the human province

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

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

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.

When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

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

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

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

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

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

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

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has been much talk of a possible Iraqi descent into internecine warfare; many commentators have talked of staving off the possibility of a civil war between Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni forces in Iraq. In this Washington Post article, via &c., David Ignatius tries to convince us that "Iraq can survive this":

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn't so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn't be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn't provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

Ackerman at &c. correctly sizes this view: "In this blithe description, fifteen years of carnage and atrocity followed by a further fifteen years of foreign domination was merely a prelude to the hopeful scenes of Martyrs' Square." The truth of the matter is that Lebanon was a mess during the civil war, and although there was technically a central government, sectarian militias ruled, and countless war crimes were committed.

But even this seems to be missing the point, because for all intents and purposes, Iraq is already embroiled in a civil war. Without going all the way, former Prime Minister Allawi, while speaking in Amman last month, said, "[American] policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak." Watching wave after wave of Sunni suicide attacks, now aimed at Shi'ite clerics and children and Shi'ite death squads roaming Sunni villages looking for revenge, it should be clear that just because there is a foreign occupation, which is also being combatted, does not mean that there is not already a civil war raging in Mesopotamia.

In Patrick Cockburn's interesting piece in this issue of the London Review of Books, he reports from Baghdad on the violence between the different groups all vying, in one way or another, for power in Iraq:

Hatred between Sunni and Shia Arabs has been intensifying over the past few months. Iraqis used to claim that sectarianism had been fomented or exacerbated by Saddam. In reality the tension between Sunni, Shia and Kurd has always shaped Iraqi politics. All the exiled parties returning after the fall of Saddam had a sectarian or ethnic base. The Sunnis opposed the US invasion, the Kurds supported it and the Shias, 60 per cent of the population, hoped to use it to give their community a share of power at last.

The army and police recruits killed by the suicide bombers are mostly Shia. Al-Qaida in Iraq, the shadowy group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, denounces the Shia as apostates. There are also near daily massacres of working-class Shias. Now the Shias have started to strike back. The bodies of Sunnis are being found in rubbish dumps across Baghdad. 'I was told in Najaf by senior leaders that they have killed upwards of a thousand Sunnis,' an Iraqi official said. Often the killers belong, at least nominally, to the government's paramilitary forces, including the police commandos. These commandos seem increasingly to be operating under the control of certain Shias, who may be members of the Badr Brigade, the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the country's largest militia, with up to seventy thousand men.

The commandos, whose units have macho names such as Wolf Brigade and Lion Brigade, certainly look and act like a militia. They drive around in pick-up trucks, shooting into the air to clear the traffic, and are regarded with terror in Sunni districts. In one raid the commandos arrested nine Sunni Arabs who had taken a friend with a bullet wound in his leg to hospital. (The commandos claimed they were suspected insurgents, even though wounded resistance fighters generally keep away from hospitals.) The men were left in the back of a police vehicle which was parked in the sun with the air conditioning switched off: all were asphyxiated. Zarqawi has announced that he is setting up a group called the Omar Brigade specifically to target the Badr militia.

So to summarize, there is the Sunni insurgency, linked with al Qaeda, which is reported to be forming another paramilitary group called the Omar Brigade; there is the predominately Sunni counter-insurgency force, the Special Police Commandos (5,000 troops); there are also Shi'ite government commandos (similar to the death squads of El Salvadoran fame) linked to and perhaps commanded by the Badr Brigade; and finally there is the Kurdish army, Pesh Merga (somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 strong).

What we appear to have in Iraq is a weak central government, incapable of providing security to its citizens but allied with foreign soldiers, fighting an insurgency, made up largely of a different sect that has its own militias, while a third group has secured its own territory and voted overwhelmingly (98 percent) for independence from the rest of the country. While the names and other particulars are of course different, the situation is not too dissimilar to that in the DRC today or Lebanon in the 1980s.

In the New York Review of Books, Galbraith's account of Iraq shows us to what extent things are fractured in Iraq and is worth quoting at length:

On June 4, Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq, attended the inauguration of the Kurdistan National Assembly in Erbil, northern Iraq. Talabani, a Kurd, is not only the first-ever democratically elected head of state in Iraq, but in a country that traces its history back to the Garden of Eden, he is, as one friend observed, "the first freely chosen leader of this land since Adam was here alone." While Kurds are enormously proud of his accomplishment, the flag of Iraq--the country Talabani heads--was noticeably absent from the inauguration ceremony, nor can it be found anyplace in Erbil, a city of one million that is the capital of Iraq's Kurdistan Region.

Ann Bodine, the head of the American embassy office in Kirkuk, spoke at the ceremony, congratulating the newly minted parliamentarians, and affirming the US commitment to an Iraq that is, she said, "democratic, federal, pluralistic, and united." The phrase evidently did not apply in Erbil. In their oath, the parliamentarians were asked to swear loyalty to the unity of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Many pointedly dropped the "of Iraq." ...

Days after the Kurdistan National Assembly convened in June, it elected Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masood Barzani as the first president of Kurdistan. Before so doing, it passed a law making him commander in chief of the Kurdistan military but then specifically prohibiting him from deploying Kurdistan forces elsewhere in Iraq, unless expressly approved by the assembly. ... The assembly also banned the entry of non-Kurdish Iraqi military forces into Kurdistan without its approval. Kurdish leaders are mindful that their people are even more militant in their demands. Two million Kurds voted in a January referendum on independence held simultaneously with the national ballot, with 98 percent choosing the independence option. ...

When he swore in his cabinet on May 3, 2005, Shiite Prime Minister Jaafari eliminated the reference to a "federal Iraq" from the statutory oath of office; this so angered Barzani that he forced a second swearing-in ceremony.

It seems unlikely that these three groups will be able to cease their fighting and come to a federal agreement any time soon. The points of conflict, most of which will need to be dealt with in any future constitution, include the strength of the central government and the autonomy of federal regions, the ownership of oil, the status of the governorate of Kirkuk, the role that Islam (and what brand of Islam) will play in the government, the sectarian and ethnic make-up of the military, what rights women will have, and what sort of relationship the state will have with the US and Iran. These are all complicated issues, which will require a fine balancing act, like the Taif agreement that ended the civil war in Lebanon, if Iraq wants to resolve its problems and steer away from internecine warfare. But in the meantime, Iraqi politics are being settled by bullets rather than ballots.

On Tuesday, Kristof showed us in the Times just how lamentable the American press has been about covering the genocide in Darfur. Generally, Kristof has reserved his criticism for Bush, counting the days of Bush's silence on the issue (141 as of May 31). But this time, he has been focusing, correctly to my mind, on the press's lack of Darfur coverage:

[T]o sustain the idealism in journalism - and to rebut the widespread perception that journalists are just irresponsible gossips - we need to show more interest in the first genocide of the 21st century than in the "runaway bride."

I'm outraged that one of my Times colleagues, Judith Miller, is in jail for protecting her sources. But if we journalists are to demand a legal privilege to protect our sources, we need to show that we serve the public good - which means covering genocide as seriously as we cover, say, Tom Cruise. In some ways, we've gone downhill: the American news media aren't even covering the Darfur genocide as well as we covered the Armenian genocide in 1915.

He goes on to tell us that "newsweeklies should be embarrassed that better magazine coverage of Darfur has often been in Christianity Today." But, according to Kristof, the worst media failure comes from, as usual, television news. Here's how much coverage the TV networks gave Darfur last year:

ABC: 18 minutes
NBC: 05 minutes
CBS: 03 minutes

By contrast, these three networks gave Martha Stewart 130 minutes of coverage last year. Furthermore, after 2 years of genocide, NBC has still yet to send a reporter to the region. But in case you think that networks don't want to send reporters to Africa, Kristof reminds us that ABC was able to send Diane Sawyer to Africa for a special hourlong edition of "Primetime Live" -- to cover Brad Pitt. To emphasize his point, Kristof gives us some more star spangled numbers:

If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.

The BBC has shown that outstanding television coverage of Darfur is possible. And, incredibly, mtvU (the MTV channel aimed at universities) has covered Darfur more seriously than any network or cable station. When MTV dispatches a crew to cover genocide and NBC doesn't, then we in journalism need to hang our heads.

So there you have it, in the UK, the BBC has unsurprisingly done an excellent job of covering Darfur, but in the US, the television press star has been mtvU.

This letter to the editor shows the most depressing thing about the lack of Darfur coverage:

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof's criticism of the news media for their lack of coverage of the genocide in Darfur is well founded. But this criticism begs an important question: Is the American news media's silence on the Darfur genocide a product of journalistic negligence, or is it a result of the American public's apathy toward conflicts in Africa?

Though neither alternative is desirable, the first is unquestionably preferable to the second. While bad journalism can be dealt with, a nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa is a possibility almost too frightening to fathom.

Wes Henricksen
San Diego, July 26, 2005

Naïve Mr. Henriscksen starts to address the real issue, but while it's clear that the press is not doing it's job, what's really disconcerting is that the they are giving the American public exactly what it wants: Tom Cruise, Jue Law and Michael Jackson. "Nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa," or the rest of the world for that matter, is most certainly not "too frightening to fathom." It's par for the course.

But there are some people in the US who have been paying special attention to Darfur. Professor Eric Reeves, of Smith College, has been on unpaid leave since 1999 in order to research and publicize the conflicts in Sudan. The New Republic online is offering a one week "crash course" on Darfur by Reeves, which is worth taking a look at for a good introduction to the issue. For more information, you can visit Protect Darfur, an informative British website on the issue, or you can sign a petition by Africa Action demanding US action in order to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Last Friday, in his op-ed column, Friedman wrote about "excuse makers" and "truth tellers." According to him,

[E]xcuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed.

It seems apparent that Friedman is making the common mistake of confusing explanation and vindication. The former is objective and value neutral, whereas the latter is not. It should be obvious to anyone who has thought about the issue at all that explaining terrorists' motives is not at all the same as vindicating murder. And not making that clear distinction is the sort of specious reasoning that leads to simplistic phrases like, "they hate us because we're free."

He then goes on to talk about the "truth tellers":

Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers' words also need to be disseminated globally.

For once, I agree with Friedman. Articles like this one from Al Jazeera by Soumayya Ghannoushi, who is a researcher in the history of ideas at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, are somewhat refreshing. Ghannoushi draws a comparison between revolutionary anarchists and al Qaeda, stressing that while the former finds ideological justification in Marxism, the latter finds its justification in a fundamental brand of Islam. She quotes the Qu'ran to show that al Qaeda's terrorism is irreconcilable with Islam, but in the end since she has no religious authority, this line of reasoning is neither here nor there, because like most holy texts (including the Christian Bible), for every verse Ghannoushi finds that spurns violence, a fundamentalist Mufti can find another that embraces it.

One interesting point that she illustrates, however, is that the acts of al Qaeda are instrumental in justifying racism against and the oppression of other Muslims. Terrorist violence creates a sort of "us vs. them" mentality, which traps reasonable Muslims between two extreme positions, "Bush's hammer and Bin Laden's anvil":

Although the two claim to be combatting each other, the reality is that they are working in unison, one providing the justifications the other desperately needs for its fanaticism, ferocity and savagery. ... The two share a shallow, myopic, dualistic conception of the world populated by 'us' and 'them' in Bush's language, 'believers' and 'non-believers' in Bin Laden's.

This has the perverse effect of stripping support and empathy away from some of the real victims, in whose name al Qaeda purports to be speaking, giving a negative image to all Muslims and giving a justification for further injustices, which creates more extremists, and so on ad nauseam.

Ghanoushi's article has some glaring problems, like her portrayal of the oppression of Palestinians as genocide -- while the Palestinians' situation is horrible and their treatment by the Israeli government egregious, a researcher in the field of social sciences should know better than to use the term "genocide" innapropriately. But in the end, her conclusion is just, and not only should more people in the Muslim world hear it, more people in the West should know that there are Muslims fighting al Qaeda in the war of ideas:

[T]he mindless killing of the innocent in Madrid, or New York is the wrong answer to ... real grievances. These are illegitimate responses to legitimate causes. Just as occupation is morally and politically deplorable, so, too, is this blind aggression masquerading as Jihad.

So in this vain, it is refreshing to see the Times reporting good news today in the form of Muslim religious groups officially condemning terrorism, and with a fatwa, no less:

Muslim scholars in the United States and Canada plan to release a fatwa, or judicial ruling, in Washington today saying that Islam condemns terrorism, religious extremism and any violence against civilians, including suicide bombings. ...

The fatwa cites the Koran and other Islamic texts, and says that making innocent people targets is forbidden - "haram" - and that those who commit such violence are "criminals" and not "martyrs," as supporters of suicide bombers have often claimed.

The edict is signed by 18 Islamic scholars who serve on the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Muslim jurists who interpret Islamic law, and is endorsed by more than 100 Muslim organizations, mosques and leaders.

This ruling, carried out by the Fiqh Council of North America follows a similar ruling by the Sunni Council, Jama'at e Ahl e Sunnat, in Birmingham, UK after the July 7 terrorist attacks in London and a March 11 fatwa (English translation here and in Arabic here) from the Spanish Muslim Council on the first anniversary of the Madrid train attacks. It seems curious that the Spanish and British fatwas would have gotten so little exposure in the American press, especially at a time when so many people are complaining that Muslims are not doing enough to discourage Islamic terrorism. After searching for news about the two Euopean edicts, the only major American source I could find was an AP piece printed in the Post. To my mind, these fatwas are newsworthy, and could actually help deter future attacks and save lives.

In the Times' op-ed pages last Friday, Olivier Roy attempted to explain "why they hate us." He advances the hypothesis that members of al Qaeda do not hate the West, and namely the US, because of the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, unconditional support for Israel and the stationing of troops on the Arabian peninsula. He claims that the conflicts in the Middle East are not the roots of Islamic terrorism, that they are more rallying excuses or justifications than genuine grievances.

As evidence for this, he splits hairs to show that it is not a question of the Middle East but of global jihad in places like Bosnia, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya. He arrives at the conclusion that Islamic terrorism is a product of globalization rather than actual Western foreign policy, and that the ranks of al Qaeda and likeminded groups are filled with westernized "converts" -- Islamic "born agains," if you will -- who have lived in Europe or the US and have become disenchanted with Western life:

The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.

First of all, I'm not sure that Roy's description of Islamic terrorists is necessarily correct. While there are certainly many westernized young militants within the ranks of international terrorist groups, who have either studied, lived or were born in the West, it's not obvious that all or even most international terrorists fit this description. Finally, while there is a clear difference between local groups like Hamas and Hizbollah and international groups like al Qaeda, it's not evident that their complaints are so terribly different.

According to Roy, the reasons given by international terrorist groups are not genuine. According to him, their claims of solidarity with Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans are hollow and mask a larger combat, namely a sort of reconquista of the ummah, or the global community of the faithful, which they feel has been under attack from Western powers, or maybe even just infidel powers, from Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan to the occupation of Iraq, Serbian war crimes in Bosnia and the Jewish settling of Palestine:

From the beginning, Al Qaeda's fighters were global jihadists, and their favored battlegrounds have been outside the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers.

Up to this point, his analysis seems very reasonable, but Roy then goes on to say that al Qaeda's list of complaints is disingenuous, that international terrorists don't really care about Palestine, Afghanistan or Bosnia and that these war cries are only justifications for a larger more generalized battle against Western cultural and military dominance brought on by globalization:

[I]f the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

To my mind this is similar to asking why a protestant preacher from Kansas or Mississippi would be more upset about gay marriage in Massachusetts than the residents of that state are. Like the fire and brimstone zealots of flyover America claim to speak in the name of the rest of the country, al Qaeda has decided to speak for all of Islam. There is a fundamental similarity between the two groups: a strong will to force a politico-religious worldview on other people, presumably for their own good. While this approach is obviously obtuse and shortsighted, it does not mean that the two groups of extremists don't actually care passionately about Afghanistan and the sanctity of marriage in Massachusetts. If anything, Islamic terrorists are more willing to put their money where their mouth is by traveling to places like Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan in order to fight and die for their worldview. In both cases one finds a similar feeling of victimhood, a defensive stance against a powerful enemy: Western neo-imperialism in one case and secular nihilism in the other.

In an article in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books (sent to me by a friend), Max Rodenbeck reviews Roy's book, among others, and compares global Islamic terrorism to the leftist radicals of the 60s and 70s, in so far as groups like the Italian Red Brigades were trying to spark a worldwide revolution against the capitalist masters oppressing the proletariat. But the analogy only seems to work to a certain extent, because up to now, Islamic terrorist groups have not stated a goal of creating a worldwide caliphate, but rather have only spoken of regaining lost ground. So while the tactics are similar, the goals seem different: without speaking of tactics, which are similar in both cases, the goals of the two groups seem very different: today's terrorism is reactionary and defensive in nature, while radical Marxists were radical and offensive.

Finally, Roy remarks that "none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. They don't distribute leaflets or collect money for hospitals and schools." Presumably, by "legitimate," Roy means non-violent, although it's highly arguable whether or not the two words are synonymous. This seems puzzling, because often, or at least sometimes, those who engage in terrorism, or other extralegal tactics, have decided to do so because they no longer believe it is possible or effective to work within the system. (It would be interesting to see how many members of militant groups in the US and Europe, like the Animal Liberation Front, also participate in letter writing campaigns.) Furthermore, a terrorist's reluctance to participate in legal movements can also reflect a fear of leaving traces behind that might point to their violent activities: when the ALF sets fire to a fur factory, the first people to be investigated are the members of legal groups like PETA.

So while there is a definite difference between global terrorist groups like al Qaeda and local groups like Hizbollah, their rationales for violence seem to differ mostly in scale: Hizbollah seems content with the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, whereas al Qaeda moves from one battle front to another. So for the latter, it's not just a question of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan; it's a question of Kashmir, Bosnia, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and all of the other places where these groups feel like the West is attacking Muslims, either directly, in the case of Iraq, or indirectly through proxy dictators, such as in Pakistan, Egypt and Uzbekistan. But Roy is correct in saying that westernized Muslims who already have their own complaints about their home countries are especially susceptible to a rhetoric of Islamic fraternal solidarity. That does not, however, make their outrage in response to the situation in Palestine, a place they have most likely never been to, any less genuine.

So to my mind, the main difference between local and global terrorism (Iraqi resistance and foreign fighters) is not necessarily their motivation, but rather the length of their list of complaints. So while history has shown that local terrorism tends to die down once the occupying power leaves (Lebanon) or the oppressive government shares power (South Africa), it remains to be seen if globalized terrorism will stop once its long list of complaints has been addressed. But one thing is certain: international terrorism is not going to be abated by adding more and more causes to terrorists' list of offenses.

I subscribe to a listserve for genocide scholars, and recently, there was a question about the Serbian state's sponsorship of the genocide at Srebrenica. I mentioned that although the Balkans were not my specialty, I had recently read about a video uncovered by Serbian activist and founder of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Natasa Kandic, and shown at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which showed Serbian paramilitary troops executing young Bosniaks from Srebrenica. Then I copied an article (no longer available online for free) from The New York Times.

Still image taken from the video.

I shouldn't have been surprised to immediately receive an e-mail off the list (and then later, a slightly changed version on the list) in addition to a previous message addressing the original question about genocide in Srebrenica. These all came from someone advancing that the video was a fake and that there had been no genocide in Srebrenica.

I shouldn't have been surprised, because there are more than a few genocide deniers and because according to a poll taken last spring, fewer than half of all Serbs polled even believed that the killings at Srebrenica happened at all. According to Angela Brkic, who has worked excavating mass graves outside Srebrenica, a debate on Srebrenica at the Belgrade Law Faculty was entitled, "10 Years After the Liberation of Srebrenica." This denial is so strong that several top priority indicted Serbian war criminals, like Karadzic and Mladic, are still free men today.

There has been a narrative of denial built around the wars, and many Serbs still consider themselves to have been the primary victims in the story. This, of course, runs completely counter to the international criminal tribunal. For example, in the case of The Prosecutor v. Krstic, the Appeals court found that genocide had, in fact, been committed. Explaining the judgement, Judge Meron said:

By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity. The Bosnian Serb forces were aware, when they embarked on this genocidal venture, that the harm they caused would continue to plague the Bosnian Muslims. The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name: genocide. Those responsible will bear this stigma, and it will serve as a warning to those who may in future contemplate the commission of such a heinous act.

Serbia could learn a lesson by coming to terms with its past, which would mean surrendering indicted war criminals and admitting to past genocide. The current government has made some progress, as was shown by the rapid arrests that were made after the tape came to light, but the Serbian people seem to be stuck in a narrative of denial.

One of my colleagues at work is Serbian, and while she believes that the Serbian government committed genocide and other crimes against humanity, she said that she would never say so in Belgrade, because "they would kill me." The scariest part of that sentence, as Natasa Kandic can bear witness to, is that she's not talking about a malevolent autocratic government; she's talking about average citizens.

In the past few years, there has been a concerted effort to try to understand terrorism, and particularly suicide terrorism. There have been varying levels of conventional wisdom put forth, which tell us that suicide terrorism is an Islamic creation, because of the rhetoric of religious martyrdom, or that the key to suicide terrorism is economic, only poor, isolated and futureless people will choose to blow themselves up. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, shows us otherwise in his article, sent to me by a friend,The Strategic Logic of Terrorism (pdf), published in 2003 in the American Political Science Review and expanded into book form this Spring as Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

Pape has compiled a complete database of every known suicide terrorist attack between 1980 and early 2004. His research was conducted in many different languages -- Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil and Russian, among others -- in order to better understand suicide terrorism through the materials written by terrorist organizations themselves. Although I have yet to read the book, his article draws five main conclusions:

1. "Suicide terrorism is strategic. ... Groups using suicide terrorism consistently announce specific political goals and stop suicide terrorism when those goals have been fully or partially achieved."

2. "The strategic logic of suicide terrorism is specifically designed to coerce modern democracies to make significant concessions to national self-determination. In general, suicide terrorist campaigns seek to achieve specific territorial goals, most often the withdrawal of the target state?s military forces from what the terrorists see as national homeland."

3. "Suicide terrorism has been steadily rising, because terrorists have learned that it pays."

4. "Although moderate suicide terrorism led to moderate concession ... more ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns are not likely to achieve still greater gains and may well fail completely."

5. "States that face persistent suicide terrorism should recognize that neither offensive military action nor concessions alone are likely to do much good..."

While drawing these conclusions through the study of nearly 500 cases of suicide terrorism, he dispels some of the myths and misconceptions that are generally held to be conventional wisdom on the subject.

First, he shows that the majority of Suicide bombers are not Islamic fundamentalists, but rather Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, who come predominately from Hindu families. Second, while no one religion has a monopoly on suicide terrorism -- there were several Christian suicide terrorists in Lebanon in the 1980s -- there is usually a difference in religion between the perpetrator and the target of suicide terrorism. Third, through biographical studies of suicide terrorists, he shows that they can be poor or rich, religious or secular, men or women, young or middle aged. What links this broad base of backgrounds is the belief in a political goal, which is generally forcing the withdrawal of occupying enemy forces from one?s homeland. Oftentimes, such as in Chechnya, Iraq and Palestine, this comes in the form of a force that is perceived as being foreign and hostile actively and explicitly exercising political power on another population. In other cases, such as in Saudi Arabia, while the American forces present do not constitute an occupation per se, the threat of such an occupation remains a real fear for supporters of al Qaeda. According to Pape, in a recent interview with a conservative magazine, also pointed out to me by a friend,

In 1996, [Osama Bin Laden] went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States?that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.

Of course, this is nothing new, al Qaeda has always had a list of complaints against the US, and the main one, until the invasion of Iraq, has always been the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

So where does this leave us? What can be done to stop suicide terrorism? When asked if it was too late to try to wind down suicide terrorism against the US, Pape responded,

Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop?and often on a dime.

In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn't completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.

This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.
That doesn?t mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush. There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him. That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism.

It seems obvious that anyone seriously and sincerely interested in stopping terrorism should try to understand its roots. This does not mean a facile recourse to clichés about how "savage muslims hate our freedom." We know that fundamentalist Islamic groups in Nigeria, Iran and Sudan, for example, are not producing suicide terrorists. And those groups from Saudi Arabia and Iraq that are producing acts of suicide terrorism are not attacking Sweden, Switzerland or Canada, but rather the US, Spain and the UK, governments supporting an occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.

Terrorism is a tactic, and as such is suited to certain circumstances. It's high time that the US start taking it seriously as a political strategy, which means taking measures to quell it rather than adding fuel to its fire.

Yesterday's workday was interrupted right after it had begun by the news of the horrible bombings in London, which have killed "at least least fifty."

My first reaction was to call friends in London to make sure that they're all right, and then I started thinking about the event, turning it over in my head. Dozens of British people on their way to work, dead. My second reaction was dismay, which was shortly followed by guilt. Dozens of people die in Iraq every week, but I've become used to it since I can't take the Eurostar there from here.

The main two narratives being sold by the Bush and Blair administrations are "they hate us because we're free," and "we're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home." The first position is obviously and demonstrably false. Militant Islamic zealots don't hate freedom or women's rights, otherwise they would be attacking Iceland, Sweden and Canada. Juan Cole has it right when discussing Michael Sheuer, the former Bin Laden analyst for the CIA, and his view of the implications of the London attacks:

Scheuer believes that al-Qaeda is an insurgent ideology focused on destroying the United States and its allies, because its members believe that the US is trying to destroy them. Al-Qaeda members see the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, backed by the US; US support for military regimes like those of Pakistan and Egypt; and US military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence of a US onslaught on Islam and Muslims aimed at reducing them to neo-colonial slavery. That is, specific Western policies are the focus of al-Qaeda response, not a generalized "hatred" of "values."

And the only group that has taken credit for the attacks says as much in their statement, of which wikipedia has posted a translation (emphasis mine):

The Secret Organization Group of Al-Qa'idah of Jihad Organization in Europe (Jama'at al-Tanzim al-Sirri, Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Urupa) In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and the dauntless fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

O nation of Islam and nation of Arabism: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge from the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The heroic mujahidin have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern and western quarters. We have repeatedly warned the British government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahidin exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

He who warns is excused.

God says: "(O ye who believe!) If ye will aid (the cause of) Allah, He will aid you, and plant your feet firmly."

As for the second idea, that we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home, that is also false. As a matter of fact, the truth seems to be the exact opposite. According to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, "al-Qaeda has added Iraq to its list of grievances," and, "it is probable that recruitment generally has accelerated on account of Iraq." So it seems obvious that instead of luring the remaining terrorists into Babylon to be defeated, the war in Iraq has served as a rallying cause for al Qaeda.

I am afraid that the attacks in London and Madrid are the beginning of a new phase of terrorism in which the Qaeda flare for drama, manifested in such enormous acts as the attacks in New York and Washington, will be replaced by the smaller, but more frequent, acts of autonomous and very loosely connected terrorist cells that communicate by motorbike and computer disk and cannot be arranged in a hierarchical chain of command. Leaders like Bin Laden will cease (or more likely already have ceased) to be micro managers, giving vague orders to be carried out on a local scale by terror franchises that may or may not have contact with these leaders.

British intelligence claims to have had absolutely no information that might have pointed to an attack yesterday, and there's no reason to disbelieve them. A small group of people can easily attack a soft target like the subway or a bus. Once the explosives have been acquired, a small attack becomes nearly impossible to predict or to stop. We have seen another country go down this same road: Israel. And we have seen that Israel's constant escalations and terrorist retaliations (assassinations, collective punishment, etc.) have not calmed the tide of bombings. On the contrary, they have had the opposite effect. I fear that the US, and to a much lesser extent its allies, has not learned this lesson.

It goes without saying that just like the attacks in New York are not a valid reason to bomb another country, like we did in Iraq, the reverse is also true: the invasion in Iraq is not a valid reason to bomb innocent civilians in London or Madrid. And that is the sad reality of this tit-for-tat exercise in bellicosity: the people getting killed on both sides are never those who are ultimately responsible for the violence, but rather innocent Londoners or Iraqis, who only want to live normal lives, free of violence and fear.

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

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

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.

When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

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

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

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

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

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

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

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has been much talk of a possible Iraqi descent into internecine warfare; many commentators have talked of staving off the possibility of a civil war between Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni forces in Iraq. In this Washington Post article, via &c., David Ignatius tries to convince us that "Iraq can survive this":

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn't so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn't be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn't provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

Ackerman at &c. correctly sizes this view: "In this blithe description, fifteen years of carnage and atrocity followed by a further fifteen years of foreign domination was merely a prelude to the hopeful scenes of Martyrs' Square." The truth of the matter is that Lebanon was a mess during the civil war, and although there was technically a central government, sectarian militias ruled, and countless war crimes were committed.

But even this seems to be missing the point, because for all intents and purposes, Iraq is already embroiled in a civil war. Without going all the way, former Prime Minister Allawi, while speaking in Amman last month, said, "[American] policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak." Watching wave after wave of Sunni suicide attacks, now aimed at Shi'ite clerics and children and Shi'ite death squads roaming Sunni villages looking for revenge, it should be clear that just because there is a foreign occupation, which is also being combatted, does not mean that there is not already a civil war raging in Mesopotamia.

In Patrick Cockburn's interesting piece in this issue of the London Review of Books, he reports from Baghdad on the violence between the different groups all vying, in one way or another, for power in Iraq:

Hatred between Sunni and Shia Arabs has been intensifying over the past few months. Iraqis used to claim that sectarianism had been fomented or exacerbated by Saddam. In reality the tension between Sunni, Shia and Kurd has always shaped Iraqi politics. All the exiled parties returning after the fall of Saddam had a sectarian or ethnic base. The Sunnis opposed the US invasion, the Kurds supported it and the Shias, 60 per cent of the population, hoped to use it to give their community a share of power at last.

The army and police recruits killed by the suicide bombers are mostly Shia. Al-Qaida in Iraq, the shadowy group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, denounces the Shia as apostates. There are also near daily massacres of working-class Shias. Now the Shias have started to strike back. The bodies of Sunnis are being found in rubbish dumps across Baghdad. 'I was told in Najaf by senior leaders that they have killed upwards of a thousand Sunnis,' an Iraqi official said. Often the killers belong, at least nominally, to the government's paramilitary forces, including the police commandos. These commandos seem increasingly to be operating under the control of certain Shias, who may be members of the Badr Brigade, the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the country's largest militia, with up to seventy thousand men.

The commandos, whose units have macho names such as Wolf Brigade and Lion Brigade, certainly look and act like a militia. They drive around in pick-up trucks, shooting into the air to clear the traffic, and are regarded with terror in Sunni districts. In one raid the commandos arrested nine Sunni Arabs who had taken a friend with a bullet wound in his leg to hospital. (The commandos claimed they were suspected insurgents, even though wounded resistance fighters generally keep away from hospitals.) The men were left in the back of a police vehicle which was parked in the sun with the air conditioning switched off: all were asphyxiated. Zarqawi has announced that he is setting up a group called the Omar Brigade specifically to target the Badr militia.

So to summarize, there is the Sunni insurgency, linked with al Qaeda, which is reported to be forming another paramilitary group called the Omar Brigade; there is the predominately Sunni counter-insurgency force, the Special Police Commandos (5,000 troops); there are also Shi'ite government commandos (similar to the death squads of El Salvadoran fame) linked to and perhaps commanded by the Badr Brigade; and finally there is the Kurdish army, Pesh Merga (somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 strong).

What we appear to have in Iraq is a weak central government, incapable of providing security to its citizens but allied with foreign soldiers, fighting an insurgency, made up largely of a different sect that has its own militias, while a third group has secured its own territory and voted overwhelmingly (98 percent) for independence from the rest of the country. While the names and other particulars are of course different, the situation is not too dissimilar to that in the DRC today or Lebanon in the 1980s.

In the New York Review of Books, Galbraith's account of Iraq shows us to what extent things are fractured in Iraq and is worth quoting at length:

On June 4, Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq, attended the inauguration of the Kurdistan National Assembly in Erbil, northern Iraq. Talabani, a Kurd, is not only the first-ever democratically elected head of state in Iraq, but in a country that traces its history back to the Garden of Eden, he is, as one friend observed, "the first freely chosen leader of this land since Adam was here alone." While Kurds are enormously proud of his accomplishment, the flag of Iraq--the country Talabani heads--was noticeably absent from the inauguration ceremony, nor can it be found anyplace in Erbil, a city of one million that is the capital of Iraq's Kurdistan Region.

Ann Bodine, the head of the American embassy office in Kirkuk, spoke at the ceremony, congratulating the newly minted parliamentarians, and affirming the US commitment to an Iraq that is, she said, "democratic, federal, pluralistic, and united." The phrase evidently did not apply in Erbil. In their oath, the parliamentarians were asked to swear loyalty to the unity of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Many pointedly dropped the "of Iraq." ...

Days after the Kurdistan National Assembly convened in June, it elected Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masood Barzani as the first president of Kurdistan. Before so doing, it passed a law making him commander in chief of the Kurdistan military but then specifically prohibiting him from deploying Kurdistan forces elsewhere in Iraq, unless expressly approved by the assembly. ... The assembly also banned the entry of non-Kurdish Iraqi military forces into Kurdistan without its approval. Kurdish leaders are mindful that their people are even more militant in their demands. Two million Kurds voted in a January referendum on independence held simultaneously with the national ballot, with 98 percent choosing the independence option. ...

When he swore in his cabinet on May 3, 2005, Shiite Prime Minister Jaafari eliminated the reference to a "federal Iraq" from the statutory oath of office; this so angered Barzani that he forced a second swearing-in ceremony.

It seems unlikely that these three groups will be able to cease their fighting and come to a federal agreement any time soon. The points of conflict, most of which will need to be dealt with in any future constitution, include the strength of the central government and the autonomy of federal regions, the ownership of oil, the status of the governorate of Kirkuk, the role that Islam (and what brand of Islam) will play in the government, the sectarian and ethnic make-up of the military, what rights women will have, and what sort of relationship the state will have with the US and Iran. These are all complicated issues, which will require a fine balancing act, like the Taif agreement that ended the civil war in Lebanon, if Iraq wants to resolve its problems and steer away from internecine warfare. But in the meantime, Iraqi politics are being settled by bullets rather than ballots.

On Tuesday, Kristof showed us in the Times just how lamentable the American press has been about covering the genocide in Darfur. Generally, Kristof has reserved his criticism for Bush, counting the days of Bush's silence on the issue (141 as of May 31). But this time, he has been focusing, correctly to my mind, on the press's lack of Darfur coverage:

[T]o sustain the idealism in journalism - and to rebut the widespread perception that journalists are just irresponsible gossips - we need to show more interest in the first genocide of the 21st century than in the "runaway bride."

I'm outraged that one of my Times colleagues, Judith Miller, is in jail for protecting her sources. But if we journalists are to demand a legal privilege to protect our sources, we need to show that we serve the public good - which means covering genocide as seriously as we cover, say, Tom Cruise. In some ways, we've gone downhill: the American news media aren't even covering the Darfur genocide as well as we covered the Armenian genocide in 1915.

He goes on to tell us that "newsweeklies should be embarrassed that better magazine coverage of Darfur has often been in Christianity Today." But, according to Kristof, the worst media failure comes from, as usual, television news. Here's how much coverage the TV networks gave Darfur last year:

ABC: 18 minutes
NBC: 05 minutes
CBS: 03 minutes

By contrast, these three networks gave Martha Stewart 130 minutes of coverage last year. Furthermore, after 2 years of genocide, NBC has still yet to send a reporter to the region. But in case you think that networks don't want to send reporters to Africa, Kristof reminds us that ABC was able to send Diane Sawyer to Africa for a special hourlong edition of "Primetime Live" -- to cover Brad Pitt. To emphasize his point, Kristof gives us some more star spangled numbers:

If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.

The BBC has shown that outstanding television coverage of Darfur is possible. And, incredibly, mtvU (the MTV channel aimed at universities) has covered Darfur more seriously than any network or cable station. When MTV dispatches a crew to cover genocide and NBC doesn't, then we in journalism need to hang our heads.

So there you have it, in the UK, the BBC has unsurprisingly done an excellent job of covering Darfur, but in the US, the television press star has been mtvU.

This letter to the editor shows the most depressing thing about the lack of Darfur coverage:

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof's criticism of the news media for their lack of coverage of the genocide in Darfur is well founded. But this criticism begs an important question: Is the American news media's silence on the Darfur genocide a product of journalistic negligence, or is it a result of the American public's apathy toward conflicts in Africa?

Though neither alternative is desirable, the first is unquestionably preferable to the second. While bad journalism can be dealt with, a nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa is a possibility almost too frightening to fathom.

Wes Henricksen
San Diego, July 26, 2005

Naïve Mr. Henriscksen starts to address the real issue, but while it's clear that the press is not doing it's job, what's really disconcerting is that the they are giving the American public exactly what it wants: Tom Cruise, Jue Law and Michael Jackson. "Nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa," or the rest of the world for that matter, is most certainly not "too frightening to fathom." It's par for the course.

But there are some people in the US who have been paying special attention to Darfur. Professor Eric Reeves, of Smith College, has been on unpaid leave since 1999 in order to research and publicize the conflicts in Sudan. The New Republic online is offering a one week "crash course" on Darfur by Reeves, which is worth taking a look at for a good introduction to the issue. For more information, you can visit Protect Darfur, an informative British website on the issue, or you can sign a petition by Africa Action demanding US action in order to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Last Friday, in his op-ed column, Friedman wrote about "excuse makers" and "truth tellers." According to him,

[E]xcuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed.

It seems apparent that Friedman is making the common mistake of confusing explanation and vindication. The former is objective and value neutral, whereas the latter is not. It should be obvious to anyone who has thought about the issue at all that explaining terrorists' motives is not at all the same as vindicating murder. And not making that clear distinction is the sort of specious reasoning that leads to simplistic phrases like, "they hate us because we're free."

He then goes on to talk about the "truth tellers":

Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers' words also need to be disseminated globally.

For once, I agree with Friedman. Articles like this one from Al Jazeera by Soumayya Ghannoushi, who is a researcher in the history of ideas at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, are somewhat refreshing. Ghannoushi draws a comparison between revolutionary anarchists and al Qaeda, stressing that while the former finds ideological justification in Marxism, the latter finds its justification in a fundamental brand of Islam. She quotes the Qu'ran to show that al Qaeda's terrorism is irreconcilable with Islam, but in the end since she has no religious authority, this line of reasoning is neither here nor there, because like most holy texts (including the Christian Bible), for every verse Ghannoushi finds that spurns violence, a fundamentalist Mufti can find another that embraces it.

One interesting point that she illustrates, however, is that the acts of al Qaeda are instrumental in justifying racism against and the oppression of other Muslims. Terrorist violence creates a sort of "us vs. them" mentality, which traps reasonable Muslims between two extreme positions, "Bush's hammer and Bin Laden's anvil":

Although the two claim to be combatting each other, the reality is that they are working in unison, one providing the justifications the other desperately needs for its fanaticism, ferocity and savagery. ... The two share a shallow, myopic, dualistic conception of the world populated by 'us' and 'them' in Bush's language, 'believers' and 'non-believers' in Bin Laden's.

This has the perverse effect of stripping support and empathy away from some of the real victims, in whose name al Qaeda purports to be speaking, giving a negative image to all Muslims and giving a justification for further injustices, which creates more extremists, and so on ad nauseam.

Ghanoushi's article has some glaring problems, like her portrayal of the oppression of Palestinians as genocide -- while the Palestinians' situation is horrible and their treatment by the Israeli government egregious, a researcher in the field of social sciences should know better than to use the term "genocide" innapropriately. But in the end, her conclusion is just, and not only should more people in the Muslim world hear it, more people in the West should know that there are Muslims fighting al Qaeda in the war of ideas:

[T]he mindless killing of the innocent in Madrid, or New York is the wrong answer to ... real grievances. These are illegitimate responses to legitimate causes. Just as occupation is morally and politically deplorable, so, too, is this blind aggression masquerading as Jihad.

So in this vain, it is refreshing to see the Times reporting good news today in the form of Muslim religious groups officially condemning terrorism, and with a fatwa, no less:

Muslim scholars in the United States and Canada plan to release a fatwa, or judicial ruling, in Washington today saying that Islam condemns terrorism, religious extremism and any violence against civilians, including suicide bombings. ...

The fatwa cites the Koran and other Islamic texts, and says that making innocent people targets is forbidden - "haram" - and that those who commit such violence are "criminals" and not "martyrs," as supporters of suicide bombers have often claimed.

The edict is signed by 18 Islamic scholars who serve on the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Muslim jurists who interpret Islamic law, and is endorsed by more than 100 Muslim organizations, mosques and leaders.

This ruling, carried out by the Fiqh Council of North America follows a similar ruling by the Sunni Council, Jama'at e Ahl e Sunnat, in Birmingham, UK after the July 7 terrorist attacks in London and a March 11 fatwa (English translation here and in Arabic here) from the Spanish Muslim Council on the first anniversary of the Madrid train attacks. It seems curious that the Spanish and British fatwas would have gotten so little exposure in the American press, especially at a time when so many people are complaining that Muslims are not doing enough to discourage Islamic terrorism. After searching for news about the two Euopean edicts, the only major American source I could find was an AP piece printed in the Post. To my mind, these fatwas are newsworthy, and could actually help deter future attacks and save lives.

In the Times' op-ed pages last Friday, Olivier Roy attempted to explain "why they hate us." He advances the hypothesis that members of al Qaeda do not hate the West, and namely the US, because of the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, unconditional support for Israel and the stationing of troops on the Arabian peninsula. He claims that the conflicts in the Middle East are not the roots of Islamic terrorism, that they are more rallying excuses or justifications than genuine grievances.

As evidence for this, he splits hairs to show that it is not a question of the Middle East but of global jihad in places like Bosnia, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya. He arrives at the conclusion that Islamic terrorism is a product of globalization rather than actual Western foreign policy, and that the ranks of al Qaeda and likeminded groups are filled with westernized "converts" -- Islamic "born agains," if you will -- who have lived in Europe or the US and have become disenchanted with Western life:

The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.

First of all, I'm not sure that Roy's description of Islamic terrorists is necessarily correct. While there are certainly many westernized young militants within the ranks of international terrorist groups, who have either studied, lived or were born in the West, it's not obvious that all or even most international terrorists fit this description. Finally, while there is a clear difference between local groups like Hamas and Hizbollah and international groups like al Qaeda, it's not evident that their complaints are so terribly different.

According to Roy, the reasons given by international terrorist groups are not genuine. According to him, their claims of solidarity with Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans are hollow and mask a larger combat, namely a sort of reconquista of the ummah, or the global community of the faithful, which they feel has been under attack from Western powers, or maybe even just infidel powers, from Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan to the occupation of Iraq, Serbian war crimes in Bosnia and the Jewish settling of Palestine:

From the beginning, Al Qaeda's fighters were global jihadists, and their favored battlegrounds have been outside the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers.

Up to this point, his analysis seems very reasonable, but Roy then goes on to say that al Qaeda's list of complaints is disingenuous, that international terrorists don't really care about Palestine, Afghanistan or Bosnia and that these war cries are only justifications for a larger more generalized battle against Western cultural and military dominance brought on by globalization:

[I]f the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

To my mind this is similar to asking why a protestant preacher from Kansas or Mississippi would be more upset about gay marriage in Massachusetts than the residents of that state are. Like the fire and brimstone zealots of flyover America claim to speak in the name of the rest of the country, al Qaeda has decided to speak for all of Islam. There is a fundamental similarity between the two groups: a strong will to force a politico-religious worldview on other people, presumably for their own good. While this approach is obviously obtuse and shortsighted, it does not mean that the two groups of extremists don't actually care passionately about Afghanistan and the sanctity of marriage in Massachusetts. If anything, Islamic terrorists are more willing to put their money where their mouth is by traveling to places like Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan in order to fight and die for their worldview. In both cases one finds a similar feeling of victimhood, a defensive stance against a powerful enemy: Western neo-imperialism in one case and secular nihilism in the other.

In an article in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books (sent to me by a friend), Max Rodenbeck reviews Roy's book, among others, and compares global Islamic terrorism to the leftist radicals of the 60s and 70s, in so far as groups like the Italian Red Brigades were trying to spark a worldwide revolution against the capitalist masters oppressing the proletariat. But the analogy only seems to work to a certain extent, because up to now, Islamic terrorist groups have not stated a goal of creating a worldwide caliphate, but rather have only spoken of regaining lost ground. So while the tactics are similar, the goals seem different: without speaking of tactics, which are similar in both cases, the goals of the two groups seem very different: today's terrorism is reactionary and defensive in nature, while radical Marxists were radical and offensive.

Finally, Roy remarks that "none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. They don't distribute leaflets or collect money for hospitals and schools." Presumably, by "legitimate," Roy means non-violent, although it's highly arguable whether or not the two words are synonymous. This seems puzzling, because often, or at least sometimes, those who engage in terrorism, or other extralegal tactics, have decided to do so because they no longer believe it is possible or effective to work within the system. (It would be interesting to see how many members of militant groups in the US and Europe, like the Animal Liberation Front, also participate in letter writing campaigns.) Furthermore, a terrorist's reluctance to participate in legal movements can also reflect a fear of leaving traces behind that might point to their violent activities: when the ALF sets fire to a fur factory, the first people to be investigated are the members of legal groups like PETA.

So while there is a definite difference between global terrorist groups like al Qaeda and local groups like Hizbollah, their rationales for violence seem to differ mostly in scale: Hizbollah seems content with the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, whereas al Qaeda moves from one battle front to another. So for the latter, it's not just a question of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan; it's a question of Kashmir, Bosnia, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and all of the other places where these groups feel like the West is attacking Muslims, either directly, in the case of Iraq, or indirectly through proxy dictators, such as in Pakistan, Egypt and Uzbekistan. But Roy is correct in saying that westernized Muslims who already have their own complaints about their home countries are especially susceptible to a rhetoric of Islamic fraternal solidarity. That does not, however, make their outrage in response to the situation in Palestine, a place they have most likely never been to, any less genuine.

So to my mind, the main difference between local and global terrorism (Iraqi resistance and foreign fighters) is not necessarily their motivation, but rather the length of their list of complaints. So while history has shown that local terrorism tends to die down once the occupying power leaves (Lebanon) or the oppressive government shares power (South Africa), it remains to be seen if globalized terrorism will stop once its long list of complaints has been addressed. But one thing is certain: international terrorism is not going to be abated by adding more and more causes to terrorists' list of offenses.

I subscribe to a listserve for genocide scholars, and recently, there was a question about the Serbian state's sponsorship of the genocide at Srebrenica. I mentioned that although the Balkans were not my specialty, I had recently read about a video uncovered by Serbian activist and founder of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Natasa Kandic, and shown at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which showed Serbian paramilitary troops executing young Bosniaks from Srebrenica. Then I copied an article (no longer available online for free) from The New York Times.

Still image taken from the video.

I shouldn't have been surprised to immediately receive an e-mail off the list (and then later, a slightly changed version on the list) in addition to a previous message addressing the original question about genocide in Srebrenica. These all came from someone advancing that the video was a fake and that there had been no genocide in Srebrenica.

I shouldn't have been surprised, because there are more than a few genocide deniers and because according to a poll taken last spring, fewer than half of all Serbs polled even believed that the killings at Srebrenica happened at all. According to Angela Brkic, who has worked excavating mass graves outside Srebrenica, a debate on Srebrenica at the Belgrade Law Faculty was entitled, "10 Years After the Liberation of Srebrenica." This denial is so strong that several top priority indicted Serbian war criminals, like Karadzic and Mladic, are still free men today.

There has been a narrative of denial built around the wars, and many Serbs still consider themselves to have been the primary victims in the story. This, of course, runs completely counter to the international criminal tribunal. For example, in the case of The Prosecutor v. Krstic, the Appeals court found that genocide had, in fact, been committed. Explaining the judgement, Judge Meron said:

By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity. The Bosnian Serb forces were aware, when they embarked on this genocidal venture, that the harm they caused would continue to plague the Bosnian Muslims. The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name: genocide. Those responsible will bear this stigma, and it will serve as a warning to those who may in future contemplate the commission of such a heinous act.

Serbia could learn a lesson by coming to terms with its past, which would mean surrendering indicted war criminals and admitting to past genocide. The current government has made some progress, as was shown by the rapid arrests that were made after the tape came to light, but the Serbian people seem to be stuck in a narrative of denial.

One of my colleagues at work is Serbian, and while she believes that the Serbian government committed genocide and other crimes against humanity, she said that she would never say so in Belgrade, because "they would kill me." The scariest part of that sentence, as Natasa Kandic can bear witness to, is that she's not talking about a malevolent autocratic government; she's talking about average citizens.

In the past few years, there has been a concerted effort to try to understand terrorism, and particularly suicide terrorism. There have been varying levels of conventional wisdom put forth, which tell us that suicide terrorism is an Islamic creation, because of the rhetoric of religious martyrdom, or that the key to suicide terrorism is economic, only poor, isolated and futureless people will choose to blow themselves up. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, shows us otherwise in his article, sent to me by a friend,The Strategic Logic of Terrorism (pdf), published in 2003 in the American Political Science Review and expanded into book form this Spring as Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

Pape has compiled a complete database of every known suicide terrorist attack between 1980 and early 2004. His research was conducted in many different languages -- Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil and Russian, among others -- in order to better understand suicide terrorism through the materials written by terrorist organizations themselves. Although I have yet to read the book, his article draws five main conclusions:

1. "Suicide terrorism is strategic. ... Groups using suicide terrorism consistently announce specific political goals and stop suicide terrorism when those goals have been fully or partially achieved."

2. "The strategic logic of suicide terrorism is specifically designed to coerce modern democracies to make significant concessions to national self-determination. In general, suicide terrorist campaigns seek to achieve specific territorial goals, most often the withdrawal of the target state?s military forces from what the terrorists see as national homeland."

3. "Suicide terrorism has been steadily rising, because terrorists have learned that it pays."

4. "Although moderate suicide terrorism led to moderate concession ... more ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns are not likely to achieve still greater gains and may well fail completely."

5. "States that face persistent suicide terrorism should recognize that neither offensive military action nor concessions alone are likely to do much good..."

While drawing these conclusions through the study of nearly 500 cases of suicide terrorism, he dispels some of the myths and misconceptions that are generally held to be conventional wisdom on the subject.

First, he shows that the majority of Suicide bombers are not Islamic fundamentalists, but rather Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, who come predominately from Hindu families. Second, while no one religion has a monopoly on suicide terrorism -- there were several Christian suicide terrorists in Lebanon in the 1980s -- there is usually a difference in religion between the perpetrator and the target of suicide terrorism. Third, through biographical studies of suicide terrorists, he shows that they can be poor or rich, religious or secular, men or women, young or middle aged. What links this broad base of backgrounds is the belief in a political goal, which is generally forcing the withdrawal of occupying enemy forces from one?s homeland. Oftentimes, such as in Chechnya, Iraq and Palestine, this comes in the form of a force that is perceived as being foreign and hostile actively and explicitly exercising political power on another population. In other cases, such as in Saudi Arabia, while the American forces present do not constitute an occupation per se, the threat of such an occupation remains a real fear for supporters of al Qaeda. According to Pape, in a recent interview with a conservative magazine, also pointed out to me by a friend,

In 1996, [Osama Bin Laden] went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States?that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.

Of course, this is nothing new, al Qaeda has always had a list of complaints against the US, and the main one, until the invasion of Iraq, has always been the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

So where does this leave us? What can be done to stop suicide terrorism? When asked if it was too late to try to wind down suicide terrorism against the US, Pape responded,

Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop?and often on a dime.

In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn't completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.

This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.
That doesn?t mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush. There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him. That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism.

It seems obvious that anyone seriously and sincerely interested in stopping terrorism should try to understand its roots. This does not mean a facile recourse to clichés about how "savage muslims hate our freedom." We know that fundamentalist Islamic groups in Nigeria, Iran and Sudan, for example, are not producing suicide terrorists. And those groups from Saudi Arabia and Iraq that are producing acts of suicide terrorism are not attacking Sweden, Switzerland or Canada, but rather the US, Spain and the UK, governments supporting an occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.

Terrorism is a tactic, and as such is suited to certain circumstances. It's high time that the US start taking it seriously as a political strategy, which means taking measures to quell it rather than adding fuel to its fire.

Yesterday's workday was interrupted right after it had begun by the news of the horrible bombings in London, which have killed "at least least fifty."

My first reaction was to call friends in London to make sure that they're all right, and then I started thinking about the event, turning it over in my head. Dozens of British people on their way to work, dead. My second reaction was dismay, which was shortly followed by guilt. Dozens of people die in Iraq every week, but I've become used to it since I can't take the Eurostar there from here.

The main two narratives being sold by the Bush and Blair administrations are "they hate us because we're free," and "we're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home." The first position is obviously and demonstrably false. Militant Islamic zealots don't hate freedom or women's rights, otherwise they would be attacking Iceland, Sweden and Canada. Juan Cole has it right when discussing Michael Sheuer, the former Bin Laden analyst for the CIA, and his view of the implications of the London attacks:

Scheuer believes that al-Qaeda is an insurgent ideology focused on destroying the United States and its allies, because its members believe that the US is trying to destroy them. Al-Qaeda members see the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, backed by the US; US support for military regimes like those of Pakistan and Egypt; and US military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence of a US onslaught on Islam and Muslims aimed at reducing them to neo-colonial slavery. That is, specific Western policies are the focus of al-Qaeda response, not a generalized "hatred" of "values."

And the only group that has taken credit for the attacks says as much in their statement, of which wikipedia has posted a translation (emphasis mine):

The Secret Organization Group of Al-Qa'idah of Jihad Organization in Europe (Jama'at al-Tanzim al-Sirri, Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Urupa) In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and the dauntless fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

O nation of Islam and nation of Arabism: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge from the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The heroic mujahidin have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern and western quarters. We have repeatedly warned the British government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahidin exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

He who warns is excused.

God says: "(O ye who believe!) If ye will aid (the cause of) Allah, He will aid you, and plant your feet firmly."

As for the second idea, that we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home, that is also false. As a matter of fact, the truth seems to be the exact opposite. According to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, "al-Qaeda has added Iraq to its list of grievances," and, "it is probable that recruitment generally has accelerated on account of Iraq." So it seems obvious that instead of luring the remaining terrorists into Babylon to be defeated, the war in Iraq has served as a rallying cause for al Qaeda.

I am afraid that the attacks in London and Madrid are the beginning of a new phase of terrorism in which the Qaeda flare for drama, manifested in such enormous acts as the attacks in New York and Washington, will be replaced by the smaller, but more frequent, acts of autonomous and very loosely connected terrorist cells that communicate by motorbike and computer disk and cannot be arranged in a hierarchical chain of command. Leaders like Bin Laden will cease (or more likely already have ceased) to be micro managers, giving vague orders to be carried out on a local scale by terror franchises that may or may not have contact with these leaders.

British intelligence claims to have had absolutely no information that might have pointed to an attack yesterday, and there's no reason to disbelieve them. A small group of people can easily attack a soft target like the subway or a bus. Once the explosives have been acquired, a small attack becomes nearly impossible to predict or to stop. We have seen another country go down this same road: Israel. And we have seen that Israel's constant escalations and terrorist retaliations (assassinations, collective punishment, etc.) have not calmed the tide of bombings. On the contrary, they have had the opposite effect. I fear that the US, and to a much lesser extent its allies, has not learned this lesson.

It goes without saying that just like the attacks in New York are not a valid reason to bomb another country, like we did in Iraq, the reverse is also true: the invasion in Iraq is not a valid reason to bomb innocent civilians in London or Madrid. And that is the sad reality of this tit-for-tat exercise in bellicosity: the people getting killed on both sides are never those who are ultimately responsible for the violence, but rather innocent Londoners or Iraqis, who only want to live normal lives, free of violence and fear.

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

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

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.

When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

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

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

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

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

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

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

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has been much talk of a possible Iraqi descent into internecine warfare; many commentators have talked of staving off the possibility of a civil war between Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni forces in Iraq. In this Washington Post article, via &c., David Ignatius tries to convince us that "Iraq can survive this":

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn't so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn't be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn't provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

Ackerman at &c. correctly sizes this view: "In this blithe description, fifteen years of carnage and atrocity followed by a further fifteen years of foreign domination was merely a prelude to the hopeful scenes of Martyrs' Square." The truth of the matter is that Lebanon was a mess during the civil war, and although there was technically a central government, sectarian militias ruled, and countless war crimes were committed.

But even this seems to be missing the point, because for all intents and purposes, Iraq is already embroiled in a civil war. Without going all the way, former Prime Minister Allawi, while speaking in Amman last month, said, "[American] policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak." Watching wave after wave of Sunni suicide attacks, now aimed at Shi'ite clerics and children and Shi'ite death squads roaming Sunni villages looking for revenge, it should be clear that just because there is a foreign occupation, which is also being combatted, does not mean that there is not already a civil war raging in Mesopotamia.

In Patrick Cockburn's interesting piece in this issue of the London Review of Books, he reports from Baghdad on the violence between the different groups all vying, in one way or another, for power in Iraq:

Hatred between Sunni and Shia Arabs has been intensifying over the past few months. Iraqis used to claim that sectarianism had been fomented or exacerbated by Saddam. In reality the tension between Sunni, Shia and Kurd has always shaped Iraqi politics. All the exiled parties returning after the fall of Saddam had a sectarian or ethnic base. The Sunnis opposed the US invasion, the Kurds supported it and the Shias, 60 per cent of the population, hoped to use it to give their community a share of power at last.

The army and police recruits killed by the suicide bombers are mostly Shia. Al-Qaida in Iraq, the shadowy group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, denounces the Shia as apostates. There are also near daily massacres of working-class Shias. Now the Shias have started to strike back. The bodies of Sunnis are being found in rubbish dumps across Baghdad. 'I was told in Najaf by senior leaders that they have killed upwards of a thousand Sunnis,' an Iraqi official said. Often the killers belong, at least nominally, to the government's paramilitary forces, including the police commandos. These commandos seem increasingly to be operating under the control of certain Shias, who may be members of the Badr Brigade, the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the country's largest militia, with up to seventy thousand men.

The commandos, whose units have macho names such as Wolf Brigade and Lion Brigade, certainly look and act like a militia. They drive around in pick-up trucks, shooting into the air to clear the traffic, and are regarded with terror in Sunni districts. In one raid the commandos arrested nine Sunni Arabs who had taken a friend with a bullet wound in his leg to hospital. (The commandos claimed they were suspected insurgents, even though wounded resistance fighters generally keep away from hospitals.) The men were left in the back of a police vehicle which was parked in the sun with the air conditioning switched off: all were asphyxiated. Zarqawi has announced that he is setting up a group called the Omar Brigade specifically to target the Badr militia.

So to summarize, there is the Sunni insurgency, linked with al Qaeda, which is reported to be forming another paramilitary group called the Omar Brigade; there is the predominately Sunni counter-insurgency force, the Special Police Commandos (5,000 troops); there are also Shi'ite government commandos (similar to the death squads of El Salvadoran fame) linked to and perhaps commanded by the Badr Brigade; and finally there is the Kurdish army, Pesh Merga (somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 strong).

What we appear to have in Iraq is a weak central government, incapable of providing security to its citizens but allied with foreign soldiers, fighting an insurgency, made up largely of a different sect that has its own militias, while a third group has secured its own territory and voted overwhelmingly (98 percent) for independence from the rest of the country. While the names and other particulars are of course different, the situation is not too dissimilar to that in the DRC today or Lebanon in the 1980s.

In the New York Review of Books, Galbraith's account of Iraq shows us to what extent things are fractured in Iraq and is worth quoting at length:

On June 4, Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq, attended the inauguration of the Kurdistan National Assembly in Erbil, northern Iraq. Talabani, a Kurd, is not only the first-ever democratically elected head of state in Iraq, but in a country that traces its history back to the Garden of Eden, he is, as one friend observed, "the first freely chosen leader of this land since Adam was here alone." While Kurds are enormously proud of his accomplishment, the flag of Iraq--the country Talabani heads--was noticeably absent from the inauguration ceremony, nor can it be found anyplace in Erbil, a city of one million that is the capital of Iraq's Kurdistan Region.

Ann Bodine, the head of the American embassy office in Kirkuk, spoke at the ceremony, congratulating the newly minted parliamentarians, and affirming the US commitment to an Iraq that is, she said, "democratic, federal, pluralistic, and united." The phrase evidently did not apply in Erbil. In their oath, the parliamentarians were asked to swear loyalty to the unity of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Many pointedly dropped the "of Iraq." ...

Days after the Kurdistan National Assembly convened in June, it elected Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masood Barzani as the first president of Kurdistan. Before so doing, it passed a law making him commander in chief of the Kurdistan military but then specifically prohibiting him from deploying Kurdistan forces elsewhere in Iraq, unless expressly approved by the assembly. ... The assembly also banned the entry of non-Kurdish Iraqi military forces into Kurdistan without its approval. Kurdish leaders are mindful that their people are even more militant in their demands. Two million Kurds voted in a January referendum on independence held simultaneously with the national ballot, with 98 percent choosing the independence option. ...

When he swore in his cabinet on May 3, 2005, Shiite Prime Minister Jaafari eliminated the reference to a "federal Iraq" from the statutory oath of office; this so angered Barzani that he forced a second swearing-in ceremony.

It seems unlikely that these three groups will be able to cease their fighting and come to a federal agreement any time soon. The points of conflict, most of which will need to be dealt with in any future constitution, include the strength of the central government and the autonomy of federal regions, the ownership of oil, the status of the governorate of Kirkuk, the role that Islam (and what brand of Islam) will play in the government, the sectarian and ethnic make-up of the military, what rights women will have, and what sort of relationship the state will have with the US and Iran. These are all complicated issues, which will require a fine balancing act, like the Taif agreement that ended the civil war in Lebanon, if Iraq wants to resolve its problems and steer away from internecine warfare. But in the meantime, Iraqi politics are being settled by bullets rather than ballots.

On Tuesday, Kristof showed us in the Times just how lamentable the American press has been about covering the genocide in Darfur. Generally, Kristof has reserved his criticism for Bush, counting the days of Bush's silence on the issue (141 as of May 31). But this time, he has been focusing, correctly to my mind, on the press's lack of Darfur coverage:

[T]o sustain the idealism in journalism - and to rebut the widespread perception that journalists are just irresponsible gossips - we need to show more interest in the first genocide of the 21st century than in the "runaway bride."

I'm outraged that one of my Times colleagues, Judith Miller, is in jail for protecting her sources. But if we journalists are to demand a legal privilege to protect our sources, we need to show that we serve the public good - which means covering genocide as seriously as we cover, say, Tom Cruise. In some ways, we've gone downhill: the American news media aren't even covering the Darfur genocide as well as we covered the Armenian genocide in 1915.

He goes on to tell us that "newsweeklies should be embarrassed that better magazine coverage of Darfur has often been in Christianity Today." But, according to Kristof, the worst media failure comes from, as usual, television news. Here's how much coverage the TV networks gave Darfur last year:

ABC: 18 minutes
NBC: 05 minutes
CBS: 03 minutes

By contrast, these three networks gave Martha Stewart 130 minutes of coverage last year. Furthermore, after 2 years of genocide, NBC has still yet to send a reporter to the region. But in case you think that networks don't want to send reporters to Africa, Kristof reminds us that ABC was able to send Diane Sawyer to Africa for a special hourlong edition of "Primetime Live" -- to cover Brad Pitt. To emphasize his point, Kristof gives us some more star spangled numbers:

If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.

The BBC has shown that outstanding television coverage of Darfur is possible. And, incredibly, mtvU (the MTV channel aimed at universities) has covered Darfur more seriously than any network or cable station. When MTV dispatches a crew to cover genocide and NBC doesn't, then we in journalism need to hang our heads.

So there you have it, in the UK, the BBC has unsurprisingly done an excellent job of covering Darfur, but in the US, the television press star has been mtvU.

This letter to the editor shows the most depressing thing about the lack of Darfur coverage:

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof's criticism of the news media for their lack of coverage of the genocide in Darfur is well founded. But this criticism begs an important question: Is the American news media's silence on the Darfur genocide a product of journalistic negligence, or is it a result of the American public's apathy toward conflicts in Africa?

Though neither alternative is desirable, the first is unquestionably preferable to the second. While bad journalism can be dealt with, a nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa is a possibility almost too frightening to fathom.

Wes Henricksen
San Diego, July 26, 2005

Naïve Mr. Henriscksen starts to address the real issue, but while it's clear that the press is not doing it's job, what's really disconcerting is that the they are giving the American public exactly what it wants: Tom Cruise, Jue Law and Michael Jackson. "Nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa," or the rest of the world for that matter, is most certainly not "too frightening to fathom." It's par for the course.

But there are some people in the US who have been paying special attention to Darfur. Professor Eric Reeves, of Smith College, has been on unpaid leave since 1999 in order to research and publicize the conflicts in Sudan. The New Republic online is offering a one week "crash course" on Darfur by Reeves, which is worth taking a look at for a good introduction to the issue. For more information, you can visit Protect Darfur, an informative British website on the issue, or you can sign a petition by Africa Action demanding US action in order to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Last Friday, in his op-ed column, Friedman wrote about "excuse makers" and "truth tellers." According to him,

[E]xcuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed.

It seems apparent that Friedman is making the common mistake of confusing explanation and vindication. The former is objective and value neutral, whereas the latter is not. It should be obvious to anyone who has thought about the issue at all that explaining terrorists' motives is not at all the same as vindicating murder. And not making that clear distinction is the sort of specious reasoning that leads to simplistic phrases like, "they hate us because we're free."

He then goes on to talk about the "truth tellers":

Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers' words also need to be disseminated globally.

For once, I agree with Friedman. Articles like this one from Al Jazeera by Soumayya Ghannoushi, who is a researcher in the history of ideas at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, are somewhat refreshing. Ghannoushi draws a comparison between revolutionary anarchists and al Qaeda, stressing that while the former finds ideological justification in Marxism, the latter finds its justification in a fundamental brand of Islam. She quotes the Qu'ran to show that al Qaeda's terrorism is irreconcilable with Islam, but in the end since she has no religious authority, this line of reasoning is neither here nor there, because like most holy texts (including the Christian Bible), for every verse Ghannoushi finds that spurns violence, a fundamentalist Mufti can find another that embraces it.

One interesting point that she illustrates, however, is that the acts of al Qaeda are instrumental in justifying racism against and the oppression of other Muslims. Terrorist violence creates a sort of "us vs. them" mentality, which traps reasonable Muslims between two extreme positions, "Bush's hammer and Bin Laden's anvil":

Although the two claim to be combatting each other, the reality is that they are working in unison, one providing the justifications the other desperately needs for its fanaticism, ferocity and savagery. ... The two share a shallow, myopic, dualistic conception of the world populated by 'us' and 'them' in Bush's language, 'believers' and 'non-believers' in Bin Laden's.

This has the perverse effect of stripping support and empathy away from some of the real victims, in whose name al Qaeda purports to be speaking, giving a negative image to all Muslims and giving a justification for further injustices, which creates more extremists, and so on ad nauseam.

Ghanoushi's article has some glaring problems, like her portrayal of the oppression of Palestinians as genocide -- while the Palestinians' situation is horrible and their treatment by the Israeli government egregious, a researcher in the field of social sciences should know better than to use the term "genocide" innapropriately. But in the end, her conclusion is just, and not only should more people in the Muslim world hear it, more people in the West should know that there are Muslims fighting al Qaeda in the war of ideas:

[T]he mindless killing of the innocent in Madrid, or New York is the wrong answer to ... real grievances. These are illegitimate responses to legitimate causes. Just as occupation is morally and politically deplorable, so, too, is this blind aggression masquerading as Jihad.

So in this vain, it is refreshing to see the Times reporting good news today in the form of Muslim religious groups officially condemning terrorism, and with a fatwa, no less:

Muslim scholars in the United States and Canada plan to release a fatwa, or judicial ruling, in Washington today saying that Islam condemns terrorism, religious extremism and any violence against civilians, including suicide bombings. ...

The fatwa cites the Koran and other Islamic texts, and says that making innocent people targets is forbidden - "haram" - and that those who commit such violence are "criminals" and not "martyrs," as supporters of suicide bombers have often claimed.

The edict is signed by 18 Islamic scholars who serve on the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Muslim jurists who interpret Islamic law, and is endorsed by more than 100 Muslim organizations, mosques and leaders.

This ruling, carried out by the Fiqh Council of North America follows a similar ruling by the Sunni Council, Jama'at e Ahl e Sunnat, in Birmingham, UK after the July 7 terrorist attacks in London and a March 11 fatwa (English translation here and in Arabic here) from the Spanish Muslim Council on the first anniversary of the Madrid train attacks. It seems curious that the Spanish and British fatwas would have gotten so little exposure in the American press, especially at a time when so many people are complaining that Muslims are not doing enough to discourage Islamic terrorism. After searching for news about the two Euopean edicts, the only major American source I could find was an AP piece printed in the Post. To my mind, these fatwas are newsworthy, and could actually help deter future attacks and save lives.

In the Times' op-ed pages last Friday, Olivier Roy attempted to explain "why they hate us." He advances the hypothesis that members of al Qaeda do not hate the West, and namely the US, because of the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, unconditional support for Israel and the stationing of troops on the Arabian peninsula. He claims that the conflicts in the Middle East are not the roots of Islamic terrorism, that they are more rallying excuses or justifications than genuine grievances.

As evidence for this, he splits hairs to show that it is not a question of the Middle East but of global jihad in places like Bosnia, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya. He arrives at the conclusion that Islamic terrorism is a product of globalization rather than actual Western foreign policy, and that the ranks of al Qaeda and likeminded groups are filled with westernized "converts" -- Islamic "born agains," if you will -- who have lived in Europe or the US and have become disenchanted with Western life:

The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.

First of all, I'm not sure that Roy's description of Islamic terrorists is necessarily correct. While there are certainly many westernized young militants within the ranks of international terrorist groups, who have either studied, lived or were born in the West, it's not obvious that all or even most international terrorists fit this description. Finally, while there is a clear difference between local groups like Hamas and Hizbollah and international groups like al Qaeda, it's not evident that their complaints are so terribly different.

According to Roy, the reasons given by international terrorist groups are not genuine. According to him, their claims of solidarity with Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans are hollow and mask a larger combat, namely a sort of reconquista of the ummah, or the global community of the faithful, which they feel has been under attack from Western powers, or maybe even just infidel powers, from Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan to the occupation of Iraq, Serbian war crimes in Bosnia and the Jewish settling of Palestine:

From the beginning, Al Qaeda's fighters were global jihadists, and their favored battlegrounds have been outside the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers.

Up to this point, his analysis seems very reasonable, but Roy then goes on to say that al Qaeda's list of complaints is disingenuous, that international terrorists don't really care about Palestine, Afghanistan or Bosnia and that these war cries are only justifications for a larger more generalized battle against Western cultural and military dominance brought on by globalization:

[I]f the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

To my mind this is similar to asking why a protestant preacher from Kansas or Mississippi would be more upset about gay marriage in Massachusetts than the residents of that state are. Like the fire and brimstone zealots of flyover America claim to speak in the name of the rest of the country, al Qaeda has decided to speak for all of Islam. There is a fundamental similarity between the two groups: a strong will to force a politico-religious worldview on other people, presumably for their own good. While this approach is obviously obtuse and shortsighted, it does not mean that the two groups of extremists don't actually care passionately about Afghanistan and the sanctity of marriage in Massachusetts. If anything, Islamic terrorists are more willing to put their money where their mouth is by traveling to places like Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan in order to fight and die for their worldview. In both cases one finds a similar feeling of victimhood, a defensive stance against a powerful enemy: Western neo-imperialism in one case and secular nihilism in the other.

In an article in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books (sent to me by a friend), Max Rodenbeck reviews Roy's book, among others, and compares global Islamic terrorism to the leftist radicals of the 60s and 70s, in so far as groups like the Italian Red Brigades were trying to spark a worldwide revolution against the capitalist masters oppressing the proletariat. But the analogy only seems to work to a certain extent, because up to now, Islamic terrorist groups have not stated a goal of creating a worldwide caliphate, but rather have only spoken of regaining lost ground. So while the tactics are similar, the goals seem different: without speaking of tactics, which are similar in both cases, the goals of the two groups seem very different: today's terrorism is reactionary and defensive in nature, while radical Marxists were radical and offensive.

Finally, Roy remarks that "none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. They don't distribute leaflets or collect money for hospitals and schools." Presumably, by "legitimate," Roy means non-violent, although it's highly arguable whether or not the two words are synonymous. This seems puzzling, because often, or at least sometimes, those who engage in terrorism, or other extralegal tactics, have decided to do so because they no longer believe it is possible or effective to work within the system. (It would be interesting to see how many members of militant groups in the US and Europe, like the Animal Liberation Front, also participate in letter writing campaigns.) Furthermore, a terrorist's reluctance to participate in legal movements can also reflect a fear of leaving traces behind that might point to their violent activities: when the ALF sets fire to a fur factory, the first people to be investigated are the members of legal groups like PETA.

So while there is a definite difference between global terrorist groups like al Qaeda and local groups like Hizbollah, their rationales for violence seem to differ mostly in scale: Hizbollah seems content with the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, whereas al Qaeda moves from one battle front to another. So for the latter, it's not just a question of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan; it's a question of Kashmir, Bosnia, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and all of the other places where these groups feel like the West is attacking Muslims, either directly, in the case of Iraq, or indirectly through proxy dictators, such as in Pakistan, Egypt and Uzbekistan. But Roy is correct in saying that westernized Muslims who already have their own complaints about their home countries are especially susceptible to a rhetoric of Islamic fraternal solidarity. That does not, however, make their outrage in response to the situation in Palestine, a place they have most likely never been to, any less genuine.

So to my mind, the main difference between local and global terrorism (Iraqi resistance and foreign fighters) is not necessarily their motivation, but rather the length of their list of complaints. So while history has shown that local terrorism tends to die down once the occupying power leaves (Lebanon) or the oppressive government shares power (South Africa), it remains to be seen if globalized terrorism will stop once its long list of complaints has been addressed. But one thing is certain: international terrorism is not going to be abated by adding more and more causes to terrorists' list of offenses.

I subscribe to a listserve for genocide scholars, and recently, there was a question about the Serbian state's sponsorship of the genocide at Srebrenica. I mentioned that although the Balkans were not my specialty, I had recently read about a video uncovered by Serbian activist and founder of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Natasa Kandic, and shown at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which showed Serbian paramilitary troops executing young Bosniaks from Srebrenica. Then I copied an article (no longer available online for free) from The New York Times.

Still image taken from the video.

I shouldn't have been surprised to immediately receive an e-mail off the list (and then later, a slightly changed version on the list) in addition to a previous message addressing the original question about genocide in Srebrenica. These all came from someone advancing that the video was a fake and that there had been no genocide in Srebrenica.

I shouldn't have been surprised, because there are more than a few genocide deniers and because according to a poll taken last spring, fewer than half of all Serbs polled even believed that the killings at Srebrenica happened at all. According to Angela Brkic, who has worked excavating mass graves outside Srebrenica, a debate on Srebrenica at the Belgrade Law Faculty was entitled, "10 Years After the Liberation of Srebrenica." This denial is so strong that several top priority indicted Serbian war criminals, like Karadzic and Mladic, are still free men today.

There has been a narrative of denial built around the wars, and many Serbs still consider themselves to have been the primary victims in the story. This, of course, runs completely counter to the international criminal tribunal. For example, in the case of The Prosecutor v. Krstic, the Appeals court found that genocide had, in fact, been committed. Explaining the judgement, Judge Meron said:

By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity. The Bosnian Serb forces were aware, when they embarked on this genocidal venture, that the harm they caused would continue to plague the Bosnian Muslims. The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name: genocide. Those responsible will bear this stigma, and it will serve as a warning to those who may in future contemplate the commission of such a heinous act.

Serbia could learn a lesson by coming to terms with its past, which would mean surrendering indicted war criminals and admitting to past genocide. The current government has made some progress, as was shown by the rapid arrests that were made after the tape came to light, but the Serbian people seem to be stuck in a narrative of denial.

One of my colleagues at work is Serbian, and while she believes that the Serbian government committed genocide and other crimes against humanity, she said that she would never say so in Belgrade, because "they would kill me." The scariest part of that sentence, as Natasa Kandic can bear witness to, is that she's not talking about a malevolent autocratic government; she's talking about average citizens.

In the past few years, there has been a concerted effort to try to understand terrorism, and particularly suicide terrorism. There have been varying levels of conventional wisdom put forth, which tell us that suicide terrorism is an Islamic creation, because of the rhetoric of religious martyrdom, or that the key to suicide terrorism is economic, only poor, isolated and futureless people will choose to blow themselves up. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, shows us otherwise in his article, sent to me by a friend,The Strategic Logic of Terrorism (pdf), published in 2003 in the American Political Science Review and expanded into book form this Spring as Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

Pape has compiled a complete database of every known suicide terrorist attack between 1980 and early 2004. His research was conducted in many different languages -- Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil and Russian, among others -- in order to better understand suicide terrorism through the materials written by terrorist organizations themselves. Although I have yet to read the book, his article draws five main conclusions:

1. "Suicide terrorism is strategic. ... Groups using suicide terrorism consistently announce specific political goals and stop suicide terrorism when those goals have been fully or partially achieved."

2. "The strategic logic of suicide terrorism is specifically designed to coerce modern democracies to make significant concessions to national self-determination. In general, suicide terrorist campaigns seek to achieve specific territorial goals, most often the withdrawal of the target state?s military forces from what the terrorists see as national homeland."

3. "Suicide terrorism has been steadily rising, because terrorists have learned that it pays."

4. "Although moderate suicide terrorism led to moderate concession ... more ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns are not likely to achieve still greater gains and may well fail completely."

5. "States that face persistent suicide terrorism should recognize that neither offensive military action nor concessions alone are likely to do much good..."

While drawing these conclusions through the study of nearly 500 cases of suicide terrorism, he dispels some of the myths and misconceptions that are generally held to be conventional wisdom on the subject.

First, he shows that the majority of Suicide bombers are not Islamic fundamentalists, but rather Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, who come predominately from Hindu families. Second, while no one religion has a monopoly on suicide terrorism -- there were several Christian suicide terrorists in Lebanon in the 1980s -- there is usually a difference in religion between the perpetrator and the target of suicide terrorism. Third, through biographical studies of suicide terrorists, he shows that they can be poor or rich, religious or secular, men or women, young or middle aged. What links this broad base of backgrounds is the belief in a political goal, which is generally forcing the withdrawal of occupying enemy forces from one?s homeland. Oftentimes, such as in Chechnya, Iraq and Palestine, this comes in the form of a force that is perceived as being foreign and hostile actively and explicitly exercising political power on another population. In other cases, such as in Saudi Arabia, while the American forces present do not constitute an occupation per se, the threat of such an occupation remains a real fear for supporters of al Qaeda. According to Pape, in a recent interview with a conservative magazine, also pointed out to me by a friend,

In 1996, [Osama Bin Laden] went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States?that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.

Of course, this is nothing new, al Qaeda has always had a list of complaints against the US, and the main one, until the invasion of Iraq, has always been the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

So where does this leave us? What can be done to stop suicide terrorism? When asked if it was too late to try to wind down suicide terrorism against the US, Pape responded,

Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop?and often on a dime.

In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn't completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.

This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.
That doesn?t mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush. There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him. That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism.

It seems obvious that anyone seriously and sincerely interested in stopping terrorism should try to understand its roots. This does not mean a facile recourse to clichés about how "savage muslims hate our freedom." We know that fundamentalist Islamic groups in Nigeria, Iran and Sudan, for example, are not producing suicide terrorists. And those groups from Saudi Arabia and Iraq that are producing acts of suicide terrorism are not attacking Sweden, Switzerland or Canada, but rather the US, Spain and the UK, governments supporting an occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.

Terrorism is a tactic, and as such is suited to certain circumstances. It's high time that the US start taking it seriously as a political strategy, which means taking measures to quell it rather than adding fuel to its fire.

Yesterday's workday was interrupted right after it had begun by the news of the horrible bombings in London, which have killed "at least least fifty."

My first reaction was to call friends in London to make sure that they're all right, and then I started thinking about the event, turning it over in my head. Dozens of British people on their way to work, dead. My second reaction was dismay, which was shortly followed by guilt. Dozens of people die in Iraq every week, but I've become used to it since I can't take the Eurostar there from here.

The main two narratives being sold by the Bush and Blair administrations are "they hate us because we're free," and "we're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home." The first position is obviously and demonstrably false. Militant Islamic zealots don't hate freedom or women's rights, otherwise they would be attacking Iceland, Sweden and Canada. Juan Cole has it right when discussing Michael Sheuer, the former Bin Laden analyst for the CIA, and his view of the implications of the London attacks:

Scheuer believes that al-Qaeda is an insurgent ideology focused on destroying the United States and its allies, because its members believe that the US is trying to destroy them. Al-Qaeda members see the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, backed by the US; US support for military regimes like those of Pakistan and Egypt; and US military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence of a US onslaught on Islam and Muslims aimed at reducing them to neo-colonial slavery. That is, specific Western policies are the focus of al-Qaeda response, not a generalized "hatred" of "values."

And the only group that has taken credit for the attacks says as much in their statement, of which wikipedia has posted a translation (emphasis mine):

The Secret Organization Group of Al-Qa'idah of Jihad Organization in Europe (Jama'at al-Tanzim al-Sirri, Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Urupa) In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and the dauntless fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

O nation of Islam and nation of Arabism: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge from the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The heroic mujahidin have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern and western quarters. We have repeatedly warned the British government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahidin exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

He who warns is excused.

God says: "(O ye who believe!) If ye will aid (the cause of) Allah, He will aid you, and plant your feet firmly."

As for the second idea, that we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home, that is also false. As a matter of fact, the truth seems to be the exact opposite. According to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, "al-Qaeda has added Iraq to its list of grievances," and, "it is probable that recruitment generally has accelerated on account of Iraq." So it seems obvious that instead of luring the remaining terrorists into Babylon to be defeated, the war in Iraq has served as a rallying cause for al Qaeda.

I am afraid that the attacks in London and Madrid are the beginning of a new phase of terrorism in which the Qaeda flare for drama, manifested in such enormous acts as the attacks in New York and Washington, will be replaced by the smaller, but more frequent, acts of autonomous and very loosely connected terrorist cells that communicate by motorbike and computer disk and cannot be arranged in a hierarchical chain of command. Leaders like Bin Laden will cease (or more likely already have ceased) to be micro managers, giving vague orders to be carried out on a local scale by terror franchises that may or may not have contact with these leaders.

British intelligence claims to have had absolutely no information that might have pointed to an attack yesterday, and there's no reason to disbelieve them. A small group of people can easily attack a soft target like the subway or a bus. Once the explosives have been acquired, a small attack becomes nearly impossible to predict or to stop. We have seen another country go down this same road: Israel. And we have seen that Israel's constant escalations and terrorist retaliations (assassinations, collective punishment, etc.) have not calmed the tide of bombings. On the contrary, they have had the opposite effect. I fear that the US, and to a much lesser extent its allies, has not learned this lesson.

It goes without saying that just like the attacks in New York are not a valid reason to bomb another country, like we did in Iraq, the reverse is also true: the invasion in Iraq is not a valid reason to bomb innocent civilians in London or Madrid. And that is the sad reality of this tit-for-tat exercise in bellicosity: the people getting killed on both sides are never those who are ultimately responsible for the violence, but rather innocent Londoners or Iraqis, who only want to live normal lives, free of violence and fear.

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

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

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.

When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

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

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

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

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

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

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

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has been much talk of a possible Iraqi descent into internecine warfare; many commentators have talked of staving off the possibility of a civil war between Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni forces in Iraq. In this Washington Post article, via &c., David Ignatius tries to convince us that "Iraq can survive this":

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn't so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn't be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn't provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

Ackerman at &c. correctly sizes this view: "In this blithe description, fifteen years of carnage and atrocity followed by a further fifteen years of foreign domination was merely a prelude to the hopeful scenes of Martyrs' Square." The truth of the matter is that Lebanon was a mess during the civil war, and although there was technically a central government, sectarian militias ruled, and countless war crimes were committed.

But even this seems to be missing the point, because for all intents and purposes, Iraq is already embroiled in a civil war. Without going all the way, former Prime Minister Allawi, while speaking in Amman last month, said, "[American] policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak." Watching wave after wave of Sunni suicide attacks, now aimed at Shi'ite clerics and children and Shi'ite death squads roaming Sunni villages looking for revenge, it should be clear that just because there is a foreign occupation, which is also being combatted, does not mean that there is not already a civil war raging in Mesopotamia.

In Patrick Cockburn's interesting piece in this issue of the London Review of Books, he reports from Baghdad on the violence between the different groups all vying, in one way or another, for power in Iraq:

Hatred between Sunni and Shia Arabs has been intensifying over the past few months. Iraqis used to claim that sectarianism had been fomented or exacerbated by Saddam. In reality the tension between Sunni, Shia and Kurd has always shaped Iraqi politics. All the exiled parties returning after the fall of Saddam had a sectarian or ethnic base. The Sunnis opposed the US invasion, the Kurds supported it and the Shias, 60 per cent of the population, hoped to use it to give their community a share of power at last.

The army and police recruits killed by the suicide bombers are mostly Shia. Al-Qaida in Iraq, the shadowy group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, denounces the Shia as apostates. There are also near daily massacres of working-class Shias. Now the Shias have started to strike back. The bodies of Sunnis are being found in rubbish dumps across Baghdad. 'I was told in Najaf by senior leaders that they have killed upwards of a thousand Sunnis,' an Iraqi official said. Often the killers belong, at least nominally, to the government's paramilitary forces, including the police commandos. These commandos seem increasingly to be operating under the control of certain Shias, who may be members of the Badr Brigade, the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the country's largest militia, with up to seventy thousand men.

The commandos, whose units have macho names such as Wolf Brigade and Lion Brigade, certainly look and act like a militia. They drive around in pick-up trucks, shooting into the air to clear the traffic, and are regarded with terror in Sunni districts. In one raid the commandos arrested nine Sunni Arabs who had taken a friend with a bullet wound in his leg to hospital. (The commandos claimed they were suspected insurgents, even though wounded resistance fighters generally keep away from hospitals.) The men were left in the back of a police vehicle which was parked in the sun with the air conditioning switched off: all were asphyxiated. Zarqawi has announced that he is setting up a group called the Omar Brigade specifically to target the Badr militia.

So to summarize, there is the Sunni insurgency, linked with al Qaeda, which is reported to be forming another paramilitary group called the Omar Brigade; there is the predominately Sunni counter-insurgency force, the Special Police Commandos (5,000 troops); there are also Shi'ite government commandos (similar to the death squads of El Salvadoran fame) linked to and perhaps commanded by the Badr Brigade; and finally there is the Kurdish army, Pesh Merga (somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 strong).

What we appear to have in Iraq is a weak central government, incapable of providing security to its citizens but allied with foreign soldiers, fighting an insurgency, made up largely of a different sect that has its own militias, while a third group has secured its own territory and voted overwhelmingly (98 percent) for independence from the rest of the country. While the names and other particulars are of course different, the situation is not too dissimilar to that in the DRC today or Lebanon in the 1980s.

In the New York Review of Books, Galbraith's account of Iraq shows us to what extent things are fractured in Iraq and is worth quoting at length:

On June 4, Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq, attended the inauguration of the Kurdistan National Assembly in Erbil, northern Iraq. Talabani, a Kurd, is not only the first-ever democratically elected head of state in Iraq, but in a country that traces its history back to the Garden of Eden, he is, as one friend observed, "the first freely chosen leader of this land since Adam was here alone." While Kurds are enormously proud of his accomplishment, the flag of Iraq--the country Talabani heads--was noticeably absent from the inauguration ceremony, nor can it be found anyplace in Erbil, a city of one million that is the capital of Iraq's Kurdistan Region.

Ann Bodine, the head of the American embassy office in Kirkuk, spoke at the ceremony, congratulating the newly minted parliamentarians, and affirming the US commitment to an Iraq that is, she said, "democratic, federal, pluralistic, and united." The phrase evidently did not apply in Erbil. In their oath, the parliamentarians were asked to swear loyalty to the unity of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Many pointedly dropped the "of Iraq." ...

Days after the Kurdistan National Assembly convened in June, it elected Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masood Barzani as the first president of Kurdistan. Before so doing, it passed a law making him commander in chief of the Kurdistan military but then specifically prohibiting him from deploying Kurdistan forces elsewhere in Iraq, unless expressly approved by the assembly. ... The assembly also banned the entry of non-Kurdish Iraqi military forces into Kurdistan without its approval. Kurdish leaders are mindful that their people are even more militant in their demands. Two million Kurds voted in a January referendum on independence held simultaneously with the national ballot, with 98 percent choosing the independence option. ...

When he swore in his cabinet on May 3, 2005, Shiite Prime Minister Jaafari eliminated the reference to a "federal Iraq" from the statutory oath of office; this so angered Barzani that he forced a second swearing-in ceremony.

It seems unlikely that these three groups will be able to cease their fighting and come to a federal agreement any time soon. The points of conflict, most of which will need to be dealt with in any future constitution, include the strength of the central government and the autonomy of federal regions, the ownership of oil, the status of the governorate of Kirkuk, the role that Islam (and what brand of Islam) will play in the government, the sectarian and ethnic make-up of the military, what rights women will have, and what sort of relationship the state will have with the US and Iran. These are all complicated issues, which will require a fine balancing act, like the Taif agreement that ended the civil war in Lebanon, if Iraq wants to resolve its problems and steer away from internecine warfare. But in the meantime, Iraqi politics are being settled by bullets rather than ballots.

On Tuesday, Kristof showed us in the Times just how lamentable the American press has been about covering the genocide in Darfur. Generally, Kristof has reserved his criticism for Bush, counting the days of Bush's silence on the issue (141 as of May 31). But this time, he has been focusing, correctly to my mind, on the press's lack of Darfur coverage:

[T]o sustain the idealism in journalism - and to rebut the widespread perception that journalists are just irresponsible gossips - we need to show more interest in the first genocide of the 21st century than in the "runaway bride."

I'm outraged that one of my Times colleagues, Judith Miller, is in jail for protecting her sources. But if we journalists are to demand a legal privilege to protect our sources, we need to show that we serve the public good - which means covering genocide as seriously as we cover, say, Tom Cruise. In some ways, we've gone downhill: the American news media aren't even covering the Darfur genocide as well as we covered the Armenian genocide in 1915.

He goes on to tell us that "newsweeklies should be embarrassed that better magazine coverage of Darfur has often been in Christianity Today." But, according to Kristof, the worst media failure comes from, as usual, television news. Here's how much coverage the TV networks gave Darfur last year:

ABC: 18 minutes
NBC: 05 minutes
CBS: 03 minutes

By contrast, these three networks gave Martha Stewart 130 minutes of coverage last year. Furthermore, after 2 years of genocide, NBC has still yet to send a reporter to the region. But in case you think that networks don't want to send reporters to Africa, Kristof reminds us that ABC was able to send Diane Sawyer to Africa for a special hourlong edition of "Primetime Live" -- to cover Brad Pitt. To emphasize his point, Kristof gives us some more star spangled numbers:

If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.

The BBC has shown that outstanding television coverage of Darfur is possible. And, incredibly, mtvU (the MTV channel aimed at universities) has covered Darfur more seriously than any network or cable station. When MTV dispatches a crew to cover genocide and NBC doesn't, then we in journalism need to hang our heads.

So there you have it, in the UK, the BBC has unsurprisingly done an excellent job of covering Darfur, but in the US, the television press star has been mtvU.

This letter to the editor shows the most depressing thing about the lack of Darfur coverage:

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof's criticism of the news media for their lack of coverage of the genocide in Darfur is well founded. But this criticism begs an important question: Is the American news media's silence on the Darfur genocide a product of journalistic negligence, or is it a result of the American public's apathy toward conflicts in Africa?

Though neither alternative is desirable, the first is unquestionably preferable to the second. While bad journalism can be dealt with, a nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa is a possibility almost too frightening to fathom.

Wes Henricksen
San Diego, July 26, 2005

Naïve Mr. Henriscksen starts to address the real issue, but while it's clear that the press is not doing it's job, what's really disconcerting is that the they are giving the American public exactly what it wants: Tom Cruise, Jue Law and Michael Jackson. "Nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa," or the rest of the world for that matter, is most certainly not "too frightening to fathom." It's par for the course.

But there are some people in the US who have been paying special attention to Darfur. Professor Eric Reeves, of Smith College, has been on unpaid leave since 1999 in order to research and publicize the conflicts in Sudan. The New Republic online is offering a one week "crash course" on Darfur by Reeves, which is worth taking a look at for a good introduction to the issue. For more information, you can visit Protect Darfur, an informative British website on the issue, or you can sign a petition by Africa Action demanding US action in order to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Last Friday, in his op-ed column, Friedman wrote about "excuse makers" and "truth tellers." According to him,

[E]xcuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed.

It seems apparent that Friedman is making the common mistake of confusing explanation and vindication. The former is objective and value neutral, whereas the latter is not. It should be obvious to anyone who has thought about the issue at all that explaining terrorists' motives is not at all the same as vindicating murder. And not making that clear distinction is the sort of specious reasoning that leads to simplistic phrases like, "they hate us because we're free."

He then goes on to talk about the "truth tellers":

Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers' words also need to be disseminated globally.

For once, I agree with Friedman. Articles like this one from Al Jazeera by Soumayya Ghannoushi, who is a researcher in the history of ideas at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, are somewhat refreshing. Ghannoushi draws a comparison between revolutionary anarchists and al Qaeda, stressing that while the former finds ideological justification in Marxism, the latter finds its justification in a fundamental brand of Islam. She quotes the Qu'ran to show that al Qaeda's terrorism is irreconcilable with Islam, but in the end since she has no religious authority, this line of reasoning is neither here nor there, because like most holy texts (including the Christian Bible), for every verse Ghannoushi finds that spurns violence, a fundamentalist Mufti can find another that embraces it.

One interesting point that she illustrates, however, is that the acts of al Qaeda are instrumental in justifying racism against and the oppression of other Muslims. Terrorist violence creates a sort of "us vs. them" mentality, which traps reasonable Muslims between two extreme positions, "Bush's hammer and Bin Laden's anvil":

Although the two claim to be combatting each other, the reality is that they are working in unison, one providing the justifications the other desperately needs for its fanaticism, ferocity and savagery. ... The two share a shallow, myopic, dualistic conception of the world populated by 'us' and 'them' in Bush's language, 'believers' and 'non-believers' in Bin Laden's.

This has the perverse effect of stripping support and empathy away from some of the real victims, in whose name al Qaeda purports to be speaking, giving a negative image to all Muslims and giving a justification for further injustices, which creates more extremists, and so on ad nauseam.

Ghanoushi's article has some glaring problems, like her portrayal of the oppression of Palestinians as genocide -- while the Palestinians' situation is horrible and their treatment by the Israeli government egregious, a researcher in the field of social sciences should know better than to use the term "genocide" innapropriately. But in the end, her conclusion is just, and not only should more people in the Muslim world hear it, more people in the West should know that there are Muslims fighting al Qaeda in the war of ideas:

[T]he mindless killing of the innocent in Madrid, or New York is the wrong answer to ... real grievances. These are illegitimate responses to legitimate causes. Just as occupation is morally and politically deplorable, so, too, is this blind aggression masquerading as Jihad.

So in this vain, it is refreshing to see the Times reporting good news today in the form of Muslim religious groups officially condemning terrorism, and with a fatwa, no less:

Muslim scholars in the United States and Canada plan to release a fatwa, or judicial ruling, in Washington today saying that Islam condemns terrorism, religious extremism and any violence against civilians, including suicide bombings. ...

The fatwa cites the Koran and other Islamic texts, and says that making innocent people targets is forbidden - "haram" - and that those who commit such violence are "criminals" and not "martyrs," as supporters of suicide bombers have often claimed.

The edict is signed by 18 Islamic scholars who serve on the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Muslim jurists who interpret Islamic law, and is endorsed by more than 100 Muslim organizations, mosques and leaders.

This ruling, carried out by the Fiqh Council of North America follows a similar ruling by the Sunni Council, Jama'at e Ahl e Sunnat, in Birmingham, UK after the July 7 terrorist attacks in London and a March 11 fatwa (English translation here and in Arabic here) from the Spanish Muslim Council on the first anniversary of the Madrid train attacks. It seems curious that the Spanish and British fatwas would have gotten so little exposure in the American press, especially at a time when so many people are complaining that Muslims are not doing enough to discourage Islamic terrorism. After searching for news about the two Euopean edicts, the only major American source I could find was an AP piece printed in the Post. To my mind, these fatwas are newsworthy, and could actually help deter future attacks and save lives.

In the Times' op-ed pages last Friday, Olivier Roy attempted to explain "why they hate us." He advances the hypothesis that members of al Qaeda do not hate the West, and namely the US, because of the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, unconditional support for Israel and the stationing of troops on the Arabian peninsula. He claims that the conflicts in the Middle East are not the roots of Islamic terrorism, that they are more rallying excuses or justifications than genuine grievances.

As evidence for this, he splits hairs to show that it is not a question of the Middle East but of global jihad in places like Bosnia, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya. He arrives at the conclusion that Islamic terrorism is a product of globalization rather than actual Western foreign policy, and that the ranks of al Qaeda and likeminded groups are filled with westernized "converts" -- Islamic "born agains," if you will -- who have lived in Europe or the US and have become disenchanted with Western life:

The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.

First of all, I'm not sure that Roy's description of Islamic terrorists is necessarily correct. While there are certainly many westernized young militants within the ranks of international terrorist groups, who have either studied, lived or were born in the West, it's not obvious that all or even most international terrorists fit this description. Finally, while there is a clear difference between local groups like Hamas and Hizbollah and international groups like al Qaeda, it's not evident that their complaints are so terribly different.

According to Roy, the reasons given by international terrorist groups are not genuine. According to him, their claims of solidarity with Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans are hollow and mask a larger combat, namely a sort of reconquista of the ummah, or the global community of the faithful, which they feel has been under attack from Western powers, or maybe even just infidel powers, from Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan to the occupation of Iraq, Serbian war crimes in Bosnia and the Jewish settling of Palestine:

From the beginning, Al Qaeda's fighters were global jihadists, and their favored battlegrounds have been outside the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers.

Up to this point, his analysis seems very reasonable, but Roy then goes on to say that al Qaeda's list of complaints is disingenuous, that international terrorists don't really care about Palestine, Afghanistan or Bosnia and that these war cries are only justifications for a larger more generalized battle against Western cultural and military dominance brought on by globalization:

[I]f the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

To my mind this is similar to asking why a protestant preacher from Kansas or Mississippi would be more upset about gay marriage in Massachusetts than the residents of that state are. Like the fire and brimstone zealots of flyover America claim to speak in the name of the rest of the country, al Qaeda has decided to speak for all of Islam. There is a fundamental similarity between the two groups: a strong will to force a politico-religious worldview on other people, presumably for their own good. While this approach is obviously obtuse and shortsighted, it does not mean that the two groups of extremists don't actually care passionately about Afghanistan and the sanctity of marriage in Massachusetts. If anything, Islamic terrorists are more willing to put their money where their mouth is by traveling to places like Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan in order to fight and die for their worldview. In both cases one finds a similar feeling of victimhood, a defensive stance against a powerful enemy: Western neo-imperialism in one case and secular nihilism in the other.

In an article in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books (sent to me by a friend), Max Rodenbeck reviews Roy's book, among others, and compares global Islamic terrorism to the leftist radicals of the 60s and 70s, in so far as groups like the Italian Red Brigades were trying to spark a worldwide revolution against the capitalist masters oppressing the proletariat. But the analogy only seems to work to a certain extent, because up to now, Islamic terrorist groups have not stated a goal of creating a worldwide caliphate, but rather have only spoken of regaining lost ground. So while the tactics are similar, the goals seem different: without speaking of tactics, which are similar in both cases, the goals of the two groups seem very different: today's terrorism is reactionary and defensive in nature, while radical Marxists were radical and offensive.

Finally, Roy remarks that "none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. They don't distribute leaflets or collect money for hospitals and schools." Presumably, by "legitimate," Roy means non-violent, although it's highly arguable whether or not the two words are synonymous. This seems puzzling, because often, or at least sometimes, those who engage in terrorism, or other extralegal tactics, have decided to do so because they no longer believe it is possible or effective to work within the system. (It would be interesting to see how many members of militant groups in the US and Europe, like the Animal Liberation Front, also participate in letter writing campaigns.) Furthermore, a terrorist's reluctance to participate in legal movements can also reflect a fear of leaving traces behind that might point to their violent activities: when the ALF sets fire to a fur factory, the first people to be investigated are the members of legal groups like PETA.

So while there is a definite difference between global terrorist groups like al Qaeda and local groups like Hizbollah, their rationales for violence seem to differ mostly in scale: Hizbollah seems content with the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, whereas al Qaeda moves from one battle front to another. So for the latter, it's not just a question of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan; it's a question of Kashmir, Bosnia, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and all of the other places where these groups feel like the West is attacking Muslims, either directly, in the case of Iraq, or indirectly through proxy dictators, such as in Pakistan, Egypt and Uzbekistan. But Roy is correct in saying that westernized Muslims who already have their own complaints about their home countries are especially susceptible to a rhetoric of Islamic fraternal solidarity. That does not, however, make their outrage in response to the situation in Palestine, a place they have most likely never been to, any less genuine.

So to my mind, the main difference between local and global terrorism (Iraqi resistance and foreign fighters) is not necessarily their motivation, but rather the length of their list of complaints. So while history has shown that local terrorism tends to die down once the occupying power leaves (Lebanon) or the oppressive government shares power (South Africa), it remains to be seen if globalized terrorism will stop once its long list of complaints has been addressed. But one thing is certain: international terrorism is not going to be abated by adding more and more causes to terrorists' list of offenses.

I subscribe to a listserve for genocide scholars, and recently, there was a question about the Serbian state's sponsorship of the genocide at Srebrenica. I mentioned that although the Balkans were not my specialty, I had recently read about a video uncovered by Serbian activist and founder of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Natasa Kandic, and shown at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which showed Serbian paramilitary troops executing young Bosniaks from Srebrenica. Then I copied an article (no longer available online for free) from The New York Times.

Still image taken from the video.

I shouldn't have been surprised to immediately receive an e-mail off the list (and then later, a slightly changed version on the list) in addition to a previous message addressing the original question about genocide in Srebrenica. These all came from someone advancing that the video was a fake and that there had been no genocide in Srebrenica.

I shouldn't have been surprised, because there are more than a few genocide deniers and because according to a poll taken last spring, fewer than half of all Serbs polled even believed that the killings at Srebrenica happened at all. According to Angela Brkic, who has worked excavating mass graves outside Srebrenica, a debate on Srebrenica at the Belgrade Law Faculty was entitled, "10 Years After the Liberation of Srebrenica." This denial is so strong that several top priority indicted Serbian war criminals, like Karadzic and Mladic, are still free men today.

There has been a narrative of denial built around the wars, and many Serbs still consider themselves to have been the primary victims in the story. This, of course, runs completely counter to the international criminal tribunal. For example, in the case of The Prosecutor v. Krstic, the Appeals court found that genocide had, in fact, been committed. Explaining the judgement, Judge Meron said:

By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity. The Bosnian Serb forces were aware, when they embarked on this genocidal venture, that the harm they caused would continue to plague the Bosnian Muslims. The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name: genocide. Those responsible will bear this stigma, and it will serve as a warning to those who may in future contemplate the commission of such a heinous act.

Serbia could learn a lesson by coming to terms with its past, which would mean surrendering indicted war criminals and admitting to past genocide. The current government has made some progress, as was shown by the rapid arrests that were made after the tape came to light, but the Serbian people seem to be stuck in a narrative of denial.

One of my colleagues at work is Serbian, and while she believes that the Serbian government committed genocide and other crimes against humanity, she said that she would never say so in Belgrade, because "they would kill me." The scariest part of that sentence, as Natasa Kandic can bear witness to, is that she's not talking about a malevolent autocratic government; she's talking about average citizens.

In the past few years, there has been a concerted effort to try to understand terrorism, and particularly suicide terrorism. There have been varying levels of conventional wisdom put forth, which tell us that suicide terrorism is an Islamic creation, because of the rhetoric of religious martyrdom, or that the key to suicide terrorism is economic, only poor, isolated and futureless people will choose to blow themselves up. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, shows us otherwise in his article, sent to me by a friend,The Strategic Logic of Terrorism (pdf), published in 2003 in the American Political Science Review and expanded into book form this Spring as Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

Pape has compiled a complete database of every known suicide terrorist attack between 1980 and early 2004. His research was conducted in many different languages -- Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil and Russian, among others -- in order to better understand suicide terrorism through the materials written by terrorist organizations themselves. Although I have yet to read the book, his article draws five main conclusions:

1. "Suicide terrorism is strategic. ... Groups using suicide terrorism consistently announce specific political goals and stop suicide terrorism when those goals have been fully or partially achieved."

2. "The strategic logic of suicide terrorism is specifically designed to coerce modern democracies to make significant concessions to national self-determination. In general, suicide terrorist campaigns seek to achieve specific territorial goals, most often the withdrawal of the target state?s military forces from what the terrorists see as national homeland."

3. "Suicide terrorism has been steadily rising, because terrorists have learned that it pays."

4. "Although moderate suicide terrorism led to moderate concession ... more ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns are not likely to achieve still greater gains and may well fail completely."

5. "States that face persistent suicide terrorism should recognize that neither offensive military action nor concessions alone are likely to do much good..."

While drawing these conclusions through the study of nearly 500 cases of suicide terrorism, he dispels some of the myths and misconceptions that are generally held to be conventional wisdom on the subject.

First, he shows that the majority of Suicide bombers are not Islamic fundamentalists, but rather Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, who come predominately from Hindu families. Second, while no one religion has a monopoly on suicide terrorism -- there were several Christian suicide terrorists in Lebanon in the 1980s -- there is usually a difference in religion between the perpetrator and the target of suicide terrorism. Third, through biographical studies of suicide terrorists, he shows that they can be poor or rich, religious or secular, men or women, young or middle aged. What links this broad base of backgrounds is the belief in a political goal, which is generally forcing the withdrawal of occupying enemy forces from one?s homeland. Oftentimes, such as in Chechnya, Iraq and Palestine, this comes in the form of a force that is perceived as being foreign and hostile actively and explicitly exercising political power on another population. In other cases, such as in Saudi Arabia, while the American forces present do not constitute an occupation per se, the threat of such an occupation remains a real fear for supporters of al Qaeda. According to Pape, in a recent interview with a conservative magazine, also pointed out to me by a friend,

In 1996, [Osama Bin Laden] went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States?that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.

Of course, this is nothing new, al Qaeda has always had a list of complaints against the US, and the main one, until the invasion of Iraq, has always been the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

So where does this leave us? What can be done to stop suicide terrorism? When asked if it was too late to try to wind down suicide terrorism against the US, Pape responded,

Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop?and often on a dime.

In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn't completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.

This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.
That doesn?t mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush. There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him. That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism.

It seems obvious that anyone seriously and sincerely interested in stopping terrorism should try to understand its roots. This does not mean a facile recourse to clichés about how "savage muslims hate our freedom." We know that fundamentalist Islamic groups in Nigeria, Iran and Sudan, for example, are not producing suicide terrorists. And those groups from Saudi Arabia and Iraq that are producing acts of suicide terrorism are not attacking Sweden, Switzerland or Canada, but rather the US, Spain and the UK, governments supporting an occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.

Terrorism is a tactic, and as such is suited to certain circumstances. It's high time that the US start taking it seriously as a political strategy, which means taking measures to quell it rather than adding fuel to its fire.

Yesterday's workday was interrupted right after it had begun by the news of the horrible bombings in London, which have killed "at least least fifty."

My first reaction was to call friends in London to make sure that they're all right, and then I started thinking about the event, turning it over in my head. Dozens of British people on their way to work, dead. My second reaction was dismay, which was shortly followed by guilt. Dozens of people die in Iraq every week, but I've become used to it since I can't take the Eurostar there from here.

The main two narratives being sold by the Bush and Blair administrations are "they hate us because we're free," and "we're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home." The first position is obviously and demonstrably false. Militant Islamic zealots don't hate freedom or women's rights, otherwise they would be attacking Iceland, Sweden and Canada. Juan Cole has it right when discussing Michael Sheuer, the former Bin Laden analyst for the CIA, and his view of the implications of the London attacks:

Scheuer believes that al-Qaeda is an insurgent ideology focused on destroying the United States and its allies, because its members believe that the US is trying to destroy them. Al-Qaeda members see the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, backed by the US; US support for military regimes like those of Pakistan and Egypt; and US military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence of a US onslaught on Islam and Muslims aimed at reducing them to neo-colonial slavery. That is, specific Western policies are the focus of al-Qaeda response, not a generalized "hatred" of "values."

And the only group that has taken credit for the attacks says as much in their statement, of which wikipedia has posted a translation (emphasis mine):

The Secret Organization Group of Al-Qa'idah of Jihad Organization in Europe (Jama'at al-Tanzim al-Sirri, Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Urupa) In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and the dauntless fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

O nation of Islam and nation of Arabism: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge from the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The heroic mujahidin have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern and western quarters. We have repeatedly warned the British government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahidin exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

He who warns is excused.

God says: "(O ye who believe!) If ye will aid (the cause of) Allah, He will aid you, and plant your feet firmly."

As for the second idea, that we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home, that is also false. As a matter of fact, the truth seems to be the exact opposite. According to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, "al-Qaeda has added Iraq to its list of grievances," and, "it is probable that recruitment generally has accelerated on account of Iraq." So it seems obvious that instead of luring the remaining terrorists into Babylon to be defeated, the war in Iraq has served as a rallying cause for al Qaeda.

I am afraid that the attacks in London and Madrid are the beginning of a new phase of terrorism in which the Qaeda flare for drama, manifested in such enormous acts as the attacks in New York and Washington, will be replaced by the smaller, but more frequent, acts of autonomous and very loosely connected terrorist cells that communicate by motorbike and computer disk and cannot be arranged in a hierarchical chain of command. Leaders like Bin Laden will cease (or more likely already have ceased) to be micro managers, giving vague orders to be carried out on a local scale by terror franchises that may or may not have contact with these leaders.

British intelligence claims to have had absolutely no information that might have pointed to an attack yesterday, and there's no reason to disbelieve them. A small group of people can easily attack a soft target like the subway or a bus. Once the explosives have been acquired, a small attack becomes nearly impossible to predict or to stop. We have seen another country go down this same road: Israel. And we have seen that Israel's constant escalations and terrorist retaliations (assassinations, collective punishment, etc.) have not calmed the tide of bombings. On the contrary, they have had the opposite effect. I fear that the US, and to a much lesser extent its allies, has not learned this lesson.

It goes without saying that just like the attacks in New York are not a valid reason to bomb another country, like we did in Iraq, the reverse is also true: the invasion in Iraq is not a valid reason to bomb innocent civilians in London or Madrid. And that is the sad reality of this tit-for-tat exercise in bellicosity: the people getting killed on both sides are never those who are ultimately responsible for the violence, but rather innocent Londoners or Iraqis, who only want to live normal lives, free of violence and fear.

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

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

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.

When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

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

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

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

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

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

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

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has been much talk of a possible Iraqi descent into internecine warfare; many commentators have talked of staving off the possibility of a civil war between Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni forces in Iraq. In this Washington Post article, via &c., David Ignatius tries to convince us that "Iraq can survive this":

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn't so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn't be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn't provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

Ackerman at &c. correctly sizes this view: "In this blithe description, fifteen years of carnage and atrocity followed by a further fifteen years of foreign domination was merely a prelude to the hopeful scenes of Martyrs' Square." The truth of the matter is that Lebanon was a mess during the civil war, and although there was technically a central government, sectarian militias ruled, and countless war crimes were committed.

But even this seems to be missing the point, because for all intents and purposes, Iraq is already embroiled in a civil war. Without going all the way, former Prime Minister Allawi, while speaking in Amman last month, said, "[American] policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak." Watching wave after wave of Sunni suicide attacks, now aimed at Shi'ite clerics and children and Shi'ite death squads roaming Sunni villages looking for revenge, it should be clear that just because there is a foreign occupation, which is also being combatted, does not mean that there is not already a civil war raging in Mesopotamia.

In Patrick Cockburn's interesting piece in this issue of the London Review of Books, he reports from Baghdad on the violence between the different groups all vying, in one way or another, for power in Iraq:

Hatred between Sunni and Shia Arabs has been intensifying over the past few months. Iraqis used to claim that sectarianism had been fomented or exacerbated by Saddam. In reality the tension between Sunni, Shia and Kurd has always shaped Iraqi politics. All the exiled parties returning after the fall of Saddam had a sectarian or ethnic base. The Sunnis opposed the US invasion, the Kurds supported it and the Shias, 60 per cent of the population, hoped to use it to give their community a share of power at last.

The army and police recruits killed by the suicide bombers are mostly Shia. Al-Qaida in Iraq, the shadowy group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, denounces the Shia as apostates. There are also near daily massacres of working-class Shias. Now the Shias have started to strike back. The bodies of Sunnis are being found in rubbish dumps across Baghdad. 'I was told in Najaf by senior leaders that they have killed upwards of a thousand Sunnis,' an Iraqi official said. Often the killers belong, at least nominally, to the government's paramilitary forces, including the police commandos. These commandos seem increasingly to be operating under the control of certain Shias, who may be members of the Badr Brigade, the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the country's largest militia, with up to seventy thousand men.

The commandos, whose units have macho names such as Wolf Brigade and Lion Brigade, certainly look and act like a militia. They drive around in pick-up trucks, shooting into the air to clear the traffic, and are regarded with terror in Sunni districts. In one raid the commandos arrested nine Sunni Arabs who had taken a friend with a bullet wound in his leg to hospital. (The commandos claimed they were suspected insurgents, even though wounded resistance fighters generally keep away from hospitals.) The men were left in the back of a police vehicle which was parked in the sun with the air conditioning switched off: all were asphyxiated. Zarqawi has announced that he is setting up a group called the Omar Brigade specifically to target the Badr militia.

So to summarize, there is the Sunni insurgency, linked with al Qaeda, which is reported to be forming another paramilitary group called the Omar Brigade; there is the predominately Sunni counter-insurgency force, the Special Police Commandos (5,000 troops); there are also Shi'ite government commandos (similar to the death squads of El Salvadoran fame) linked to and perhaps commanded by the Badr Brigade; and finally there is the Kurdish army, Pesh Merga (somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 strong).

What we appear to have in Iraq is a weak central government, incapable of providing security to its citizens but allied with foreign soldiers, fighting an insurgency, made up largely of a different sect that has its own militias, while a third group has secured its own territory and voted overwhelmingly (98 percent) for independence from the rest of the country. While the names and other particulars are of course different, the situation is not too dissimilar to that in the DRC today or Lebanon in the 1980s.

In the New York Review of Books, Galbraith's account of Iraq shows us to what extent things are fractured in Iraq and is worth quoting at length:

On June 4, Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq, attended the inauguration of the Kurdistan National Assembly in Erbil, northern Iraq. Talabani, a Kurd, is not only the first-ever democratically elected head of state in Iraq, but in a country that traces its history back to the Garden of Eden, he is, as one friend observed, "the first freely chosen leader of this land since Adam was here alone." While Kurds are enormously proud of his accomplishment, the flag of Iraq--the country Talabani heads--was noticeably absent from the inauguration ceremony, nor can it be found anyplace in Erbil, a city of one million that is the capital of Iraq's Kurdistan Region.

Ann Bodine, the head of the American embassy office in Kirkuk, spoke at the ceremony, congratulating the newly minted parliamentarians, and affirming the US commitment to an Iraq that is, she said, "democratic, federal, pluralistic, and united." The phrase evidently did not apply in Erbil. In their oath, the parliamentarians were asked to swear loyalty to the unity of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Many pointedly dropped the "of Iraq." ...

Days after the Kurdistan National Assembly convened in June, it elected Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masood Barzani as the first president of Kurdistan. Before so doing, it passed a law making him commander in chief of the Kurdistan military but then specifically prohibiting him from deploying Kurdistan forces elsewhere in Iraq, unless expressly approved by the assembly. ... The assembly also banned the entry of non-Kurdish Iraqi military forces into Kurdistan without its approval. Kurdish leaders are mindful that their people are even more militant in their demands. Two million Kurds voted in a January referendum on independence held simultaneously with the national ballot, with 98 percent choosing the independence option. ...

When he swore in his cabinet on May 3, 2005, Shiite Prime Minister Jaafari eliminated the reference to a "federal Iraq" from the statutory oath of office; this so angered Barzani that he forced a second swearing-in ceremony.

It seems unlikely that these three groups will be able to cease their fighting and come to a federal agreement any time soon. The points of conflict, most of which will need to be dealt with in any future constitution, include the strength of the central government and the autonomy of federal regions, the ownership of oil, the status of the governorate of Kirkuk, the role that Islam (and what brand of Islam) will play in the government, the sectarian and ethnic make-up of the military, what rights women will have, and what sort of relationship the state will have with the US and Iran. These are all complicated issues, which will require a fine balancing act, like the Taif agreement that ended the civil war in Lebanon, if Iraq wants to resolve its problems and steer away from internecine warfare. But in the meantime, Iraqi politics are being settled by bullets rather than ballots.

On Tuesday, Kristof showed us in the Times just how lamentable the American press has been about covering the genocide in Darfur. Generally, Kristof has reserved his criticism for Bush, counting the days of Bush's silence on the issue (141 as of May 31). But this time, he has been focusing, correctly to my mind, on the press's lack of Darfur coverage:

[T]o sustain the idealism in journalism - and to rebut the widespread perception that journalists are just irresponsible gossips - we need to show more interest in the first genocide of the 21st century than in the "runaway bride."

I'm outraged that one of my Times colleagues, Judith Miller, is in jail for protecting her sources. But if we journalists are to demand a legal privilege to protect our sources, we need to show that we serve the public good - which means covering genocide as seriously as we cover, say, Tom Cruise. In some ways, we've gone downhill: the American news media aren't even covering the Darfur genocide as well as we covered the Armenian genocide in 1915.

He goes on to tell us that "newsweeklies should be embarrassed that better magazine coverage of Darfur has often been in Christianity Today." But, according to Kristof, the worst media failure comes from, as usual, television news. Here's how much coverage the TV networks gave Darfur last year:

ABC: 18 minutes
NBC: 05 minutes
CBS: 03 minutes

By contrast, these three networks gave Martha Stewart 130 minutes of coverage last year. Furthermore, after 2 years of genocide, NBC has still yet to send a reporter to the region. But in case you think that networks don't want to send reporters to Africa, Kristof reminds us that ABC was able to send Diane Sawyer to Africa for a special hourlong edition of "Primetime Live" -- to cover Brad Pitt. To emphasize his point, Kristof gives us some more star spangled numbers:

If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.

The BBC has shown that outstanding television coverage of Darfur is possible. And, incredibly, mtvU (the MTV channel aimed at universities) has covered Darfur more seriously than any network or cable station. When MTV dispatches a crew to cover genocide and NBC doesn't, then we in journalism need to hang our heads.

So there you have it, in the UK, the BBC has unsurprisingly done an excellent job of covering Darfur, but in the US, the television press star has been mtvU.

This letter to the editor shows the most depressing thing about the lack of Darfur coverage:

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof's criticism of the news media for their lack of coverage of the genocide in Darfur is well founded. But this criticism begs an important question: Is the American news media's silence on the Darfur genocide a product of journalistic negligence, or is it a result of the American public's apathy toward conflicts in Africa?

Though neither alternative is desirable, the first is unquestionably preferable to the second. While bad journalism can be dealt with, a nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa is a possibility almost too frightening to fathom.

Wes Henricksen
San Diego, July 26, 2005

Naïve Mr. Henriscksen starts to address the real issue, but while it's clear that the press is not doing it's job, what's really disconcerting is that the they are giving the American public exactly what it wants: Tom Cruise, Jue Law and Michael Jackson. "Nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa," or the rest of the world for that matter, is most certainly not "too frightening to fathom." It's par for the course.

But there are some people in the US who have been paying special attention to Darfur. Professor Eric Reeves, of Smith College, has been on unpaid leave since 1999 in order to research and publicize the conflicts in Sudan. The New Republic online is offering a one week "crash course" on Darfur by Reeves, which is worth taking a look at for a good introduction to the issue. For more information, you can visit Protect Darfur, an informative British website on the issue, or you can sign a petition by Africa Action demanding US action in order to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Last Friday, in his op-ed column, Friedman wrote about "excuse makers" and "truth tellers." According to him,

[E]xcuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed.

It seems apparent that Friedman is making the common mistake of confusing explanation and vindication. The former is objective and value neutral, whereas the latter is not. It should be obvious to anyone who has thought about the issue at all that explaining terrorists' motives is not at all the same as vindicating murder. And not making that clear distinction is the sort of specious reasoning that leads to simplistic phrases like, "they hate us because we're free."

He then goes on to talk about the "truth tellers":

Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers' words also need to be disseminated globally.

For once, I agree with Friedman. Articles like this one from Al Jazeera by Soumayya Ghannoushi, who is a researcher in the history of ideas at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, are somewhat refreshing. Ghannoushi draws a comparison between revolutionary anarchists and al Qaeda, stressing that while the former finds ideological justification in Marxism, the latter finds its justification in a fundamental brand of Islam. She quotes the Qu'ran to show that al Qaeda's terrorism is irreconcilable with Islam, but in the end since she has no religious authority, this line of reasoning is neither here nor there, because like most holy texts (including the Christian Bible), for every verse Ghannoushi finds that spurns violence, a fundamentalist Mufti can find another that embraces it.

One interesting point that she illustrates, however, is that the acts of al Qaeda are instrumental in justifying racism against and the oppression of other Muslims. Terrorist violence creates a sort of "us vs. them" mentality, which traps reasonable Muslims between two extreme positions, "Bush's hammer and Bin Laden's anvil":

Although the two claim to be combatting each other, the reality is that they are working in unison, one providing the justifications the other desperately needs for its fanaticism, ferocity and savagery. ... The two share a shallow, myopic, dualistic conception of the world populated by 'us' and 'them' in Bush's language, 'believers' and 'non-believers' in Bin Laden's.

This has the perverse effect of stripping support and empathy away from some of the real victims, in whose name al Qaeda purports to be speaking, giving a negative image to all Muslims and giving a justification for further injustices, which creates more extremists, and so on ad nauseam.

Ghanoushi's article has some glaring problems, like her portrayal of the oppression of Palestinians as genocide -- while the Palestinians' situation is horrible and their treatment by the Israeli government egregious, a researcher in the field of social sciences should know better than to use the term "genocide" innapropriately. But in the end, her conclusion is just, and not only should more people in the Muslim world hear it, more people in the West should know that there are Muslims fighting al Qaeda in the war of ideas:

[T]he mindless killing of the innocent in Madrid, or New York is the wrong answer to ... real grievances. These are illegitimate responses to legitimate causes. Just as occupation is morally and politically deplorable, so, too, is this blind aggression masquerading as Jihad.

So in this vain, it is refreshing to see the Times reporting good news today in the form of Muslim religious groups officially condemning terrorism, and with a fatwa, no less:

Muslim scholars in the United States and Canada plan to release a fatwa, or judicial ruling, in Washington today saying that Islam condemns terrorism, religious extremism and any violence against civilians, including suicide bombings. ...

The fatwa cites the Koran and other Islamic texts, and says that making innocent people targets is forbidden - "haram" - and that those who commit such violence are "criminals" and not "martyrs," as supporters of suicide bombers have often claimed.

The edict is signed by 18 Islamic scholars who serve on the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Muslim jurists who interpret Islamic law, and is endorsed by more than 100 Muslim organizations, mosques and leaders.

This ruling, carried out by the Fiqh Council of North America follows a similar ruling by the Sunni Council, Jama'at e Ahl e Sunnat, in Birmingham, UK after the July 7 terrorist attacks in London and a March 11 fatwa (English translation here and in Arabic here) from the Spanish Muslim Council on the first anniversary of the Madrid train attacks. It seems curious that the Spanish and British fatwas would have gotten so little exposure in the American press, especially at a time when so many people are complaining that Muslims are not doing enough to discourage Islamic terrorism. After searching for news about the two Euopean edicts, the only major American source I could find was an AP piece printed in the Post. To my mind, these fatwas are newsworthy, and could actually help deter future attacks and save lives.

In the Times' op-ed pages last Friday, Olivier Roy attempted to explain "why they hate us." He advances the hypothesis that members of al Qaeda do not hate the West, and namely the US, because of the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, unconditional support for Israel and the stationing of troops on the Arabian peninsula. He claims that the conflicts in the Middle East are not the roots of Islamic terrorism, that they are more rallying excuses or justifications than genuine grievances.

As evidence for this, he splits hairs to show that it is not a question of the Middle East but of global jihad in places like Bosnia, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya. He arrives at the conclusion that Islamic terrorism is a product of globalization rather than actual Western foreign policy, and that the ranks of al Qaeda and likeminded groups are filled with westernized "converts" -- Islamic "born agains," if you will -- who have lived in Europe or the US and have become disenchanted with Western life:

The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.

First of all, I'm not sure that Roy's description of Islamic terrorists is necessarily correct. While there are certainly many westernized young militants within the ranks of international terrorist groups, who have either studied, lived or were born in the West, it's not obvious that all or even most international terrorists fit this description. Finally, while there is a clear difference between local groups like Hamas and Hizbollah and international groups like al Qaeda, it's not evident that their complaints are so terribly different.

According to Roy, the reasons given by international terrorist groups are not genuine. According to him, their claims of solidarity with Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans are hollow and mask a larger combat, namely a sort of reconquista of the ummah, or the global community of the faithful, which they feel has been under attack from Western powers, or maybe even just infidel powers, from Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan to the occupation of Iraq, Serbian war crimes in Bosnia and the Jewish settling of Palestine:

From the beginning, Al Qaeda's fighters were global jihadists, and their favored battlegrounds have been outside the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers.

Up to this point, his analysis seems very reasonable, but Roy then goes on to say that al Qaeda's list of complaints is disingenuous, that international terrorists don't really care about Palestine, Afghanistan or Bosnia and that these war cries are only justifications for a larger more generalized battle against Western cultural and military dominance brought on by globalization:

[I]f the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

To my mind this is similar to asking why a protestant preacher from Kansas or Mississippi would be more upset about gay marriage in Massachusetts than the residents of that state are. Like the fire and brimstone zealots of flyover America claim to speak in the name of the rest of the country, al Qaeda has decided to speak for all of Islam. There is a fundamental similarity between the two groups: a strong will to force a politico-religious worldview on other people, presumably for their own good. While this approach is obviously obtuse and shortsighted, it does not mean that the two groups of extremists don't actually care passionately about Afghanistan and the sanctity of marriage in Massachusetts. If anything, Islamic terrorists are more willing to put their money where their mouth is by traveling to places like Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan in order to fight and die for their worldview. In both cases one finds a similar feeling of victimhood, a defensive stance against a powerful enemy: Western neo-imperialism in one case and secular nihilism in the other.

In an article in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books (sent to me by a friend), Max Rodenbeck reviews Roy's book, among others, and compares global Islamic terrorism to the leftist radicals of the 60s and 70s, in so far as groups like the Italian Red Brigades were trying to spark a worldwide revolution against the capitalist masters oppressing the proletariat. But the analogy only seems to work to a certain extent, because up to now, Islamic terrorist groups have not stated a goal of creating a worldwide caliphate, but rather have only spoken of regaining lost ground. So while the tactics are similar, the goals seem different: without speaking of tactics, which are similar in both cases, the goals of the two groups seem very different: today's terrorism is reactionary and defensive in nature, while radical Marxists were radical and offensive.

Finally, Roy remarks that "none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. They don't distribute leaflets or collect money for hospitals and schools." Presumably, by "legitimate," Roy means non-violent, although it's highly arguable whether or not the two words are synonymous. This seems puzzling, because often, or at least sometimes, those who engage in terrorism, or other extralegal tactics, have decided to do so because they no longer believe it is possible or effective to work within the system. (It would be interesting to see how many members of militant groups in the US and Europe, like the Animal Liberation Front, also participate in letter writing campaigns.) Furthermore, a terrorist's reluctance to participate in legal movements can also reflect a fear of leaving traces behind that might point to their violent activities: when the ALF sets fire to a fur factory, the first people to be investigated are the members of legal groups like PETA.

So while there is a definite difference between global terrorist groups like al Qaeda and local groups like Hizbollah, their rationales for violence seem to differ mostly in scale: Hizbollah seems content with the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, whereas al Qaeda moves from one battle front to another. So for the latter, it's not just a question of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan; it's a question of Kashmir, Bosnia, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and all of the other places where these groups feel like the West is attacking Muslims, either directly, in the case of Iraq, or indirectly through proxy dictators, such as in Pakistan, Egypt and Uzbekistan. But Roy is correct in saying that westernized Muslims who already have their own complaints about their home countries are especially susceptible to a rhetoric of Islamic fraternal solidarity. That does not, however, make their outrage in response to the situation in Palestine, a place they have most likely never been to, any less genuine.

So to my mind, the main difference between local and global terrorism (Iraqi resistance and foreign fighters) is not necessarily their motivation, but rather the length of their list of complaints. So while history has shown that local terrorism tends to die down once the occupying power leaves (Lebanon) or the oppressive government shares power (South Africa), it remains to be seen if globalized terrorism will stop once its long list of complaints has been addressed. But one thing is certain: international terrorism is not going to be abated by adding more and more causes to terrorists' list of offenses.

I subscribe to a listserve for genocide scholars, and recently, there was a question about the Serbian state's sponsorship of the genocide at Srebrenica. I mentioned that although the Balkans were not my specialty, I had recently read about a video uncovered by Serbian activist and founder of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Natasa Kandic, and shown at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which showed Serbian paramilitary troops executing young Bosniaks from Srebrenica. Then I copied an article (no longer available online for free) from The New York Times.

Still image taken from the video.

I shouldn't have been surprised to immediately receive an e-mail off the list (and then later, a slightly changed version on the list) in addition to a previous message addressing the original question about genocide in Srebrenica. These all came from someone advancing that the video was a fake and that there had been no genocide in Srebrenica.

I shouldn't have been surprised, because there are more than a few genocide deniers and because according to a poll taken last spring, fewer than half of all Serbs polled even believed that the killings at Srebrenica happened at all. According to Angela Brkic, who has worked excavating mass graves outside Srebrenica, a debate on Srebrenica at the Belgrade Law Faculty was entitled, "10 Years After the Liberation of Srebrenica." This denial is so strong that several top priority indicted Serbian war criminals, like Karadzic and Mladic, are still free men today.

There has been a narrative of denial built around the wars, and many Serbs still consider themselves to have been the primary victims in the story. This, of course, runs completely counter to the international criminal tribunal. For example, in the case of The Prosecutor v. Krstic, the Appeals court found that genocide had, in fact, been committed. Explaining the judgement, Judge Meron said:

By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity. The Bosnian Serb forces were aware, when they embarked on this genocidal venture, that the harm they caused would continue to plague the Bosnian Muslims. The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name: genocide. Those responsible will bear this stigma, and it will serve as a warning to those who may in future contemplate the commission of such a heinous act.

Serbia could learn a lesson by coming to terms with its past, which would mean surrendering indicted war criminals and admitting to past genocide. The current government has made some progress, as was shown by the rapid arrests that were made after the tape came to light, but the Serbian people seem to be stuck in a narrative of denial.

One of my colleagues at work is Serbian, and while she believes that the Serbian government committed genocide and other crimes against humanity, she said that she would never say so in Belgrade, because "they would kill me." The scariest part of that sentence, as Natasa Kandic can bear witness to, is that she's not talking about a malevolent autocratic government; she's talking about average citizens.

In the past few years, there has been a concerted effort to try to understand terrorism, and particularly suicide terrorism. There have been varying levels of conventional wisdom put forth, which tell us that suicide terrorism is an Islamic creation, because of the rhetoric of religious martyrdom, or that the key to suicide terrorism is economic, only poor, isolated and futureless people will choose to blow themselves up. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, shows us otherwise in his article, sent to me by a friend,The Strategic Logic of Terrorism (pdf), published in 2003 in the American Political Science Review and expanded into book form this Spring as Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

Pape has compiled a complete database of every known suicide terrorist attack between 1980 and early 2004. His research was conducted in many different languages -- Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil and Russian, among others -- in order to better understand suicide terrorism through the materials written by terrorist organizations themselves. Although I have yet to read the book, his article draws five main conclusions:

1. "Suicide terrorism is strategic. ... Groups using suicide terrorism consistently announce specific political goals and stop suicide terrorism when those goals have been fully or partially achieved."

2. "The strategic logic of suicide terrorism is specifically designed to coerce modern democracies to make significant concessions to national self-determination. In general, suicide terrorist campaigns seek to achieve specific territorial goals, most often the withdrawal of the target state?s military forces from what the terrorists see as national homeland."

3. "Suicide terrorism has been steadily rising, because terrorists have learned that it pays."

4. "Although moderate suicide terrorism led to moderate concession ... more ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns are not likely to achieve still greater gains and may well fail completely."

5. "States that face persistent suicide terrorism should recognize that neither offensive military action nor concessions alone are likely to do much good..."

While drawing these conclusions through the study of nearly 500 cases of suicide terrorism, he dispels some of the myths and misconceptions that are generally held to be conventional wisdom on the subject.

First, he shows that the majority of Suicide bombers are not Islamic fundamentalists, but rather Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, who come predominately from Hindu families. Second, while no one religion has a monopoly on suicide terrorism -- there were several Christian suicide terrorists in Lebanon in the 1980s -- there is usually a difference in religion between the perpetrator and the target of suicide terrorism. Third, through biographical studies of suicide terrorists, he shows that they can be poor or rich, religious or secular, men or women, young or middle aged. What links this broad base of backgrounds is the belief in a political goal, which is generally forcing the withdrawal of occupying enemy forces from one?s homeland. Oftentimes, such as in Chechnya, Iraq and Palestine, this comes in the form of a force that is perceived as being foreign and hostile actively and explicitly exercising political power on another population. In other cases, such as in Saudi Arabia, while the American forces present do not constitute an occupation per se, the threat of such an occupation remains a real fear for supporters of al Qaeda. According to Pape, in a recent interview with a conservative magazine, also pointed out to me by a friend,

In 1996, [Osama Bin Laden] went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States?that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.

Of course, this is nothing new, al Qaeda has always had a list of complaints against the US, and the main one, until the invasion of Iraq, has always been the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

So where does this leave us? What can be done to stop suicide terrorism? When asked if it was too late to try to wind down suicide terrorism against the US, Pape responded,

Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop?and often on a dime.

In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn't completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.

This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.
That doesn?t mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush. There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him. That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism.

It seems obvious that anyone seriously and sincerely interested in stopping terrorism should try to understand its roots. This does not mean a facile recourse to clichés about how "savage muslims hate our freedom." We know that fundamentalist Islamic groups in Nigeria, Iran and Sudan, for example, are not producing suicide terrorists. And those groups from Saudi Arabia and Iraq that are producing acts of suicide terrorism are not attacking Sweden, Switzerland or Canada, but rather the US, Spain and the UK, governments supporting an occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.

Terrorism is a tactic, and as such is suited to certain circumstances. It's high time that the US start taking it seriously as a political strategy, which means taking measures to quell it rather than adding fuel to its fire.

Yesterday's workday was interrupted right after it had begun by the news of the horrible bombings in London, which have killed "at least least fifty."

My first reaction was to call friends in London to make sure that they're all right, and then I started thinking about the event, turning it over in my head. Dozens of British people on their way to work, dead. My second reaction was dismay, which was shortly followed by guilt. Dozens of people die in Iraq every week, but I've become used to it since I can't take the Eurostar there from here.

The main two narratives being sold by the Bush and Blair administrations are "they hate us because we're free," and "we're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home." The first position is obviously and demonstrably false. Militant Islamic zealots don't hate freedom or women's rights, otherwise they would be attacking Iceland, Sweden and Canada. Juan Cole has it right when discussing Michael Sheuer, the former Bin Laden analyst for the CIA, and his view of the implications of the London attacks:

Scheuer believes that al-Qaeda is an insurgent ideology focused on destroying the United States and its allies, because its members believe that the US is trying to destroy them. Al-Qaeda members see the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, backed by the US; US support for military regimes like those of Pakistan and Egypt; and US military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence of a US onslaught on Islam and Muslims aimed at reducing them to neo-colonial slavery. That is, specific Western policies are the focus of al-Qaeda response, not a generalized "hatred" of "values."

And the only group that has taken credit for the attacks says as much in their statement, of which wikipedia has posted a translation (emphasis mine):

The Secret Organization Group of Al-Qa'idah of Jihad Organization in Europe (Jama'at al-Tanzim al-Sirri, Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Urupa) In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and the dauntless fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

O nation of Islam and nation of Arabism: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge from the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The heroic mujahidin have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern and western quarters. We have repeatedly warned the British government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahidin exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

He who warns is excused.

God says: "(O ye who believe!) If ye will aid (the cause of) Allah, He will aid you, and plant your feet firmly."

As for the second idea, that we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home, that is also false. As a matter of fact, the truth seems to be the exact opposite. According to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, "al-Qaeda has added Iraq to its list of grievances," and, "it is probable that recruitment generally has accelerated on account of Iraq." So it seems obvious that instead of luring the remaining terrorists into Babylon to be defeated, the war in Iraq has served as a rallying cause for al Qaeda.

I am afraid that the attacks in London and Madrid are the beginning of a new phase of terrorism in which the Qaeda flare for drama, manifested in such enormous acts as the attacks in New York and Washington, will be replaced by the smaller, but more frequent, acts of autonomous and very loosely connected terrorist cells that communicate by motorbike and computer disk and cannot be arranged in a hierarchical chain of command. Leaders like Bin Laden will cease (or more likely already have ceased) to be micro managers, giving vague orders to be carried out on a local scale by terror franchises that may or may not have contact with these leaders.

British intelligence claims to have had absolutely no information that might have pointed to an attack yesterday, and there's no reason to disbelieve them. A small group of people can easily attack a soft target like the subway or a bus. Once the explosives have been acquired, a small attack becomes nearly impossible to predict or to stop. We have seen another country go down this same road: Israel. And we have seen that Israel's constant escalations and terrorist retaliations (assassinations, collective punishment, etc.) have not calmed the tide of bombings. On the contrary, they have had the opposite effect. I fear that the US, and to a much lesser extent its allies, has not learned this lesson.

It goes without saying that just like the attacks in New York are not a valid reason to bomb another country, like we did in Iraq, the reverse is also true: the invasion in Iraq is not a valid reason to bomb innocent civilians in London or Madrid. And that is the sad reality of this tit-for-tat exercise in bellicosity: the people getting killed on both sides are never those who are ultimately responsible for the violence, but rather innocent Londoners or Iraqis, who only want to live normal lives, free of violence and fear.

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

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

For the first time, you will accept, clearly and unambiguously, that you have a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. You will make clear your willingness to take timely and decisive collective action through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their own populations. Excellencies, you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms.

When reading the final document, however, one is much less optimistic. Mr. Annan expressed satisfaction and seems convinced that the problem of the international community's chronic inaction when faced with genocide has been solved. The actual text, however, tells another story altogether:

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

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

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

These two paragraphs were born from a Canadian initiative, called The Responsibility to Protect. In his speech before the General Assembly, Canadian Prime Minister Martin said (text or video), "Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example."

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

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

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

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

In any case, the Summit's final text falls very short of the ICISS report's conclusions. First of all, the Summit text sets up a state's responsibility to protect its own population without taking the second and crucial step of making a state's sovereignty conditional on its fulfilling that responsibility. Stressing a state's responsibility without agreeing that a failure to live up to that responsibility will necessarily result in a loss of sovereignty means nothing at all. It is essentially the same as telling a murderer that it is his responsibility to not kill without asserting that his freedom as a citizen will be suspended if he chooses not to live up to this responsibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has been much talk of a possible Iraqi descent into internecine warfare; many commentators have talked of staving off the possibility of a civil war between Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni forces in Iraq. In this Washington Post article, via &c., David Ignatius tries to convince us that "Iraq can survive this":

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn't so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn't be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn't provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

Ackerman at &c. correctly sizes this view: "In this blithe description, fifteen years of carnage and atrocity followed by a further fifteen years of foreign domination was merely a prelude to the hopeful scenes of Martyrs' Square." The truth of the matter is that Lebanon was a mess during the civil war, and although there was technically a central government, sectarian militias ruled, and countless war crimes were committed.

But even this seems to be missing the point, because for all intents and purposes, Iraq is already embroiled in a civil war. Without going all the way, former Prime Minister Allawi, while speaking in Amman last month, said, "[American] policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak." Watching wave after wave of Sunni suicide attacks, now aimed at Shi'ite clerics and children and Shi'ite death squads roaming Sunni villages looking for revenge, it should be clear that just because there is a foreign occupation, which is also being combatted, does not mean that there is not already a civil war raging in Mesopotamia.

In Patrick Cockburn's interesting piece in this issue of the London Review of Books, he reports from Baghdad on the violence between the different groups all vying, in one way or another, for power in Iraq:

Hatred between Sunni and Shia Arabs has been intensifying over the past few months. Iraqis used to claim that sectarianism had been fomented or exacerbated by Saddam. In reality the tension between Sunni, Shia and Kurd has always shaped Iraqi politics. All the exiled parties returning after the fall of Saddam had a sectarian or ethnic base. The Sunnis opposed the US invasion, the Kurds supported it and the Shias, 60 per cent of the population, hoped to use it to give their community a share of power at last.

The army and police recruits killed by the suicide bombers are mostly Shia. Al-Qaida in Iraq, the shadowy group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, denounces the Shia as apostates. There are also near daily massacres of working-class Shias. Now the Shias have started to strike back. The bodies of Sunnis are being found in rubbish dumps across Baghdad. 'I was told in Najaf by senior leaders that they have killed upwards of a thousand Sunnis,' an Iraqi official said. Often the killers belong, at least nominally, to the government's paramilitary forces, including the police commandos. These commandos seem increasingly to be operating under the control of certain Shias, who may be members of the Badr Brigade, the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the country's largest militia, with up to seventy thousand men.

The commandos, whose units have macho names such as Wolf Brigade and Lion Brigade, certainly look and act like a militia. They drive around in pick-up trucks, shooting into the air to clear the traffic, and are regarded with terror in Sunni districts. In one raid the commandos arrested nine Sunni Arabs who had taken a friend with a bullet wound in his leg to hospital. (The commandos claimed they were suspected insurgents, even though wounded resistance fighters generally keep away from hospitals.) The men were left in the back of a police vehicle which was parked in the sun with the air conditioning switched off: all were asphyxiated. Zarqawi has announced that he is setting up a group called the Omar Brigade specifically to target the Badr militia.

So to summarize, there is the Sunni insurgency, linked with al Qaeda, which is reported to be forming another paramilitary group called the Omar Brigade; there is the predominately Sunni counter-insurgency force, the Special Police Commandos (5,000 troops); there are also Shi'ite government commandos (similar to the death squads of El Salvadoran fame) linked to and perhaps commanded by the Badr Brigade; and finally there is the Kurdish army, Pesh Merga (somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 strong).

What we appear to have in Iraq is a weak central government, incapable of providing security to its citizens but allied with foreign soldiers, fighting an insurgency, made up largely of a different sect that has its own militias, while a third group has secured its own territory and voted overwhelmingly (98 percent) for independence from the rest of the country. While the names and other particulars are of course different, the situation is not too dissimilar to that in the DRC today or Lebanon in the 1980s.

In the New York Review of Books, Galbraith's account of Iraq shows us to what extent things are fractured in Iraq and is worth quoting at length:

On June 4, Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq, attended the inauguration of the Kurdistan National Assembly in Erbil, northern Iraq. Talabani, a Kurd, is not only the first-ever democratically elected head of state in Iraq, but in a country that traces its history back to the Garden of Eden, he is, as one friend observed, "the first freely chosen leader of this land since Adam was here alone." While Kurds are enormously proud of his accomplishment, the flag of Iraq--the country Talabani heads--was noticeably absent from the inauguration ceremony, nor can it be found anyplace in Erbil, a city of one million that is the capital of Iraq's Kurdistan Region.

Ann Bodine, the head of the American embassy office in Kirkuk, spoke at the ceremony, congratulating the newly minted parliamentarians, and affirming the US commitment to an Iraq that is, she said, "democratic, federal, pluralistic, and united." The phrase evidently did not apply in Erbil. In their oath, the parliamentarians were asked to swear loyalty to the unity of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Many pointedly dropped the "of Iraq." ...

Days after the Kurdistan National Assembly convened in June, it elected Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masood Barzani as the first president of Kurdistan. Before so doing, it passed a law making him commander in chief of the Kurdistan military but then specifically prohibiting him from deploying Kurdistan forces elsewhere in Iraq, unless expressly approved by the assembly. ... The assembly also banned the entry of non-Kurdish Iraqi military forces into Kurdistan without its approval. Kurdish leaders are mindful that their people are even more militant in their demands. Two million Kurds voted in a January referendum on independence held simultaneously with the national ballot, with 98 percent choosing the independence option. ...

When he swore in his cabinet on May 3, 2005, Shiite Prime Minister Jaafari eliminated the reference to a "federal Iraq" from the statutory oath of office; this so angered Barzani that he forced a second swearing-in ceremony.

It seems unlikely that these three groups will be able to cease their fighting and come to a federal agreement any time soon. The points of conflict, most of which will need to be dealt with in any future constitution, include the strength of the central government and the autonomy of federal regions, the ownership of oil, the status of the governorate of Kirkuk, the role that Islam (and what brand of Islam) will play in the government, the sectarian and ethnic make-up of the military, what rights women will have, and what sort of relationship the state will have with the US and Iran. These are all complicated issues, which will require a fine balancing act, like the Taif agreement that ended the civil war in Lebanon, if Iraq wants to resolve its problems and steer away from internecine warfare. But in the meantime, Iraqi politics are being settled by bullets rather than ballots.

On Tuesday, Kristof showed us in the Times just how lamentable the American press has been about covering the genocide in Darfur. Generally, Kristof has reserved his criticism for Bush, counting the days of Bush's silence on the issue (141 as of May 31). But this time, he has been focusing, correctly to my mind, on the press's lack of Darfur coverage:

[T]o sustain the idealism in journalism - and to rebut the widespread perception that journalists are just irresponsible gossips - we need to show more interest in the first genocide of the 21st century than in the "runaway bride."

I'm outraged that one of my Times colleagues, Judith Miller, is in jail for protecting her sources. But if we journalists are to demand a legal privilege to protect our sources, we need to show that we serve the public good - which means covering genocide as seriously as we cover, say, Tom Cruise. In some ways, we've gone downhill: the American news media aren't even covering the Darfur genocide as well as we covered the Armenian genocide in 1915.

He goes on to tell us that "newsweeklies should be embarrassed that better magazine coverage of Darfur has often been in Christianity Today." But, according to Kristof, the worst media failure comes from, as usual, television news. Here's how much coverage the TV networks gave Darfur last year:

ABC: 18 minutes
NBC: 05 minutes
CBS: 03 minutes

By contrast, these three networks gave Martha Stewart 130 minutes of coverage last year. Furthermore, after 2 years of genocide, NBC has still yet to send a reporter to the region. But in case you think that networks don't want to send reporters to Africa, Kristof reminds us that ABC was able to send Diane Sawyer to Africa for a special hourlong edition of "Primetime Live" -- to cover Brad Pitt. To emphasize his point, Kristof gives us some more star spangled numbers:

If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.

The BBC has shown that outstanding television coverage of Darfur is possible. And, incredibly, mtvU (the MTV channel aimed at universities) has covered Darfur more seriously than any network or cable station. When MTV dispatches a crew to cover genocide and NBC doesn't, then we in journalism need to hang our heads.

So there you have it, in the UK, the BBC has unsurprisingly done an excellent job of covering Darfur, but in the US, the television press star has been mtvU.

This letter to the editor shows the most depressing thing about the lack of Darfur coverage:

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof's criticism of the news media for their lack of coverage of the genocide in Darfur is well founded. But this criticism begs an important question: Is the American news media's silence on the Darfur genocide a product of journalistic negligence, or is it a result of the American public's apathy toward conflicts in Africa?

Though neither alternative is desirable, the first is unquestionably preferable to the second. While bad journalism can be dealt with, a nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa is a possibility almost too frightening to fathom.

Wes Henricksen
San Diego, July 26, 2005

Naïve Mr. Henriscksen starts to address the real issue, but while it's clear that the press is not doing it's job, what's really disconcerting is that the they are giving the American public exactly what it wants: Tom Cruise, Jue Law and Michael Jackson. "Nationwide indifference toward human suffering in Africa," or the rest of the world for that matter, is most certainly not "too frightening to fathom." It's par for the course.

But there are some people in the US who have been paying special attention to Darfur. Professor Eric Reeves, of Smith College, has been on unpaid leave since 1999 in order to research and publicize the conflicts in Sudan. The New Republic online is offering a one week "crash course" on Darfur by Reeves, which is worth taking a look at for a good introduction to the issue. For more information, you can visit Protect Darfur, an informative British website on the issue, or you can sign a petition by Africa Action demanding US action in order to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Last Friday, in his op-ed column, Friedman wrote about "excuse makers" and "truth tellers." According to him,

[E]xcuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed.

It seems apparent that Friedman is making the common mistake of confusing explanation and vindication. The former is objective and value neutral, whereas the latter is not. It should be obvious to anyone who has thought about the issue at all that explaining terrorists' motives is not at all the same as vindicating murder. And not making that clear distinction is the sort of specious reasoning that leads to simplistic phrases like, "they hate us because we're free."

He then goes on to talk about the "truth tellers":

Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers' words also need to be disseminated globally.

For once, I agree with Friedman. Articles like this one from Al Jazeera by Soumayya Ghannoushi, who is a researcher in the history of ideas at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, are somewhat refreshing. Ghannoushi draws a comparison between revolutionary anarchists and al Qaeda, stressing that while the former finds ideological justification in Marxism, the latter finds its justification in a fundamental brand of Islam. She quotes the Qu'ran to show that al Qaeda's terrorism is irreconcilable with Islam, but in the end since she has no religious authority, this line of reasoning is neither here nor there, because like most holy texts (including the Christian Bible), for every verse Ghannoushi finds that spurns violence, a fundamentalist Mufti can find another that embraces it.

One interesting point that she illustrates, however, is that the acts of al Qaeda are instrumental in justifying racism against and the oppression of other Muslims. Terrorist violence creates a sort of "us vs. them" mentality, which traps reasonable Muslims between two extreme positions, "Bush's hammer and Bin Laden's anvil":

Although the two claim to be combatting each other, the reality is that they are working in unison, one providing the justifications the other desperately needs for its fanaticism, ferocity and savagery. ... The two share a shallow, myopic, dualistic conception of the world populated by 'us' and 'them' in Bush's language, 'believers' and 'non-believers' in Bin Laden's.

This has the perverse effect of stripping support and empathy away from some of the real victims, in whose name al Qaeda purports to be speaking, giving a negative image to all Muslims and giving a justification for further injustices, which creates more extremists, and so on ad nauseam.

Ghanoushi's article has some glaring problems, like her portrayal of the oppression of Palestinians as genocide -- while the Palestinians' situation is horrible and their treatment by the Israeli government egregious, a researcher in the field of social sciences should know better than to use the term "genocide" innapropriately. But in the end, her conclusion is just, and not only should more people in the Muslim world hear it, more people in the West should know that there are Muslims fighting al Qaeda in the war of ideas:

[T]he mindless killing of the innocent in Madrid, or New York is the wrong answer to ... real grievances. These are illegitimate responses to legitimate causes. Just as occupation is morally and politically deplorable, so, too, is this blind aggression masquerading as Jihad.

So in this vain, it is refreshing to see the Times reporting good news today in the form of Muslim religious groups officially condemning terrorism, and with a fatwa, no less:

Muslim scholars in the United States and Canada plan to release a fatwa, or judicial ruling, in Washington today saying that Islam condemns terrorism, religious extremism and any violence against civilians, including suicide bombings. ...

The fatwa cites the Koran and other Islamic texts, and says that making innocent people targets is forbidden - "haram" - and that those who commit such violence are "criminals" and not "martyrs," as supporters of suicide bombers have often claimed.

The edict is signed by 18 Islamic scholars who serve on the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Muslim jurists who interpret Islamic law, and is endorsed by more than 100 Muslim organizations, mosques and leaders.

This ruling, carried out by the Fiqh Council of North America follows a similar ruling by the Sunni Council, Jama'at e Ahl e Sunnat, in Birmingham, UK after the July 7 terrorist attacks in London and a March 11 fatwa (English translation here and in Arabic here) from the Spanish Muslim Council on the first anniversary of the Madrid train attacks. It seems curious that the Spanish and British fatwas would have gotten so little exposure in the American press, especially at a time when so many people are complaining that Muslims are not doing enough to discourage Islamic terrorism. After searching for news about the two Euopean edicts, the only major American source I could find was an AP piece printed in the Post. To my mind, these fatwas are newsworthy, and could actually help deter future attacks and save lives.

In the Times' op-ed pages last Friday, Olivier Roy attempted to explain "why they hate us." He advances the hypothesis that members of al Qaeda do not hate the West, and namely the US, because of the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, unconditional support for Israel and the stationing of troops on the Arabian peninsula. He claims that the conflicts in the Middle East are not the roots of Islamic terrorism, that they are more rallying excuses or justifications than genuine grievances.

As evidence for this, he splits hairs to show that it is not a question of the Middle East but of global jihad in places like Bosnia, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya. He arrives at the conclusion that Islamic terrorism is a product of globalization rather than actual Western foreign policy, and that the ranks of al Qaeda and likeminded groups are filled with westernized "converts" -- Islamic "born agains," if you will -- who have lived in Europe or the US and have become disenchanted with Western life:

The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.

First of all, I'm not sure that Roy's description of Islamic terrorists is necessarily correct. While there are certainly many westernized young militants within the ranks of international terrorist groups, who have either studied, lived or were born in the West, it's not obvious that all or even most international terrorists fit this description. Finally, while there is a clear difference between local groups like Hamas and Hizbollah and international groups like al Qaeda, it's not evident that their complaints are so terribly different.

According to Roy, the reasons given by international terrorist groups are not genuine. According to him, their claims of solidarity with Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans are hollow and mask a larger combat, namely a sort of reconquista of the ummah, or the global community of the faithful, which they feel has been under attack from Western powers, or maybe even just infidel powers, from Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan to the occupation of Iraq, Serbian war crimes in Bosnia and the Jewish settling of Palestine:

From the beginning, Al Qaeda's fighters were global jihadists, and their favored battlegrounds have been outside the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers.

Up to this point, his analysis seems very reasonable, but Roy then goes on to say that al Qaeda's list of complaints is disingenuous, that international terrorists don't really care about Palestine, Afghanistan or Bosnia and that these war cries are only justifications for a larger more generalized battle against Western cultural and military dominance brought on by globalization:

[I]f the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

To my mind this is similar to asking why a protestant preacher from Kansas or Mississippi would be more upset about gay marriage in Massachusetts than the residents of that state are. Like the fire and brimstone zealots of flyover America claim to speak in the name of the rest of the country, al Qaeda has decided to speak for all of Islam. There is a fundamental similarity between the two groups: a strong will to force a politico-religious worldview on other people, presumably for their own good. While this approach is obviously obtuse and shortsighted, it does not mean that the two groups of extremists don't actually care passionately about Afghanistan and the sanctity of marriage in Massachusetts. If anything, Islamic terrorists are more willing to put their money where their mouth is by traveling to places like Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan in order to fight and die for their worldview. In both cases one finds a similar feeling of victimhood, a defensive stance against a powerful enemy: Western neo-imperialism in one case and secular nihilism in the other.

In an article in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books (sent to me by a friend), Max Rodenbeck reviews Roy's book, among others, and compares global Islamic terrorism to the leftist radicals of the 60s and 70s, in so far as groups like the Italian Red Brigades were trying to spark a worldwide revolution against the capitalist masters oppressing the proletariat. But the analogy only seems to work to a certain extent, because up to now, Islamic terrorist groups have not stated a goal of creating a worldwide caliphate, but rather have only spoken of regaining lost ground. So while the tactics are similar, the goals seem different: without speaking of tactics, which are similar in both cases, the goals of the two groups seem very different: today's terrorism is reactionary and defensive in nature, while radical Marxists were radical and offensive.

Finally, Roy remarks that "none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. They don't distribute leaflets or collect money for hospitals and schools." Presumably, by "legitimate," Roy means non-violent, although it's highly arguable whether or not the two words are synonymous. This seems puzzling, because often, or at least sometimes, those who engage in terrorism, or other extralegal tactics, have decided to do so because they no longer believe it is possible or effective to work within the system. (It would be interesting to see how many members of militant groups in the US and Europe, like the Animal Liberation Front, also participate in letter writing campaigns.) Furthermore, a terrorist's reluctance to participate in legal movements can also reflect a fear of leaving traces behind that might point to their violent activities: when the ALF sets fire to a fur factory, the first people to be investigated are the members of legal groups like PETA.

So while there is a definite difference between global terrorist groups like al Qaeda and local groups like Hizbollah, their rationales for violence seem to differ mostly in scale: Hizbollah seems content with the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, whereas al Qaeda moves from one battle front to another. So for the latter, it's not just a question of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan; it's a question of Kashmir, Bosnia, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and all of the other places where these groups feel like the West is attacking Muslims, either directly, in the case of Iraq, or indirectly through proxy dictators, such as in Pakistan, Egypt and Uzbekistan. But Roy is correct in saying that westernized Muslims who already have their own complaints about their home countries are especially susceptible to a rhetoric of Islamic fraternal solidarity. That does not, however, make their outrage in response to the situation in Palestine, a place they have most likely never been to, any less genuine.

So to my mind, the main difference between local and global terrorism (Iraqi resistance and foreign fighters) is not necessarily their motivation, but rather the length of their list of complaints. So while history has shown that local terrorism tends to die down once the occupying power leaves (Lebanon) or the oppressive government shares power (South Africa), it remains to be seen if globalized terrorism will stop once its long list of complaints has been addressed. But one thing is certain: international terrorism is not going to be abated by adding more and more causes to terrorists' list of offenses.

I subscribe to a listserve for genocide scholars, and recently, there was a question about the Serbian state's sponsorship of the genocide at Srebrenica. I mentioned that although the Balkans were not my specialty, I had recently read about a video uncovered by Serbian activist and founder of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Natasa Kandic, and shown at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which showed Serbian paramilitary troops executing young Bosniaks from Srebrenica. Then I copied an article (no longer available online for free) from The New York Times.

Still image taken from the video.

I shouldn't have been surprised to immediately receive an e-mail off the list (and then later, a slightly changed version on the list) in addition to a previous message addressing the original question about genocide in Srebrenica. These all came from someone advancing that the video was a fake and that there had been no genocide in Srebrenica.

I shouldn't have been surprised, because there are more than a few genocide deniers and because according to a poll taken last spring, fewer than half of all Serbs polled even believed that the killings at Srebrenica happened at all. According to Angela Brkic, who has worked excavating mass graves outside Srebrenica, a debate on Srebrenica at the Belgrade Law Faculty was entitled, "10 Years After the Liberation of Srebrenica." This denial is so strong that several top priority indicted Serbian war criminals, like Karadzic and Mladic, are still free men today.

There has been a narrative of denial built around the wars, and many Serbs still consider themselves to have been the primary victims in the story. This, of course, runs completely counter to the international criminal tribunal. For example, in the case of The Prosecutor v. Krstic, the Appeals court found that genocide had, in fact, been committed. Explaining the judgement, Judge Meron said:

By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity. The Bosnian Serb forces were aware, when they embarked on this genocidal venture, that the harm they caused would continue to plague the Bosnian Muslims. The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name: genocide. Those responsible will bear this stigma, and it will serve as a warning to those who may in future contemplate the commission of such a heinous act.

Serbia could learn a lesson by coming to terms with its past, which would mean surrendering indicted war criminals and admitting to past genocide. The current government has made some progress, as was shown by the rapid arrests that were made after the tape came to light, but the Serbian people seem to be stuck in a narrative of denial.

One of my colleagues at work is Serbian, and while she believes that the Serbian government committed genocide and other crimes against humanity, she said that she would never say so in Belgrade, because "they would kill me." The scariest part of that sentence, as Natasa Kandic can bear witness to, is that she's not talking about a malevolent autocratic government; she's talking about average citizens.

In the past few years, there has been a concerted effort to try to understand terrorism, and particularly suicide terrorism. There have been varying levels of conventional wisdom put forth, which tell us that suicide terrorism is an Islamic creation, because of the rhetoric of religious martyrdom, or that the key to suicide terrorism is economic, only poor, isolated and futureless people will choose to blow themselves up. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, shows us otherwise in his article, sent to me by a friend,The Strategic Logic of Terrorism (pdf), published in 2003 in the American Political Science Review and expanded into book form this Spring as Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

Pape has compiled a complete database of every known suicide terrorist attack between 1980 and early 2004. His research was conducted in many different languages -- Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil and Russian, among others -- in order to better understand suicide terrorism through the materials written by terrorist organizations themselves. Although I have yet to read the book, his article draws five main conclusions:

1. "Suicide terrorism is strategic. ... Groups using suicide terrorism consistently announce specific political goals and stop suicide terrorism when those goals have been fully or partially achieved."

2. "The strategic logic of suicide terrorism is specifically designed to coerce modern democracies to make significant concessions to national self-determination. In general, suicide terrorist campaigns seek to achieve specific territorial goals, most often the withdrawal of the target state?s military forces from what the terrorists see as national homeland."

3. "Suicide terrorism has been steadily rising, because terrorists have learned that it pays."

4. "Although moderate suicide terrorism led to moderate concession ... more ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns are not likely to achieve still greater gains and may well fail completely."

5. "States that face persistent suicide terrorism should recognize that neither offensive military action nor concessions alone are likely to do much good..."

While drawing these conclusions through the study of nearly 500 cases of suicide terrorism, he dispels some of the myths and misconceptions that are generally held to be conventional wisdom on the subject.

First, he shows that the majority of Suicide bombers are not Islamic fundamentalists, but rather Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, who come predominately from Hindu families. Second, while no one religion has a monopoly on suicide terrorism -- there were several Christian suicide terrorists in Lebanon in the 1980s -- there is usually a difference in religion between the perpetrator and the target of suicide terrorism. Third, through biographical studies of suicide terrorists, he shows that they can be poor or rich, religious or secular, men or women, young or middle aged. What links this broad base of backgrounds is the belief in a political goal, which is generally forcing the withdrawal of occupying enemy forces from one?s homeland. Oftentimes, such as in Chechnya, Iraq and Palestine, this comes in the form of a force that is perceived as being foreign and hostile actively and explicitly exercising political power on another population. In other cases, such as in Saudi Arabia, while the American forces present do not constitute an occupation per se, the threat of such an occupation remains a real fear for supporters of al Qaeda. According to Pape, in a recent interview with a conservative magazine, also pointed out to me by a friend,

In 1996, [Osama Bin Laden] went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States?that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.

Of course, this is nothing new, al Qaeda has always had a list of complaints against the US, and the main one, until the invasion of Iraq, has always been the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

So where does this leave us? What can be done to stop suicide terrorism? When asked if it was too late to try to wind down suicide terrorism against the US, Pape responded,

Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop?and often on a dime.

In Lebanon, for instance, there were 41 suicide-terrorist attacks from 1982 to 1986, and after the U.S. withdrew its forces, France withdrew its forces, and then Israel withdrew to just that six-mile buffer zone of Lebanon, they virtually ceased. They didn't completely stop, but there was no campaign of suicide terrorism. Once Israel withdrew from the vast bulk of Lebanese territory, the suicide terrorists did not follow Israel to Tel Aviv.

This is also the pattern of the second Intifada with the Palestinians. As Israel is at least promising to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled territory (in addition to some other factors), there has been a decline of that ferocious suicide-terrorist campaign. This is just more evidence that withdrawal of military forces really does diminish the ability of the terrorist leaders to recruit more suicide terrorists.
That doesn?t mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going. I am not saying that Osama bin Laden would turn over a new leaf and suddenly vote for George Bush. There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him. That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism.

It seems obvious that anyone seriously and sincerely interested in stopping terrorism should try to understand its roots. This does not mean a facile recourse to clichés about how "savage muslims hate our freedom." We know that fundamentalist Islamic groups in Nigeria, Iran and Sudan, for example, are not producing suicide terrorists. And those groups from Saudi Arabia and Iraq that are producing acts of suicide terrorism are not attacking Sweden, Switzerland or Canada, but rather the US, Spain and the UK, governments supporting an occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.

Terrorism is a tactic, and as such is suited to certain circumstances. It's high time that the US start taking it seriously as a political strategy, which means taking measures to quell it rather than adding fuel to its fire.

Yesterday's workday was interrupted right after it had begun by the news of the horrible bombings in London, which have killed "at least least fifty."

My first reaction was to call friends in London to make sure that they're all right, and then I started thinking about the event, turning it over in my head. Dozens of British people on their way to work, dead. My second reaction was dismay, which was shortly followed by guilt. Dozens of people die in Iraq every week, but I've become used to it since I can't take the Eurostar there from here.

The main two narratives being sold by the Bush and Blair administrations are "they hate us because we're free," and "we're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home." The first position is obviously and demonstrably false. Militant Islamic zealots don't hate freedom or women's rights, otherwise they would be attacking Iceland, Sweden and Canada. Juan Cole has it right when discussing Michael Sheuer, the former Bin Laden analyst for the CIA, and his view of the implications of the London attacks:

Scheuer believes that al-Qaeda is an insurgent ideology focused on destroying the United States and its allies, because its members believe that the US is trying to destroy them. Al-Qaeda members see the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, backed by the US; US support for military regimes like those of Pakistan and Egypt; and US military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence of a US onslaught on Islam and Muslims aimed at reducing them to neo-colonial slavery. That is, specific Western policies are the focus of al-Qaeda response, not a generalized "hatred" of "values."

And the only group that has taken credit for the attacks says as much in their statement, of which wikipedia has posted a translation (emphasis mine):

The Secret Organization Group of Al-Qa'idah of Jihad Organization in Europe (Jama'at al-Tanzim al-Sirri, Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Urupa) In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and the dauntless fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

O nation of Islam and nation of Arabism: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge from the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The heroic mujahidin have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern and western quarters. We have repeatedly warned the British government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahidin exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

He who warns is excused.

God says: "(O ye who believe!) If ye will aid (the cause of) Allah, He will aid you, and plant your feet firmly."

As for the second idea, that we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home, that is also false. As a matter of fact, the truth seems to be the exact opposite. According to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, "al-Qaeda has added Iraq to its list of grievances," and, "it is probable that recruitment generally has accelerated on account of Iraq." So it seems obvious that instead of luring the remaining terrorists into Babylon to be defeated, the war in Iraq has served as a rallying cause for al Qaeda.

I am afraid that the attacks in London and Madrid are the beginning of a new phase of terrorism in which the Qaeda flare for drama, manifested in such enormous acts as the attacks in New York and Washington, will be replaced by the smaller, but more frequent, acts of autonomous and very loosely connected terrorist cells that communicate by motorbike and computer disk and cannot be arranged in a hierarchical chain of command. Leaders like Bin Laden will cease (or more likely already have ceased) to be micro managers, giving vague orders to be carried out on a local scale by terror franchises that may or may not have contact with these leaders.

British intelligence claims to have had absolutely no information that might have pointed to an attack yesterday, and there's no reason to disbelieve them. A small group of people can easily attack a soft target like the subway or a bus. Once the explosives have been acquired, a small attack becomes nearly impossible to predict or to stop. We have seen another country go down this same road: Israel. And we have seen that Israel's constant escalations and terrorist retaliations (assassinations, collective punishment, etc.) have not calmed the tide of bombings. On the contrary, they have had the opposite effect. I fear that the US, and to a much lesser extent its allies, has not learned this lesson.

It goes without saying that just like the attacks in New York are not a valid reason to bomb another country, like we did in Iraq, the reverse is also true: the invasion in Iraq is not a valid reason to bomb innocent civilians in London or Madrid. And that is the sad reality of this tit-for-tat exercise in bellicosity: the people getting killed on both sides are never those who are ultimately responsible for the violence, but rather innocent Londoners or Iraqis, who only want to live normal lives, free of violence and fear.