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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

On moderation

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

More on arming the Middle East

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

Monday, July 30, 2007

Arming the Middle East

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

"Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa"

A new friend of mine sent me a blog entry on a Washington Post piece attacking Americans and Europeans who want to "Save Africa," and especially those who want to "Save Darfur."

Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."

There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority. My mood is dampened every time I attend a benefit whose host runs through a litany of African disasters before presenting a (usually) wealthy, white person, who often proceeds to list the things he or she has done for the poor, starving Africans. Every time a well-meaning college student speaks of villagers dancing because they were so grateful for her help, I cringe. Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head -- because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself. And not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West's prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems.

Regardless of whether Africa is "in" or not -- whether it's the cause du jour -- if anyone's to be giving a finger rapping to well-meaning white kids from the ivy league, it certainly ought not to be Uzodinma Iweala, the American-born and -raised son of a cabinet member of the Nigerian thug extraordinaire, Obasanjo. The piece's author went to a D.C. prep school then to Harvard, and is now off to Columbia med school, so I imagine that his time in Africa hasn't been much better than that of those pasty-faced do-gooders who "fly in for internships." (Incidentally, does Iweala take the boat from Washington, I wonder?) Furthermore, I think it's telling that Granta named him in their "Best of Young American Novelists 2." 

Fairly or not, Iweala reminds me of my time in the UN system. The UN works on a quota system for permanent posts, presumably so that the secretariat be filled with people from all over the world. This might be a good thing if it weren't for the fact that the quota for countries like Nigeria are taken up by people like Iweala, not the Africans and Asians who have lived their entire lives in their native countries and had to fight against the odds to get an education while working at a human rights NGO in countries like Cameroon or Bangladesh. I once took coffee breaks with a brilliant European intern who wasn't getting paid and couldn't get a proper job in his section, despite the fact that he'd completed his PhD in a relevant field and was widely published in his field's academic journals. The person who was second-in-charge in his section was a European guy who only had the equivalent of a B.A. in his field, but whose dad happened to be a former diplomat (and UN functionary) from an African country. This guy had lived his whole life in a European capital , but he had a passport from Africa, and the intern's compatriots were over-represented at that UN organization. So that was that.

Another thing that bothers me about the remarks made by Iweala is that he doesn't mention, for example, the role that such a campaign led by Americans (mostly black and religious groups) played in negotiating an end to the civil war between the north and south of Sudan. And guys like him are the same ones who are quick to fault Europe or the US for not having done anything for Rwanda. (I'm also in that camp, but I'd like to think that I'm somewhat more consistent in my criticism.) Furthermore, what about the Congo? If Central Africa had been left to its own devices instead of given the world's largest UN peacekeeping force (from five different continents), I imagine that the death toll would be considerably worse than it already is.

So while there's something to be said about "African solutions for African problems," I'm afraid that entrusting Libya, a country that's responsible for many of the current problems in Darfur and Chad in the first place, isn't necessarily such a hot idea just because Gadaffi isn't white. Likewise, Uganda's and Rwanda's African solution to the Congo and Mbeki's African non-solution to Zimbabwe aren't exactly what I'd call steps in the right direction.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Final resolution

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

Captured Israeli soldiers

This an-Nahar report says that one of the Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah last summer is dead. The headline makes it sound like the dead is recent, but the actual article itself makes it sound like the death isn't a new thing:

Israeli Soldier held by Hizbullah Dies

One of the two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah for more than a year has died and the other is still alive the daily newspaper an-Nahar reported Saturday.

An-Nahar quoted unnamed German diplomatic sources as saying officials in Berlin tried to obtain from Free Patriotic Movement leader Michael Aoun "some information" about the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah operatives in a cross-border raid on July 12, 2006 which sparked a 34-day devastating war with Israel.

"Aoun refused to get involved in this issue. However, security agencies there understood that one of the two prisoners is still alive and the second had passed away," the report said without further elaboration.

Aoun is allied with Hizbullah, which leads a campaign backed by Syria and Iran against Premier Fouad Saniora's majority government.

The two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah are Ehud Goldwaser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26.

Hizbullah had said it was prepared to swap them for Lebanese and Arab prisoners held by Israel.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Suleiman threatens to resign

According to an-Nahar, Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese Army, has said that if the Lebanese parliament failed to elect a president by November 24 (the date when Lahoud's mandate expires), resulting in the forming of two rival governments, he would resign:

Lebanese army commander Gen. Michel Suleiman warned that he would resign if two competing governments emerged as a result of a presidential vacancy.

Suleiman said he would submit his resignation on Nov. 24, the day the term of President Emile Lahoud expires, if rival legislators failed to elect a new head of state.

The army commander said he would not tolerate a political divide that would threaten Lebanon's unity and the military institution.

"If they create two governments, I will personally hand in my resignation to each of the two governments and I will go home," Suleiman was quoted as telling ambassadors as well as political and spiritual leaders.

It's hard to say if this is a genuine effort to pressure both sides to compromise or a genuine effort to pressure both sides to choose Suleiman as president, but my initial response is that both sides need to know that Lebanon will not tolerate another formation of rival governments. A similar split marked the end of the civil war last time but would probably mark the beginning of a new civil war this time.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Al-Nakba accepted into Israeli history books

The Times reports that a new edition of Arabic text books in Israel give the history of 1948 from both Jewish and Arab points of view:

The Arabic version of a new book for a third-grade course on homeland, society and citizenship, states that “some of the Palestinians fled and some were expelled following the War of Independence” and that “many Arab-owned lands were confiscated,” said an Education Ministry official, Dalia Fenig. It refers to the establishment of Israel as a catastrophe for the Palestinians.

The book also reflects the Jewish version of the establishment of the state, as have previous books for the Arab curriculum, including the fact that the Arab parties rejected the 1947 United Nations partition plan for Palestine while the Jews were willing to accept it. About 700,000 Arabs who lived in what is now Israel left during 1948 and 1949. About 20 percent of the current population of just over seven million are Arabs.

Unfortunately, the Arab point of view is not included in the Hebrew versions of the book. Baby steps, I suppose.

I cannot stress how important it is for a good curriculum that aims at objectivity to be used in schools. This is one of the major problems in Lebanon. There is no official history of the civil war, and each side hears of the war from its own clan, to the extent that young people in Lebanon hear about the civil war at all. In any case, this is a step in the right direction in Israel/Palestine, and the Ministry of Education should be applauded. 

Update on "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Marching bands and diplomats

Via the Reading File in the Week in Review of the Times:

David J. Kilcullen, writing in the State Department’s eJournal USA about the challenges for future wars:

At present, the U.S. defense budget accounts for approximately half of total global defense spending, while the U.S. armed forces employ about 1.68 million uniformed members. By comparison, the State Department employs about 6,000 foreign service officers, while the U.S. Agency for International Development has about 2,000. In other words, the Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined — there are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service.

An Israeli in Lebanon

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Darfur and the environment

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Death in the Ogaden

US allies in Addis Ababa have been facing some pretty serious charges lately, the latest coming from the Times. It seems that in an effort to combat the mainly ethnic-Somali rebel group in the east of the country, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the government has been starving the entire region:

The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.

The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.

The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.

Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.

“Food cannot get in,” said Mohammed Diab, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia.

In this part of Africa, famine has often been used a blunt political tool by central governments to keep the periphery in line. Precedent has already been set in Addis Ababa and Khartoum. Possibly even more disconcerting, however, are allegations that the government is arming ethnic militias in order to attack the rebels:

The people of the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year. The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a field visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.

Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the Ogaden National Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan, and so the government has turned to other clans to form anti-rebel militias. In the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.

“Those Ethiopians are smart,” [former MP] Mr. Kalif, 32, said. “They know Somalis are more loyal to clans than anything else.” Tactics like these, he said, drove him to defect June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was affiliated with the ruling party, and had been representing an area in the eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.

In both cases, the actions of the Ethiopian government are disconcertingly close to those of the Sudanese government. It looks like any ethnic-based collective punishment aimed at quelling a separatist movement in Ogaden is still in the formative stage. The US should use its clout to dissuade Addis Ababa from going down the same road that Sudan has taken, as some in the House of Representatives like Randy Forbes (R, VA) have started to do by stripping Ethiopia of American aid. In any case, this is a case that Americans should keep an eye on, because it's obviously better to prevent humanitarian disasters and ethnic violence before it happens rather than wringing our hands when it does. 

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Young on Iraq

Michael Young has an unfortunate piece about how the US cannot "switch off" the Iraq war and how success may just be "around the corner."

Thursday, July 19, 2007

More on Israel's right to exist

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Telling America what it wants to hear

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Monday, July 16, 2007

Supply and demand in Beirut

I heard once that Lebanon's economy, and especially the banking sector, strangely did not follow any of the given wisdom about macroeconomics and conflict during the 15-year civil war. I don't really have anything to back this up with except for a conversation that I don't even fully recall. (If anyone does have any information on this, I'd love to read it.)

That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if it were true, because I see economic verities being brashly thwarted all the time here. My latest example is with cab drivers. Normally, a cab ride should cost me a dollar from pretty much anywhere in Beirut to anywhere. (Foreigners typically have a harder time getting the normal rate, but that's true all the time, and in most places that don't have metered cabs. As a matter of fact, it's also true in some cities that do, like the time I got ripped off in Istanbul coming from the airport because the cabby charged me the night rate.)

Lately, though, it's been hard to find a cab between East and West Beirut for the normal price. Cab drivers keep asking for two dollars (servicein, for fellow Beiruis). The other night, I did the usual haggling dance with a cabby for a ride from Gemayzeh/Mar Mkhail to Hamra. I said one dollar; he insisted on two. When I asked him why, he told me it was because there wasn't anyone around, so he needed to charge more because there were fewer fares lately.

I stopped and thought about this for a second: if there were fewer customers (lower demand) and presumably just as many cabs (equal supply), wouldn't that mean a decrease in the usual fare? Wasn't his logic flying in the face of the basic principles of supply and demand?

Well, yes and no. On paper, I should definitely be paying less than a dollar for that ride. But in the end, I suppose he was right, because I was tired of arguing about it and gave him his two dollars. 

Another attack on UNIFIL

An-Nahar reported this afternoon that UNIFIL was attacked again. (The AP has a more complete report here.) This time it was a Tanzanian contingent outside of Tyre. Thankfully there were no casualties. Both Amal and Hezbollah condemned the attack immediately.

I know it's hard to keep security in Lebanon, but the fact that this is the second attack in a month on UNIFIL (presumably by Sunni groups that may or may not have ties to al-Qaida) really doesn't look good for Hezbollah's ability to police the south.

Gimme Freedom

Last month when I was in the US, I picked up a copy of Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan after reading about it in the Times. I've been reading it in little bursts between more serious stuff related to my research, and as a whole, I've been a little disappointed. The hype was strong, but it reminds me a little of Rushdie or Zadie Smith, but not quite as clever or well-written. It does, however, have its moments, which are more often than not pretty funny.

The fat protagonist of Shteyngart's book, Misha Borisovich Vainberg, is a filthy (rich) Russian Jew who wants to go back to Brooklyn and meet his voluptuous African-American love. The only hitch is that the State Department won't let him, because his defunct Dad once killed an American businessman. About 100 pages into the book, he decides to go to Absurdistan, an oil-rich Orthodox Caspian former Soviet Republic, so as to buy a Belgian passport. When he gets there, the situation is shaky, because the country is split into two ethnicities,the Svanï and the Sevo whose dispute is similar in nature to that of the inhabitants of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Misha arrives with his American friend Alyosha-Bob at the time when the Svanï disctator is about to appoint his son as his heir. At the Hyatt, he runs into an American official who just happens to have gone to college with him:

"So let's talk politics, dog," Alyosha-Bob said, changing the subject. "Word on the Absurdi street is that the Sevo are gonna go apeshit if Georgi Kanuk's idiot son takes over. What's the official U.S. position on this one?"

"We're not really sure," Josh Weiner admitted as he pillaged a bowl of complimentary smoked almonds. "We've got a little problem. See, none of our staff actually speak any of the local languages. I mean, there's one guy who sort of speaks Russian, but he's still trying to learn the future tense. You dogs are both from this part of the world. Do you know what's gonna happen after Georgi Kanuk dies? More democracy? Less?"

"Whenever there's any kind of upheaval in this country, the pistols come out," Alyosha-Bob said. "Think of the Ottoman rebellion of 1756 or the Persian succession of 1550."

"Oh, I can't think that far back," Josh Weiner said. "That was then, and this is now. We're in a global economy. It's in no one's interests to rock the boat. Look at the stats, homeboys. The Absurdi GNP went up nine percent last year. The Figa-6 Chevron/BP oilfields are coming online in mid-September. That's, like, a hundred and eighty thousand barrels a day! And it's not just oil! The service sector's booming, too. Did you see the new Tucson Steak and Bean Company on the Boulevard of National Unity? Did you try the ribolita soup and the crostini misti? This place has serious primary and reinvestment capital, dogs."  

When Misha brings up the ethnic divide, Weiner brushes the worry aside and says that the people of Absurdistan are pragmatists. He then introduces his Absurdi pet project, Sakha the Democrat, who is editor-in-chief of the American-funded journal, Gimme Freedom, and who begs Weiner to let him have the deluxe platter with fries for lunch. Weiner tells him that the democracy budget is slim these days so he should order his meal without fries.

Discothèque dialectic

I recently went to Casablanca, a really nice "fusion" restaurant on the Corniche in Ain el-Mreisseh, to celebrate a friend's graduation from one of the American universities here in Beirut. The food was good, and the service was exceptional. Afterwards, while the rest of the family, which was in town from Jordan for the event, went home to recuperate from their busy day, I went back to East Beirut to go home but stopped at a bar with a friend of mine (the recent graduate's cousin who also lives in Beirut) for a quick drink.

The bar where we stopped is by my house and is called Gauche Caviar. For those not familiar with French or the republic's political landscape, the "Caviar Left" is often set in opposition to the "Cassoulet Right" by lazy political analysts, journalists and barstool sociologists, much in the same way "Latte Liberals" are compared with "Meat and Potatoes Conservatives" by people like David Brooks, the American media's answer to the idea of a public intellectual.

In any case, we met up with my friend's ex-girlfriend, who, with some friends, was making merry with a mixture of Red Bull and Vodka. We started talking, and she told me that she had gone to university in the US, and I was surprised to learn that her focus has been "Marxists Economics." (I imagine her diploma only said "Economics," but that's what she told me, and it makes the story better.) I asked her if she recognized the irony in a college graduate with a degree in Marxist Economics partying at a place called Gauche Caviar, and in Beirut no less. It seems that as an Anglophone, she had been going to the bar for some time before someone explained the name to her.

This weekend, I saw that same lovely woman in a nightclub called Basement, whose ingenious new slogan is "It's Safer Underground," where she was dancing atop a table to the pulsing electronic buzz of what passes for dance music these days. Despite my distaste for the DJ's repertoire, she cut a sexy figure with her cigarette tracing patterns in the dark and her scantily clothed olive skin, moving left and right and up and down, mesmerizing all but only the most unobservant or intoxicated in her close vicinity.

As I was leaving, I couldn't help myself from tapping her on the shoulder and whispering into her ear, "You know, for a Marxist, you really know how to shake your ass." 

Friday, July 13, 2007

Erasing the past one mosque at a time

Ha'aretz recently ran a piece about Israeli archaeology in the 1950s, when dozens of Mosques and holy places were razed to the ground. It's worth a read:

In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon - was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of the rift between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni, would visit the site. But after July 1950, there was nothing left for them to visit: that's when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein.

This was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel's War of Independence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing. What is unusual about the case of Mash'had Nabi Hussein is that the demolition is documented, and direct responsibility was taken by none other than the GOC Southern Command at the time, an officer named Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site was blown up deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod.

...

David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of Majdal at the time, says "he does not want to return" to that period. The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan's bureau chief during his term as chief of staff and remained close to him for years, says he himself did not serve in Southern Command at the time and therefore is not familiar with the destruction of mosques in Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heard Dayan issue any such order.

"As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs from Zakariyya, but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still there," Bar-On says. "I know that in the South, in the villages of Bureir and Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil], the villages were leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not familiar with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn't sound reasonable to me."

The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter's book "Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology," published in Britain (Equinox Publishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the Antiquities Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider himself a "new historian" and has no accounts to settle with Zionism or the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes across in his book to no small degree as one of destruction: the utter destruction of towns and villages, the destruction of an entire culture - its present but also its past, from 3,000-year-old Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at the last minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the other. Had it not been for a few fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save these historical monuments, they might all have been wiped off the face of the earth.

As the documents quoted in the book show, only a small part of this devastation occurred in the heat of battle. The vast majority took place later, because the remnants of the Arab past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked facts everyone wanted to forget. "The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighborhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage," wrote A. Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in an August 1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter's book. A copy was sent to Yeivin in the Department of Antiquities. "In the past nine years, many ruins have been cleared ... However, those that remain now stand out even more prominently in sharp contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are irreparable or have no archaeological value should be cleared away." The letter, Dotan noted, was written "at the instruction of the foreign minister," Golda Meir.

The piece is long-ish, but well worth reading in full. It tells of a systematic destruction of Palestine's Arab past, including Israeli soldiers' raids into museums and archaeological digs in order to steal and destroy artifacts and burn down the offices of foreign archeological expeditions.

Beirut's bloody hot summer

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

On moderation

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

More on arming the Middle East

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

Monday, July 30, 2007

Arming the Middle East

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

"Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa"

A new friend of mine sent me a blog entry on a Washington Post piece attacking Americans and Europeans who want to "Save Africa," and especially those who want to "Save Darfur."

Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."

There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority. My mood is dampened every time I attend a benefit whose host runs through a litany of African disasters before presenting a (usually) wealthy, white person, who often proceeds to list the things he or she has done for the poor, starving Africans. Every time a well-meaning college student speaks of villagers dancing because they were so grateful for her help, I cringe. Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head -- because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself. And not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West's prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems.

Regardless of whether Africa is "in" or not -- whether it's the cause du jour -- if anyone's to be giving a finger rapping to well-meaning white kids from the ivy league, it certainly ought not to be Uzodinma Iweala, the American-born and -raised son of a cabinet member of the Nigerian thug extraordinaire, Obasanjo. The piece's author went to a D.C. prep school then to Harvard, and is now off to Columbia med school, so I imagine that his time in Africa hasn't been much better than that of those pasty-faced do-gooders who "fly in for internships." (Incidentally, does Iweala take the boat from Washington, I wonder?) Furthermore, I think it's telling that Granta named him in their "Best of Young American Novelists 2." 

Fairly or not, Iweala reminds me of my time in the UN system. The UN works on a quota system for permanent posts, presumably so that the secretariat be filled with people from all over the world. This might be a good thing if it weren't for the fact that the quota for countries like Nigeria are taken up by people like Iweala, not the Africans and Asians who have lived their entire lives in their native countries and had to fight against the odds to get an education while working at a human rights NGO in countries like Cameroon or Bangladesh. I once took coffee breaks with a brilliant European intern who wasn't getting paid and couldn't get a proper job in his section, despite the fact that he'd completed his PhD in a relevant field and was widely published in his field's academic journals. The person who was second-in-charge in his section was a European guy who only had the equivalent of a B.A. in his field, but whose dad happened to be a former diplomat (and UN functionary) from an African country. This guy had lived his whole life in a European capital , but he had a passport from Africa, and the intern's compatriots were over-represented at that UN organization. So that was that.

Another thing that bothers me about the remarks made by Iweala is that he doesn't mention, for example, the role that such a campaign led by Americans (mostly black and religious groups) played in negotiating an end to the civil war between the north and south of Sudan. And guys like him are the same ones who are quick to fault Europe or the US for not having done anything for Rwanda. (I'm also in that camp, but I'd like to think that I'm somewhat more consistent in my criticism.) Furthermore, what about the Congo? If Central Africa had been left to its own devices instead of given the world's largest UN peacekeeping force (from five different continents), I imagine that the death toll would be considerably worse than it already is.

So while there's something to be said about "African solutions for African problems," I'm afraid that entrusting Libya, a country that's responsible for many of the current problems in Darfur and Chad in the first place, isn't necessarily such a hot idea just because Gadaffi isn't white. Likewise, Uganda's and Rwanda's African solution to the Congo and Mbeki's African non-solution to Zimbabwe aren't exactly what I'd call steps in the right direction.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Final resolution

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

Captured Israeli soldiers

This an-Nahar report says that one of the Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah last summer is dead. The headline makes it sound like the dead is recent, but the actual article itself makes it sound like the death isn't a new thing:

Israeli Soldier held by Hizbullah Dies

One of the two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah for more than a year has died and the other is still alive the daily newspaper an-Nahar reported Saturday.

An-Nahar quoted unnamed German diplomatic sources as saying officials in Berlin tried to obtain from Free Patriotic Movement leader Michael Aoun "some information" about the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah operatives in a cross-border raid on July 12, 2006 which sparked a 34-day devastating war with Israel.

"Aoun refused to get involved in this issue. However, security agencies there understood that one of the two prisoners is still alive and the second had passed away," the report said without further elaboration.

Aoun is allied with Hizbullah, which leads a campaign backed by Syria and Iran against Premier Fouad Saniora's majority government.

The two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah are Ehud Goldwaser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26.

Hizbullah had said it was prepared to swap them for Lebanese and Arab prisoners held by Israel.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Suleiman threatens to resign

According to an-Nahar, Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese Army, has said that if the Lebanese parliament failed to elect a president by November 24 (the date when Lahoud's mandate expires), resulting in the forming of two rival governments, he would resign:

Lebanese army commander Gen. Michel Suleiman warned that he would resign if two competing governments emerged as a result of a presidential vacancy.

Suleiman said he would submit his resignation on Nov. 24, the day the term of President Emile Lahoud expires, if rival legislators failed to elect a new head of state.

The army commander said he would not tolerate a political divide that would threaten Lebanon's unity and the military institution.

"If they create two governments, I will personally hand in my resignation to each of the two governments and I will go home," Suleiman was quoted as telling ambassadors as well as political and spiritual leaders.

It's hard to say if this is a genuine effort to pressure both sides to compromise or a genuine effort to pressure both sides to choose Suleiman as president, but my initial response is that both sides need to know that Lebanon will not tolerate another formation of rival governments. A similar split marked the end of the civil war last time but would probably mark the beginning of a new civil war this time.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Al-Nakba accepted into Israeli history books

The Times reports that a new edition of Arabic text books in Israel give the history of 1948 from both Jewish and Arab points of view:

The Arabic version of a new book for a third-grade course on homeland, society and citizenship, states that “some of the Palestinians fled and some were expelled following the War of Independence” and that “many Arab-owned lands were confiscated,” said an Education Ministry official, Dalia Fenig. It refers to the establishment of Israel as a catastrophe for the Palestinians.

The book also reflects the Jewish version of the establishment of the state, as have previous books for the Arab curriculum, including the fact that the Arab parties rejected the 1947 United Nations partition plan for Palestine while the Jews were willing to accept it. About 700,000 Arabs who lived in what is now Israel left during 1948 and 1949. About 20 percent of the current population of just over seven million are Arabs.

Unfortunately, the Arab point of view is not included in the Hebrew versions of the book. Baby steps, I suppose.

I cannot stress how important it is for a good curriculum that aims at objectivity to be used in schools. This is one of the major problems in Lebanon. There is no official history of the civil war, and each side hears of the war from its own clan, to the extent that young people in Lebanon hear about the civil war at all. In any case, this is a step in the right direction in Israel/Palestine, and the Ministry of Education should be applauded. 

Update on "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Marching bands and diplomats

Via the Reading File in the Week in Review of the Times:

David J. Kilcullen, writing in the State Department’s eJournal USA about the challenges for future wars:

At present, the U.S. defense budget accounts for approximately half of total global defense spending, while the U.S. armed forces employ about 1.68 million uniformed members. By comparison, the State Department employs about 6,000 foreign service officers, while the U.S. Agency for International Development has about 2,000. In other words, the Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined — there are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service.

An Israeli in Lebanon

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Darfur and the environment

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Death in the Ogaden

US allies in Addis Ababa have been facing some pretty serious charges lately, the latest coming from the Times. It seems that in an effort to combat the mainly ethnic-Somali rebel group in the east of the country, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the government has been starving the entire region:

The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.

The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.

The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.

Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.

“Food cannot get in,” said Mohammed Diab, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia.

In this part of Africa, famine has often been used a blunt political tool by central governments to keep the periphery in line. Precedent has already been set in Addis Ababa and Khartoum. Possibly even more disconcerting, however, are allegations that the government is arming ethnic militias in order to attack the rebels:

The people of the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year. The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a field visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.

Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the Ogaden National Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan, and so the government has turned to other clans to form anti-rebel militias. In the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.

“Those Ethiopians are smart,” [former MP] Mr. Kalif, 32, said. “They know Somalis are more loyal to clans than anything else.” Tactics like these, he said, drove him to defect June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was affiliated with the ruling party, and had been representing an area in the eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.

In both cases, the actions of the Ethiopian government are disconcertingly close to those of the Sudanese government. It looks like any ethnic-based collective punishment aimed at quelling a separatist movement in Ogaden is still in the formative stage. The US should use its clout to dissuade Addis Ababa from going down the same road that Sudan has taken, as some in the House of Representatives like Randy Forbes (R, VA) have started to do by stripping Ethiopia of American aid. In any case, this is a case that Americans should keep an eye on, because it's obviously better to prevent humanitarian disasters and ethnic violence before it happens rather than wringing our hands when it does. 

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Young on Iraq

Michael Young has an unfortunate piece about how the US cannot "switch off" the Iraq war and how success may just be "around the corner."

Thursday, July 19, 2007

More on Israel's right to exist

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Telling America what it wants to hear

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Monday, July 16, 2007

Supply and demand in Beirut

I heard once that Lebanon's economy, and especially the banking sector, strangely did not follow any of the given wisdom about macroeconomics and conflict during the 15-year civil war. I don't really have anything to back this up with except for a conversation that I don't even fully recall. (If anyone does have any information on this, I'd love to read it.)

That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if it were true, because I see economic verities being brashly thwarted all the time here. My latest example is with cab drivers. Normally, a cab ride should cost me a dollar from pretty much anywhere in Beirut to anywhere. (Foreigners typically have a harder time getting the normal rate, but that's true all the time, and in most places that don't have metered cabs. As a matter of fact, it's also true in some cities that do, like the time I got ripped off in Istanbul coming from the airport because the cabby charged me the night rate.)

Lately, though, it's been hard to find a cab between East and West Beirut for the normal price. Cab drivers keep asking for two dollars (servicein, for fellow Beiruis). The other night, I did the usual haggling dance with a cabby for a ride from Gemayzeh/Mar Mkhail to Hamra. I said one dollar; he insisted on two. When I asked him why, he told me it was because there wasn't anyone around, so he needed to charge more because there were fewer fares lately.

I stopped and thought about this for a second: if there were fewer customers (lower demand) and presumably just as many cabs (equal supply), wouldn't that mean a decrease in the usual fare? Wasn't his logic flying in the face of the basic principles of supply and demand?

Well, yes and no. On paper, I should definitely be paying less than a dollar for that ride. But in the end, I suppose he was right, because I was tired of arguing about it and gave him his two dollars. 

Another attack on UNIFIL

An-Nahar reported this afternoon that UNIFIL was attacked again. (The AP has a more complete report here.) This time it was a Tanzanian contingent outside of Tyre. Thankfully there were no casualties. Both Amal and Hezbollah condemned the attack immediately.

I know it's hard to keep security in Lebanon, but the fact that this is the second attack in a month on UNIFIL (presumably by Sunni groups that may or may not have ties to al-Qaida) really doesn't look good for Hezbollah's ability to police the south.

Gimme Freedom

Last month when I was in the US, I picked up a copy of Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan after reading about it in the Times. I've been reading it in little bursts between more serious stuff related to my research, and as a whole, I've been a little disappointed. The hype was strong, but it reminds me a little of Rushdie or Zadie Smith, but not quite as clever or well-written. It does, however, have its moments, which are more often than not pretty funny.

The fat protagonist of Shteyngart's book, Misha Borisovich Vainberg, is a filthy (rich) Russian Jew who wants to go back to Brooklyn and meet his voluptuous African-American love. The only hitch is that the State Department won't let him, because his defunct Dad once killed an American businessman. About 100 pages into the book, he decides to go to Absurdistan, an oil-rich Orthodox Caspian former Soviet Republic, so as to buy a Belgian passport. When he gets there, the situation is shaky, because the country is split into two ethnicities,the Svanï and the Sevo whose dispute is similar in nature to that of the inhabitants of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Misha arrives with his American friend Alyosha-Bob at the time when the Svanï disctator is about to appoint his son as his heir. At the Hyatt, he runs into an American official who just happens to have gone to college with him:

"So let's talk politics, dog," Alyosha-Bob said, changing the subject. "Word on the Absurdi street is that the Sevo are gonna go apeshit if Georgi Kanuk's idiot son takes over. What's the official U.S. position on this one?"

"We're not really sure," Josh Weiner admitted as he pillaged a bowl of complimentary smoked almonds. "We've got a little problem. See, none of our staff actually speak any of the local languages. I mean, there's one guy who sort of speaks Russian, but he's still trying to learn the future tense. You dogs are both from this part of the world. Do you know what's gonna happen after Georgi Kanuk dies? More democracy? Less?"

"Whenever there's any kind of upheaval in this country, the pistols come out," Alyosha-Bob said. "Think of the Ottoman rebellion of 1756 or the Persian succession of 1550."

"Oh, I can't think that far back," Josh Weiner said. "That was then, and this is now. We're in a global economy. It's in no one's interests to rock the boat. Look at the stats, homeboys. The Absurdi GNP went up nine percent last year. The Figa-6 Chevron/BP oilfields are coming online in mid-September. That's, like, a hundred and eighty thousand barrels a day! And it's not just oil! The service sector's booming, too. Did you see the new Tucson Steak and Bean Company on the Boulevard of National Unity? Did you try the ribolita soup and the crostini misti? This place has serious primary and reinvestment capital, dogs."  

When Misha brings up the ethnic divide, Weiner brushes the worry aside and says that the people of Absurdistan are pragmatists. He then introduces his Absurdi pet project, Sakha the Democrat, who is editor-in-chief of the American-funded journal, Gimme Freedom, and who begs Weiner to let him have the deluxe platter with fries for lunch. Weiner tells him that the democracy budget is slim these days so he should order his meal without fries.

Discothèque dialectic

I recently went to Casablanca, a really nice "fusion" restaurant on the Corniche in Ain el-Mreisseh, to celebrate a friend's graduation from one of the American universities here in Beirut. The food was good, and the service was exceptional. Afterwards, while the rest of the family, which was in town from Jordan for the event, went home to recuperate from their busy day, I went back to East Beirut to go home but stopped at a bar with a friend of mine (the recent graduate's cousin who also lives in Beirut) for a quick drink.

The bar where we stopped is by my house and is called Gauche Caviar. For those not familiar with French or the republic's political landscape, the "Caviar Left" is often set in opposition to the "Cassoulet Right" by lazy political analysts, journalists and barstool sociologists, much in the same way "Latte Liberals" are compared with "Meat and Potatoes Conservatives" by people like David Brooks, the American media's answer to the idea of a public intellectual.

In any case, we met up with my friend's ex-girlfriend, who, with some friends, was making merry with a mixture of Red Bull and Vodka. We started talking, and she told me that she had gone to university in the US, and I was surprised to learn that her focus has been "Marxists Economics." (I imagine her diploma only said "Economics," but that's what she told me, and it makes the story better.) I asked her if she recognized the irony in a college graduate with a degree in Marxist Economics partying at a place called Gauche Caviar, and in Beirut no less. It seems that as an Anglophone, she had been going to the bar for some time before someone explained the name to her.

This weekend, I saw that same lovely woman in a nightclub called Basement, whose ingenious new slogan is "It's Safer Underground," where she was dancing atop a table to the pulsing electronic buzz of what passes for dance music these days. Despite my distaste for the DJ's repertoire, she cut a sexy figure with her cigarette tracing patterns in the dark and her scantily clothed olive skin, moving left and right and up and down, mesmerizing all but only the most unobservant or intoxicated in her close vicinity.

As I was leaving, I couldn't help myself from tapping her on the shoulder and whispering into her ear, "You know, for a Marxist, you really know how to shake your ass." 

Friday, July 13, 2007

Erasing the past one mosque at a time

Ha'aretz recently ran a piece about Israeli archaeology in the 1950s, when dozens of Mosques and holy places were razed to the ground. It's worth a read:

In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon - was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of the rift between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni, would visit the site. But after July 1950, there was nothing left for them to visit: that's when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein.

This was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel's War of Independence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing. What is unusual about the case of Mash'had Nabi Hussein is that the demolition is documented, and direct responsibility was taken by none other than the GOC Southern Command at the time, an officer named Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site was blown up deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod.

...

David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of Majdal at the time, says "he does not want to return" to that period. The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan's bureau chief during his term as chief of staff and remained close to him for years, says he himself did not serve in Southern Command at the time and therefore is not familiar with the destruction of mosques in Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heard Dayan issue any such order.

"As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs from Zakariyya, but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still there," Bar-On says. "I know that in the South, in the villages of Bureir and Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil], the villages were leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not familiar with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn't sound reasonable to me."

The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter's book "Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology," published in Britain (Equinox Publishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the Antiquities Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider himself a "new historian" and has no accounts to settle with Zionism or the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes across in his book to no small degree as one of destruction: the utter destruction of towns and villages, the destruction of an entire culture - its present but also its past, from 3,000-year-old Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at the last minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the other. Had it not been for a few fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save these historical monuments, they might all have been wiped off the face of the earth.

As the documents quoted in the book show, only a small part of this devastation occurred in the heat of battle. The vast majority took place later, because the remnants of the Arab past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked facts everyone wanted to forget. "The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighborhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage," wrote A. Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in an August 1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter's book. A copy was sent to Yeivin in the Department of Antiquities. "In the past nine years, many ruins have been cleared ... However, those that remain now stand out even more prominently in sharp contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are irreparable or have no archaeological value should be cleared away." The letter, Dotan noted, was written "at the instruction of the foreign minister," Golda Meir.

The piece is long-ish, but well worth reading in full. It tells of a systematic destruction of Palestine's Arab past, including Israeli soldiers' raids into museums and archaeological digs in order to steal and destroy artifacts and burn down the offices of foreign archeological expeditions.

Beirut's bloody hot summer

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

On moderation

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

More on arming the Middle East

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

Monday, July 30, 2007

Arming the Middle East

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

"Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa"

A new friend of mine sent me a blog entry on a Washington Post piece attacking Americans and Europeans who want to "Save Africa," and especially those who want to "Save Darfur."

Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."

There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority. My mood is dampened every time I attend a benefit whose host runs through a litany of African disasters before presenting a (usually) wealthy, white person, who often proceeds to list the things he or she has done for the poor, starving Africans. Every time a well-meaning college student speaks of villagers dancing because they were so grateful for her help, I cringe. Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head -- because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself. And not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West's prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems.

Regardless of whether Africa is "in" or not -- whether it's the cause du jour -- if anyone's to be giving a finger rapping to well-meaning white kids from the ivy league, it certainly ought not to be Uzodinma Iweala, the American-born and -raised son of a cabinet member of the Nigerian thug extraordinaire, Obasanjo. The piece's author went to a D.C. prep school then to Harvard, and is now off to Columbia med school, so I imagine that his time in Africa hasn't been much better than that of those pasty-faced do-gooders who "fly in for internships." (Incidentally, does Iweala take the boat from Washington, I wonder?) Furthermore, I think it's telling that Granta named him in their "Best of Young American Novelists 2." 

Fairly or not, Iweala reminds me of my time in the UN system. The UN works on a quota system for permanent posts, presumably so that the secretariat be filled with people from all over the world. This might be a good thing if it weren't for the fact that the quota for countries like Nigeria are taken up by people like Iweala, not the Africans and Asians who have lived their entire lives in their native countries and had to fight against the odds to get an education while working at a human rights NGO in countries like Cameroon or Bangladesh. I once took coffee breaks with a brilliant European intern who wasn't getting paid and couldn't get a proper job in his section, despite the fact that he'd completed his PhD in a relevant field and was widely published in his field's academic journals. The person who was second-in-charge in his section was a European guy who only had the equivalent of a B.A. in his field, but whose dad happened to be a former diplomat (and UN functionary) from an African country. This guy had lived his whole life in a European capital , but he had a passport from Africa, and the intern's compatriots were over-represented at that UN organization. So that was that.

Another thing that bothers me about the remarks made by Iweala is that he doesn't mention, for example, the role that such a campaign led by Americans (mostly black and religious groups) played in negotiating an end to the civil war between the north and south of Sudan. And guys like him are the same ones who are quick to fault Europe or the US for not having done anything for Rwanda. (I'm also in that camp, but I'd like to think that I'm somewhat more consistent in my criticism.) Furthermore, what about the Congo? If Central Africa had been left to its own devices instead of given the world's largest UN peacekeeping force (from five different continents), I imagine that the death toll would be considerably worse than it already is.

So while there's something to be said about "African solutions for African problems," I'm afraid that entrusting Libya, a country that's responsible for many of the current problems in Darfur and Chad in the first place, isn't necessarily such a hot idea just because Gadaffi isn't white. Likewise, Uganda's and Rwanda's African solution to the Congo and Mbeki's African non-solution to Zimbabwe aren't exactly what I'd call steps in the right direction.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Final resolution

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

Captured Israeli soldiers

This an-Nahar report says that one of the Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah last summer is dead. The headline makes it sound like the dead is recent, but the actual article itself makes it sound like the death isn't a new thing:

Israeli Soldier held by Hizbullah Dies

One of the two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah for more than a year has died and the other is still alive the daily newspaper an-Nahar reported Saturday.

An-Nahar quoted unnamed German diplomatic sources as saying officials in Berlin tried to obtain from Free Patriotic Movement leader Michael Aoun "some information" about the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah operatives in a cross-border raid on July 12, 2006 which sparked a 34-day devastating war with Israel.

"Aoun refused to get involved in this issue. However, security agencies there understood that one of the two prisoners is still alive and the second had passed away," the report said without further elaboration.

Aoun is allied with Hizbullah, which leads a campaign backed by Syria and Iran against Premier Fouad Saniora's majority government.

The two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah are Ehud Goldwaser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26.

Hizbullah had said it was prepared to swap them for Lebanese and Arab prisoners held by Israel.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Suleiman threatens to resign

According to an-Nahar, Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese Army, has said that if the Lebanese parliament failed to elect a president by November 24 (the date when Lahoud's mandate expires), resulting in the forming of two rival governments, he would resign:

Lebanese army commander Gen. Michel Suleiman warned that he would resign if two competing governments emerged as a result of a presidential vacancy.

Suleiman said he would submit his resignation on Nov. 24, the day the term of President Emile Lahoud expires, if rival legislators failed to elect a new head of state.

The army commander said he would not tolerate a political divide that would threaten Lebanon's unity and the military institution.

"If they create two governments, I will personally hand in my resignation to each of the two governments and I will go home," Suleiman was quoted as telling ambassadors as well as political and spiritual leaders.

It's hard to say if this is a genuine effort to pressure both sides to compromise or a genuine effort to pressure both sides to choose Suleiman as president, but my initial response is that both sides need to know that Lebanon will not tolerate another formation of rival governments. A similar split marked the end of the civil war last time but would probably mark the beginning of a new civil war this time.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Al-Nakba accepted into Israeli history books

The Times reports that a new edition of Arabic text books in Israel give the history of 1948 from both Jewish and Arab points of view:

The Arabic version of a new book for a third-grade course on homeland, society and citizenship, states that “some of the Palestinians fled and some were expelled following the War of Independence” and that “many Arab-owned lands were confiscated,” said an Education Ministry official, Dalia Fenig. It refers to the establishment of Israel as a catastrophe for the Palestinians.

The book also reflects the Jewish version of the establishment of the state, as have previous books for the Arab curriculum, including the fact that the Arab parties rejected the 1947 United Nations partition plan for Palestine while the Jews were willing to accept it. About 700,000 Arabs who lived in what is now Israel left during 1948 and 1949. About 20 percent of the current population of just over seven million are Arabs.

Unfortunately, the Arab point of view is not included in the Hebrew versions of the book. Baby steps, I suppose.

I cannot stress how important it is for a good curriculum that aims at objectivity to be used in schools. This is one of the major problems in Lebanon. There is no official history of the civil war, and each side hears of the war from its own clan, to the extent that young people in Lebanon hear about the civil war at all. In any case, this is a step in the right direction in Israel/Palestine, and the Ministry of Education should be applauded. 

Update on "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Marching bands and diplomats

Via the Reading File in the Week in Review of the Times:

David J. Kilcullen, writing in the State Department’s eJournal USA about the challenges for future wars:

At present, the U.S. defense budget accounts for approximately half of total global defense spending, while the U.S. armed forces employ about 1.68 million uniformed members. By comparison, the State Department employs about 6,000 foreign service officers, while the U.S. Agency for International Development has about 2,000. In other words, the Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined — there are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service.

An Israeli in Lebanon

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Darfur and the environment

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Death in the Ogaden

US allies in Addis Ababa have been facing some pretty serious charges lately, the latest coming from the Times. It seems that in an effort to combat the mainly ethnic-Somali rebel group in the east of the country, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the government has been starving the entire region:

The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.

The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.

The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.

Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.

“Food cannot get in,” said Mohammed Diab, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia.

In this part of Africa, famine has often been used a blunt political tool by central governments to keep the periphery in line. Precedent has already been set in Addis Ababa and Khartoum. Possibly even more disconcerting, however, are allegations that the government is arming ethnic militias in order to attack the rebels:

The people of the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year. The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a field visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.

Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the Ogaden National Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan, and so the government has turned to other clans to form anti-rebel militias. In the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.

“Those Ethiopians are smart,” [former MP] Mr. Kalif, 32, said. “They know Somalis are more loyal to clans than anything else.” Tactics like these, he said, drove him to defect June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was affiliated with the ruling party, and had been representing an area in the eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.

In both cases, the actions of the Ethiopian government are disconcertingly close to those of the Sudanese government. It looks like any ethnic-based collective punishment aimed at quelling a separatist movement in Ogaden is still in the formative stage. The US should use its clout to dissuade Addis Ababa from going down the same road that Sudan has taken, as some in the House of Representatives like Randy Forbes (R, VA) have started to do by stripping Ethiopia of American aid. In any case, this is a case that Americans should keep an eye on, because it's obviously better to prevent humanitarian disasters and ethnic violence before it happens rather than wringing our hands when it does. 

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Young on Iraq

Michael Young has an unfortunate piece about how the US cannot "switch off" the Iraq war and how success may just be "around the corner."

Thursday, July 19, 2007

More on Israel's right to exist

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Telling America what it wants to hear

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Monday, July 16, 2007

Supply and demand in Beirut

I heard once that Lebanon's economy, and especially the banking sector, strangely did not follow any of the given wisdom about macroeconomics and conflict during the 15-year civil war. I don't really have anything to back this up with except for a conversation that I don't even fully recall. (If anyone does have any information on this, I'd love to read it.)

That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if it were true, because I see economic verities being brashly thwarted all the time here. My latest example is with cab drivers. Normally, a cab ride should cost me a dollar from pretty much anywhere in Beirut to anywhere. (Foreigners typically have a harder time getting the normal rate, but that's true all the time, and in most places that don't have metered cabs. As a matter of fact, it's also true in some cities that do, like the time I got ripped off in Istanbul coming from the airport because the cabby charged me the night rate.)

Lately, though, it's been hard to find a cab between East and West Beirut for the normal price. Cab drivers keep asking for two dollars (servicein, for fellow Beiruis). The other night, I did the usual haggling dance with a cabby for a ride from Gemayzeh/Mar Mkhail to Hamra. I said one dollar; he insisted on two. When I asked him why, he told me it was because there wasn't anyone around, so he needed to charge more because there were fewer fares lately.

I stopped and thought about this for a second: if there were fewer customers (lower demand) and presumably just as many cabs (equal supply), wouldn't that mean a decrease in the usual fare? Wasn't his logic flying in the face of the basic principles of supply and demand?

Well, yes and no. On paper, I should definitely be paying less than a dollar for that ride. But in the end, I suppose he was right, because I was tired of arguing about it and gave him his two dollars. 

Another attack on UNIFIL

An-Nahar reported this afternoon that UNIFIL was attacked again. (The AP has a more complete report here.) This time it was a Tanzanian contingent outside of Tyre. Thankfully there were no casualties. Both Amal and Hezbollah condemned the attack immediately.

I know it's hard to keep security in Lebanon, but the fact that this is the second attack in a month on UNIFIL (presumably by Sunni groups that may or may not have ties to al-Qaida) really doesn't look good for Hezbollah's ability to police the south.

Gimme Freedom

Last month when I was in the US, I picked up a copy of Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan after reading about it in the Times. I've been reading it in little bursts between more serious stuff related to my research, and as a whole, I've been a little disappointed. The hype was strong, but it reminds me a little of Rushdie or Zadie Smith, but not quite as clever or well-written. It does, however, have its moments, which are more often than not pretty funny.

The fat protagonist of Shteyngart's book, Misha Borisovich Vainberg, is a filthy (rich) Russian Jew who wants to go back to Brooklyn and meet his voluptuous African-American love. The only hitch is that the State Department won't let him, because his defunct Dad once killed an American businessman. About 100 pages into the book, he decides to go to Absurdistan, an oil-rich Orthodox Caspian former Soviet Republic, so as to buy a Belgian passport. When he gets there, the situation is shaky, because the country is split into two ethnicities,the Svanï and the Sevo whose dispute is similar in nature to that of the inhabitants of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Misha arrives with his American friend Alyosha-Bob at the time when the Svanï disctator is about to appoint his son as his heir. At the Hyatt, he runs into an American official who just happens to have gone to college with him:

"So let's talk politics, dog," Alyosha-Bob said, changing the subject. "Word on the Absurdi street is that the Sevo are gonna go apeshit if Georgi Kanuk's idiot son takes over. What's the official U.S. position on this one?"

"We're not really sure," Josh Weiner admitted as he pillaged a bowl of complimentary smoked almonds. "We've got a little problem. See, none of our staff actually speak any of the local languages. I mean, there's one guy who sort of speaks Russian, but he's still trying to learn the future tense. You dogs are both from this part of the world. Do you know what's gonna happen after Georgi Kanuk dies? More democracy? Less?"

"Whenever there's any kind of upheaval in this country, the pistols come out," Alyosha-Bob said. "Think of the Ottoman rebellion of 1756 or the Persian succession of 1550."

"Oh, I can't think that far back," Josh Weiner said. "That was then, and this is now. We're in a global economy. It's in no one's interests to rock the boat. Look at the stats, homeboys. The Absurdi GNP went up nine percent last year. The Figa-6 Chevron/BP oilfields are coming online in mid-September. That's, like, a hundred and eighty thousand barrels a day! And it's not just oil! The service sector's booming, too. Did you see the new Tucson Steak and Bean Company on the Boulevard of National Unity? Did you try the ribolita soup and the crostini misti? This place has serious primary and reinvestment capital, dogs."  

When Misha brings up the ethnic divide, Weiner brushes the worry aside and says that the people of Absurdistan are pragmatists. He then introduces his Absurdi pet project, Sakha the Democrat, who is editor-in-chief of the American-funded journal, Gimme Freedom, and who begs Weiner to let him have the deluxe platter with fries for lunch. Weiner tells him that the democracy budget is slim these days so he should order his meal without fries.

Discothèque dialectic

I recently went to Casablanca, a really nice "fusion" restaurant on the Corniche in Ain el-Mreisseh, to celebrate a friend's graduation from one of the American universities here in Beirut. The food was good, and the service was exceptional. Afterwards, while the rest of the family, which was in town from Jordan for the event, went home to recuperate from their busy day, I went back to East Beirut to go home but stopped at a bar with a friend of mine (the recent graduate's cousin who also lives in Beirut) for a quick drink.

The bar where we stopped is by my house and is called Gauche Caviar. For those not familiar with French or the republic's political landscape, the "Caviar Left" is often set in opposition to the "Cassoulet Right" by lazy political analysts, journalists and barstool sociologists, much in the same way "Latte Liberals" are compared with "Meat and Potatoes Conservatives" by people like David Brooks, the American media's answer to the idea of a public intellectual.

In any case, we met up with my friend's ex-girlfriend, who, with some friends, was making merry with a mixture of Red Bull and Vodka. We started talking, and she told me that she had gone to university in the US, and I was surprised to learn that her focus has been "Marxists Economics." (I imagine her diploma only said "Economics," but that's what she told me, and it makes the story better.) I asked her if she recognized the irony in a college graduate with a degree in Marxist Economics partying at a place called Gauche Caviar, and in Beirut no less. It seems that as an Anglophone, she had been going to the bar for some time before someone explained the name to her.

This weekend, I saw that same lovely woman in a nightclub called Basement, whose ingenious new slogan is "It's Safer Underground," where she was dancing atop a table to the pulsing electronic buzz of what passes for dance music these days. Despite my distaste for the DJ's repertoire, she cut a sexy figure with her cigarette tracing patterns in the dark and her scantily clothed olive skin, moving left and right and up and down, mesmerizing all but only the most unobservant or intoxicated in her close vicinity.

As I was leaving, I couldn't help myself from tapping her on the shoulder and whispering into her ear, "You know, for a Marxist, you really know how to shake your ass." 

Friday, July 13, 2007

Erasing the past one mosque at a time

Ha'aretz recently ran a piece about Israeli archaeology in the 1950s, when dozens of Mosques and holy places were razed to the ground. It's worth a read:

In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon - was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of the rift between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni, would visit the site. But after July 1950, there was nothing left for them to visit: that's when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein.

This was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel's War of Independence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing. What is unusual about the case of Mash'had Nabi Hussein is that the demolition is documented, and direct responsibility was taken by none other than the GOC Southern Command at the time, an officer named Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site was blown up deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod.

...

David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of Majdal at the time, says "he does not want to return" to that period. The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan's bureau chief during his term as chief of staff and remained close to him for years, says he himself did not serve in Southern Command at the time and therefore is not familiar with the destruction of mosques in Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heard Dayan issue any such order.

"As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs from Zakariyya, but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still there," Bar-On says. "I know that in the South, in the villages of Bureir and Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil], the villages were leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not familiar with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn't sound reasonable to me."

The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter's book "Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology," published in Britain (Equinox Publishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the Antiquities Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider himself a "new historian" and has no accounts to settle with Zionism or the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes across in his book to no small degree as one of destruction: the utter destruction of towns and villages, the destruction of an entire culture - its present but also its past, from 3,000-year-old Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at the last minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the other. Had it not been for a few fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save these historical monuments, they might all have been wiped off the face of the earth.

As the documents quoted in the book show, only a small part of this devastation occurred in the heat of battle. The vast majority took place later, because the remnants of the Arab past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked facts everyone wanted to forget. "The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighborhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage," wrote A. Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in an August 1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter's book. A copy was sent to Yeivin in the Department of Antiquities. "In the past nine years, many ruins have been cleared ... However, those that remain now stand out even more prominently in sharp contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are irreparable or have no archaeological value should be cleared away." The letter, Dotan noted, was written "at the instruction of the foreign minister," Golda Meir.

The piece is long-ish, but well worth reading in full. It tells of a systematic destruction of Palestine's Arab past, including Israeli soldiers' raids into museums and archaeological digs in order to steal and destroy artifacts and burn down the offices of foreign archeological expeditions.

Beirut's bloody hot summer

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

On moderation

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

More on arming the Middle East

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

Monday, July 30, 2007

Arming the Middle East

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

"Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa"

A new friend of mine sent me a blog entry on a Washington Post piece attacking Americans and Europeans who want to "Save Africa," and especially those who want to "Save Darfur."

Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."

There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority. My mood is dampened every time I attend a benefit whose host runs through a litany of African disasters before presenting a (usually) wealthy, white person, who often proceeds to list the things he or she has done for the poor, starving Africans. Every time a well-meaning college student speaks of villagers dancing because they were so grateful for her help, I cringe. Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head -- because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself. And not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West's prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems.

Regardless of whether Africa is "in" or not -- whether it's the cause du jour -- if anyone's to be giving a finger rapping to well-meaning white kids from the ivy league, it certainly ought not to be Uzodinma Iweala, the American-born and -raised son of a cabinet member of the Nigerian thug extraordinaire, Obasanjo. The piece's author went to a D.C. prep school then to Harvard, and is now off to Columbia med school, so I imagine that his time in Africa hasn't been much better than that of those pasty-faced do-gooders who "fly in for internships." (Incidentally, does Iweala take the boat from Washington, I wonder?) Furthermore, I think it's telling that Granta named him in their "Best of Young American Novelists 2." 

Fairly or not, Iweala reminds me of my time in the UN system. The UN works on a quota system for permanent posts, presumably so that the secretariat be filled with people from all over the world. This might be a good thing if it weren't for the fact that the quota for countries like Nigeria are taken up by people like Iweala, not the Africans and Asians who have lived their entire lives in their native countries and had to fight against the odds to get an education while working at a human rights NGO in countries like Cameroon or Bangladesh. I once took coffee breaks with a brilliant European intern who wasn't getting paid and couldn't get a proper job in his section, despite the fact that he'd completed his PhD in a relevant field and was widely published in his field's academic journals. The person who was second-in-charge in his section was a European guy who only had the equivalent of a B.A. in his field, but whose dad happened to be a former diplomat (and UN functionary) from an African country. This guy had lived his whole life in a European capital , but he had a passport from Africa, and the intern's compatriots were over-represented at that UN organization. So that was that.

Another thing that bothers me about the remarks made by Iweala is that he doesn't mention, for example, the role that such a campaign led by Americans (mostly black and religious groups) played in negotiating an end to the civil war between the north and south of Sudan. And guys like him are the same ones who are quick to fault Europe or the US for not having done anything for Rwanda. (I'm also in that camp, but I'd like to think that I'm somewhat more consistent in my criticism.) Furthermore, what about the Congo? If Central Africa had been left to its own devices instead of given the world's largest UN peacekeeping force (from five different continents), I imagine that the death toll would be considerably worse than it already is.

So while there's something to be said about "African solutions for African problems," I'm afraid that entrusting Libya, a country that's responsible for many of the current problems in Darfur and Chad in the first place, isn't necessarily such a hot idea just because Gadaffi isn't white. Likewise, Uganda's and Rwanda's African solution to the Congo and Mbeki's African non-solution to Zimbabwe aren't exactly what I'd call steps in the right direction.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Final resolution

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

Captured Israeli soldiers

This an-Nahar report says that one of the Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah last summer is dead. The headline makes it sound like the dead is recent, but the actual article itself makes it sound like the death isn't a new thing:

Israeli Soldier held by Hizbullah Dies

One of the two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah for more than a year has died and the other is still alive the daily newspaper an-Nahar reported Saturday.

An-Nahar quoted unnamed German diplomatic sources as saying officials in Berlin tried to obtain from Free Patriotic Movement leader Michael Aoun "some information" about the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah operatives in a cross-border raid on July 12, 2006 which sparked a 34-day devastating war with Israel.

"Aoun refused to get involved in this issue. However, security agencies there understood that one of the two prisoners is still alive and the second had passed away," the report said without further elaboration.

Aoun is allied with Hizbullah, which leads a campaign backed by Syria and Iran against Premier Fouad Saniora's majority government.

The two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah are Ehud Goldwaser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26.

Hizbullah had said it was prepared to swap them for Lebanese and Arab prisoners held by Israel.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Suleiman threatens to resign

According to an-Nahar, Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese Army, has said that if the Lebanese parliament failed to elect a president by November 24 (the date when Lahoud's mandate expires), resulting in the forming of two rival governments, he would resign:

Lebanese army commander Gen. Michel Suleiman warned that he would resign if two competing governments emerged as a result of a presidential vacancy.

Suleiman said he would submit his resignation on Nov. 24, the day the term of President Emile Lahoud expires, if rival legislators failed to elect a new head of state.

The army commander said he would not tolerate a political divide that would threaten Lebanon's unity and the military institution.

"If they create two governments, I will personally hand in my resignation to each of the two governments and I will go home," Suleiman was quoted as telling ambassadors as well as political and spiritual leaders.

It's hard to say if this is a genuine effort to pressure both sides to compromise or a genuine effort to pressure both sides to choose Suleiman as president, but my initial response is that both sides need to know that Lebanon will not tolerate another formation of rival governments. A similar split marked the end of the civil war last time but would probably mark the beginning of a new civil war this time.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Al-Nakba accepted into Israeli history books

The Times reports that a new edition of Arabic text books in Israel give the history of 1948 from both Jewish and Arab points of view:

The Arabic version of a new book for a third-grade course on homeland, society and citizenship, states that “some of the Palestinians fled and some were expelled following the War of Independence” and that “many Arab-owned lands were confiscated,” said an Education Ministry official, Dalia Fenig. It refers to the establishment of Israel as a catastrophe for the Palestinians.

The book also reflects the Jewish version of the establishment of the state, as have previous books for the Arab curriculum, including the fact that the Arab parties rejected the 1947 United Nations partition plan for Palestine while the Jews were willing to accept it. About 700,000 Arabs who lived in what is now Israel left during 1948 and 1949. About 20 percent of the current population of just over seven million are Arabs.

Unfortunately, the Arab point of view is not included in the Hebrew versions of the book. Baby steps, I suppose.

I cannot stress how important it is for a good curriculum that aims at objectivity to be used in schools. This is one of the major problems in Lebanon. There is no official history of the civil war, and each side hears of the war from its own clan, to the extent that young people in Lebanon hear about the civil war at all. In any case, this is a step in the right direction in Israel/Palestine, and the Ministry of Education should be applauded. 

Update on "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Marching bands and diplomats

Via the Reading File in the Week in Review of the Times:

David J. Kilcullen, writing in the State Department’s eJournal USA about the challenges for future wars:

At present, the U.S. defense budget accounts for approximately half of total global defense spending, while the U.S. armed forces employ about 1.68 million uniformed members. By comparison, the State Department employs about 6,000 foreign service officers, while the U.S. Agency for International Development has about 2,000. In other words, the Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined — there are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service.

An Israeli in Lebanon

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Darfur and the environment

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Death in the Ogaden

US allies in Addis Ababa have been facing some pretty serious charges lately, the latest coming from the Times. It seems that in an effort to combat the mainly ethnic-Somali rebel group in the east of the country, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the government has been starving the entire region:

The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.

The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.

The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.

Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.

“Food cannot get in,” said Mohammed Diab, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia.

In this part of Africa, famine has often been used a blunt political tool by central governments to keep the periphery in line. Precedent has already been set in Addis Ababa and Khartoum. Possibly even more disconcerting, however, are allegations that the government is arming ethnic militias in order to attack the rebels:

The people of the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year. The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a field visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.

Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the Ogaden National Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan, and so the government has turned to other clans to form anti-rebel militias. In the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.

“Those Ethiopians are smart,” [former MP] Mr. Kalif, 32, said. “They know Somalis are more loyal to clans than anything else.” Tactics like these, he said, drove him to defect June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was affiliated with the ruling party, and had been representing an area in the eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.

In both cases, the actions of the Ethiopian government are disconcertingly close to those of the Sudanese government. It looks like any ethnic-based collective punishment aimed at quelling a separatist movement in Ogaden is still in the formative stage. The US should use its clout to dissuade Addis Ababa from going down the same road that Sudan has taken, as some in the House of Representatives like Randy Forbes (R, VA) have started to do by stripping Ethiopia of American aid. In any case, this is a case that Americans should keep an eye on, because it's obviously better to prevent humanitarian disasters and ethnic violence before it happens rather than wringing our hands when it does. 

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Young on Iraq

Michael Young has an unfortunate piece about how the US cannot "switch off" the Iraq war and how success may just be "around the corner."

Thursday, July 19, 2007

More on Israel's right to exist

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Telling America what it wants to hear

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Monday, July 16, 2007

Supply and demand in Beirut

I heard once that Lebanon's economy, and especially the banking sector, strangely did not follow any of the given wisdom about macroeconomics and conflict during the 15-year civil war. I don't really have anything to back this up with except for a conversation that I don't even fully recall. (If anyone does have any information on this, I'd love to read it.)

That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if it were true, because I see economic verities being brashly thwarted all the time here. My latest example is with cab drivers. Normally, a cab ride should cost me a dollar from pretty much anywhere in Beirut to anywhere. (Foreigners typically have a harder time getting the normal rate, but that's true all the time, and in most places that don't have metered cabs. As a matter of fact, it's also true in some cities that do, like the time I got ripped off in Istanbul coming from the airport because the cabby charged me the night rate.)

Lately, though, it's been hard to find a cab between East and West Beirut for the normal price. Cab drivers keep asking for two dollars (servicein, for fellow Beiruis). The other night, I did the usual haggling dance with a cabby for a ride from Gemayzeh/Mar Mkhail to Hamra. I said one dollar; he insisted on two. When I asked him why, he told me it was because there wasn't anyone around, so he needed to charge more because there were fewer fares lately.

I stopped and thought about this for a second: if there were fewer customers (lower demand) and presumably just as many cabs (equal supply), wouldn't that mean a decrease in the usual fare? Wasn't his logic flying in the face of the basic principles of supply and demand?

Well, yes and no. On paper, I should definitely be paying less than a dollar for that ride. But in the end, I suppose he was right, because I was tired of arguing about it and gave him his two dollars. 

Another attack on UNIFIL

An-Nahar reported this afternoon that UNIFIL was attacked again. (The AP has a more complete report here.) This time it was a Tanzanian contingent outside of Tyre. Thankfully there were no casualties. Both Amal and Hezbollah condemned the attack immediately.

I know it's hard to keep security in Lebanon, but the fact that this is the second attack in a month on UNIFIL (presumably by Sunni groups that may or may not have ties to al-Qaida) really doesn't look good for Hezbollah's ability to police the south.

Gimme Freedom

Last month when I was in the US, I picked up a copy of Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan after reading about it in the Times. I've been reading it in little bursts between more serious stuff related to my research, and as a whole, I've been a little disappointed. The hype was strong, but it reminds me a little of Rushdie or Zadie Smith, but not quite as clever or well-written. It does, however, have its moments, which are more often than not pretty funny.

The fat protagonist of Shteyngart's book, Misha Borisovich Vainberg, is a filthy (rich) Russian Jew who wants to go back to Brooklyn and meet his voluptuous African-American love. The only hitch is that the State Department won't let him, because his defunct Dad once killed an American businessman. About 100 pages into the book, he decides to go to Absurdistan, an oil-rich Orthodox Caspian former Soviet Republic, so as to buy a Belgian passport. When he gets there, the situation is shaky, because the country is split into two ethnicities,the Svanï and the Sevo whose dispute is similar in nature to that of the inhabitants of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Misha arrives with his American friend Alyosha-Bob at the time when the Svanï disctator is about to appoint his son as his heir. At the Hyatt, he runs into an American official who just happens to have gone to college with him:

"So let's talk politics, dog," Alyosha-Bob said, changing the subject. "Word on the Absurdi street is that the Sevo are gonna go apeshit if Georgi Kanuk's idiot son takes over. What's the official U.S. position on this one?"

"We're not really sure," Josh Weiner admitted as he pillaged a bowl of complimentary smoked almonds. "We've got a little problem. See, none of our staff actually speak any of the local languages. I mean, there's one guy who sort of speaks Russian, but he's still trying to learn the future tense. You dogs are both from this part of the world. Do you know what's gonna happen after Georgi Kanuk dies? More democracy? Less?"

"Whenever there's any kind of upheaval in this country, the pistols come out," Alyosha-Bob said. "Think of the Ottoman rebellion of 1756 or the Persian succession of 1550."

"Oh, I can't think that far back," Josh Weiner said. "That was then, and this is now. We're in a global economy. It's in no one's interests to rock the boat. Look at the stats, homeboys. The Absurdi GNP went up nine percent last year. The Figa-6 Chevron/BP oilfields are coming online in mid-September. That's, like, a hundred and eighty thousand barrels a day! And it's not just oil! The service sector's booming, too. Did you see the new Tucson Steak and Bean Company on the Boulevard of National Unity? Did you try the ribolita soup and the crostini misti? This place has serious primary and reinvestment capital, dogs."  

When Misha brings up the ethnic divide, Weiner brushes the worry aside and says that the people of Absurdistan are pragmatists. He then introduces his Absurdi pet project, Sakha the Democrat, who is editor-in-chief of the American-funded journal, Gimme Freedom, and who begs Weiner to let him have the deluxe platter with fries for lunch. Weiner tells him that the democracy budget is slim these days so he should order his meal without fries.

Discothèque dialectic

I recently went to Casablanca, a really nice "fusion" restaurant on the Corniche in Ain el-Mreisseh, to celebrate a friend's graduation from one of the American universities here in Beirut. The food was good, and the service was exceptional. Afterwards, while the rest of the family, which was in town from Jordan for the event, went home to recuperate from their busy day, I went back to East Beirut to go home but stopped at a bar with a friend of mine (the recent graduate's cousin who also lives in Beirut) for a quick drink.

The bar where we stopped is by my house and is called Gauche Caviar. For those not familiar with French or the republic's political landscape, the "Caviar Left" is often set in opposition to the "Cassoulet Right" by lazy political analysts, journalists and barstool sociologists, much in the same way "Latte Liberals" are compared with "Meat and Potatoes Conservatives" by people like David Brooks, the American media's answer to the idea of a public intellectual.

In any case, we met up with my friend's ex-girlfriend, who, with some friends, was making merry with a mixture of Red Bull and Vodka. We started talking, and she told me that she had gone to university in the US, and I was surprised to learn that her focus has been "Marxists Economics." (I imagine her diploma only said "Economics," but that's what she told me, and it makes the story better.) I asked her if she recognized the irony in a college graduate with a degree in Marxist Economics partying at a place called Gauche Caviar, and in Beirut no less. It seems that as an Anglophone, she had been going to the bar for some time before someone explained the name to her.

This weekend, I saw that same lovely woman in a nightclub called Basement, whose ingenious new slogan is "It's Safer Underground," where she was dancing atop a table to the pulsing electronic buzz of what passes for dance music these days. Despite my distaste for the DJ's repertoire, she cut a sexy figure with her cigarette tracing patterns in the dark and her scantily clothed olive skin, moving left and right and up and down, mesmerizing all but only the most unobservant or intoxicated in her close vicinity.

As I was leaving, I couldn't help myself from tapping her on the shoulder and whispering into her ear, "You know, for a Marxist, you really know how to shake your ass." 

Friday, July 13, 2007

Erasing the past one mosque at a time

Ha'aretz recently ran a piece about Israeli archaeology in the 1950s, when dozens of Mosques and holy places were razed to the ground. It's worth a read:

In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon - was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of the rift between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni, would visit the site. But after July 1950, there was nothing left for them to visit: that's when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein.

This was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel's War of Independence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing. What is unusual about the case of Mash'had Nabi Hussein is that the demolition is documented, and direct responsibility was taken by none other than the GOC Southern Command at the time, an officer named Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site was blown up deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod.

...

David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of Majdal at the time, says "he does not want to return" to that period. The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan's bureau chief during his term as chief of staff and remained close to him for years, says he himself did not serve in Southern Command at the time and therefore is not familiar with the destruction of mosques in Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heard Dayan issue any such order.

"As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs from Zakariyya, but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still there," Bar-On says. "I know that in the South, in the villages of Bureir and Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil], the villages were leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not familiar with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn't sound reasonable to me."

The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter's book "Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology," published in Britain (Equinox Publishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the Antiquities Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider himself a "new historian" and has no accounts to settle with Zionism or the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes across in his book to no small degree as one of destruction: the utter destruction of towns and villages, the destruction of an entire culture - its present but also its past, from 3,000-year-old Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at the last minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the other. Had it not been for a few fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save these historical monuments, they might all have been wiped off the face of the earth.

As the documents quoted in the book show, only a small part of this devastation occurred in the heat of battle. The vast majority took place later, because the remnants of the Arab past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked facts everyone wanted to forget. "The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighborhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage," wrote A. Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in an August 1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter's book. A copy was sent to Yeivin in the Department of Antiquities. "In the past nine years, many ruins have been cleared ... However, those that remain now stand out even more prominently in sharp contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are irreparable or have no archaeological value should be cleared away." The letter, Dotan noted, was written "at the instruction of the foreign minister," Golda Meir.

The piece is long-ish, but well worth reading in full. It tells of a systematic destruction of Palestine's Arab past, including Israeli soldiers' raids into museums and archaeological digs in order to steal and destroy artifacts and burn down the offices of foreign archeological expeditions.

Beirut's bloody hot summer

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

On moderation

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

More on arming the Middle East

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

Monday, July 30, 2007

Arming the Middle East

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

"Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa"

A new friend of mine sent me a blog entry on a Washington Post piece attacking Americans and Europeans who want to "Save Africa," and especially those who want to "Save Darfur."

Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."

There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority. My mood is dampened every time I attend a benefit whose host runs through a litany of African disasters before presenting a (usually) wealthy, white person, who often proceeds to list the things he or she has done for the poor, starving Africans. Every time a well-meaning college student speaks of villagers dancing because they were so grateful for her help, I cringe. Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head -- because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself. And not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West's prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems.

Regardless of whether Africa is "in" or not -- whether it's the cause du jour -- if anyone's to be giving a finger rapping to well-meaning white kids from the ivy league, it certainly ought not to be Uzodinma Iweala, the American-born and -raised son of a cabinet member of the Nigerian thug extraordinaire, Obasanjo. The piece's author went to a D.C. prep school then to Harvard, and is now off to Columbia med school, so I imagine that his time in Africa hasn't been much better than that of those pasty-faced do-gooders who "fly in for internships." (Incidentally, does Iweala take the boat from Washington, I wonder?) Furthermore, I think it's telling that Granta named him in their "Best of Young American Novelists 2." 

Fairly or not, Iweala reminds me of my time in the UN system. The UN works on a quota system for permanent posts, presumably so that the secretariat be filled with people from all over the world. This might be a good thing if it weren't for the fact that the quota for countries like Nigeria are taken up by people like Iweala, not the Africans and Asians who have lived their entire lives in their native countries and had to fight against the odds to get an education while working at a human rights NGO in countries like Cameroon or Bangladesh. I once took coffee breaks with a brilliant European intern who wasn't getting paid and couldn't get a proper job in his section, despite the fact that he'd completed his PhD in a relevant field and was widely published in his field's academic journals. The person who was second-in-charge in his section was a European guy who only had the equivalent of a B.A. in his field, but whose dad happened to be a former diplomat (and UN functionary) from an African country. This guy had lived his whole life in a European capital , but he had a passport from Africa, and the intern's compatriots were over-represented at that UN organization. So that was that.

Another thing that bothers me about the remarks made by Iweala is that he doesn't mention, for example, the role that such a campaign led by Americans (mostly black and religious groups) played in negotiating an end to the civil war between the north and south of Sudan. And guys like him are the same ones who are quick to fault Europe or the US for not having done anything for Rwanda. (I'm also in that camp, but I'd like to think that I'm somewhat more consistent in my criticism.) Furthermore, what about the Congo? If Central Africa had been left to its own devices instead of given the world's largest UN peacekeeping force (from five different continents), I imagine that the death toll would be considerably worse than it already is.

So while there's something to be said about "African solutions for African problems," I'm afraid that entrusting Libya, a country that's responsible for many of the current problems in Darfur and Chad in the first place, isn't necessarily such a hot idea just because Gadaffi isn't white. Likewise, Uganda's and Rwanda's African solution to the Congo and Mbeki's African non-solution to Zimbabwe aren't exactly what I'd call steps in the right direction.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Final resolution

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

Captured Israeli soldiers

This an-Nahar report says that one of the Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah last summer is dead. The headline makes it sound like the dead is recent, but the actual article itself makes it sound like the death isn't a new thing:

Israeli Soldier held by Hizbullah Dies

One of the two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah for more than a year has died and the other is still alive the daily newspaper an-Nahar reported Saturday.

An-Nahar quoted unnamed German diplomatic sources as saying officials in Berlin tried to obtain from Free Patriotic Movement leader Michael Aoun "some information" about the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah operatives in a cross-border raid on July 12, 2006 which sparked a 34-day devastating war with Israel.

"Aoun refused to get involved in this issue. However, security agencies there understood that one of the two prisoners is still alive and the second had passed away," the report said without further elaboration.

Aoun is allied with Hizbullah, which leads a campaign backed by Syria and Iran against Premier Fouad Saniora's majority government.

The two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah are Ehud Goldwaser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26.

Hizbullah had said it was prepared to swap them for Lebanese and Arab prisoners held by Israel.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Suleiman threatens to resign

According to an-Nahar, Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese Army, has said that if the Lebanese parliament failed to elect a president by November 24 (the date when Lahoud's mandate expires), resulting in the forming of two rival governments, he would resign:

Lebanese army commander Gen. Michel Suleiman warned that he would resign if two competing governments emerged as a result of a presidential vacancy.

Suleiman said he would submit his resignation on Nov. 24, the day the term of President Emile Lahoud expires, if rival legislators failed to elect a new head of state.

The army commander said he would not tolerate a political divide that would threaten Lebanon's unity and the military institution.

"If they create two governments, I will personally hand in my resignation to each of the two governments and I will go home," Suleiman was quoted as telling ambassadors as well as political and spiritual leaders.

It's hard to say if this is a genuine effort to pressure both sides to compromise or a genuine effort to pressure both sides to choose Suleiman as president, but my initial response is that both sides need to know that Lebanon will not tolerate another formation of rival governments. A similar split marked the end of the civil war last time but would probably mark the beginning of a new civil war this time.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Al-Nakba accepted into Israeli history books

The Times reports that a new edition of Arabic text books in Israel give the history of 1948 from both Jewish and Arab points of view:

The Arabic version of a new book for a third-grade course on homeland, society and citizenship, states that “some of the Palestinians fled and some were expelled following the War of Independence” and that “many Arab-owned lands were confiscated,” said an Education Ministry official, Dalia Fenig. It refers to the establishment of Israel as a catastrophe for the Palestinians.

The book also reflects the Jewish version of the establishment of the state, as have previous books for the Arab curriculum, including the fact that the Arab parties rejected the 1947 United Nations partition plan for Palestine while the Jews were willing to accept it. About 700,000 Arabs who lived in what is now Israel left during 1948 and 1949. About 20 percent of the current population of just over seven million are Arabs.

Unfortunately, the Arab point of view is not included in the Hebrew versions of the book. Baby steps, I suppose.

I cannot stress how important it is for a good curriculum that aims at objectivity to be used in schools. This is one of the major problems in Lebanon. There is no official history of the civil war, and each side hears of the war from its own clan, to the extent that young people in Lebanon hear about the civil war at all. In any case, this is a step in the right direction in Israel/Palestine, and the Ministry of Education should be applauded. 

Update on "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Marching bands and diplomats

Via the Reading File in the Week in Review of the Times:

David J. Kilcullen, writing in the State Department’s eJournal USA about the challenges for future wars:

At present, the U.S. defense budget accounts for approximately half of total global defense spending, while the U.S. armed forces employ about 1.68 million uniformed members. By comparison, the State Department employs about 6,000 foreign service officers, while the U.S. Agency for International Development has about 2,000. In other words, the Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined — there are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service.

An Israeli in Lebanon

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Darfur and the environment

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Death in the Ogaden

US allies in Addis Ababa have been facing some pretty serious charges lately, the latest coming from the Times. It seems that in an effort to combat the mainly ethnic-Somali rebel group in the east of the country, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the government has been starving the entire region:

The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.

The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.

The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.

Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.

“Food cannot get in,” said Mohammed Diab, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia.

In this part of Africa, famine has often been used a blunt political tool by central governments to keep the periphery in line. Precedent has already been set in Addis Ababa and Khartoum. Possibly even more disconcerting, however, are allegations that the government is arming ethnic militias in order to attack the rebels:

The people of the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year. The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a field visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.

Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the Ogaden National Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan, and so the government has turned to other clans to form anti-rebel militias. In the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.

“Those Ethiopians are smart,” [former MP] Mr. Kalif, 32, said. “They know Somalis are more loyal to clans than anything else.” Tactics like these, he said, drove him to defect June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was affiliated with the ruling party, and had been representing an area in the eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.

In both cases, the actions of the Ethiopian government are disconcertingly close to those of the Sudanese government. It looks like any ethnic-based collective punishment aimed at quelling a separatist movement in Ogaden is still in the formative stage. The US should use its clout to dissuade Addis Ababa from going down the same road that Sudan has taken, as some in the House of Representatives like Randy Forbes (R, VA) have started to do by stripping Ethiopia of American aid. In any case, this is a case that Americans should keep an eye on, because it's obviously better to prevent humanitarian disasters and ethnic violence before it happens rather than wringing our hands when it does. 

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Young on Iraq

Michael Young has an unfortunate piece about how the US cannot "switch off" the Iraq war and how success may just be "around the corner."

Thursday, July 19, 2007

More on Israel's right to exist

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Telling America what it wants to hear

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Monday, July 16, 2007

Supply and demand in Beirut

I heard once that Lebanon's economy, and especially the banking sector, strangely did not follow any of the given wisdom about macroeconomics and conflict during the 15-year civil war. I don't really have anything to back this up with except for a conversation that I don't even fully recall. (If anyone does have any information on this, I'd love to read it.)

That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if it were true, because I see economic verities being brashly thwarted all the time here. My latest example is with cab drivers. Normally, a cab ride should cost me a dollar from pretty much anywhere in Beirut to anywhere. (Foreigners typically have a harder time getting the normal rate, but that's true all the time, and in most places that don't have metered cabs. As a matter of fact, it's also true in some cities that do, like the time I got ripped off in Istanbul coming from the airport because the cabby charged me the night rate.)

Lately, though, it's been hard to find a cab between East and West Beirut for the normal price. Cab drivers keep asking for two dollars (servicein, for fellow Beiruis). The other night, I did the usual haggling dance with a cabby for a ride from Gemayzeh/Mar Mkhail to Hamra. I said one dollar; he insisted on two. When I asked him why, he told me it was because there wasn't anyone around, so he needed to charge more because there were fewer fares lately.

I stopped and thought about this for a second: if there were fewer customers (lower demand) and presumably just as many cabs (equal supply), wouldn't that mean a decrease in the usual fare? Wasn't his logic flying in the face of the basic principles of supply and demand?

Well, yes and no. On paper, I should definitely be paying less than a dollar for that ride. But in the end, I suppose he was right, because I was tired of arguing about it and gave him his two dollars. 

Another attack on UNIFIL

An-Nahar reported this afternoon that UNIFIL was attacked again. (The AP has a more complete report here.) This time it was a Tanzanian contingent outside of Tyre. Thankfully there were no casualties. Both Amal and Hezbollah condemned the attack immediately.

I know it's hard to keep security in Lebanon, but the fact that this is the second attack in a month on UNIFIL (presumably by Sunni groups that may or may not have ties to al-Qaida) really doesn't look good for Hezbollah's ability to police the south.

Gimme Freedom

Last month when I was in the US, I picked up a copy of Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan after reading about it in the Times. I've been reading it in little bursts between more serious stuff related to my research, and as a whole, I've been a little disappointed. The hype was strong, but it reminds me a little of Rushdie or Zadie Smith, but not quite as clever or well-written. It does, however, have its moments, which are more often than not pretty funny.

The fat protagonist of Shteyngart's book, Misha Borisovich Vainberg, is a filthy (rich) Russian Jew who wants to go back to Brooklyn and meet his voluptuous African-American love. The only hitch is that the State Department won't let him, because his defunct Dad once killed an American businessman. About 100 pages into the book, he decides to go to Absurdistan, an oil-rich Orthodox Caspian former Soviet Republic, so as to buy a Belgian passport. When he gets there, the situation is shaky, because the country is split into two ethnicities,the Svanï and the Sevo whose dispute is similar in nature to that of the inhabitants of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Misha arrives with his American friend Alyosha-Bob at the time when the Svanï disctator is about to appoint his son as his heir. At the Hyatt, he runs into an American official who just happens to have gone to college with him:

"So let's talk politics, dog," Alyosha-Bob said, changing the subject. "Word on the Absurdi street is that the Sevo are gonna go apeshit if Georgi Kanuk's idiot son takes over. What's the official U.S. position on this one?"

"We're not really sure," Josh Weiner admitted as he pillaged a bowl of complimentary smoked almonds. "We've got a little problem. See, none of our staff actually speak any of the local languages. I mean, there's one guy who sort of speaks Russian, but he's still trying to learn the future tense. You dogs are both from this part of the world. Do you know what's gonna happen after Georgi Kanuk dies? More democracy? Less?"

"Whenever there's any kind of upheaval in this country, the pistols come out," Alyosha-Bob said. "Think of the Ottoman rebellion of 1756 or the Persian succession of 1550."

"Oh, I can't think that far back," Josh Weiner said. "That was then, and this is now. We're in a global economy. It's in no one's interests to rock the boat. Look at the stats, homeboys. The Absurdi GNP went up nine percent last year. The Figa-6 Chevron/BP oilfields are coming online in mid-September. That's, like, a hundred and eighty thousand barrels a day! And it's not just oil! The service sector's booming, too. Did you see the new Tucson Steak and Bean Company on the Boulevard of National Unity? Did you try the ribolita soup and the crostini misti? This place has serious primary and reinvestment capital, dogs."  

When Misha brings up the ethnic divide, Weiner brushes the worry aside and says that the people of Absurdistan are pragmatists. He then introduces his Absurdi pet project, Sakha the Democrat, who is editor-in-chief of the American-funded journal, Gimme Freedom, and who begs Weiner to let him have the deluxe platter with fries for lunch. Weiner tells him that the democracy budget is slim these days so he should order his meal without fries.

Discothèque dialectic

I recently went to Casablanca, a really nice "fusion" restaurant on the Corniche in Ain el-Mreisseh, to celebrate a friend's graduation from one of the American universities here in Beirut. The food was good, and the service was exceptional. Afterwards, while the rest of the family, which was in town from Jordan for the event, went home to recuperate from their busy day, I went back to East Beirut to go home but stopped at a bar with a friend of mine (the recent graduate's cousin who also lives in Beirut) for a quick drink.

The bar where we stopped is by my house and is called Gauche Caviar. For those not familiar with French or the republic's political landscape, the "Caviar Left" is often set in opposition to the "Cassoulet Right" by lazy political analysts, journalists and barstool sociologists, much in the same way "Latte Liberals" are compared with "Meat and Potatoes Conservatives" by people like David Brooks, the American media's answer to the idea of a public intellectual.

In any case, we met up with my friend's ex-girlfriend, who, with some friends, was making merry with a mixture of Red Bull and Vodka. We started talking, and she told me that she had gone to university in the US, and I was surprised to learn that her focus has been "Marxists Economics." (I imagine her diploma only said "Economics," but that's what she told me, and it makes the story better.) I asked her if she recognized the irony in a college graduate with a degree in Marxist Economics partying at a place called Gauche Caviar, and in Beirut no less. It seems that as an Anglophone, she had been going to the bar for some time before someone explained the name to her.

This weekend, I saw that same lovely woman in a nightclub called Basement, whose ingenious new slogan is "It's Safer Underground," where she was dancing atop a table to the pulsing electronic buzz of what passes for dance music these days. Despite my distaste for the DJ's repertoire, she cut a sexy figure with her cigarette tracing patterns in the dark and her scantily clothed olive skin, moving left and right and up and down, mesmerizing all but only the most unobservant or intoxicated in her close vicinity.

As I was leaving, I couldn't help myself from tapping her on the shoulder and whispering into her ear, "You know, for a Marxist, you really know how to shake your ass." 

Friday, July 13, 2007

Erasing the past one mosque at a time

Ha'aretz recently ran a piece about Israeli archaeology in the 1950s, when dozens of Mosques and holy places were razed to the ground. It's worth a read:

In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon - was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of the rift between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni, would visit the site. But after July 1950, there was nothing left for them to visit: that's when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein.

This was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel's War of Independence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing. What is unusual about the case of Mash'had Nabi Hussein is that the demolition is documented, and direct responsibility was taken by none other than the GOC Southern Command at the time, an officer named Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site was blown up deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod.

...

David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of Majdal at the time, says "he does not want to return" to that period. The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan's bureau chief during his term as chief of staff and remained close to him for years, says he himself did not serve in Southern Command at the time and therefore is not familiar with the destruction of mosques in Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heard Dayan issue any such order.

"As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs from Zakariyya, but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still there," Bar-On says. "I know that in the South, in the villages of Bureir and Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil], the villages were leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not familiar with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn't sound reasonable to me."

The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter's book "Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology," published in Britain (Equinox Publishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the Antiquities Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider himself a "new historian" and has no accounts to settle with Zionism or the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes across in his book to no small degree as one of destruction: the utter destruction of towns and villages, the destruction of an entire culture - its present but also its past, from 3,000-year-old Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at the last minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the other. Had it not been for a few fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save these historical monuments, they might all have been wiped off the face of the earth.

As the documents quoted in the book show, only a small part of this devastation occurred in the heat of battle. The vast majority took place later, because the remnants of the Arab past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked facts everyone wanted to forget. "The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighborhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage," wrote A. Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in an August 1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter's book. A copy was sent to Yeivin in the Department of Antiquities. "In the past nine years, many ruins have been cleared ... However, those that remain now stand out even more prominently in sharp contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are irreparable or have no archaeological value should be cleared away." The letter, Dotan noted, was written "at the instruction of the foreign minister," Golda Meir.

The piece is long-ish, but well worth reading in full. It tells of a systematic destruction of Palestine's Arab past, including Israeli soldiers' raids into museums and archaeological digs in order to steal and destroy artifacts and burn down the offices of foreign archeological expeditions.

Beirut's bloody hot summer

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

On moderation

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

More on arming the Middle East

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

Monday, July 30, 2007

Arming the Middle East

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

"Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa"

A new friend of mine sent me a blog entry on a Washington Post piece attacking Americans and Europeans who want to "Save Africa," and especially those who want to "Save Darfur."

Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."

There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority. My mood is dampened every time I attend a benefit whose host runs through a litany of African disasters before presenting a (usually) wealthy, white person, who often proceeds to list the things he or she has done for the poor, starving Africans. Every time a well-meaning college student speaks of villagers dancing because they were so grateful for her help, I cringe. Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head -- because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself. And not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West's prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems.

Regardless of whether Africa is "in" or not -- whether it's the cause du jour -- if anyone's to be giving a finger rapping to well-meaning white kids from the ivy league, it certainly ought not to be Uzodinma Iweala, the American-born and -raised son of a cabinet member of the Nigerian thug extraordinaire, Obasanjo. The piece's author went to a D.C. prep school then to Harvard, and is now off to Columbia med school, so I imagine that his time in Africa hasn't been much better than that of those pasty-faced do-gooders who "fly in for internships." (Incidentally, does Iweala take the boat from Washington, I wonder?) Furthermore, I think it's telling that Granta named him in their "Best of Young American Novelists 2." 

Fairly or not, Iweala reminds me of my time in the UN system. The UN works on a quota system for permanent posts, presumably so that the secretariat be filled with people from all over the world. This might be a good thing if it weren't for the fact that the quota for countries like Nigeria are taken up by people like Iweala, not the Africans and Asians who have lived their entire lives in their native countries and had to fight against the odds to get an education while working at a human rights NGO in countries like Cameroon or Bangladesh. I once took coffee breaks with a brilliant European intern who wasn't getting paid and couldn't get a proper job in his section, despite the fact that he'd completed his PhD in a relevant field and was widely published in his field's academic journals. The person who was second-in-charge in his section was a European guy who only had the equivalent of a B.A. in his field, but whose dad happened to be a former diplomat (and UN functionary) from an African country. This guy had lived his whole life in a European capital , but he had a passport from Africa, and the intern's compatriots were over-represented at that UN organization. So that was that.

Another thing that bothers me about the remarks made by Iweala is that he doesn't mention, for example, the role that such a campaign led by Americans (mostly black and religious groups) played in negotiating an end to the civil war between the north and south of Sudan. And guys like him are the same ones who are quick to fault Europe or the US for not having done anything for Rwanda. (I'm also in that camp, but I'd like to think that I'm somewhat more consistent in my criticism.) Furthermore, what about the Congo? If Central Africa had been left to its own devices instead of given the world's largest UN peacekeeping force (from five different continents), I imagine that the death toll would be considerably worse than it already is.

So while there's something to be said about "African solutions for African problems," I'm afraid that entrusting Libya, a country that's responsible for many of the current problems in Darfur and Chad in the first place, isn't necessarily such a hot idea just because Gadaffi isn't white. Likewise, Uganda's and Rwanda's African solution to the Congo and Mbeki's African non-solution to Zimbabwe aren't exactly what I'd call steps in the right direction.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Final resolution

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

Captured Israeli soldiers

This an-Nahar report says that one of the Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah last summer is dead. The headline makes it sound like the dead is recent, but the actual article itself makes it sound like the death isn't a new thing:

Israeli Soldier held by Hizbullah Dies

One of the two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah for more than a year has died and the other is still alive the daily newspaper an-Nahar reported Saturday.

An-Nahar quoted unnamed German diplomatic sources as saying officials in Berlin tried to obtain from Free Patriotic Movement leader Michael Aoun "some information" about the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah operatives in a cross-border raid on July 12, 2006 which sparked a 34-day devastating war with Israel.

"Aoun refused to get involved in this issue. However, security agencies there understood that one of the two prisoners is still alive and the second had passed away," the report said without further elaboration.

Aoun is allied with Hizbullah, which leads a campaign backed by Syria and Iran against Premier Fouad Saniora's majority government.

The two Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah are Ehud Goldwaser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26.

Hizbullah had said it was prepared to swap them for Lebanese and Arab prisoners held by Israel.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Suleiman threatens to resign

According to an-Nahar, Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese Army, has said that if the Lebanese parliament failed to elect a president by November 24 (the date when Lahoud's mandate expires), resulting in the forming of two rival governments, he would resign:

Lebanese army commander Gen. Michel Suleiman warned that he would resign if two competing governments emerged as a result of a presidential vacancy.

Suleiman said he would submit his resignation on Nov. 24, the day the term of President Emile Lahoud expires, if rival legislators failed to elect a new head of state.

The army commander said he would not tolerate a political divide that would threaten Lebanon's unity and the military institution.

"If they create two governments, I will personally hand in my resignation to each of the two governments and I will go home," Suleiman was quoted as telling ambassadors as well as political and spiritual leaders.

It's hard to say if this is a genuine effort to pressure both sides to compromise or a genuine effort to pressure both sides to choose Suleiman as president, but my initial response is that both sides need to know that Lebanon will not tolerate another formation of rival governments. A similar split marked the end of the civil war last time but would probably mark the beginning of a new civil war this time.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Al-Nakba accepted into Israeli history books

The Times reports that a new edition of Arabic text books in Israel give the history of 1948 from both Jewish and Arab points of view:

The Arabic version of a new book for a third-grade course on homeland, society and citizenship, states that “some of the Palestinians fled and some were expelled following the War of Independence” and that “many Arab-owned lands were confiscated,” said an Education Ministry official, Dalia Fenig. It refers to the establishment of Israel as a catastrophe for the Palestinians.

The book also reflects the Jewish version of the establishment of the state, as have previous books for the Arab curriculum, including the fact that the Arab parties rejected the 1947 United Nations partition plan for Palestine while the Jews were willing to accept it. About 700,000 Arabs who lived in what is now Israel left during 1948 and 1949. About 20 percent of the current population of just over seven million are Arabs.

Unfortunately, the Arab point of view is not included in the Hebrew versions of the book. Baby steps, I suppose.

I cannot stress how important it is for a good curriculum that aims at objectivity to be used in schools. This is one of the major problems in Lebanon. There is no official history of the civil war, and each side hears of the war from its own clan, to the extent that young people in Lebanon hear about the civil war at all. In any case, this is a step in the right direction in Israel/Palestine, and the Ministry of Education should be applauded. 

Update on "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Marching bands and diplomats

Via the Reading File in the Week in Review of the Times:

David J. Kilcullen, writing in the State Department’s eJournal USA about the challenges for future wars:

At present, the U.S. defense budget accounts for approximately half of total global defense spending, while the U.S. armed forces employ about 1.68 million uniformed members. By comparison, the State Department employs about 6,000 foreign service officers, while the U.S. Agency for International Development has about 2,000. In other words, the Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined — there are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service.

An Israeli in Lebanon

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Darfur and the environment

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Death in the Ogaden

US allies in Addis Ababa have been facing some pretty serious charges lately, the latest coming from the Times. It seems that in an effort to combat the mainly ethnic-Somali rebel group in the east of the country, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the government has been starving the entire region:

The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.

The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.

The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.

Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.

“Food cannot get in,” said Mohammed Diab, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia.

In this part of Africa, famine has often been used a blunt political tool by central governments to keep the periphery in line. Precedent has already been set in Addis Ababa and Khartoum. Possibly even more disconcerting, however, are allegations that the government is arming ethnic militias in order to attack the rebels:

The people of the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year. The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a field visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.

Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the Ogaden National Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan, and so the government has turned to other clans to form anti-rebel militias. In the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.

“Those Ethiopians are smart,” [former MP] Mr. Kalif, 32, said. “They know Somalis are more loyal to clans than anything else.” Tactics like these, he said, drove him to defect June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was affiliated with the ruling party, and had been representing an area in the eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.

In both cases, the actions of the Ethiopian government are disconcertingly close to those of the Sudanese government. It looks like any ethnic-based collective punishment aimed at quelling a separatist movement in Ogaden is still in the formative stage. The US should use its clout to dissuade Addis Ababa from going down the same road that Sudan has taken, as some in the House of Representatives like Randy Forbes (R, VA) have started to do by stripping Ethiopia of American aid. In any case, this is a case that Americans should keep an eye on, because it's obviously better to prevent humanitarian disasters and ethnic violence before it happens rather than wringing our hands when it does. 

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Young on Iraq

Michael Young has an unfortunate piece about how the US cannot "switch off" the Iraq war and how success may just be "around the corner."

Thursday, July 19, 2007

More on Israel's right to exist

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Telling America what it wants to hear

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Monday, July 16, 2007

Supply and demand in Beirut

I heard once that Lebanon's economy, and especially the banking sector, strangely did not follow any of the given wisdom about macroeconomics and conflict during the 15-year civil war. I don't really have anything to back this up with except for a conversation that I don't even fully recall. (If anyone does have any information on this, I'd love to read it.)

That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if it were true, because I see economic verities being brashly thwarted all the time here. My latest example is with cab drivers. Normally, a cab ride should cost me a dollar from pretty much anywhere in Beirut to anywhere. (Foreigners typically have a harder time getting the normal rate, but that's true all the time, and in most places that don't have metered cabs. As a matter of fact, it's also true in some cities that do, like the time I got ripped off in Istanbul coming from the airport because the cabby charged me the night rate.)

Lately, though, it's been hard to find a cab between East and West Beirut for the normal price. Cab drivers keep asking for two dollars (servicein, for fellow Beiruis). The other night, I did the usual haggling dance with a cabby for a ride from Gemayzeh/Mar Mkhail to Hamra. I said one dollar; he insisted on two. When I asked him why, he told me it was because there wasn't anyone around, so he needed to charge more because there were fewer fares lately.

I stopped and thought about this for a second: if there were fewer customers (lower demand) and presumably just as many cabs (equal supply), wouldn't that mean a decrease in the usual fare? Wasn't his logic flying in the face of the basic principles of supply and demand?

Well, yes and no. On paper, I should definitely be paying less than a dollar for that ride. But in the end, I suppose he was right, because I was tired of arguing about it and gave him his two dollars. 

Another attack on UNIFIL

An-Nahar reported this afternoon that UNIFIL was attacked again. (The AP has a more complete report here.) This time it was a Tanzanian contingent outside of Tyre. Thankfully there were no casualties. Both Amal and Hezbollah condemned the attack immediately.

I know it's hard to keep security in Lebanon, but the fact that this is the second attack in a month on UNIFIL (presumably by Sunni groups that may or may not have ties to al-Qaida) really doesn't look good for Hezbollah's ability to police the south.

Gimme Freedom

Last month when I was in the US, I picked up a copy of Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan after reading about it in the Times. I've been reading it in little bursts between more serious stuff related to my research, and as a whole, I've been a little disappointed. The hype was strong, but it reminds me a little of Rushdie or Zadie Smith, but not quite as clever or well-written. It does, however, have its moments, which are more often than not pretty funny.

The fat protagonist of Shteyngart's book, Misha Borisovich Vainberg, is a filthy (rich) Russian Jew who wants to go back to Brooklyn and meet his voluptuous African-American love. The only hitch is that the State Department won't let him, because his defunct Dad once killed an American businessman. About 100 pages into the book, he decides to go to Absurdistan, an oil-rich Orthodox Caspian former Soviet Republic, so as to buy a Belgian passport. When he gets there, the situation is shaky, because the country is split into two ethnicities,the Svanï and the Sevo whose dispute is similar in nature to that of the inhabitants of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Misha arrives with his American friend Alyosha-Bob at the time when the Svanï disctator is about to appoint his son as his heir. At the Hyatt, he runs into an American official who just happens to have gone to college with him:

"So let's talk politics, dog," Alyosha-Bob said, changing the subject. "Word on the Absurdi street is that the Sevo are gonna go apeshit if Georgi Kanuk's idiot son takes over. What's the official U.S. position on this one?"

"We're not really sure," Josh Weiner admitted as he pillaged a bowl of complimentary smoked almonds. "We've got a little problem. See, none of our staff actually speak any of the local languages. I mean, there's one guy who sort of speaks Russian, but he's still trying to learn the future tense. You dogs are both from this part of the world. Do you know what's gonna happen after Georgi Kanuk dies? More democracy? Less?"

"Whenever there's any kind of upheaval in this country, the pistols come out," Alyosha-Bob said. "Think of the Ottoman rebellion of 1756 or the Persian succession of 1550."

"Oh, I can't think that far back," Josh Weiner said. "That was then, and this is now. We're in a global economy. It's in no one's interests to rock the boat. Look at the stats, homeboys. The Absurdi GNP went up nine percent last year. The Figa-6 Chevron/BP oilfields are coming online in mid-September. That's, like, a hundred and eighty thousand barrels a day! And it's not just oil! The service sector's booming, too. Did you see the new Tucson Steak and Bean Company on the Boulevard of National Unity? Did you try the ribolita soup and the crostini misti? This place has serious primary and reinvestment capital, dogs."  

When Misha brings up the ethnic divide, Weiner brushes the worry aside and says that the people of Absurdistan are pragmatists. He then introduces his Absurdi pet project, Sakha the Democrat, who is editor-in-chief of the American-funded journal, Gimme Freedom, and who begs Weiner to let him have the deluxe platter with fries for lunch. Weiner tells him that the democracy budget is slim these days so he should order his meal without fries.

Discothèque dialectic

I recently went to Casablanca, a really nice "fusion" restaurant on the Corniche in Ain el-Mreisseh, to celebrate a friend's graduation from one of the American universities here in Beirut. The food was good, and the service was exceptional. Afterwards, while the rest of the family, which was in town from Jordan for the event, went home to recuperate from their busy day, I went back to East Beirut to go home but stopped at a bar with a friend of mine (the recent graduate's cousin who also lives in Beirut) for a quick drink.

The bar where we stopped is by my house and is called Gauche Caviar. For those not familiar with French or the republic's political landscape, the "Caviar Left" is often set in opposition to the "Cassoulet Right" by lazy political analysts, journalists and barstool sociologists, much in the same way "Latte Liberals" are compared with "Meat and Potatoes Conservatives" by people like David Brooks, the American media's answer to the idea of a public intellectual.

In any case, we met up with my friend's ex-girlfriend, who, with some friends, was making merry with a mixture of Red Bull and Vodka. We started talking, and she told me that she had gone to university in the US, and I was surprised to learn that her focus has been "Marxists Economics." (I imagine her diploma only said "Economics," but that's what she told me, and it makes the story better.) I asked her if she recognized the irony in a college graduate with a degree in Marxist Economics partying at a place called Gauche Caviar, and in Beirut no less. It seems that as an Anglophone, she had been going to the bar for some time before someone explained the name to her.

This weekend, I saw that same lovely woman in a nightclub called Basement, whose ingenious new slogan is "It's Safer Underground," where she was dancing atop a table to the pulsing electronic buzz of what passes for dance music these days. Despite my distaste for the DJ's repertoire, she cut a sexy figure with her cigarette tracing patterns in the dark and her scantily clothed olive skin, moving left and right and up and down, mesmerizing all but only the most unobservant or intoxicated in her close vicinity.

As I was leaving, I couldn't help myself from tapping her on the shoulder and whispering into her ear, "You know, for a Marxist, you really know how to shake your ass." 

Friday, July 13, 2007

Erasing the past one mosque at a time

Ha'aretz recently ran a piece about Israeli archaeology in the 1950s, when dozens of Mosques and holy places were razed to the ground. It's worth a read:

In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon - was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of the rift between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi'ite and Sunni, would visit the site. But after July 1950, there was nothing left for them to visit: that's when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash'had Nabi Hussein.

This was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel's War of Independence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing. What is unusual about the case of Mash'had Nabi Hussein is that the demolition is documented, and direct responsibility was taken by none other than the GOC Southern Command at the time, an officer named Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site was blown up deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod.

...

David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of Majdal at the time, says "he does not want to return" to that period. The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan's bureau chief during his term as chief of staff and remained close to him for years, says he himself did not serve in Southern Command at the time and therefore is not familiar with the destruction of mosques in Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heard Dayan issue any such order.

"As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs from Zakariyya, but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still there," Bar-On says. "I know that in the South, in the villages of Bureir and Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil], the villages were leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not familiar with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn't sound reasonable to me."

The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter's book "Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology," published in Britain (Equinox Publishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the Antiquities Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider himself a "new historian" and has no accounts to settle with Zionism or the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes across in his book to no small degree as one of destruction: the utter destruction of towns and villages, the destruction of an entire culture - its present but also its past, from 3,000-year-old Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at the last minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the other. Had it not been for a few fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save these historical monuments, they might all have been wiped off the face of the earth.

As the documents quoted in the book show, only a small part of this devastation occurred in the heat of battle. The vast majority took place later, because the remnants of the Arab past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked facts everyone wanted to forget. "The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighborhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage," wrote A. Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in an August 1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter's book. A copy was sent to Yeivin in the Department of Antiquities. "In the past nine years, many ruins have been cleared ... However, those that remain now stand out even more prominently in sharp contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are irreparable or have no archaeological value should be cleared away." The letter, Dotan noted, was written "at the instruction of the foreign minister," Golda Meir.

The piece is long-ish, but well worth reading in full. It tells of a systematic destruction of Palestine's Arab past, including Israeli soldiers' raids into museums and archaeological digs in order to steal and destroy artifacts and burn down the offices of foreign archeological expeditions.

Beirut's bloody hot summer

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.