Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side

I was fortunate enough on Saturday night to be in the audience at the Tribeca Film Festival here in New York for a screening of Taxi to the Dark Side, the new documentary by director Alex Gibney. The film is a damning and impassioned examination of use of torture by the United States on suspected terrorists after the September 11th attacks, stretching from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Iraq. Gibney, whose 2005 documentary on the Enron fiasco, The Smartest Guys in the Room, was nominated for an Academy Award, has constructed a viscerally powerful examination of the way the Bush administration’s use of torture, often though by no means always obscured behind wink-and-nod acceptance and convoluted legalese, has devastated that lives of many of those on the front lines of recent military actions by the United States, both in terms of the local inhabitants of conflict zones and U.S. soldiers on the ground themselves.

The thread running throughout the film’s examination of culpability is the story of an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar, seized by Afghani militiamen in December 2002 at then turned over to the U.S. military detention center at Bagram Air Base. Five days later, after being hung from a cage in chains, kept awake for days at a time and kicked until a medical examiner later described his legs as having been “pulpified,” he was dead.

The film takes its title from comments that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney made to television host Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press on September 16, 2001. Asked what kind of response the United States was planning to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania, Cheney answered as follows:

We also have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We're going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussions, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

What makes Gibney’s film so much more powerful and effective than many other recent ventures in political documentary cinema (which probably reached its nadir with Swiss director Nicolas Rossier’s smug, clueless and dilettantish attempt to whitewash Haiti’s recent political history) is the fact that Gibney never condescends to his subjects, whether they be humble Afghan farmers or the working-class military grunts who administered the beatings to Dilawar that eventually killed him. He does not excuse the actions of anyone, but he does glean insight into how a system rotten to the core makes brutal, criminal deaths such as that which happened to Dilawar not only possible but inevitable and how, while the low-level soldiers who implement policy will be held accountable in the event of public outcry, the criminals in suits and offices who wrote the policy have yet not been. The soldiers themselves, even those who administered the fatal beatings, appear quietly eloquent and terribly conflicted over what they have been party to.

“The main reason I did this film is that I wanted the truth to be told,” said one of the soldiers stationed at Bagram at the time, a hulking fellow named Damien Corsetti, who was at Saturday night’s screening. Corsetti was charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, assault and performing an indecent act with another person, and was later found not guilty of all charges. “The prisoners need their rights restored and we them an apology for what we did to them.”

And what of the commanders of men like Corsetti? Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld enjoys a quiet retirement, having left the Bush administration last year. His former deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, is currently clinging with his fingernails to his job as head of the World Bank, awash in scandal. John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2001 to 2003, who co-authored a February 2002 memo advising that the U.S. military had no obligation to comply with international laws in the handling of detainees in the war on terrorism, is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. Perhaps Yoo’s most memorable commentary on the whole torture saga came in a December 2005 debate with Doug Cassel, director of Notre Dame Law School's Center for Civil and Human Rights. Asked by Cassel whether "if the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"

"No treaty," Yoo responded, and going on to say "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that."

Even more recently, who can forget the words of U.S. president George W. Bush fhimself from a press conference in September of last year, when he declared that, when the U.S. government captured the Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah “the CIA used an alternative set of procedures” to question him.

“These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations.” Bush went on. “The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used -- I think you understand why -- if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.”

One month later, Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, a piece of legislation which, though specifically barring acts such as murder and rape and "cruel and inhuman" treatment, gave the green light for, among other things, withholding evidence from defendants, denying defendants the right to file habeas corpus petitions, established military tribunals for terror suspects, retained the right to send detainees to secret prisons abroad and gave immunity to U.S. government agents for acts regarding their interrogation practices. The Act also broadened the definition of “enemy combatant” to include anyone who offered “material support” to a person or persons engaged in hostilities against the U.S., enabling them to be held indefinitely in military detention regardless of whether or not they took any active role in any hostilities.

Tomorrow, May 1st, organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights will be holding a Restore Habeus Day, to pressure lawmakers to restore the ability to file habeas corpus petitions to all prisoners in U.S. custody. Write or call your local congressperson and let them know that there should be no more Dilawars.

Sudan: Do Something Now, Because People Are Dying Every Day

My most recent article for the Inter Press Service, on the humanitarian disaster in the Sudanese region of Darfur and the Global Days for Darfur events in response to it, is out and can be read here.

An important aspect of the struggle to hold those aiding human rights abuses in Darfur accountable, one which is covered in my new article in detail, is the divestment movement currently targeting Fidelity, the largest mutual fund in the United Sates, and also the largest single shareholder of PetroChina Company, a subsidiary of the state-controlled China National Petroleum Corporation which owns a major stake in Sudan's national oil consortia. You can find out more about the divestment movement here.

The most shocking thing in India

As India, where I spent the early part of this year, strides into the 21st century witnessing as rapid an economic and social transformation as any country has seen in the last 25 years, one may fairly ask what is the biggest challenge facing this diverse, vibrant but often problematic mini-continent of 1.2 billion people. Would it be its historic enmity with neighboring Pakistan, which has lead to four wars between the two since 1947 and resulted in both countries exploding nuclear bombs to prove their dominance in their respective deserts in 1998? Would it be the shameless demagoguery of local politicians such as Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat state, who used his position in 2002 to (at best) stand idly by as 2,000 (most Muslim) citizens of his state were slaughtered and is now being accused of involvement in extra-judicial police killings? Would it be the continuing conflict in Kashmir or the country's ongoing Maoist insurgency?

According to Jaipur’s Chief Judicial Magistrate Dinesh Gupta and solicitor Poonam Chand Bhandari, no. The greatest problem facing India is what you see in the photo, the over-enthusiastic embrace and kiss that American actor Richard Gere planted on Indian actress Shilpa Shetty during an AIDS awareness program in the Indian capital of New Delhi early this month. This week, at Bhandari’s request, Gupta’s court issued a warrant ordering the arrests of Gere and Shetty charging that their kiss was “highly sexually erotic” and “transgressed all limits of vulgarity and have the tendency to corrupt the society.”

I can only imagine the guffaws with which this order is being greeted among the Bollywood elite of Colaba and elsewhere in India’s cultural and economic capital of Bombay, but to me, the Gere/Shetty evokes an unwelcome sense of intolerant deju vu, recalling this past Valentine’s Day, when supporters of the xenophobic Shiv Sena party ran amok in Maharashtra state, trashing a shop that sold Valentine’s Day cards and setting much of the merchandise on fire before pummeling a large billboard put up by the Indian cell phone giant Hutch which advertised Valentine’s Day with a host of balloons. A Shiv Sena youth leader at the time explained that "Valentine’s Day-like celebrations are all western concepts and has been forced on our society for the commercial purpose. Shiv Sena will never allow the commercialization of Indian feelings.”

But one must ask if the Shiv Sainiks, Dinesh Gupta and Poonam Chand Bhandari have ever bothered to study their own country's history. As I have noted on this blog before, India, despite what some opportunistic politicians and judges might like to lead people to believe, is hardly any stranger to highly charged eroticism, nor to public displays of it, nor is the rather brief tangle between Gere and Shetty so much as a patch on India’s own highly developed sense of carnal tradition. This is the country, after all, that composed the Kama Sutra, a hefty chunk of which can perhaps best be described as an owner's manual for how to best use the body for sexual enjoyment and, indeed, describes the act of making love itself as a "divine union." Likewise, near the holy ghats of Varanasi (now Benares) resides the 800 year-old erotic temples at Khajuraho, which depict men and women in various acrobatic and highly explicit sexual poses and quite joyfully copulating, often with multiple partners.

Of course, puritanical busybodies are hardly a phenomenon particular to India but, given their relatively advanced levels of education, one thinks that the gentlemen from Jaipur could find something better to do with their time to engage in demagoguery about an incident that looks childish in comparison to India’s own highly-developed (and quite positive) zest for pleasures of the flesh.

A Greener New York City?

On Sunday, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled a broad tapestry of 127 measures designed to create what he called “the first environmentally sustainable 21st-century city.” With admirable chutzpah while speaking at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, Mayor Bloomberg stated that the city would attempt to plant more than 1 million trees in the next 10 years, create a dual city-state fund of some $200 million to create a financing authority to oversee the completion of major mass-transit projects such as the Second Avenue subway, increasing the number of bike paths and cultivating mussels to cut down on pollution out of the rivers. More controversially, though, Mr. Bloomberg also proposed a three-year test of congestion pricing, which would represent a charge for $8 for cars and $21 for commercial trucks that enter Manhattan below 86th Street from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays (with any tolls paid deducted from the fee). Modeled on similar systems affected congested areas of London and Singapore, Mr. Bloomberg contends that congestion would be reduced and air quality improved.

"Moving to New York has always been an act of optimism," read the proposal, dubbed PlaNYC, in its unusually eloquent introduction. "To come here you must have faith in a better future, and courage to seek it out; you must trust the city to give you a chance, and know that you’ll take advantage when it does. You must believe in investing in your future with hard work and ingenuity. You must, in short, believe in accepting a challenge."

Though some parts of the plan strike me as easier to implement and more realistic than others, and though supporters of the process will have to convince the powers-that-be in Albany and Washington to sign on for sizable financial commitments (and add hundreds of millions of dollars to the proposed $57 billion budget New York City has for the next fiscal year,) Mr. Bloomberg's statement that “our economy is humming, our fiscal house is in order and our near-term horizon looks bright, if we don’t act now, when?” is a refreshing bit of reality injected into a political milieu that often seems to be awash in short-sighted politics-of-the-moment political ends. An American friend of mine in Rome writes to me that "city centers are renewing themselves without the bulldozer ( as in the 1960's) but this time with a paint brush, creativity and investment." On a glorious spring day here in New York, with the mercury set to climb into the mid 80s, who could not support the desire for a greener, healthier, more environmentally responsible New York City? With the city expected to gain about 1 million residents by 2030, now is indeed the time to look ahead to ensure its enduring viability is sustained for future generations.

Henri Petithomme’s hunger for justice

Almost lost in this week’s coverage of the new round of violence in Iraq and the latest violent explosion by a frustrated nerd with far too easy access to handguns, was the fact that Haitian-American U.S. Army veteran Henri Petithomme ended his 15 day hunger strike at St. Paul Episcopal Church in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood.

Drinking only liquids, Petithomme was protesting the detention of 101 Haitian migrants who landed at Hallandale Beach, about 15 miles north of downtown Miami, after three weeks at sea in a ramshackle sailboat . Petithomme’s fast also brought into sharp relief the hypocrisy of the so-called “wet foot-dry foot” policy, which as a general rule allows Cuban immigrants to stay in the U.S. to pursue residency once they touch soil (as opposed to being interdicted at sea), though the fate that awaits the vast majority of Haitians is either a direct ticket straight back to Haiti, or imprisonment at a “detention” center. Petithomme has said that he hopes that the U.S. will give temporary legal status to Haitians already in the country. Having reported myself on a heart-wrenching landing of more than two hundred Haitians onto a major Miami causeway on 29 October 2002 - where people aboard an overloaded steamer hemmed in by the U.S. Coast Guard jumped overboard and begged passing motorists to give them rides away - I have long supported changes in U.S. immigration policy vis-à-vis Haitians arriving in the United States. One of South Florida’s U.S. Congressman, Kendrick B. Meek, to his credit, has been leading the call for fairer treatment of Haitians in this regard.

On a different note, next week will mark the "Global Days for Darfur," events around the world from April 23rd-30th to call attention to the escalating violence in Darfur region of Sudan and the continued failure of the international community to adequately respond to the crisis. Including rallies, readings, concerts, vigils and more, it will be week that should involve all people of conscience. More can be learned about the programs in various cities here.

Planet India: Where prosperity and poverty collide

My review of Asia Society fellow Mira Kamdar's highly interesting new book, Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy is Transforming the World, appears in today's Miami Herald and can be read here.

A Literary Icon for "Les Dammés de la Terre"

My article on the centenary of the masterful Haitian author Jacques Roumain has been published by the Inter Press Service today. It can be read here.

Équipe haïtienne does it again

While it may seem that Haitians may sometimes have little to cheer about, one group of individuals who have been gladdening the hearts of those in that Caribbean country thus far this year have been Haiti’s national football teams. On Sunday, a Haitian team followed up on the country's Caribbean Cup victory in January by “pulverizing” El Salvador (in the words of Radio Kiskeya) 3:0 in Honduras, thus paving the way for the Haitian team’s first appearance in the FIFA Tournament since the 1974 World Cup. Haitian football fans recall with pride the Haitian team’s performance that year and, in particular, Manno Sanon’s brilliant playing which put Haiti in the lead in its match against Italy in the finals, albeit for only six minutes.

A tip of the hat goes to Herold Junior Charles, Normil Valdo, Jean Francis Fabien Vorbe and the entire Haitian team for showing the world the meaning of true heart. Ayibobo!

Remember Gujarat

Five years ago this spring, in the India state of Gujarat, something dark and terrible took place that appears to have passed from the world’s consciousness and conscience with little long-lasting impression, swept away in the tide of violence and blood emanating daily from other parts of the world, chiefly Iraq.

In Gujarat, on 27 February 2002, 59 people were killed when a fire swept through several compartments of the Sabarmati Express train as it was returning with Hindu religious pilgrims from the town of Ayodhya. Ayodhya itself, some readers will recall, was where, in December 1992, the destruction of a 500-year-old Mughal-era mosque by Hindu zealots set off spiraling riots around India and, particularly in the country’s economic capital, Bombay, riots that, by early 1993, had left more than 2,000 dead, the majority of them Muslims targeted by Hindu mobs. In March 1993, in what is seen as a response by Muslim extremists, 13 bombs exploded nearly simultaneously around Bombay, killing 257 people.

So when that fire - a tragedy that an inquiry committee lead by Justice U.C. Banerjee concluded in early 2005 was an accident - swept through the Sabarmati Express, it carried with it not only the heat of oxidation but also the scorching power of terrible history.

Between February 28 and March 2 2002, Human Rights Watch later concluded, “thousands of attackers descended on Muslim neighborhoods, clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of Hindu nationalist groups, and armed with swords, sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders. They were guided by voter lists and printouts of addresses of Muslim-owned properties-information obtained from the local municipality.” Some 2,000 people, again the vast majority of them Muslims, were slain, and some 100,000 were left homeless.

But there is more. Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat and a member of then then-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with no evidence, claimed publicly at the time that the killings were an “organized terrorist attack" and threw the Gujarat state government's support behind a call for a general strike to protest the deaths. Even more pointedly, Gujarat’s state police were under instructions from the Modi administration not to act firmly against anyone participating in attacks against Gujarat's Muslim population. Human Rights Watch wrote that “the groups most directly involved in the violence against Muslims include the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, VHP), the Bajrang Dal, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that heads the Gujarat state government.” An account of the destruction in some detail can be found in Asia Society fellow Mira Kamdar’s new book, Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy is Transforming the World (Scribner). The Indian journalist Dilip D'Souza has likewise been remembering Gujarat's carnage in frequent postings on his blog from Bombay.

What, one may ask, was the official sanction against Narendra Modi (who continues to make speeches in Gujarat fanning anti-Muslim sentiment) and his subordinates for their role in the slayings of so many of their fellow citizens? Was Modi relived of his post, hauled before a tribunal, punished and sanctioned and sent to prison?

The United States revoked Modi's tourist visa, citing the provisions of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act and the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 which forbid foreign government officials who are "responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom" from being eligible for a visa to the U.S., and later denied him a diplomatic visa, as well. Mr. Modi is apparently still a welcome visitor in Europe, though.

And in India itself, where the government of Prime Minster Manmohan Singh frequently proclaims his administration’s commitment to the rule of law and credentials as the safeguard of India’s secular democracy? Silence. A silence, as the Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique, slain seven years ago this month, might say, to awaken the dead, the dead of Gujarat still awaiting justice.

Many years earlier, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, surveying the often pointless destruction of the Irish civil war, penned the following lines in his poem, The Stare's Nest by My Window, which seem like an eloquent meditation with which to conclude this posting.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
no clear fact to be discerned…
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Five years on, remember Gujarat.

N'ap sonje w, Jean Do

Seven years ago today, on 3 April 2000, in the courtyard of Radio Haiti-Inter on the Route de Delmas in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, journalist and free man Jean-Léopold Dominique, and Radio Haiti's caretaker, Jean-Claude Louissaint, were gunned down, and Haiti lost one of the most powerful advocates for a free press and the enfranchisement of the peasant majority that the nation had ever seen.

In the years that followed, I watched as a young, Paris-educated barrister named Claudy Gassant fought against the weight of a corrupt state and a 200-year tradition of impunity, to try and bring justice to the slain men. During the first tenure of Haiti's president René Préval, until 7 February 2001, Gassant was supplied with security, vehicles ad other tools that he needed to prosecute the investigation. Upon the installation of the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2001, all of that was peeled away until Gassant was left virtually defenseless. Even before, he had reason to be afraid. His requests to interview then-senator Dany Toussaint were met with scorn by Haiti's senate, controlled by Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party, of which Toussaint was a member, with then-senate president Yvon Neptune dismissing Gassant as “a small judge that cannot summon someone from such a great body” and threatening to launch an investigation into his “exact motives.” In early 2001, Police nationale d’Haïti (PNH) assistant traffic chief Evens Sainturné, a former bodyguard of Aristide’s, demanding that Gassant return an armored vehicle that had been given to the investigation by Préval, and on 30 January of that year, driving through Port-au-Prince, Gassant’s car was cut off by a vehicle full of armed men belonging to Millien Rommage, a Fanmi Lavalas deputy who brandished weapons at Gassant from the windows of their vehicle and shouted that they could kill him anytime they wanted. Finally, in January 2002, Gassant fled into exile in the United States. At the time, Gassant, the staff of Radio Haiti-Inter and now-PNH chief Mario Andresol all charged the Aristide government with having intentionally blocked the investigation into the murder.

Over the years, I got to know something of Dominique's widow, Michele Montas, who bravely soldiered on running Radio Haiti alone until a Christmas 2002 attempt on her own life resulted in the death of her bodyguard, Maxime Seide, and forced her as well to flee into exile in the United States. She is now the spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon here in New York. Her courage, and the courage of the entire staff of Radio Haiti to soldier on under such conditions served as a great example to me.

Now, in 2007, Aristide is gone and Préval is once again president. Claudy Gassant has returned to Haiti, and is the chief magistrate of Port-au-Prince. But alas, as the press freedom group Reporters sans frontières said in a statement today, "the investigation that was relaunched two years ago has still not yielded any results and impunity continues to prevail in this case." Of the suspects two - Dymsley "Ti Lou" Milien and Jeudi "Guimy" Jean--Daniel - are said to hiding among the gangs of the capital's Martissant neighborhood, where I reported from this past summer, while others have fled abroad.

Jean Dominique and Jean-Claude Louissaint deserve better.

I close today with some lines from a radio broadcast Dominique made shortly before his murder, where he denounced the destructive violence that was tearing apart his country and directly addressed those who were trying to intimidate him:

I have no other weapon than my journalist’s pen! And my microphone and my unquenchable faith as a militant for true change! Over Radio Haiti, there is a silence to awaken the dead, the five thousand dead of the coup d’ètat; this is the truth that must emerge from this insignificant exercise in intimidation today. This is the truth that it is right to speak of this morning, the truth of a free man. Earlier I cited another free man, Laclos. I close with Shakespeare: “The truth will always make the face of the devil blush!”

Long live a free press. Viv Ayiti.

A disgraceful campaign by the government of the Dominican Republic

News has filtered out from the Dominican Republic about how the government of Dominican President Leonel Fernández intends to respond to the growing international outcry regarding the labor conditions and treatment of immigrant Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian-descent within the country. Apparently, the Fernández government will responded the only way it seems to know how, through a sustained demagogic campaign of whipping up of even further bigotry, character assassination and, I fear, potential physical violence against those who speak out for the rights of the disadvantaged in the country.

In the wake of a 21 March statement by Amnesty International saying that “deep-rooted racial discrimination against Haitian migrants living in the Dominican Republic is causing arbitrary mass deportations and the denial of birth certificates to thousands of children” and in advance of Esclaves au Paradis (Slaves in Paradise) exhibition in Paris later this spring, Dominican officials have announced that they are seeking to revoke the citizenship of Movimiento De Mujeres Dominico Haitiana (MUDHA) leader Sonia Pierre, a Dominican of Haitian-descent who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1963. A recipient of the 2006 Human Rights Award from the Washington-based Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, Pierre has been one of the most active and eloquent voices for the disenfranchised in the Dominican Republic. The campaign against Pierre appears to be of a piece with similar campaigns against two activist priests, Father Pedro Ruquoy and Father Christopher Hartley, who were driven from the country in late 2006 and late 2005, respectively, after advocating for better treatment of behalf of Haitian workers laboring in the bateys, as the Dominican Republic’s sprawling sugar plantations are known.

Concurrently with the moves against Pierre, the internet publication Dominican Today, which slavishly parrots the Dominican government line at nearly every opportunity (reminding this observer of nothing so much as the propaganda machine that was Agence Haitian de Presse during the regime of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide), has printed libelous claims by an unnamed “government official” that the human rights situation in the Dominican Republic is being exaggerated by “foreigners” who use it “to obtain financing and to justify themselves” and that Father Christopher Hartley, who labored bravely for ten years in the bateys before big sugar interests drove him out, was accused of committing "serious crimes," two statements for which no evidence whatsoever exists.

Since its return to power in 2004, the Fernández government has appeared to be completely beholden to the whims of big sugar. Foreign Minister Carlos Morales Troncoso, one of Sonia Pierre’s bitterest critics, has a long-standing relationship as an executive and major shareholder of the Central Romana sugar concern, along with Cuban-American sugar barons Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul, and the wealthy Vicini family, who run the Batey dos Hermanos sugar-growing territory, maintain close ties with the government. Nevertheless, even by this rather compromised standard, the behavior of the Fernández government and its representatives over the last week has been nothing but demagoguery of the lowest kind.

One of the reasons for the recent attacks against Pierre is likely the fact the she was part of the legal team that, in September 2005, successfully argued before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the Dominican Republic was in violation of Articles 3, 5, 19, 20 and 24 of the American Convention on Human Right Pact of San Jose, Costa Rica in denying citizenship to two young girls, Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico, born in the Dominican Republic. That decision also reinforced the fact that, in its denial of citizenship to persons born within its borders, the Dominican Republic was in violation of its own constitution, Article 11 of which reads in the original Spanish as follows:

“Todas las personas que nacieren en el territorio dela República, con excepción de los hijos legítimos delos extranjeros residentes en el país enrepresentació n diplomática o los que están de tránsitoen él.”

In a gesture of disrespect for international law, Fernández has said that, though his government has begun paying damages to the two girl, it will not follow the Inter-American Commission’s broader ruling demanding that the country follow its international obligations by granting citizenship to those born to families living there.

Many of us had hoped for far greater things from Fernández when he returned to office in 2004, looking forward to a socially progressive, pro-business, vigorous and law-abiding government to correct the drift and corruption that characterized the administration of his predecessor, Hipólito Mejía.

Unfortunately, it appears that was not to be, and that the influence of money and the instinctual reflex to cheap nationalist sentiment and scapegoating was too appealing in the narrow political advantage it offered to resist. It looks increasingly like Fernández’s second term will go down in history as one of the great lost opportunities that the Dominican Republic ever had and that, much like their brothers and sisters in Haiti, the majority of decent, poor, gentle Dominicans will have been betrayed once again by their cynical and opportunistic politicians who had a real chance to uplift their country and blew it.

NYC to Wal-Mart: fuhgeddaboudit

Saying "thanks, but no thanks" but to union-hostile, low-wage jobs with employer-provided healthcare often worse than the meager public health benefits available to its employees, upon my arrival from Europe, New York City succeeded in doing me proud once more by prompting Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. to exclaim “I don’t think it’s worth the effort.” Scott was referring to the efforts of Wal-Mart, one of most visible manifestations of corporate banality, to come to the five boroughs.

In a city of such dizzying variety of choice, the New York Times opined yesterday that, in addition to union-led opposition to a New York invasion by the chain, “Wal-Mart, a cost-minded retailer known for its dowdy merchandise, and New York, a city of excesses known for cutting-edge style, have long had an uneasy relationship.”

Damn straight, and hopefully this beautiful city will resist the malling of America for many years more.

In Zimbabwean, meanwhile, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was detained by police for several hours in an apparent attempt to keep him from addressing reporters on the spiraling violence by the government of Robert Mugabe against the citizens there. Tsvangirai was eventually released, but this situation requires vigilance.

An interview with me, conducted in Spanish, was published on the Haitian media outlet AlterPresse, after originally appearing in the New York Spanish-language publication La Voz. It can be read here.

Adieu, Paris (for now, at least)

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure,
Les jours s'en vont je demeure.
-Guillaume Apollinaire

When I told my friend Justin, an Italian-American currently resident in Rome, that I was coming to France to recuperate from India last month, he wrote to me sarcastically “Oh, I feel so sorry for you. Paris. What hell. What condemnation. What a despicable place. Cultured people. Good looking, well-dressed people. Gourmet food at the corner shops.”

Of course, this is one image of France, a country that also has a ton of problems and appears to be going through some sort of agonizing personality crisis at present. It is a crisis perhaps best typified by the riots in the banlieues in fall 2005, the million-plus protesters the following year successfully scuttling a jobs bill designed to reduce the soaring youth unemployment the was one of the main causes for the unrest and this spring’s rather underwhelming presidential campaign, which pits a former interior minister given to feinting to the far right (Nicolas Sarkozy) against a rather unreconstructed big-spending socialist (Ségolène Royal) and a relatively undistinguished former education minister who enjoys portraying himself as a yeoman farmer (François Bayrou), none of whom seem to have the mixture of new ideas and compassion needed to bring France out of its slump.

When people in the United States complain about 4.5% unemployment and a 3.4% GDP growth rate, the picture in France looks as follows: France's jobless rate has not dipped below 8% for 25 years (measuring an astonishing 21.5% for the under-25s and nearly 50% in some housing projects) and its GDP growth was just 2% last year. That is in some ways a sick, staggering economy.

However, the French do have many things to be envied, not the least of which is first-class public healthcare and an excellent public transportation system, something that, living in New York, it is often easy to forget the rest of the United States conspicuously lacks, with some urban exceptions. There is a sense of societal responsibility for the welfare of the average citizen that has all but vanished from Washington after two terms of one of the most venomous, corrupt, oligarchic and unfeeling administrations the United States has ever seen. There is a brutal inequality in the American system, where minimum wages are beneath any possibility of making a living on them and generalized health care is non-existent (I myself lack any). The key for the French, it would seem, is how to reconcile the social protections and comforts they have grown so used to (and elements of which, in my view, the U.S. could learn much from), with an entrepreneurial and free-market zeal that will unblock the vast, dispirited underclass and youth that feel they have very little to gain from the French economy on the whole, and whose sense of hopelessness has been a main driver in the civil tumult seen here in recent years.

But alas, before France makes it big choice, I will have to depart, back to the United States. I will have to momentarily leave behind the rainy streets, the exquisite museums, the people selling stolen watches and households gems along the Marché Dejean, the call centers offering special rates to Côte d'Ivoire and Algeria, and the warm, inviting bistros and boulangeries that seem to line every street. But I will be back.

“Le monde est comme une goutte de rosée…

…Qui s'évapore aux premiers rayons de soleil.”

That is the wistful Syrian proverb that greets visitors to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, one of outgoing French president (and long-time Paris mayor) Jacques Chirac’s most notable cultural contributions to this ever-more diverse and multicultural European capital. The fruit of the merger of two Paris institutions - the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and the ethnographic department of the Musée de l'Homme - in a defiantly modern setting in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, as well as likely a tribute to Mr. Chirac’s immense self-regard and desire for “legacy,” the museum has stirred more than its fair share of debate since opening last summer. The International Herald Tribune described it shortly after its opening as "defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric,“ while the New York Times last summer adopted a pouty theater-critic’s tone, bemoaning that “if the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection ( of the Quai Branly).”

Back from Spain, I finally made my way there today, taking in the market along Avenue du President Wilson (the name itself an echo of a time when the United States and France were not seen to be at odds) before crossing the Seine at the Pont de l’Ama to the Quai Branly itself.

Certainly, the dimly-lit, often music-filled chambers of the museum may seem rather otherworldly and transporting when stepping in from the gray, rainy boulevards of Paris on a March afternoon, but, on the whole, I found the museum’s impressive collection more reverent and subdued than sensational. One aspect of the material on display that has gone oddly underreported is the fact that it contains what is probably the best single collection of carvings and statues from Papua New Guinea that I have ever seen, including beautiful Asmat funerary posts, masks, matted shields, elaborate ritual costumes and even decorated skulls, all presented with an explanation as to their cultural significance to a region with a dizzying variety of ethnic and linguistic lines.

There are radiant Christian tapestries from 17th century Ethiopia depicting familiar kings and prophets with features that delicately blend African and Semitic traits, robustly-colored images from the northeastern Indian state of Assam illustrating the story of Manasa, and a 13th century Hebrew manuscript from the Moroccan city of Fes laying out the story of Esther. If there is any message to be taken from these various representations of the secular and divine, to me it was that the unity of spirit in cultures that political and religious leaders often try and put in opposition to one another, a unity that in facts shines through loud and clear. There is a common humanity in the simplest carved spoon just as there is in the most exquisite statuette of the Buddha, in protective figures from Angola and Congo as there are in mannequins from Malekula.

The weather in Paris, by the way, keeps getting stranger and stranger. The day began with a rainstorm, which gave way to bright sunshine. This in turn gave way to gray, cloud-streaked skies, followed by a steady drizzle, which unexpectedly erupted at around 4:30pm to a full-fledged hail storm. Now the sun is shining brightly again. If it keeps up like this, tomorrow I expect that I will walk out the door and there will be fire everywhere.

Michael Deibert interviewed on KDVS

I was interviewed by France Kassing on KDVS (University of California, Davis) on a variety of subjects - including Kashmir, Haiti, Spain and Zimbabwe - yesterday. The audio link to the broadcast can be found here.

Suerte, España

I passed my last full day in Madrid with a long and hugely enjoyable lunch of paella with a roomful of Haitians and another token American, and again tonight we found ourselves wandering the streets around the Plaza Santa Ana, more crowded and active than even its usual buzz of activity because, I later found out, that it was St. Patrick’s Day, which explained the preponderance of visibly intoxicated people and British Isle brogues and American accents, I think. Dinner was a long affair at a streetside café.

It has been a very interesting and productive time here in Spain, and one that left me with a taste to return. I’ve seen some of the richness of Spanish culture and its hospitality, and also have witnessed Spanish politics at perhaps its most bare-knuckled since the 1981 coup attempt here. The Partido Popular conservative opposition has done a good job of whipping up a demagogic frenzy against what many Spaniards see as the weak and vacillating policy of the socialist government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in allowing convicted Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) terrorist Iñaki de Juana Chaos to serve out the remainder of his sentence under house arrest after a hunger strike left him near death. In a country where, despite claims of a ceasefire, ETA attacks continue to claim lives (a 30 December bomb at Madrid airport, which killed two Ecuadorian immigrants, added another pair to the ETA’s 800+ total), this is potent stuff. In a country with such a lively, vivacious people and such impressive artistic traditions, it would be good for all concerned if the political temperature was lowered a few degrees but, given the current climate in Spain, I don’t know how likely that is to happen.

Tonight, sitting in the silence of my friend’s home on the northern outskirts of Madrid and having experienced some of this deep country’s greatness and fragility over the last 10 days, I think of some words by one of Spain’s greatest sons, the Andalusian poet Federico Garcia Lorca , killed by Nationalist partisans in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War at the age of 38 years old.

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars…

Slaves in paradise, Tsvangirai to hospital and Tracy Quan downtown

My new article for the Inter Press Service, on the Esclaves au Paradis (Slaves in Paradise) exhibit, Father Christopher Hartley and the state of Haitians laboring in the Dominican Republic, was published yesterday and can be read here. I was going to post it yesterday but thought that, given the situation with Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe, it could wait until today.

Reuters reports today that Tsvangirai is now in intensive care with a broken skull, after having been released from police custody along with 30 other opposition figures arrested on Sunday. But, given the track record of the Zimbabwe government up until this point, it would appear that this crisis is far from over and continued vigilance is required. Many thanks to all of you who wrote, called or faxed the Zimbabwean embassies in the U.S. and the U.K.

On a far lighter note, my friend Tracy Quan will be having a reading tonight at East 9th Street’s Manhattan nightspot Solas, for any of those who are in town, celebrating her "special relationship with the Upper East Side," a neighborhood I have never been able to afford to live in (being a Brooklyn and Queens boy) but have visited from time to time.

Help save Morgan Tsvangirai and Zimbabwe's democratic opposition

The regime of the man who is perhaps Africa’s most repulsive dictator, Robert Mugabe, he of the Hitler mustache and Mobutu-esque pretensions, has committed another outrage against the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe, news reports say.

A visibly battered Morgan Tsvangirai, the president of the largest faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, arrived at court today dazed and bloodied, with part of his hair shaved as the result of an apparent head wound, the Associated Press reports. Tsvangirai was arrested on Sunday along with scores of others, some who were also brutalized when Mugabe’s riot police violently attacked a planned meeting of opposition groups in the poor neighborhood of Highfields in the capital Harare, the New York Times’ Michael Wines reports. At least one man was shot and killed by police. Colleagues said that Tsvangirai was tortured severely after his arrest. Michele Montas, the former director of Radio Haiti-Inter and now the spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released a statement in the wake of the government attack saying that such “actions violate the basic democratic right of citizens to engage in peaceful assembly.”

As this is the latest chapter of brutality written in the blood of his people by the petty tyrant Mugabe, now, more than ever, is the time to allow the Zimbabwean government know that the eyes of the world are upon them and that such crimes will not go unreported and, inshallah, unpunished in the international legal realm.

One cannot forget the despot Mugabe’s attacks against Harare’s poorest residents in May 2005, when, under the guise of a long-planned operation codenamed Operation Murambatsvina - Shona for Operation Drive Out Trash - the Mugabe governed acted as follows, recounted by the Zimbabwean Sokwanele organization:

Zimbabwe's police have used sledgehammers and bulldozers to reduce brick homes to rubble, and they have torched flimsy shacks. At the same time, thousands of informal businesses have been destroyed, with more than 20,000 traders arrested, their possessions smashed or irretrievably confiscated by those entrusted to uphold the law...The onslaught came like a military raid with overtones of a Zimbabwean Kristallnacht. As on November 9 1938, when rampaging Nazi mobs violently destroyed Jewish properties and businesses, the Zimbabwean police have completely disregarded the law, focusing instead on wholesale destruction.

The operation was dubbed “slow genocide by bulldozer” by the Affordable Housing Institute, by Christian Aid as an act where “hundreds of thousands of people have been made homeless…and thousands have since been detained” and as a “blatant violation of civil, political, economic and social rights guaranteed under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights” by Amnesty International.

Let the Mugabe government know that this attack will not go unrecorded by the world at large, and let Zimbabwe’s democratic opposition know they are not alone. Contact the Zimbabwean embassies in the United States and the United Kingdom at the links below to demand proper medical attention, access to attorneys and human rights advocates and an end to the violence directed at those arrested during Sunday’s attack.

Embassy of Zimbabwe in the United Kingon

http://www.embassy.uk.com/contact.htm

Embassy of Zimbabwe in the United States

1608 New Hampshire Ave

Washington, , DC 20009

Phone: 202-332-7100

E-Mail: info@zimbabwe-embassy.us

Yon sel, nou feb,

Ansanm, nou fo!

Rioja, flamenco y crispación

It was an unexpectedly sumptuous and enjoyable weekend around Madrid and its environs over the last few days, with free-flowing Rioja and much fine Spanish food. My Haitian friends and I spent an enjoyable Saturday lunch with the owners of the Aldea Santillana retreat, with the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Central rising in the distance. The afternoon concluded with a visit to the colonial town of Buitrago de Lozoya and a stroll over its finely preserved old city walls as the sun was setting and in the evening, following a rest and a bit of reading, we sampled some of the movida - the perpetual partying lifestyle that Madrid is so famous for - in the streets along the Plaza Santa Ana, including a stop at the beautifully preserved bar Viva Madrid.

Sunday saw a day of Spanish culture, co-promoted by Guillermo Fesser, the co-host of Madrid’s hugely popular Gomaespuma radio show, who has co-founded an organization to help promote indigenous musical and artistic traditions here. Commencing with a many-hours long lunch at a finca outside of the capital that included spontaneous (and highly energetic) outbreaks of flamenco guitar, singing and dancing, there was interesting conversation with a wide cross-section of Spanish and European political viewpoints. The evening ended up with an outstanding concert of modern flamenco music by the singer Diego el Cigala in the small industrial city of Guadalajara. One could get used to this.

As we were enjoying ourselves, though, all was not quiet in Spain. On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Madrid to protest the decision of the government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to allow José Ignacio de Juana Chaos (aka Iñaki de Juana Chaos), a leader of the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) Basque separatist group convicted of killing 25 people, to serve out the remainder of his sentence under house arrest. De Juana had been on a 115 day hunder strike that he threatened to continue until death if he was not freed. Despite supposedly having initiated a permanent ceasefire as a pre-condition of becoming involved in peace talks with Zapatero’s government, the ETA exploded a bomb at Madrid airport on 30 December, killing a pair of Ecuadorian immigrants, and, unlike Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, Juana Chaos has never expressed any remorse for his blood-drenched past. The image of Miguel Ángel Blanco Garrido, a politician in the Basque region kidnapped and murdered by the ETA in 1997, one of the group's more than 800 victims, was prominent among the demonstrators.

It is a misstep that has been adroitly, and perhaps a touch cynically, exploited by the opposition conservative party, the Partido Popular, that has seemed to effectively be tapping into a very real well of outrage here that I heard expressed by people of various social classes and political stripes in my travels around the capital. Many are wondering aloud what the ramifications will be for Zapatero’s Partido Socialista Obrero Espanola (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party or PSOE) in Spain’s upcoming municipal elections. A British friend of mine, a keen observer of Spanish politics for over 20 years and living in the southern city of Málaga, wrote to me that, although he felt that the PP was “making dirty politics out of trying to sabotage the peace effort” by their rather strenuous attacks on Zapatero’s government, “releasing de Juana Chaos into house arrest may have been a major political blunder, if the PP is able to use it to convince a majority of voters Zapatero is someone who gives into terrorists and lets unrepentant mass murderers out on the streets.”

In Spain, as elsewhere, it appears that politics is a complicated business.

Desde Madrid

My first full day in the city of Almodóvar was marked by bright blue skies and a leisurely stroll through Huertas up to the Plaza Mayor in the company of a friend who has lived here since 2001. The plaza was as sweeping and grand as one would expect the heart of Spain to be, and there was a great hum of activity as we descended on foot back down through the book fair on the Paseo del Prado and finally into the famous galleries of the Museo del Prado itself, my first visit to one of the world’s great museums.

Mulling over works by such justly renowned artists as Spain’s own Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velasquez and the Germany’s native son Albrecht Dürer, I was immediately taken by the extraordinary power of Francisco de Goya’s later-period work when, beset by deafness and isolation, the painter’s tone shifted markedly from portraits of self-obsessed and foppish noblemen to far darker visions of war, chaos and the true price exacted on ordinary citizens by the vainglorious war making of Europe’s political leaders of his time, the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In Coloso (The Giant), Goya depicts the bestial back of some massive being turning away and towering over a scene of anarchy and bloodshed, a possible allegory for what Goya himself saw as his beloved Spain was ripped apart by a French invasion as occurred during Europe’s so-called Peninsular War.

Most stunning of all in its emotional power, though, rendered with all the immediacy of a Robert Capa photograph, is Goya’s painting El 3 de mayo en Madrid: Los fusilamientos en la montaña del Principe Pío, which depicts the merciless French suppression of a rebellion against Napoleon’s invading forces by Spanish patriots in May 1808. Following the revolt, the French army executed at least 5,000 Spanish citizens and in doing so provoked a general uprising and guerilla war that would drive Napoleon’s armies from Spain in defeat only a few months later, marking the first major defeat for the French empire on the European continent some four year after the Haitians had handed the pint-sized tyrant a similar drubbing in the Caribbean, half a world away.

But, victory dances aside, in El 3 de mayo, Goya cuts right to the bloody heart of military conflict: A nighttime execution, the simultaneous terror and dignity in the eyes of those about to be slain, the stigmata-like markings on the hands of the condemned man draw in greatest relief, the terrible machinery of killing represented by the French firing squad and, in the distance and removed and seemingly uncaring, the rising steeple of a church.

My friend, who watched from feverish exile in the United States as many members of his family were massacred by the Tontons Macoutes of Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier during the appalling Jérémie Vespers that took place in that Haitian town of that name in 1964, commented to me that it reminded him of the indifference of the United States to the terrible crimes that Duvalier and later Haitian presidents committed against that country's people. For me, something of the picture spoke of the day in February 2004 when three companions and I drove to the central Haitian city of Saint Marc and, instead of finding the town I had driven through dozens of times before, found a charnel house of burned homes, Bale Wouze (Clean Sweep) paramilitary forces and Unite de Securite de la Garde du Palais National d’Haiti (USGPNH) personnel seemingly drunk on blood and as terrorized and victimized a population as I have ever seen.

By authoritative counts, at least 27 people were killed by forces acting in support of the government of then-Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide when, on 11 February, Bale Wouze and USGPNH re-took the town from the lightly-armed anti-government Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint-Marc (Ramicos) forces that had seized it on 7 February. The victims in Saint Marc were people like Leroy Joseph, killed in front of his wife and children; Kenol St. Gilles, thrown alive into a fire; Yveto Morancy, killed on 13 February; and Ketia Paul, gang-raped over the course of seven hours in the burned-out remnants of the Saint Marc police commissariat where she had gone to plead for the release of a friend held there.

These are also victims worthy of remembrance and now, three years on, with still no one having been brought to trial for the crimes they were subjected to, they are still crying out for justice.