least nine other people were killed in a massive car bomb attack on the Beirut seafront today.
A Sunni Muslim billionaire from Sidon, who made his fortune as a contractor in Saudi Arabia, Hariri was Lebanon's PM from 1992 thru 1998, and again from 2000 till last October.
Initial speculation-- in the case of this bomb as of the one that severely wounded MP Marwan Hamadeh last October-- turned to the possibility of a Syrian hand in the attack. Both Hamadeh and Hariri had been in the movement that opposed the Syrian-backed extension in office of Maronite Christian President Emil Lahoud.
However, in both cases there is also the possibility that the attacks were part of an orchestrated destabilization campaign in Lebanon aimed at turning the Lebanese people even more strongly against Syria. Who might be behind such a campaign? On the principle of cui bono one would have to say certain hardline forces inside Israel.
The possibility of some kind of a Mossad hand seems to me even more likely this time around than in October. Since October, the Syrians have definitely been trying to handle their relations with Lebanon in a more intelligent, less heavy-handed manner.
Al-Jazeera is reporting that its office in Beirut,
The caller said this group has "announced carrying out the fair penalty against the infidel agent Rafiq al-Hariri", adding that it was a "martyrdom operation" whose details would be later announced.
"We have never heard about this group before," Aljazeera's correspondent said. "The person is not a native-Arabic speaker. He was speaking Arabic with a foreign accent."
Destabilizing Lebanon's still fractured, war-ravaged society is something that both its bigger neighbors have done a lot of over the past 35 years. In Syria's case, these destabilization attempts have on occasion been pursued with the apparent aim of "persuading" the Lebanese that the only way to prevent their country from falling back into the abyss of civil war is to hang onto the Syrian security presence there "for dear life." In Israel's case, the ruling elite there has imho absolutely no desire or intention (since 1982, anyway) to send any kind of a lasting, regular troop presence back into Lebanon. But they have often sought to destabilize things there in order to "punish" Syria; to keep Syria "busy" in Lebanon; and to diminish the Damascus regime's general ability to exert influence outside its borders.
It would be much, much easier for the Lebanese to prevent all these kinds of externally generated destabilization operations from succeeding if they could come to some kind of a durable national understanding among themselves. But they have never been able to do that yet. That has left their country extremely vulnerable to the often brutal machinations of their neighbors.
Poor old Rafiq Hariri. He was a decent person who did a lot of good for the country. But he did always have a very technocratic, top-down, investment-driven view of what "post-war reconstruction" should be. So his years in office ended up achieving very little in bringing about the kinds of deep social reconstruction that post-war societies need.
That was due to a lack of vision, however; and in no way to malice. Certainly, absolutely no-one could ever "deserve" to die in the terrible way that Rafiq and so many of his countrymen died today.
The Al-Jazeera correspondent cited above reported that after the car-bombing there were pro-Hariri demonstrations in Beirut's Hamra Street, and that "pro-and-anti al-Hariri citizens in Beirut feel very upset."
I am just praying that the destabilization efforts in Lebanon-- whoever their author is this time around-- do not succeed. It is totally obsecene that any party would (1) launch such a ghastly attack, and (2) seek apparently to use it to jerk the entire country back into a civil war.
I lived through six years of civil war in Lebanon. One thing war never does is serve the interests of the people living in the areas through which it stalks.
I just posted the December 2003 JWN Golden Oldies onto the sidebar on the front page. Check them out. It was a pretty good month for JWN. Lots there about Iraq, war-crimes courts, and my first visit to China.
Warning: you may find lots of really nasty (including pornographic) spam posted into the comments of some of those posts. Sorry about that. When I have time, I'll delete that nastiness.
Because of spam attacks like those into old posts, I now have a policy of closing the Comments boards after a certain amount of time. (Maybe two weeks?) So if you want to comment on any of those brilliant -- or not so brilliant-- old posts, here is the place to do it.
(By the way: I hope you're enjoying my nod to Lusophonia regarding the date-stamps on the posts. I only discovered the range of language options for datestamps in the MT system recently. What shall it be next, I wonder? Possibly not Japanese.)
So finally, two whole weeks after Iraqis went to the polls, we have preliminary results of the Jan 30 election.
That story, from AP, gave only the (preliminary) totals for the three biggest blocs that ran. Another AP story, to which I can't find a link, said the total number of votes cast came to 8.456 million.
So if you take the (preliminary) numbers listed for the three biggie lists, then you find that, of the ballots cast:
the Kurdish list got 25.7%, and
Allawi's list got 13.8%.
[Update, Sun. mid-afternoon, NYC time: I just learned here that the 8.456 million figure is the figure for valid votes cast, so those percentages there HOLD. Also, the number of votes required to win one seat in the Assembly is about 30,750. Down at the bottom of this, I'll try to give my estimates for seat numbers.]
Interesting how tantalizingly close to 50% the UIA list got. I should imagine that if they can make a decent working coalition with pro-Moqtada or other small Shiite parties, they would come in at over 50%, giving them the kind of strong electoral victory that I'm sure Sistani was looking for.
Lots of politics over the days ahead, no doubt. For starters, the IEC isn't going to announce "verified" final results for another three days, after it has sorted out all outstanding challenges.
And then, there's the politics of coalition building. Allawi was described in this Hayat story as offering PUK leader Jalal Talabani the presidency if he would enter a coalition with him. The WaPo today had a story about Ahmad Chalabi, who's a little low down on the UIA list, desperately wooing Moqtada.
The big question remains. That is,how can the next administration (whoever ends up heading it: I'm kind of expecting Ibrahim Jaafari) win broad enough legitimacy both for itself, and for the constitution-writing process that desperately needs to get underway?
I'd say, legitimacy-wise, that whoever heads the new (still interim) administration needs to find a credible way to be able to draw in significant representatives of the Sunni community, as well as of major different strands of the Shiite community. It goes without saying that the Kurds, who are very well organized at the political level, also have to be-- and will be-- inside the tent.
An attempt to form a Shiite-Kurdish coalition to the exclusion of the Sunnis can't work.
Okay, here, added in mid-afternoon Sunday, New York time, are the votes and rough seat counts (out of 275 seats), as taken from this AP story:
The Kurdistan Alliance (coalition of two main Kurdish factions): 2,175,551 (= 70 seats)
The Iraqi List (headed by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi): 1,168,943 ( = 38 seats)
Iraqis (headed by interim Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawer): 150,680 ( = 4 seats; 4.9 actually)
The Turkomen Iraqi Front (represents the countries ethnic Turks): 93,480 ( = 3 seats)
National Independent Elites and Cadres Party: 69,938 ( = 2 seats)
The Communist Party: 69,920 ( = 2 seats)
The Islamic Kurdish Society: 60,592 ( = 1 seat; 1.9 actually)
The Islamic Labor Movement in Iraq: 43,205 ( = 1 seat)
The National Democratic Alliance: 36,795 ( = 1 seat)
National Rafidain List (Assyrian Christians): 36,255 ( = 1 seat)
The Reconciliation and Liberation Entity: 30,796 ( = 1 seat)
Iraqi Islamic Party (main Sunni group headed by Mohsen Abdel-Hamid): 21,342 ( < 1 seat)
Assembly of Independent Democrats (headed by Sunni elder statesman Adnan Pachachi): 12,728 ( < 1 seat)
National Democratic Party (headed by Naseer Kamel al-Chaderchi, Sunni lawyer and member of the former Iraqi Governing Council): 1,603 ( considerably less than 1 seat)
Where did those other 480,000 votes go? That's not a small number. Some of them might, of course, have gone to the numerous much smaller lists also on the ballot paper. But are some of them votes whose validity the Commission is still considering?
Actually, the way the AP story reported the global vote tally was this:
Invalid votes: 94,305
I guess we need to keep watching the story.
There is also, of course, the numerically smaller story of what the rules are for aggregating the votes that didn't go into constituing a "whole seat". But that should have been pre-decreed in the IEC's voting rules and clearly calculable.
Go straight here. Read why Eyad Sarraj, a dedicated children's psychiatrist, human rights activist, and the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, titled this op-ed piece, This time, I'm hopeful.
By the way, I hope you got the chance to go over and read my CSM column, Thursday. The title of that one was, Hope takes root, again, in Mideast.
Sarraj writes of a recent encounter he had with the press:
To his obvious shock I replied, "Yes."
I have spent many years observing Hamas at close range as it has grown from a small Islamic religious movement into a major army. I have been debating politics with its leaders and members for a long, long time. That experience leads me to believe that Hamas will very soon transform into a political party and will seriously contemplate taking over the government by democratic means.
There are sound reasons for my optimism. The first is that Hamas finally has an incentive to halt terrorist activity. For years, its raison d'etre has been military action. But Hamas has just achieved an astounding victory in municipal elections in the Gaza Strip, winning 70 percent of the seats in local councils. Fatah, the ruling party that had long dominated the political scene, was roundly defeated. Hamas has a guaranteed political future when it chooses to abandon the armed struggle.
Furthermore, close observers have noted important signs of change within Hamas over time. From remarks made by its spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, before his assassination last year, we understand that Hamas is now prepared to accept a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And as the recent elections showed, Hamas now participates fully in the democratic process -- something that it once called a Western conspiracy, and even a sin.
Hamas is becoming more organized, more sophisticated and more confident in itself. For example, in the first intifada, Hamas was quick to charge people with collaboration with Israel and to kill them. That was a sign of insecurity. The Hamas of today pledges not to kill fellow Palestinians, but instead urges the Palestinian Authority to enforce its laws.
Not long ago, I was stopped at a Gaza border crossing along with some colleagues. Inside the fortified post was an Israeli soldier, his face appearing every few minutes through a small opening in the concrete. To my surprise he called me over to ask, "Your friend says you are a psychiatrist. Can I ask you something?" "Yes," I replied warily. The soldier said, "I have a problem, doctor. I live in a settlement in Hebron, and I want to leave."
I hid my surprise and played the psychiatrist, listening calmly as this young man with his baby face and thin beard continued: "My parents want me to stay, but I know it will only lead to more killing. I don't like it there, but I don't want to anger my father and mother who have given their lives for me."
After a moment, I said, "I think it is best if you talk about your feelings with your mother and your father. It will be best if you convince them of your decision. But I want to tell you something else, my friend." The soldier smiled in anticipation as I continued: "By choosing to talk to me about yourself, you made me feel proud of humanity and sure of its future." He stretched his arm through the hole to shake my hand, saying, "I trust you."
Last year in February, I tried to go to Gaza. (You can read about some of my adventures in that regard here, or here.) I wanted to go there because Gaza is home to some extraordinary courageous and visionary Palestinian social activists, of whom Eyad is definitely one.
Well, the IDF never let me in.
Now, I'm aching to try to get back there again. But I totally need to finish my Africa book first!!!
The more I think about the situation, though, the more I think I'm on to something by saying that Hamas and Hizbullah have been following extremely similar political paths. In so many ways, both in how they pursue their domestic-level politics and in how they have pursued a "two-track" approach to the confrontation with Israel.
I see that "two-track" approach as roughly analogous to the ANC's, in South Africa. That is, not to eschew armed struggle completely until they get to the point where the acceptable final-status agreement with the oppressor/ oppenent is finally reached; but along the way there, to place ever-increasing emphasis on using non-violent methods of struggle backed up by extremely impressive and resilient mass organizing...
I do see one possible, and significant, difference between Hizbullah and Hamas, however. That concerns how the two organizations seem to see the status of Israel (within its pre-1967 boundaries.) Hamas has increasingly moved to a point of readiness to accept the existence of Israel within its pre-1967 borders-- and note that Sarraj attributed that shift in part to Ahmad Yassin. Hizbullah, however, has generally seemed unready until now to "concede" Israel's right to exist.
But, and this is a key caveat, Hizbullah's leaders have always claimed that what happens south of the Lebanese-Israeli border is up to their Palestinian "brothers" to decide. So while they may have their own point of view on whether Israel has a right to exist or not, and they might even try to persuade Palestinians of the correctness of their view, at the end of the day they will probably be prepared to defer on this matter to the judgment of any Palestinian leadership that they judge to be legitimate.
And yes, that would almost certainly include Hamas.
This past week, the Israeli hasbara (PSYOPS) folks have been trying to stir up a firestorm of anti-Hizbullah activity. Their FM, Silvan Shalom, has been in France, trying to lobby the French to put Hizbullah on their "terrorist" list. Those wellknown experts on Palestinian affairs (!) who work at the Jerusalem Post are reporting that "PA security officials" fear a Hizbullah assassination attack against Abu Mazen. Etc., etc.
Hizbullah is pretty expert at PSYOPS and media operations, too. Today, their deputy Secretary-General, Naim Kassem told Reuters' Lucy Fielding that,
"They show the existence of an Israeli cell working to spread such ideas before Israeli actions to destroy the truce by repeated aggressions against the Palestinians," he said...
He denied the group was trying to harm an Israeli- Palestinian truce announced in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh this week, already punctured by militant attacks.
"We say over and over again that we are not concerned with the details of what the Palestinians do, whether they resist or not or whether they call a truce or not.
"It must be clear to all that it is the Palestinian people who are fighting and resisting and it was they who created this uprising and can clearly manage their own affairs."
Hamas, because of the big story of the ceasefire that has been developing over the past month, and because of my recent CSM column.
Hizbullah, because in mid-week my editors at Boston Review sent back their markup on the big Hizbullah piece I sent to them at the end of January. They'd cut about one-third of the piece's originally 13,000-word length. Which is okay, I guess. But they asked me to put in a couple of other things--and I found a couple of other things I really needed to put in. So now it's sitting about 10,400 words.
But anyway, that was a bunch of work to keep me busy. Such an interesting story! It's not coming out till their April-May issue. What a bother! Why can't they give instant gratification, like blogging??
This, from Imshin, made me laugh out loud today. Particularly the part where Al-Aqsa Brigades commander Zakariya Zubeidi is quoted calling "Arik" Sharon "a real man".
Zubeidi continued:
Regarding Peres, I've felt for a very long time indeed that the guy's "Mr. Peace" credentials have been, ahem, vastly over-rated. He was, after all, one of the principal organizers of Israel's whole nuclear weapons program, back in the '50s and '60s. Then in 1996-- not long after winning the Nobel peace Prize-- he launched the gratuitous and vicious little war in Lebanon, the main aim of which was to secure his own victory in Israel's elections of that year.
But if Zubaidi is saying things like those quoted above, then welcome change is most definitely in the air! It means, at the very least, that there's a constituency at the militant end of the Palestinian political spectrum that is prepared to give Sharon a chance to make a deal.
I'm glad, too, to see Imshin herself apparently more relaxed about the prospect of making peace with the Palestinians than she has been for a very long time.
Regarding the peace negotiations, Israel has just agreed to go some distance toward meeting the key Hamas demand re repatriation of many previously expelled militants.
And from Hamas's side, Mahmoud Zahar met Abu Mazen and then told AP that Hamas is,
"Up to this moment, we are committed to the previous agreement with Mr. Abbas, and we are going to see how the Israelis" will act, Zahar told the AP.
Let's keep hoping.
Really interesting things are happening all over the world. The North Koreans have announced they have nuclear weapons... The Iraqi election commission has announced yet more problems in ballot-counting, necessitating yet further delay in releasing the results. (Do I smell a fish? Is Negrocontre desperately searching around for which UIA leader will take his dollar and become his humble servant?)... The situation in Gaza looks poised on a knife-edge... (By the way, here is my column from today's CSM.) ... All kinds of revelations are coming out about yet more heinous misdeeds in the US global gulag... A few score thousand Saudi men got the chance to go vote in highly constrained local elections...
As I said, a lot happening, about which I wish I were blogging.
Instead of which I am sitting at my desk having a really upsetting writing crisis. Long and short: none of the work I've done on my book in the past month is worth saving.
Aaaaaaaaaargh!
I won't bore you with the details. All I'll say is that-- though none of what I've drafted will end up in the book, it is not totally wasted. From two points of view. First, everything I write helps me organize my thoughts and draws me, hopefully, to greater understanding and wisdom. (Blah, blah, blah.) That one is also known as the "mulch theory."
And secondly, it ain't wasted because nowadays I get to post it on the blog! And so, dear readers, sometime in the near future you can look forward to not one but two drafts of "Helena's definitive accounting of the history of international atrocities law"! And my short draft of the history of truth commissions!
I bet you can't wait. Right?
Jonathan and I are having a pretty interesting discussion down here on the topic of "what makes a 'truth' commission?" Stop on by, everybody, and share your views, too.
I've done a bit more work on the chart I've been compiling about the general phenomenon of truth commissions. Actually, while doing that, I've learned a lot more interesting things about the range of truth commissions that have operated around the world in the past 30 years.
For example, the t.c. established in Timor Leste (East Timor) in 2001 is titled the "Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor". "Reception" there refers to receiving the perpetrators of (at least) smal