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Wednesday, September 28, 2005

A step backward on genocide


Earlier this month, the UN released the outcome of the 2005 World Summit, whose goal was to reform the Organization in several different domains. The main issues were development, terrorism, the peace-building commission, genocide prevention, human rights, Secretariat reform, Security Council reform and disarmament and non-proliferation.

Many nations, and the Secretariat itself, seemed disappointed with the final document (pdf), which, as any document agreed upon by nearly 200 countries, was necessarily a compromise. The 40-page document spent only half a page on genocide, but one could be forgiven for thinking that those two paragraphs made a big difference after listening to Kofi Annan's address (text or video) to the General Assembly:

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.
When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

Responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity

138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability.

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.
These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

However, the final text from the World Summit differs in no small degree from the conclusions of its parent document, the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which, on the initiative of the of the Government of Canada, was charged with addressing the thorny issues implicated by "military intervention for human protection purposes."

The report concluded that "state sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself," and that when a state is either unable or unwilling to stop "serious harm" suffered by its population, "the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect." The report then goes on to describe this responsibility to protect as being threefold, comprised of the responsibilities to prevent, react and rebuild. The responsibility to react includes "coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme cases military intervention."

ICISS's 90-page report went much further than this month's World Summit, under pressure from states like Zimbabwe, Cuba, the U.S., Iran, Syria and Venezuela, was prepared to go. Granted, the ICISS document has its faults, which are inextricably linked to fundamental problems of the U.N. in general and the Security Council in particular. The main problem being that it relies on the five permanent members of the Security Council to agree not to use their veto power to block military interventions in cases of genocide. It does, however, offer an often overlooked alternative to the Security Council: the General Assembly's Uniting for Peace procedure, which was adopted in 1950 by the Security Council as Resolution 377 and resolves,

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.
In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

Second, the Summit text implies that the international community's responsibility to protect ceases at the exhaustion of peaceful means. Beyond "appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means," stopping genocide ceases to be an obligation. There is a stark language shift, which says that the international community is

prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council ... on a case-by-case basis ... should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

Concretely, this means that once the international community has exhausted peaceful means, it is no longer responsible for intervening in order to stop genocide. This is a far cry from ICISS's responsibility to react and Mr. Annan's claim that the international community "will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms."

There is a fair amount of debate about whether or not the 1948 Genocide Convention legally binds signatory states to stop genocide. And while the UN Secretariat's commentary on the first draft of that convention stated that the Convention "should bind the States to do everything in their power to support any action by the United Nations intended to prevent or stop these crimes," in the end, negotiations by the signatory states softened the language and deleted references like the obligation to report acts of genocide to the Security Council.

It is a disgrace that nearly 60 years later, after having experienced the shame of watching silently as 800,000 Rwandans were mercilessly slaughtered, we have yet to make any progress on keeping our oft repeated promise of "never again." If anything, after this month's UN 2005 World Summit, we seem to have taken a step backward.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

On the massacre in Uzbekistan


Uzbekistan is a strange and mysterious country that most people cannot find on a map. And it has been playing a fairly big role in international events for an isolated and remote central Asian former Soviet Republic in the last year or so. The US described the government of President Karimov, a former Sovier apparatchik who ran the KGB in Uzbekistan until independence, as an ally in the global war on terror, and according to Craig Murray, who was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, both British and American intelligence agencies have been outsourcing torture there. As a matter of fact, UN Special Rapporteur on the question of torture, Theo van Boven, wrote a 64-page addendum (pdf), to his report to the Commission on Human Rights, on torture in Uzbekistan.

Furthermore, until recently, Uzbekistan allowed the US to use the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airbase in southern Uzbekistan for its missions in Afghanistan.

So it's surprising and disappointing that there has been so little media coverage and diplomatic indignation about the massacre that happened in Andijan last May. In a Guardian article by Ed Vulliamy yesterday, the massacre and the survivors' plight as refugees is pieced together from eye witness accounts.

The night of May 12 there was a jailbreak to release 23 businessmen who had been arrested for "religious extremism" (see Human Rights Watch's report on religious persecution in Uzbekistan). This was then followed the next morning at 7 by a big demonstration the next day in Bobur Square. Estimates say that there were around 10,000 people at the demonstration, including some armed oppositionists near a government building and women and children, who had gone expecting "speeches, not bullets." According to survivors, the shooting began an hour later with the arrival of cars and jeeps full of government militiamen, who proceeded to open fire on the crowd.

Naively, the protesters expected government forced to stop the slaughter: "we were expecting people from the government to arrive and stop it, to save us. Someone said Karimov was on his way, and people started cheering." Instead, armored government vehicles arrived on the scene, and Uzbek forces starting firing indiscriminately on the protestors, apparently not targeting either the militiamen or the armed oppositionists. The shooting continued off and on until 5, when Uzbek armed personnel carriers arrived, which immediately carried on where the first column of vehicles had left off. The government then proceeded to use these vehicles, snipers, foot soldiers and perhaps even anti-aircraft weapons against the unarmed crowd. "The dead were lying in front of me piled three-thick," said one survivor. To get out, "I had to climb over the bodies. There were dead women and children; I saw one woman lying dead with a small baby in her arms."

The official death count was initially 9 people, but that figure was increased to 169 a few days later. Estimates from NGOs and opposition parties range from 500 to over 700. Tashkent claims that all of the casualties, except the 32 Uzbek troops killed, were armed fundamentalists; the survivors and eye-witnesses beg to differ. (According to a source of mine who is a specialist in the region, this story is more complex than suspected. There may have been a clash between the government militiamen and regular government forces, which would account for such a high casualty rate for the well armed Uzbek soldiers as they fired on a mostly unarmed crowd.) At least 439 refugees escaped to neighboring Kyrgyzstan, from where they were then transported to Romania. Amnesty International estimates that as many as 1,000 refugees are still in hiding in Kyrgyzstan, and there have been reports that those who were caught or went back to Uzbekistan have been imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases, killed. In addition to this, the family members of those who escaped and human rights and opposition activists have been arrested, beaten and intimidated.

After all this, the "international community" has done nothing.

Uzbekistan is a beautiful country with rich artisanal and musical traditions and very hospitable people. It is peopled by Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Tatars, amongst others, to form a rich mixture of different languages and traditions. I saw many amazing things and met many amazing people while I was there this month, and I came back with many good memories and made some really good friends. But I also saw the surveillance apparatus of a police state, and the number of police and armed forces it takes to maintain autocratic rule. Uzbekistan has a lot of potential, and it's currently going to waste, because of a totalitarian despot and his strangle hold on the country and its people. As the "international community," we should be doing something to help these people breathe free for the first time in centuries.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Treading oily water


From my hotel room in Samarkand, I saw on BBC World and TV5 that a force four or five hurricane had hit the gulf coast of my childhood. It looked pretty bad, but most of the news seemed aimed at oil investors and insurance companies. Crude was up to an all time high of over 70 dollars a drum, and the dollar value of Katrina's destruction was to be higher than ever seen before.

No one was mentioning the people, not yet. Then I started hearing short reports of human suffering and a breakdown of civil society. There was price gouging, violence and looting. The first always happens, during every single hurricane, but the last two were new to my ears. I called my father and he assured me that they had been untouched on the Alabama coast and that there were few problems there. Mississippi and Louisiana, however, were another matter altogether. When I got back home, I started seeing the newspaper pictures and some others on the internet, which was re-broadcasting television images.

There were masses of poor and black people who had stayed behind. People, like my father, were complaining about these people, saying that they were stupid to have stayed behind when there was a mandatory evacuation. I couldn't help but wonder where they would have gone and how they would have gotten there. For the 100,000 citizens of New Orleans who are dirt poor, how mandatory is a mandatory evacuation without free buses taking them to free Ramada Inns stocked with free food and running water?

And so once again, the victims are to be blamed. Old women in wheelchairs perched upon their rooftop with saltine crackers and warm Coca Cola are being lectured about fiscal responsibility and preparedness four days after their last meal, while we tut-tut from our comfortable lazyboy recliners and try to ignore that a third of Mississippi's National Guard and half of its equipment is in Iraq or Afghanistan instead of Biloxi or New Orleans. The media shows us what we knew to be true all along: white people find food, and black people loot for it.

But then I saw one man on television, during his fourth day in the convention center with no food or water, who said, "My family is not going to starve to death. I will do what I have to do to feed them." I don't see why we shouldn't make a distinction between taking food from a grocery store and taking flat screen televisions from an electronics store. If the first is looting just like the second, then I'm afraid any sensible person should be looting, seeing as how the government has proven itself incapable or unwilling to help these people.

Leon Wynter has done a piece on the poor black people we see on our television screens, which can be heard here (in an edited form) and read here in its entirety:

Last Saturday the "official" evacuation looked like nothing more than the start of a very long weekend--people with available credit, mostly white, stuck in traffic. Or was that the 60's white flight to the suburbs. No, no, it was the stampede of white Dixiecrats into the party of small government and big oil, AFTER they got to the suburbs. But where is THAT video?

Instead, we've got talking heads. The FEMA director insisted to CNN that he makes "no judgement" as to the reason why Auntie and nephew stayed sadly behind. He didn't want to "second guess" them. That's a euphemism for saying they had no good reason at all. Not when tax cuts have brought so many new jobs and so much prosperity. [...]

In my metaphor, what we are seeing is the SS Deep Dixie. It has been gored by an iceberg that everyone saw coming. It's poorest blackest passengers are trapped in the steerage of political minority, going down slowly, but not without putting up a dirty fight. And sometimes they come up, treading water, like rats in an oil-slicked sea.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

A step backward on genocide


Earlier this month, the UN released the outcome of the 2005 World Summit, whose goal was to reform the Organization in several different domains. The main issues were development, terrorism, the peace-building commission, genocide prevention, human rights, Secretariat reform, Security Council reform and disarmament and non-proliferation.

Many nations, and the Secretariat itself, seemed disappointed with the final document (pdf), which, as any document agreed upon by nearly 200 countries, was necessarily a compromise. The 40-page document spent only half a page on genocide, but one could be forgiven for thinking that those two paragraphs made a big difference after listening to Kofi Annan's address (text or video) to the General Assembly:

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.
When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

Responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity

138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability.

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.
These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

However, the final text from the World Summit differs in no small degree from the conclusions of its parent document, the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which, on the initiative of the of the Government of Canada, was charged with addressing the thorny issues implicated by "military intervention for human protection purposes."

The report concluded that "state sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself," and that when a state is either unable or unwilling to stop "serious harm" suffered by its population, "the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect." The report then goes on to describe this responsibility to protect as being threefold, comprised of the responsibilities to prevent, react and rebuild. The responsibility to react includes "coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme cases military intervention."

ICISS's 90-page report went much further than this month's World Summit, under pressure from states like Zimbabwe, Cuba, the U.S., Iran, Syria and Venezuela, was prepared to go. Granted, the ICISS document has its faults, which are inextricably linked to fundamental problems of the U.N. in general and the Security Council in particular. The main problem being that it relies on the five permanent members of the Security Council to agree not to use their veto power to block military interventions in cases of genocide. It does, however, offer an often overlooked alternative to the Security Council: the General Assembly's Uniting for Peace procedure, which was adopted in 1950 by the Security Council as Resolution 377 and resolves,

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.
In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

Second, the Summit text implies that the international community's responsibility to protect ceases at the exhaustion of peaceful means. Beyond "appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means," stopping genocide ceases to be an obligation. There is a stark language shift, which says that the international community is

prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council ... on a case-by-case basis ... should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

Concretely, this means that once the international community has exhausted peaceful means, it is no longer responsible for intervening in order to stop genocide. This is a far cry from ICISS's responsibility to react and Mr. Annan's claim that the international community "will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms."

There is a fair amount of debate about whether or not the 1948 Genocide Convention legally binds signatory states to stop genocide. And while the UN Secretariat's commentary on the first draft of that convention stated that the Convention "should bind the States to do everything in their power to support any action by the United Nations intended to prevent or stop these crimes," in the end, negotiations by the signatory states softened the language and deleted references like the obligation to report acts of genocide to the Security Council.

It is a disgrace that nearly 60 years later, after having experienced the shame of watching silently as 800,000 Rwandans were mercilessly slaughtered, we have yet to make any progress on keeping our oft repeated promise of "never again." If anything, after this month's UN 2005 World Summit, we seem to have taken a step backward.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

On the massacre in Uzbekistan


Uzbekistan is a strange and mysterious country that most people cannot find on a map. And it has been playing a fairly big role in international events for an isolated and remote central Asian former Soviet Republic in the last year or so. The US described the government of President Karimov, a former Sovier apparatchik who ran the KGB in Uzbekistan until independence, as an ally in the global war on terror, and according to Craig Murray, who was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, both British and American intelligence agencies have been outsourcing torture there. As a matter of fact, UN Special Rapporteur on the question of torture, Theo van Boven, wrote a 64-page addendum (pdf), to his report to the Commission on Human Rights, on torture in Uzbekistan.

Furthermore, until recently, Uzbekistan allowed the US to use the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airbase in southern Uzbekistan for its missions in Afghanistan.

So it's surprising and disappointing that there has been so little media coverage and diplomatic indignation about the massacre that happened in Andijan last May. In a Guardian article by Ed Vulliamy yesterday, the massacre and the survivors' plight as refugees is pieced together from eye witness accounts.

The night of May 12 there was a jailbreak to release 23 businessmen who had been arrested for "religious extremism" (see Human Rights Watch's report on religious persecution in Uzbekistan). This was then followed the next morning at 7 by a big demonstration the next day in Bobur Square. Estimates say that there were around 10,000 people at the demonstration, including some armed oppositionists near a government building and women and children, who had gone expecting "speeches, not bullets." According to survivors, the shooting began an hour later with the arrival of cars and jeeps full of government militiamen, who proceeded to open fire on the crowd.

Naively, the protesters expected government forced to stop the slaughter: "we were expecting people from the government to arrive and stop it, to save us. Someone said Karimov was on his way, and people started cheering." Instead, armored government vehicles arrived on the scene, and Uzbek forces starting firing indiscriminately on the protestors, apparently not targeting either the militiamen or the armed oppositionists. The shooting continued off and on until 5, when Uzbek armed personnel carriers arrived, which immediately carried on where the first column of vehicles had left off. The government then proceeded to use these vehicles, snipers, foot soldiers and perhaps even anti-aircraft weapons against the unarmed crowd. "The dead were lying in front of me piled three-thick," said one survivor. To get out, "I had to climb over the bodies. There were dead women and children; I saw one woman lying dead with a small baby in her arms."

The official death count was initially 9 people, but that figure was increased to 169 a few days later. Estimates from NGOs and opposition parties range from 500 to over 700. Tashkent claims that all of the casualties, except the 32 Uzbek troops killed, were armed fundamentalists; the survivors and eye-witnesses beg to differ. (According to a source of mine who is a specialist in the region, this story is more complex than suspected. There may have been a clash between the government militiamen and regular government forces, which would account for such a high casualty rate for the well armed Uzbek soldiers as they fired on a mostly unarmed crowd.) At least 439 refugees escaped to neighboring Kyrgyzstan, from where they were then transported to Romania. Amnesty International estimates that as many as 1,000 refugees are still in hiding in Kyrgyzstan, and there have been reports that those who were caught or went back to Uzbekistan have been imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases, killed. In addition to this, the family members of those who escaped and human rights and opposition activists have been arrested, beaten and intimidated.

After all this, the "international community" has done nothing.

Uzbekistan is a beautiful country with rich artisanal and musical traditions and very hospitable people. It is peopled by Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Tatars, amongst others, to form a rich mixture of different languages and traditions. I saw many amazing things and met many amazing people while I was there this month, and I came back with many good memories and made some really good friends. But I also saw the surveillance apparatus of a police state, and the number of police and armed forces it takes to maintain autocratic rule. Uzbekistan has a lot of potential, and it's currently going to waste, because of a totalitarian despot and his strangle hold on the country and its people. As the "international community," we should be doing something to help these people breathe free for the first time in centuries.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Treading oily water


From my hotel room in Samarkand, I saw on BBC World and TV5 that a force four or five hurricane had hit the gulf coast of my childhood. It looked pretty bad, but most of the news seemed aimed at oil investors and insurance companies. Crude was up to an all time high of over 70 dollars a drum, and the dollar value of Katrina's destruction was to be higher than ever seen before.

No one was mentioning the people, not yet. Then I started hearing short reports of human suffering and a breakdown of civil society. There was price gouging, violence and looting. The first always happens, during every single hurricane, but the last two were new to my ears. I called my father and he assured me that they had been untouched on the Alabama coast and that there were few problems there. Mississippi and Louisiana, however, were another matter altogether. When I got back home, I started seeing the newspaper pictures and some others on the internet, which was re-broadcasting television images.

There were masses of poor and black people who had stayed behind. People, like my father, were complaining about these people, saying that they were stupid to have stayed behind when there was a mandatory evacuation. I couldn't help but wonder where they would have gone and how they would have gotten there. For the 100,000 citizens of New Orleans who are dirt poor, how mandatory is a mandatory evacuation without free buses taking them to free Ramada Inns stocked with free food and running water?

And so once again, the victims are to be blamed. Old women in wheelchairs perched upon their rooftop with saltine crackers and warm Coca Cola are being lectured about fiscal responsibility and preparedness four days after their last meal, while we tut-tut from our comfortable lazyboy recliners and try to ignore that a third of Mississippi's National Guard and half of its equipment is in Iraq or Afghanistan instead of Biloxi or New Orleans. The media shows us what we knew to be true all along: white people find food, and black people loot for it.

But then I saw one man on television, during his fourth day in the convention center with no food or water, who said, "My family is not going to starve to death. I will do what I have to do to feed them." I don't see why we shouldn't make a distinction between taking food from a grocery store and taking flat screen televisions from an electronics store. If the first is looting just like the second, then I'm afraid any sensible person should be looting, seeing as how the government has proven itself incapable or unwilling to help these people.

Leon Wynter has done a piece on the poor black people we see on our television screens, which can be heard here (in an edited form) and read here in its entirety:

Last Saturday the "official" evacuation looked like nothing more than the start of a very long weekend--people with available credit, mostly white, stuck in traffic. Or was that the 60's white flight to the suburbs. No, no, it was the stampede of white Dixiecrats into the party of small government and big oil, AFTER they got to the suburbs. But where is THAT video?

Instead, we've got talking heads. The FEMA director insisted to CNN that he makes "no judgement" as to the reason why Auntie and nephew stayed sadly behind. He didn't want to "second guess" them. That's a euphemism for saying they had no good reason at all. Not when tax cuts have brought so many new jobs and so much prosperity. [...]

In my metaphor, what we are seeing is the SS Deep Dixie. It has been gored by an iceberg that everyone saw coming. It's poorest blackest passengers are trapped in the steerage of political minority, going down slowly, but not without putting up a dirty fight. And sometimes they come up, treading water, like rats in an oil-slicked sea.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

A step backward on genocide


Earlier this month, the UN released the outcome of the 2005 World Summit, whose goal was to reform the Organization in several different domains. The main issues were development, terrorism, the peace-building commission, genocide prevention, human rights, Secretariat reform, Security Council reform and disarmament and non-proliferation.

Many nations, and the Secretariat itself, seemed disappointed with the final document (pdf), which, as any document agreed upon by nearly 200 countries, was necessarily a compromise. The 40-page document spent only half a page on genocide, but one could be forgiven for thinking that those two paragraphs made a big difference after listening to Kofi Annan's address (text or video) to the General Assembly:

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.
When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

Responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity

138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability.

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.
These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

However, the final text from the World Summit differs in no small degree from the conclusions of its parent document, the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which, on the initiative of the of the Government of Canada, was charged with addressing the thorny issues implicated by "military intervention for human protection purposes."

The report concluded that "state sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself," and that when a state is either unable or unwilling to stop "serious harm" suffered by its population, "the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect." The report then goes on to describe this responsibility to protect as being threefold, comprised of the responsibilities to prevent, react and rebuild. The responsibility to react includes "coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme cases military intervention."

ICISS's 90-page report went much further than this month's World Summit, under pressure from states like Zimbabwe, Cuba, the U.S., Iran, Syria and Venezuela, was prepared to go. Granted, the ICISS document has its faults, which are inextricably linked to fundamental problems of the U.N. in general and the Security Council in particular. The main problem being that it relies on the five permanent members of the Security Council to agree not to use their veto power to block military interventions in cases of genocide. It does, however, offer an often overlooked alternative to the Security Council: the General Assembly's Uniting for Peace procedure, which was adopted in 1950 by the Security Council as Resolution 377 and resolves,

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.
In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

Second, the Summit text implies that the international community's responsibility to protect ceases at the exhaustion of peaceful means. Beyond "appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means," stopping genocide ceases to be an obligation. There is a stark language shift, which says that the international community is

prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council ... on a case-by-case basis ... should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

Concretely, this means that once the international community has exhausted peaceful means, it is no longer responsible for intervening in order to stop genocide. This is a far cry from ICISS's responsibility to react and Mr. Annan's claim that the international community "will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms."

There is a fair amount of debate about whether or not the 1948 Genocide Convention legally binds signatory states to stop genocide. And while the UN Secretariat's commentary on the first draft of that convention stated that the Convention "should bind the States to do everything in their power to support any action by the United Nations intended to prevent or stop these crimes," in the end, negotiations by the signatory states softened the language and deleted references like the obligation to report acts of genocide to the Security Council.

It is a disgrace that nearly 60 years later, after having experienced the shame of watching silently as 800,000 Rwandans were mercilessly slaughtered, we have yet to make any progress on keeping our oft repeated promise of "never again." If anything, after this month's UN 2005 World Summit, we seem to have taken a step backward.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

On the massacre in Uzbekistan


Uzbekistan is a strange and mysterious country that most people cannot find on a map. And it has been playing a fairly big role in international events for an isolated and remote central Asian former Soviet Republic in the last year or so. The US described the government of President Karimov, a former Sovier apparatchik who ran the KGB in Uzbekistan until independence, as an ally in the global war on terror, and according to Craig Murray, who was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, both British and American intelligence agencies have been outsourcing torture there. As a matter of fact, UN Special Rapporteur on the question of torture, Theo van Boven, wrote a 64-page addendum (pdf), to his report to the Commission on Human Rights, on torture in Uzbekistan.

Furthermore, until recently, Uzbekistan allowed the US to use the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airbase in southern Uzbekistan for its missions in Afghanistan.

So it's surprising and disappointing that there has been so little media coverage and diplomatic indignation about the massacre that happened in Andijan last May. In a Guardian article by Ed Vulliamy yesterday, the massacre and the survivors' plight as refugees is pieced together from eye witness accounts.

The night of May 12 there was a jailbreak to release 23 businessmen who had been arrested for "religious extremism" (see Human Rights Watch's report on religious persecution in Uzbekistan). This was then followed the next morning at 7 by a big demonstration the next day in Bobur Square. Estimates say that there were around 10,000 people at the demonstration, including some armed oppositionists near a government building and women and children, who had gone expecting "speeches, not bullets." According to survivors, the shooting began an hour later with the arrival of cars and jeeps full of government militiamen, who proceeded to open fire on the crowd.

Naively, the protesters expected government forced to stop the slaughter: "we were expecting people from the government to arrive and stop it, to save us. Someone said Karimov was on his way, and people started cheering." Instead, armored government vehicles arrived on the scene, and Uzbek forces starting firing indiscriminately on the protestors, apparently not targeting either the militiamen or the armed oppositionists. The shooting continued off and on until 5, when Uzbek armed personnel carriers arrived, which immediately carried on where the first column of vehicles had left off. The government then proceeded to use these vehicles, snipers, foot soldiers and perhaps even anti-aircraft weapons against the unarmed crowd. "The dead were lying in front of me piled three-thick," said one survivor. To get out, "I had to climb over the bodies. There were dead women and children; I saw one woman lying dead with a small baby in her arms."

The official death count was initially 9 people, but that figure was increased to 169 a few days later. Estimates from NGOs and opposition parties range from 500 to over 700. Tashkent claims that all of the casualties, except the 32 Uzbek troops killed, were armed fundamentalists; the survivors and eye-witnesses beg to differ. (According to a source of mine who is a specialist in the region, this story is more complex than suspected. There may have been a clash between the government militiamen and regular government forces, which would account for such a high casualty rate for the well armed Uzbek soldiers as they fired on a mostly unarmed crowd.) At least 439 refugees escaped to neighboring Kyrgyzstan, from where they were then transported to Romania. Amnesty International estimates that as many as 1,000 refugees are still in hiding in Kyrgyzstan, and there have been reports that those who were caught or went back to Uzbekistan have been imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases, killed. In addition to this, the family members of those who escaped and human rights and opposition activists have been arrested, beaten and intimidated.

After all this, the "international community" has done nothing.

Uzbekistan is a beautiful country with rich artisanal and musical traditions and very hospitable people. It is peopled by Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Tatars, amongst others, to form a rich mixture of different languages and traditions. I saw many amazing things and met many amazing people while I was there this month, and I came back with many good memories and made some really good friends. But I also saw the surveillance apparatus of a police state, and the number of police and armed forces it takes to maintain autocratic rule. Uzbekistan has a lot of potential, and it's currently going to waste, because of a totalitarian despot and his strangle hold on the country and its people. As the "international community," we should be doing something to help these people breathe free for the first time in centuries.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Treading oily water


From my hotel room in Samarkand, I saw on BBC World and TV5 that a force four or five hurricane had hit the gulf coast of my childhood. It looked pretty bad, but most of the news seemed aimed at oil investors and insurance companies. Crude was up to an all time high of over 70 dollars a drum, and the dollar value of Katrina's destruction was to be higher than ever seen before.

No one was mentioning the people, not yet. Then I started hearing short reports of human suffering and a breakdown of civil society. There was price gouging, violence and looting. The first always happens, during every single hurricane, but the last two were new to my ears. I called my father and he assured me that they had been untouched on the Alabama coast and that there were few problems there. Mississippi and Louisiana, however, were another matter altogether. When I got back home, I started seeing the newspaper pictures and some others on the internet, which was re-broadcasting television images.

There were masses of poor and black people who had stayed behind. People, like my father, were complaining about these people, saying that they were stupid to have stayed behind when there was a mandatory evacuation. I couldn't help but wonder where they would have gone and how they would have gotten there. For the 100,000 citizens of New Orleans who are dirt poor, how mandatory is a mandatory evacuation without free buses taking them to free Ramada Inns stocked with free food and running water?

And so once again, the victims are to be blamed. Old women in wheelchairs perched upon their rooftop with saltine crackers and warm Coca Cola are being lectured about fiscal responsibility and preparedness four days after their last meal, while we tut-tut from our comfortable lazyboy recliners and try to ignore that a third of Mississippi's National Guard and half of its equipment is in Iraq or Afghanistan instead of Biloxi or New Orleans. The media shows us what we knew to be true all along: white people find food, and black people loot for it.

But then I saw one man on television, during his fourth day in the convention center with no food or water, who said, "My family is not going to starve to death. I will do what I have to do to feed them." I don't see why we shouldn't make a distinction between taking food from a grocery store and taking flat screen televisions from an electronics store. If the first is looting just like the second, then I'm afraid any sensible person should be looting, seeing as how the government has proven itself incapable or unwilling to help these people.

Leon Wynter has done a piece on the poor black people we see on our television screens, which can be heard here (in an edited form) and read here in its entirety:

Last Saturday the "official" evacuation looked like nothing more than the start of a very long weekend--people with available credit, mostly white, stuck in traffic. Or was that the 60's white flight to the suburbs. No, no, it was the stampede of white Dixiecrats into the party of small government and big oil, AFTER they got to the suburbs. But where is THAT video?

Instead, we've got talking heads. The FEMA director insisted to CNN that he makes "no judgement" as to the reason why Auntie and nephew stayed sadly behind. He didn't want to "second guess" them. That's a euphemism for saying they had no good reason at all. Not when tax cuts have brought so many new jobs and so much prosperity. [...]

In my metaphor, what we are seeing is the SS Deep Dixie. It has been gored by an iceberg that everyone saw coming. It's poorest blackest passengers are trapped in the steerage of political minority, going down slowly, but not without putting up a dirty fight. And sometimes they come up, treading water, like rats in an oil-slicked sea.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

A step backward on genocide


Earlier this month, the UN released the outcome of the 2005 World Summit, whose goal was to reform the Organization in several different domains. The main issues were development, terrorism, the peace-building commission, genocide prevention, human rights, Secretariat reform, Security Council reform and disarmament and non-proliferation.

Many nations, and the Secretariat itself, seemed disappointed with the final document (pdf), which, as any document agreed upon by nearly 200 countries, was necessarily a compromise. The 40-page document spent only half a page on genocide, but one could be forgiven for thinking that those two paragraphs made a big difference after listening to Kofi Annan's address (text or video) to the General Assembly:

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.
When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

Responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity

138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability.

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.
These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

However, the final text from the World Summit differs in no small degree from the conclusions of its parent document, the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which, on the initiative of the of the Government of Canada, was charged with addressing the thorny issues implicated by "military intervention for human protection purposes."

The report concluded that "state sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself," and that when a state is either unable or unwilling to stop "serious harm" suffered by its population, "the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect." The report then goes on to describe this responsibility to protect as being threefold, comprised of the responsibilities to prevent, react and rebuild. The responsibility to react includes "coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme cases military intervention."

ICISS's 90-page report went much further than this month's World Summit, under pressure from states like Zimbabwe, Cuba, the U.S., Iran, Syria and Venezuela, was prepared to go. Granted, the ICISS document has its faults, which are inextricably linked to fundamental problems of the U.N. in general and the Security Council in particular. The main problem being that it relies on the five permanent members of the Security Council to agree not to use their veto power to block military interventions in cases of genocide. It does, however, offer an often overlooked alternative to the Security Council: the General Assembly's Uniting for Peace procedure, which was adopted in 1950 by the Security Council as Resolution 377 and resolves,

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.
In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

Second, the Summit text implies that the international community's responsibility to protect ceases at the exhaustion of peaceful means. Beyond "appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means," stopping genocide ceases to be an obligation. There is a stark language shift, which says that the international community is

prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council ... on a case-by-case basis ... should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

Concretely, this means that once the international community has exhausted peaceful means, it is no longer responsible for intervening in order to stop genocide. This is a far cry from ICISS's responsibility to react and Mr. Annan's claim that the international community "will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms."

There is a fair amount of debate about whether or not the 1948 Genocide Convention legally binds signatory states to stop genocide. And while the UN Secretariat's commentary on the first draft of that convention stated that the Convention "should bind the States to do everything in their power to support any action by the United Nations intended to prevent or stop these crimes," in the end, negotiations by the signatory states softened the language and deleted references like the obligation to report acts of genocide to the Security Council.

It is a disgrace that nearly 60 years later, after having experienced the shame of watching silently as 800,000 Rwandans were mercilessly slaughtered, we have yet to make any progress on keeping our oft repeated promise of "never again." If anything, after this month's UN 2005 World Summit, we seem to have taken a step backward.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

On the massacre in Uzbekistan


Uzbekistan is a strange and mysterious country that most people cannot find on a map. And it has been playing a fairly big role in international events for an isolated and remote central Asian former Soviet Republic in the last year or so. The US described the government of President Karimov, a former Sovier apparatchik who ran the KGB in Uzbekistan until independence, as an ally in the global war on terror, and according to Craig Murray, who was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, both British and American intelligence agencies have been outsourcing torture there. As a matter of fact, UN Special Rapporteur on the question of torture, Theo van Boven, wrote a 64-page addendum (pdf), to his report to the Commission on Human Rights, on torture in Uzbekistan.

Furthermore, until recently, Uzbekistan allowed the US to use the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airbase in southern Uzbekistan for its missions in Afghanistan.

So it's surprising and disappointing that there has been so little media coverage and diplomatic indignation about the massacre that happened in Andijan last May. In a Guardian article by Ed Vulliamy yesterday, the massacre and the survivors' plight as refugees is pieced together from eye witness accounts.

The night of May 12 there was a jailbreak to release 23 businessmen who had been arrested for "religious extremism" (see Human Rights Watch's report on religious persecution in Uzbekistan). This was then followed the next morning at 7 by a big demonstration the next day in Bobur Square. Estimates say that there were around 10,000 people at the demonstration, including some armed oppositionists near a government building and women and children, who had gone expecting "speeches, not bullets." According to survivors, the shooting began an hour later with the arrival of cars and jeeps full of government militiamen, who proceeded to open fire on the crowd.

Naively, the protesters expected government forced to stop the slaughter: "we were expecting people from the government to arrive and stop it, to save us. Someone said Karimov was on his way, and people started cheering." Instead, armored government vehicles arrived on the scene, and Uzbek forces starting firing indiscriminately on the protestors, apparently not targeting either the militiamen or the armed oppositionists. The shooting continued off and on until 5, when Uzbek armed personnel carriers arrived, which immediately carried on where the first column of vehicles had left off. The government then proceeded to use these vehicles, snipers, foot soldiers and perhaps even anti-aircraft weapons against the unarmed crowd. "The dead were lying in front of me piled three-thick," said one survivor. To get out, "I had to climb over the bodies. There were dead women and children; I saw one woman lying dead with a small baby in her arms."

The official death count was initially 9 people, but that figure was increased to 169 a few days later. Estimates from NGOs and opposition parties range from 500 to over 700. Tashkent claims that all of the casualties, except the 32 Uzbek troops killed, were armed fundamentalists; the survivors and eye-witnesses beg to differ. (According to a source of mine who is a specialist in the region, this story is more complex than suspected. There may have been a clash between the government militiamen and regular government forces, which would account for such a high casualty rate for the well armed Uzbek soldiers as they fired on a mostly unarmed crowd.) At least 439 refugees escaped to neighboring Kyrgyzstan, from where they were then transported to Romania. Amnesty International estimates that as many as 1,000 refugees are still in hiding in Kyrgyzstan, and there have been reports that those who were caught or went back to Uzbekistan have been imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases, killed. In addition to this, the family members of those who escaped and human rights and opposition activists have been arrested, beaten and intimidated.

After all this, the "international community" has done nothing.

Uzbekistan is a beautiful country with rich artisanal and musical traditions and very hospitable people. It is peopled by Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Tatars, amongst others, to form a rich mixture of different languages and traditions. I saw many amazing things and met many amazing people while I was there this month, and I came back with many good memories and made some really good friends. But I also saw the surveillance apparatus of a police state, and the number of police and armed forces it takes to maintain autocratic rule. Uzbekistan has a lot of potential, and it's currently going to waste, because of a totalitarian despot and his strangle hold on the country and its people. As the "international community," we should be doing something to help these people breathe free for the first time in centuries.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Treading oily water


From my hotel room in Samarkand, I saw on BBC World and TV5 that a force four or five hurricane had hit the gulf coast of my childhood. It looked pretty bad, but most of the news seemed aimed at oil investors and insurance companies. Crude was up to an all time high of over 70 dollars a drum, and the dollar value of Katrina's destruction was to be higher than ever seen before.

No one was mentioning the people, not yet. Then I started hearing short reports of human suffering and a breakdown of civil society. There was price gouging, violence and looting. The first always happens, during every single hurricane, but the last two were new to my ears. I called my father and he assured me that they had been untouched on the Alabama coast and that there were few problems there. Mississippi and Louisiana, however, were another matter altogether. When I got back home, I started seeing the newspaper pictures and some others on the internet, which was re-broadcasting television images.

There were masses of poor and black people who had stayed behind. People, like my father, were complaining about these people, saying that they were stupid to have stayed behind when there was a mandatory evacuation. I couldn't help but wonder where they would have gone and how they would have gotten there. For the 100,000 citizens of New Orleans who are dirt poor, how mandatory is a mandatory evacuation without free buses taking them to free Ramada Inns stocked with free food and running water?

And so once again, the victims are to be blamed. Old women in wheelchairs perched upon their rooftop with saltine crackers and warm Coca Cola are being lectured about fiscal responsibility and preparedness four days after their last meal, while we tut-tut from our comfortable lazyboy recliners and try to ignore that a third of Mississippi's National Guard and half of its equipment is in Iraq or Afghanistan instead of Biloxi or New Orleans. The media shows us what we knew to be true all along: white people find food, and black people loot for it.

But then I saw one man on television, during his fourth day in the convention center with no food or water, who said, "My family is not going to starve to death. I will do what I have to do to feed them." I don't see why we shouldn't make a distinction between taking food from a grocery store and taking flat screen televisions from an electronics store. If the first is looting just like the second, then I'm afraid any sensible person should be looting, seeing as how the government has proven itself incapable or unwilling to help these people.

Leon Wynter has done a piece on the poor black people we see on our television screens, which can be heard here (in an edited form) and read here in its entirety:

Last Saturday the "official" evacuation looked like nothing more than the start of a very long weekend--people with available credit, mostly white, stuck in traffic. Or was that the 60's white flight to the suburbs. No, no, it was the stampede of white Dixiecrats into the party of small government and big oil, AFTER they got to the suburbs. But where is THAT video?

Instead, we've got talking heads. The FEMA director insisted to CNN that he makes "no judgement" as to the reason why Auntie and nephew stayed sadly behind. He didn't want to "second guess" them. That's a euphemism for saying they had no good reason at all. Not when tax cuts have brought so many new jobs and so much prosperity. [...]

In my metaphor, what we are seeing is the SS Deep Dixie. It has been gored by an iceberg that everyone saw coming. It's poorest blackest passengers are trapped in the steerage of political minority, going down slowly, but not without putting up a dirty fight. And sometimes they come up, treading water, like rats in an oil-slicked sea.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

A step backward on genocide


Earlier this month, the UN released the outcome of the 2005 World Summit, whose goal was to reform the Organization in several different domains. The main issues were development, terrorism, the peace-building commission, genocide prevention, human rights, Secretariat reform, Security Council reform and disarmament and non-proliferation.

Many nations, and the Secretariat itself, seemed disappointed with the final document (pdf), which, as any document agreed upon by nearly 200 countries, was necessarily a compromise. The 40-page document spent only half a page on genocide, but one could be forgiven for thinking that those two paragraphs made a big difference after listening to Kofi Annan's address (text or video) to the General Assembly:

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.
When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

Responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity

138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability.

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.
These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

However, the final text from the World Summit differs in no small degree from the conclusions of its parent document, the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which, on the initiative of the of the Government of Canada, was charged with addressing the thorny issues implicated by "military intervention for human protection purposes."

The report concluded that "state sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself," and that when a state is either unable or unwilling to stop "serious harm" suffered by its population, "the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect." The report then goes on to describe this responsibility to protect as being threefold, comprised of the responsibilities to prevent, react and rebuild. The responsibility to react includes "coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme cases military intervention."

ICISS's 90-page report went much further than this month's World Summit, under pressure from states like Zimbabwe, Cuba, the U.S., Iran, Syria and Venezuela, was prepared to go. Granted, the ICISS document has its faults, which are inextricably linked to fundamental problems of the U.N. in general and the Security Council in particular. The main problem being that it relies on the five permanent members of the Security Council to agree not to use their veto power to block military interventions in cases of genocide. It does, however, offer an often overlooked alternative to the Security Council: the General Assembly's Uniting for Peace procedure, which was adopted in 1950 by the Security Council as Resolution 377 and resolves,

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.
In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

Second, the Summit text implies that the international community's responsibility to protect ceases at the exhaustion of peaceful means. Beyond "appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means," stopping genocide ceases to be an obligation. There is a stark language shift, which says that the international community is

prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council ... on a case-by-case basis ... should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

Concretely, this means that once the international community has exhausted peaceful means, it is no longer responsible for intervening in order to stop genocide. This is a far cry from ICISS's responsibility to react and Mr. Annan's claim that the international community "will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms."

There is a fair amount of debate about whether or not the 1948 Genocide Convention legally binds signatory states to stop genocide. And while the UN Secretariat's commentary on the first draft of that convention stated that the Convention "should bind the States to do everything in their power to support any action by the United Nations intended to prevent or stop these crimes," in the end, negotiations by the signatory states softened the language and deleted references like the obligation to report acts of genocide to the Security Council.

It is a disgrace that nearly 60 years later, after having experienced the shame of watching silently as 800,000 Rwandans were mercilessly slaughtered, we have yet to make any progress on keeping our oft repeated promise of "never again." If anything, after this month's UN 2005 World Summit, we seem to have taken a step backward.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

On the massacre in Uzbekistan


Uzbekistan is a strange and mysterious country that most people cannot find on a map. And it has been playing a fairly big role in international events for an isolated and remote central Asian former Soviet Republic in the last year or so. The US described the government of President Karimov, a former Sovier apparatchik who ran the KGB in Uzbekistan until independence, as an ally in the global war on terror, and according to Craig Murray, who was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, both British and American intelligence agencies have been outsourcing torture there. As a matter of fact, UN Special Rapporteur on the question of torture, Theo van Boven, wrote a 64-page addendum (pdf), to his report to the Commission on Human Rights, on torture in Uzbekistan.

Furthermore, until recently, Uzbekistan allowed the US to use the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airbase in southern Uzbekistan for its missions in Afghanistan.

So it's surprising and disappointing that there has been so little media coverage and diplomatic indignation about the massacre that happened in Andijan last May. In a Guardian article by Ed Vulliamy yesterday, the massacre and the survivors' plight as refugees is pieced together from eye witness accounts.

The night of May 12 there was a jailbreak to release 23 businessmen who had been arrested for "religious extremism" (see Human Rights Watch's report on religious persecution in Uzbekistan). This was then followed the next morning at 7 by a big demonstration the next day in Bobur Square. Estimates say that there were around 10,000 people at the demonstration, including some armed oppositionists near a government building and women and children, who had gone expecting "speeches, not bullets." According to survivors, the shooting began an hour later with the arrival of cars and jeeps full of government militiamen, who proceeded to open fire on the crowd.

Naively, the protesters expected government forced to stop the slaughter: "we were expecting people from the government to arrive and stop it, to save us. Someone said Karimov was on his way, and people started cheering." Instead, armored government vehicles arrived on the scene, and Uzbek forces starting firing indiscriminately on the protestors, apparently not targeting either the militiamen or the armed oppositionists. The shooting continued off and on until 5, when Uzbek armed personnel carriers arrived, which immediately carried on where the first column of vehicles had left off. The government then proceeded to use these vehicles, snipers, foot soldiers and perhaps even anti-aircraft weapons against the unarmed crowd. "The dead were lying in front of me piled three-thick," said one survivor. To get out, "I had to climb over the bodies. There were dead women and children; I saw one woman lying dead with a small baby in her arms."

The official death count was initially 9 people, but that figure was increased to 169 a few days later. Estimates from NGOs and opposition parties range from 500 to over 700. Tashkent claims that all of the casualties, except the 32 Uzbek troops killed, were armed fundamentalists; the survivors and eye-witnesses beg to differ. (According to a source of mine who is a specialist in the region, this story is more complex than suspected. There may have been a clash between the government militiamen and regular government forces, which would account for such a high casualty rate for the well armed Uzbek soldiers as they fired on a mostly unarmed crowd.) At least 439 refugees escaped to neighboring Kyrgyzstan, from where they were then transported to Romania. Amnesty International estimates that as many as 1,000 refugees are still in hiding in Kyrgyzstan, and there have been reports that those who were caught or went back to Uzbekistan have been imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases, killed. In addition to this, the family members of those who escaped and human rights and opposition activists have been arrested, beaten and intimidated.

After all this, the "international community" has done nothing.

Uzbekistan is a beautiful country with rich artisanal and musical traditions and very hospitable people. It is peopled by Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Tatars, amongst others, to form a rich mixture of different languages and traditions. I saw many amazing things and met many amazing people while I was there this month, and I came back with many good memories and made some really good friends. But I also saw the surveillance apparatus of a police state, and the number of police and armed forces it takes to maintain autocratic rule. Uzbekistan has a lot of potential, and it's currently going to waste, because of a totalitarian despot and his strangle hold on the country and its people. As the "international community," we should be doing something to help these people breathe free for the first time in centuries.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Treading oily water


From my hotel room in Samarkand, I saw on BBC World and TV5 that a force four or five hurricane had hit the gulf coast of my childhood. It looked pretty bad, but most of the news seemed aimed at oil investors and insurance companies. Crude was up to an all time high of over 70 dollars a drum, and the dollar value of Katrina's destruction was to be higher than ever seen before.

No one was mentioning the people, not yet. Then I started hearing short reports of human suffering and a breakdown of civil society. There was price gouging, violence and looting. The first always happens, during every single hurricane, but the last two were new to my ears. I called my father and he assured me that they had been untouched on the Alabama coast and that there were few problems there. Mississippi and Louisiana, however, were another matter altogether. When I got back home, I started seeing the newspaper pictures and some others on the internet, which was re-broadcasting television images.

There were masses of poor and black people who had stayed behind. People, like my father, were complaining about these people, saying that they were stupid to have stayed behind when there was a mandatory evacuation. I couldn't help but wonder where they would have gone and how they would have gotten there. For the 100,000 citizens of New Orleans who are dirt poor, how mandatory is a mandatory evacuation without free buses taking them to free Ramada Inns stocked with free food and running water?

And so once again, the victims are to be blamed. Old women in wheelchairs perched upon their rooftop with saltine crackers and warm Coca Cola are being lectured about fiscal responsibility and preparedness four days after their last meal, while we tut-tut from our comfortable lazyboy recliners and try to ignore that a third of Mississippi's National Guard and half of its equipment is in Iraq or Afghanistan instead of Biloxi or New Orleans. The media shows us what we knew to be true all along: white people find food, and black people loot for it.

But then I saw one man on television, during his fourth day in the convention center with no food or water, who said, "My family is not going to starve to death. I will do what I have to do to feed them." I don't see why we shouldn't make a distinction between taking food from a grocery store and taking flat screen televisions from an electronics store. If the first is looting just like the second, then I'm afraid any sensible person should be looting, seeing as how the government has proven itself incapable or unwilling to help these people.

Leon Wynter has done a piece on the poor black people we see on our television screens, which can be heard here (in an edited form) and read here in its entirety:

Last Saturday the "official" evacuation looked like nothing more than the start of a very long weekend--people with available credit, mostly white, stuck in traffic. Or was that the 60's white flight to the suburbs. No, no, it was the stampede of white Dixiecrats into the party of small government and big oil, AFTER they got to the suburbs. But where is THAT video?

Instead, we've got talking heads. The FEMA director insisted to CNN that he makes "no judgement" as to the reason why Auntie and nephew stayed sadly behind. He didn't want to "second guess" them. That's a euphemism for saying they had no good reason at all. Not when tax cuts have brought so many new jobs and so much prosperity. [...]

In my metaphor, what we are seeing is the SS Deep Dixie. It has been gored by an iceberg that everyone saw coming. It's poorest blackest passengers are trapped in the steerage of political minority, going down slowly, but not without putting up a dirty fight. And sometimes they come up, treading water, like rats in an oil-slicked sea.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

A step backward on genocide


Earlier this month, the UN released the outcome of the 2005 World Summit, whose goal was to reform the Organization in several different domains. The main issues were development, terrorism, the peace-building commission, genocide prevention, human rights, Secretariat reform, Security Council reform and disarmament and non-proliferation.

Many nations, and the Secretariat itself, seemed disappointed with the final document (pdf), which, as any document agreed upon by nearly 200 countries, was necessarily a compromise. The 40-page document spent only half a page on genocide, but one could be forgiven for thinking that those two paragraphs made a big difference after listening to Kofi Annan's address (text or video) to the General Assembly:

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.
When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

Responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity

138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability.

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.
These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

However, the final text from the World Summit differs in no small degree from the conclusions of its parent document, the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which, on the initiative of the of the Government of Canada, was charged with addressing the thorny issues implicated by "military intervention for human protection purposes."

The report concluded that "state sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself," and that when a state is either unable or unwilling to stop "serious harm" suffered by its population, "the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect." The report then goes on to describe this responsibility to protect as being threefold, comprised of the responsibilities to prevent, react and rebuild. The responsibility to react includes "coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme cases military intervention."

ICISS's 90-page report went much further than this month's World Summit, under pressure from states like Zimbabwe, Cuba, the U.S., Iran, Syria and Venezuela, was prepared to go. Granted, the ICISS document has its faults, which are inextricably linked to fundamental problems of the U.N. in general and the Security Council in particular. The main problem being that it relies on the five permanent members of the Security Council to agree not to use their veto power to block military interventions in cases of genocide. It does, however, offer an often overlooked alternative to the Security Council: the General Assembly's Uniting for Peace procedure, which was adopted in 1950 by the Security Council as Resolution 377 and resolves,

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.
In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

Second, the Summit text implies that the international community's responsibility to protect ceases at the exhaustion of peaceful means. Beyond "appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means," stopping genocide ceases to be an obligation. There is a stark language shift, which says that the international community is

prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council ... on a case-by-case basis ... should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

Concretely, this means that once the international community has exhausted peaceful means, it is no longer responsible for intervening in order to stop genocide. This is a far cry from ICISS's responsibility to react and Mr. Annan's claim that the international community "will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms."

There is a fair amount of debate about whether or not the 1948 Genocide Convention legally binds signatory states to stop genocide. And while the UN Secretariat's commentary on the first draft of that convention stated that the Convention "should bind the States to do everything in their power to support any action by the United Nations intended to prevent or stop these crimes," in the end, negotiations by the signatory states softened the language and deleted references like the obligation to report acts of genocide to the Security Council.

It is a disgrace that nearly 60 years later, after having experienced the shame of watching silently as 800,000 Rwandans were mercilessly slaughtered, we have yet to make any progress on keeping our oft repeated promise of "never again." If anything, after this month's UN 2005 World Summit, we seem to have taken a step backward.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

On the massacre in Uzbekistan


Uzbekistan is a strange and mysterious country that most people cannot find on a map. And it has been playing a fairly big role in international events for an isolated and remote central Asian former Soviet Republic in the last year or so. The US described the government of President Karimov, a former Sovier apparatchik who ran the KGB in Uzbekistan until independence, as an ally in the global war on terror, and according to Craig Murray, who was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, both British and American intelligence agencies have been outsourcing torture there. As a matter of fact, UN Special Rapporteur on the question of torture, Theo van Boven, wrote a 64-page addendum (pdf), to his report to the Commission on Human Rights, on torture in Uzbekistan.

Furthermore, until recently, Uzbekistan allowed the US to use the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airbase in southern Uzbekistan for its missions in Afghanistan.

So it's surprising and disappointing that there has been so little media coverage and diplomatic indignation about the massacre that happened in Andijan last May. In a Guardian article by Ed Vulliamy yesterday, the massacre and the survivors' plight as refugees is pieced together from eye witness accounts.

The night of May 12 there was a jailbreak to release 23 businessmen who had been arrested for "religious extremism" (see Human Rights Watch's report on religious persecution in Uzbekistan). This was then followed the next morning at 7 by a big demonstration the next day in Bobur Square. Estimates say that there were around 10,000 people at the demonstration, including some armed oppositionists near a government building and women and children, who had gone expecting "speeches, not bullets." According to survivors, the shooting began an hour later with the arrival of cars and jeeps full of government militiamen, who proceeded to open fire on the crowd.

Naively, the protesters expected government forced to stop the slaughter: "we were expecting people from the government to arrive and stop it, to save us. Someone said Karimov was on his way, and people started cheering." Instead, armored government vehicles arrived on the scene, and Uzbek forces starting firing indiscriminately on the protestors, apparently not targeting either the militiamen or the armed oppositionists. The shooting continued off and on until 5, when Uzbek armed personnel carriers arrived, which immediately carried on where the first column of vehicles had left off. The government then proceeded to use these vehicles, snipers, foot soldiers and perhaps even anti-aircraft weapons against the unarmed crowd. "The dead were lying in front of me piled three-thick," said one survivor. To get out, "I had to climb over the bodies. There were dead women and children; I saw one woman lying dead with a small baby in her arms."

The official death count was initially 9 people, but that figure was increased to 169 a few days later. Estimates from NGOs and opposition parties range from 500 to over 700. Tashkent claims that all of the casualties, except the 32 Uzbek troops killed, were armed fundamentalists; the survivors and eye-witnesses beg to differ. (According to a source of mine who is a specialist in the region, this story is more complex than suspected. There may have been a clash between the government militiamen and regular government forces, which would account for such a high casualty rate for the well armed Uzbek soldiers as they fired on a mostly unarmed crowd.) At least 439 refugees escaped to neighboring Kyrgyzstan, from where they were then transported to Romania. Amnesty International estimates that as many as 1,000 refugees are still in hiding in Kyrgyzstan, and there have been reports that those who were caught or went back to Uzbekistan have been imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases, killed. In addition to this, the family members of those who escaped and human rights and opposition activists have been arrested, beaten and intimidated.

After all this, the "international community" has done nothing.

Uzbekistan is a beautiful country with rich artisanal and musical traditions and very hospitable people. It is peopled by Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Tatars, amongst others, to form a rich mixture of different languages and traditions. I saw many amazing things and met many amazing people while I was there this month, and I came back with many good memories and made some really good friends. But I also saw the surveillance apparatus of a police state, and the number of police and armed forces it takes to maintain autocratic rule. Uzbekistan has a lot of potential, and it's currently going to waste, because of a totalitarian despot and his strangle hold on the country and its people. As the "international community," we should be doing something to help these people breathe free for the first time in centuries.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Treading oily water


From my hotel room in Samarkand, I saw on BBC World and TV5 that a force four or five hurricane had hit the gulf coast of my childhood. It looked pretty bad, but most of the news seemed aimed at oil investors and insurance companies. Crude was up to an all time high of over 70 dollars a drum, and the dollar value of Katrina's destruction was to be higher than ever seen before.

No one was mentioning the people, not yet. Then I started hearing short reports of human suffering and a breakdown of civil society. There was price gouging, violence and looting. The first always happens, during every single hurricane, but the last two were new to my ears. I called my father and he assured me that they had been untouched on the Alabama coast and that there were few problems there. Mississippi and Louisiana, however, were another matter altogether. When I got back home, I started seeing the newspaper pictures and some others on the internet, which was re-broadcasting television images.

There were masses of poor and black people who had stayed behind. People, like my father, were complaining about these people, saying that they were stupid to have stayed behind when there was a mandatory evacuation. I couldn't help but wonder where they would have gone and how they would have gotten there. For the 100,000 citizens of New Orleans who are dirt poor, how mandatory is a mandatory evacuation without free buses taking them to free Ramada Inns stocked with free food and running water?

And so once again, the victims are to be blamed. Old women in wheelchairs perched upon their rooftop with saltine crackers and warm Coca Cola are being lectured about fiscal responsibility and preparedness four days after their last meal, while we tut-tut from our comfortable lazyboy recliners and try to ignore that a third of Mississippi's National Guard and half of its equipment is in Iraq or Afghanistan instead of Biloxi or New Orleans. The media shows us what we knew to be true all along: white people find food, and black people loot for it.

But then I saw one man on television, during his fourth day in the convention center with no food or water, who said, "My family is not going to starve to death. I will do what I have to do to feed them." I don't see why we shouldn't make a distinction between taking food from a grocery store and taking flat screen televisions from an electronics store. If the first is looting just like the second, then I'm afraid any sensible person should be looting, seeing as how the government has proven itself incapable or unwilling to help these people.

Leon Wynter has done a piece on the poor black people we see on our television screens, which can be heard here (in an edited form) and read here in its entirety:

Last Saturday the "official" evacuation looked like nothing more than the start of a very long weekend--people with available credit, mostly white, stuck in traffic. Or was that the 60's white flight to the suburbs. No, no, it was the stampede of white Dixiecrats into the party of small government and big oil, AFTER they got to the suburbs. But where is THAT video?

Instead, we've got talking heads. The FEMA director insisted to CNN that he makes "no judgement" as to the reason why Auntie and nephew stayed sadly behind. He didn't want to "second guess" them. That's a euphemism for saying they had no good reason at all. Not when tax cuts have brought so many new jobs and so much prosperity. [...]

In my metaphor, what we are seeing is the SS Deep Dixie. It has been gored by an iceberg that everyone saw coming. It's poorest blackest passengers are trapped in the steerage of political minority, going down slowly, but not without putting up a dirty fight. And sometimes they come up, treading water, like rats in an oil-slicked sea.