Jamaica: The more things change...

At almost exactly this time last year, wrapping up a several-week’s long trip to Jamaica, one of my favorite places, and I published an article with the Inter Press Service detailing the struggle of one father to get justice for a son that he claimed was murdered in an extrajudicial killing by Jamaican police.

The story of the struggle of Barrington Fox who, along with Yvonne Sobers, founded Families Against State Terrorism (FAST), a Jamaican organization that now lobbies for greater police oversight and accountability and judicial reform, seemed to speak for all of the those concerned about the level of killings by the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), among the highest per capita in the world.

Today, the Jamaica Gleaner is reporting that, far from having improved from 2005, which saw 168 fatal shootings by police in this Caribbean country of just under 3 million people, things have gotten even worse, with 196 people slain by police thus far thus year. That’s roughly about 22 people per month.

Having spent a decent amount of time in impoverished areas of Kingston where gunmen often loyal to one of Jamaica’s two main political parties, the People’s National Party (PNP) and Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), hold sway, and having seen first-hand the confluence between criminal and political activity, I realize that there is much truth in something that Mark Shields, a 30-year veteran of police forces in Britain who has served as deputy commissioner for crime in the JCF since 2005, told me last year.

"Policing in Jamaica is a highly dangerous enterprise," Shields said, as we sat in his office in Kingston. "The criminals here are armed with high velocity weapons, are not afraid to use them and the police have limited resources."

Nevertheless, something is obviously terribly wrong at the heart of Jamaican policing, when groups such as FAST and Jamaicans for Justice are able to cite statistics such as those that came out this week, and then also point to cases such as that of the former commander of the JCF's Crime Management Unit (CMU), Reneto Adams. Six police officers, including Adams, were acquitted in December 2005 of the murders of two women and two men in the rural village of Kraal in May 2003, despite what human rights advocates and even some police (in private conversations with me) characterized as “overwhelming” evidence that the victims were unarmed and that police had tampered with the crime scene.

It is high time that the government of Jamaica’s new Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, push for an independent, non-partisan investigative body to probe police misconduct, something that some policemen I spoke to on the island were also in favour as, as well as giving the JCF’s superintendent more leeway to act against officers that he believes to be guilty of wrongdoing.

Violence comes from a host of complex causes, but with those two simple moves, perhaps Jamaica could begin to reverse this sad trend and close the book an era of impunity that which the island’s populace has endured for far too long.

Two economic articles of note

The Inter Press Service published a pair of my articles this week looking at economic developments across North Africa in the automotive and electronics manufacturing sectors. Excerpts from the stories, as well as link to the full articles on the Inter Press Service website, are included below.

MD

******************************

TRADE: North Africa a Launch Pad For Auto Markets

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Sep 25 (IPS) - When French car company Renault SA and its Japanese partner, Nissan Motor Co., announced their intention to build a joint assembly plant in Tangier, Morocco at an estimated cost of 1 billion euros, it was a substantial enough investment to make auto industry analysts take notice.

The labour-rich swath of the five countries that make up North Africa, with their easy access to the Mediterranean Sea and the entirety of sub-Saharan African unfurling to their south, are becoming an increasingly important -- and strategic -- centre for auto production.

Read the full article here.


******************************

TRADE: 'Silicon Ribbon' Pops Up Across the Maghreb

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Sep 29 (IPS) - Poised attractively near to the European market and with an abundance of skilled labour, North Africa may be poised to become an electronics manufacturing hub.

An assessment released this month by the California-based consulting firm Frost & Sullivan is based on a survey of companies operating in North Africa and trade organisations governing the areas in which they operate. It found that "strategic initiatives including ensuring the effective flow of goods and services, and the building of a reliable supplier base are having a positive impact on electronics manufacturing services (EMS) providers in the region."

It is a market, observers say, that began to grow organically but now is making rapid advances into the international realm, focused on the trio of North Africa's former French colonies, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, often referred to as the Maghreb countries.

Read the full article here.

Improved Regional Integration Still Key For Success

TRADE-AFRICA:

Improved Regional Integration Still Key For Success

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Sep 25, 2007 (IPS) - While its economic landscape is brightening, Africa is still bedeviled by some of the same obstacles that has historically served to undermine economic development in the resource and labour-rich region. And many of those woes could be solved through development of further intraregional trade.

"The relatively small weight of intraregional trade in Africa, despite the existence of several (and frequently overlapping) regional trade agreements, is due largely to their structure of production and the composition of their exports," according to a report released earlier this month by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

UNCTAD puts the blame on the continent's continued reliance on exports of primary commodities while importing costly manufactured products from overseas, a trade pattern that significantly limits intraregional trade.

Though the continent's growth is seen at 6 percent in 2007, according to the report, and that per capita GDP in Africa has increased by more than 15 percent in the past five years along similar lines as West Asia and Latin America, analysts still see substantial hurdles for the region to overcome in order to meet the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Read the full article here.

Two Years After Riots, Little Has Changed

FRANCE:

Two Years After Riots, Little Has Changed

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, Sep 24 (IPS) - The community in this Paris suburb is waiting keenly for transformation promised by France's new government.

Clichy-sous-Bois gained an unwelcome iconic significance two years ago following the deaths of Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna, two youths from immigrant families who were electrocuted while trying to hide from the police.

The deaths, a particularly grim chapter in a long history of simmering tension between local youths and the police, set off rioting and civil unrest around France. Almost 9,000 cars were burnt, and dozens of buildings were set on fire. Close to 130 police and firefighter staff were injured, and nearly 2,900 people were arrested.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of interior, promised to rid the banlieues, as the impoverished suburbs that ring many French cities are known, of racaille (rabble), and clean them out with a kärcher (a high-pressure hose). Residents now ask if he will be equally vehement about addressing the chronic unemployment and prejudice that they say were at the root of the upheaval.

Read the full article here.

Why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be allowed to speak at Columbia University

The execution by stoning of Jafar Kiani violates Iran’s obligations under international human rights treaties that it has ratified. Iran is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states in Article 6 that “in countries which have not abolished the death penalty, sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes.” According to Article 7 of the covenant, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Human Rights Watch opposes capital punishment in all circumstances because of its cruel and inhumane nature. We find that stoning is a particularly cruel form of capital punishment. Human rights principles and protections are founded upon respect for the inherent dignity of all human beings and the inviolability of the human person.

- Human Rights Watch, July 11, 2007

The government's opponents, real or imaginary—be they secular liberals, trade unionists, campaigners for women's rights, immodestly dressed youths, disgruntled ethnic minorities, even dissenting clergymen—have recently been subjected to a string of arrests, harassment and threats.

-The Economist, Jun 28th 2007

The country’s police chief boasted that 150,000 people — a number far larger than usual — were detained in the annual spring sweep against any clothing considered not Islamic. More than 30 women’s rights advocates were arrested in one day in March, according to Human Rights Watch, five of whom have since been sentenced to prison terms of up to four years. They were charged with endangering national security for organizing an Internet campaign to collect more than a million signatures supporting the removal of all laws that discriminate against women.

-The New York Times, June 24, 2007

One woman, Nazanin, 28, was stopped last month in Vanak Square, she thought she had dressed more modestly than usual, she said. But she was told that her coat was tight and showed the shape of her body…She received a warning about her large sunglasses, her coat, her eyeliner and her socks, which the police officers said should be longer. She was allowed to go after she signed a letter, which included her name and address, saying she would not appear in public like that again. The police have said the letters will be used against violators in court if they defy the rules a second time.

-The New York Times, May 3rd 2007

From all authoritative reports I have read, it seems that the regime of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad veers between farce and tragedy. The farce of wasting the recourses of a country in the midst of an economic crisis on keeping track of how tight a woman's clothes fit, and tragedy in the brutal denial of equality to women under the law and the stifling of free speech dissenting from the ideological line of the ossified theocracy that ultimately governs the country. This is to say nothing what appears to be Teheran’s active collusion in helping to create the bloodbath that is modern-day Iraq . Being a firm supporter of the separation of church and state, of free speech, of the equality of women, and of the right to self-determination of the Iraqi people free from either American or Persian overlords, reading the accounts of the kind of government Ahmadinejad and his supporters preside over fills me with disgust.

Much controversy has swirled around the invitation to speak that Ahmadinejad received from Columbia University on Monday preceding his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. Does a man who oversees such depredations, who has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel and who questions whether or not the Holocaust ever happened really belong lecturing at one of the premier universities in the United States?

In short, if they want him, yes. The strength of pluralistic democracy when compared with throwback theocracy is that it can rationally and openly confront even the most distasteful views and practices and knock them down through the strength or argument and debate. If one has nothing to hide, one has nothing to fear from an open debate. As I wrote almost exactly one year ago on this blog, when the address of another individual whose views I disdain - Minuteman Project head Jim Gilchrist, who assembled hundreds of volunteers, some armed, to patrol the Arizona-Mexico border for illegal immigrants - was scuttled at Columbia, either campuses are places of free inquiry, where the airing of the views of the minority are given equal protection as the views of the majority, or they are not.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s and Mr. Gilchrist’s views, as repellent as they might be, are simply no match for an informed, vigorous and intelligent debate, and I certainly hope that Mr. Ahmadinejad is subject to robust questioning and challenging during a question-and-answer session following his address by the student body and faculty at Columbia. A large protest rally against the policies of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s government, so long as it does not interrupt the address itself, would also seem to be highly desirable.

Mr. Ahmadinejad should be allowed to speak, but should be left in no doubt about how the students and faculty of Columbia University and, indeed, the citizens of New York City, view him and the practices of his government.

What to do in Iraq

A recent Op-Ed in the Economist, a magazine that I respect even though it occasionally seems to err on the side of having contributors who can tell good gin from bad gin as opposed to those who have genuinely in-depth knowledge of the countries they are reporting on, made an argument for the continued presence of United States and other forces in Iraq.

Titled “Why they should stay,” the editorial posited the following:

If America removes its forces while Iraq remains in its present condition, the Iraqi future is indeed likely to be disastrous. For that reason above any other, and despite misgivings about the possibility of even modest success any time soon, our own view is that America (and Britain) ought to stay in Iraq until conditions improve.

It is a horrendously thorny issue, with those on both sides of the issue, the neocons safe in Washington and much of the anti-war movement, safe behind their computer screens, arrogantly sure that they know the ONLY right path by which to succeed, while the Iraqi people themselves are aught up in a terrible whirlwind of violence, as typified by the recent murder of Sheikh Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha and the recent attack on Shiite villages north of Baghdad, both of which were apparently carried out by Al Qaeda-linked elements. Add to this the killing of nine people by private U.S. security contractors in Baghdad itself and you have only the tip of the iceberg of the suffering the Iraqis have had to endure over the last four years.

Regarding the Economist piece, a British acquaintance here in Paris wrote that “It's too late to avoid earthshaking regional consequences and the US or the UK are the last people to be able to head them off. The damage has been done, but like any imperial leadership, the US (which hasn't learned from the earlier antics of the UK, USSR, France) can't lose face and admit this.”

An American friend of mine, a fluent Arabic speaker who has spent a fair bit of time in Iraq, responded to the argument for a continued American and British presence in Iraq (in part) with the following:

I'm definitely scared of what will happen when we pull out, but as the article observes, it's already been happening. I think pulling out sooner rather than later would be a good idea, not because it would be a good thing, but I think things will get worse if we stay and the best thing to do at the moment would be to admit in a very dramatic fashion our total ignobility in this enterprise and to acknowledge that all of the chaos, sectarian violence, criminal mayhem, and civilian suffering and death is our fault and particularly the fault of this administration. Then hopefully either the situation in Iraq would improve or if, more plausibly, it deteriorated rapidly, Iran and Syria would have a newfound freedom to contain the situation which would probably have a better chance of restoring law and order . People here are obviously distrustful of both Iran and Syria, particularly Iran, but I'd trust Iran insofar as it has a much more direct and urgent need for a stable Iraq than we do.

For it’s part, in the Guardian, one columnist, Timothy Garton Ash, writes on the invasion of Iraq that “the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic. Looking back over a quarter-century of writing about international affairs, I can not recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.”

Another columnist from the same paper, Simon Jenkins, compared the Congressional grilling of America's senior commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, to Britain’s own often seemingly mute junior-partner status in the Iraq adventure.

“Britain should be so lucky,” Jenkins wrote. “A top general grilled on the Iraq war by skeptical representatives of the people. An ambassador summoned to explain his policy before the cameras. Three detailed reports challenging the official line submitted to Congress. A nation in a ferment of debate. Americans may have blundered into the Iraq morass, but they will retreat from it with political guns blazing.”

For my part, my thoughts on the matter (formed, like those of most people, from afar, without having ever set foot in Iraq) are roughly the following.

The invasion of Iraq was a terribly misguided affair from the beginning, undertaken with a willful deception of the public, an ignoring of expert advice, an almost magic-realist view of the likely consequences of U.S. military action and no desire or ability on the part of the Bush administration to face up to the cauldron of violent forces that toppling Saddam Hussein let lose on the country until it was too late.

That said, now that the U.S. and U.K. helped set into motion a multifront civil war, I think it would be immoral to say "Whoops, sorry we destroyed your country" and then depart to leave the Iraqis at the mercies of the Iranians, the Syrians, the Turks and Al Qaeda.

Unless one subscribes to a theory that news organizations across the board a conspiring to slant the news in favour of the now-thoroughly discredited Bush administration, articles written by journalists on the ground, in Iraq suggest that, however unpalatable the U.S. and U.K. presence in Iraq is (and for me, it definitely is), the alternative at present is far worse.

I don't know if any of the armchair commentators such as myself really have the answer for this mess, though some opinion writers certainly seem to think they do. I certainly don't have the answer, aside from hanging on a little while longer with Congress pushing the Bush administration to try and put Iraq back together again. I just more or less have always adhered to the "you broke it, you bought it" school of foreign affairs and, as such, feel that it would be wrong the throw the Iraqis to the wolves any more than they have shamefully been already. Hopefully, some day, the Bush administration. will be hauled into the dock to answer for all of this, but as disorganized and spineless as the Democrats often show themselves to be, I doubt it.

For further reading on the subject, I suggest two books: The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by New Yorker staff writer George Packer and Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War by a Lebanese-American (and Arabic-speaking) Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid,

The first, written by someone who was a moderately pro-invasion left-winger, examines how, in the wake of September 11th and given Saddam Hussein's record - the invasions of Iran and Kuwait, the al-Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, the tens of thousands of Shiites murdered in the wake of the first Gulf War, the everyday brutality and monstrousness of the regime and behaviour of the two maniac sons he intended to bequeath it to - some rather decent folks such as Kanan Makiya and Ayad Rahim were able to justify supporting the invasion on humanitarian grounds (an ironic turn of phrase) and how that support was used by some of the most cynical, corrupt and least visionary political operators Washington has ever seen in mustering an agenda for the ultimately disastrous enterprise. I don't know if I have ever read a more scathing critique of the administration or its policy, its ignoring of its own Middle East experts and military planners or the fantasy of the neocons thinking they would remake the Middle East in their own image.

The second book paints a devastating picture of the effects that the war and its aftermath had on the lives of ordinary Iraqis, of whom Shadid appears to have interviewed hundreds. It is really reportage in the finest tradition and it gives a despairing picture of the human cost of the endeavour.

In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions or thoughts on the subject, please do comment away.

Sarkozy Hedges Free Market With Government Control

FRANCE: Sarkozy Hedges Free Market With Government Control

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Sep 15 (IPS) - Following nearly two years of squabbling, this month France's national gas utility, Gaz de France, finally agreed to team up with the Franco-Belgian utility Suez, to create an energy behemoth with some 72 billion euros in revenue.

An impressive union, indeed, but some Eurozone observers find the insight the merger gives into the economic policies of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to be the deal's most interesting storyline.

Read the full article here.

Travels through the north country

Though this blog is often devoted to far weightier matters than the trajectory of my weekend entertainments (I hope), this past Saturday my friend Claire and I took off from Paris and discovered that driving through Normandy in the lush and still-warm early autumn must be one of the more understated yet sublime pleasures of time spent in France.

Heading north from the French capital and getting lost in one or two somnolent country towns along the way, we eventually arrived in the department of Calvados and decamped at Bayeux, an almost-as-sleepy historic city of winding cobblestone streets, an impressive cathedral and a reputation as a repository of one of the loveliest pieces of political propaganda ever created. The 200 foot-long Tapisserie de Bayeux, perhaps the city’s main attraction, depicts, in 58 exquisitely colored and detailed panels, the political intrigue that preceded the Norman invasion of England in 1066 and the triumph of William the Conqueror (also known, somewhat less generously, as William the Bastard) over the forces of England’s King Harold II at the Battle Of Hastings.

We browsed the tapestry for a time with the other assorted gawking tourists before traveling to the Norman coast and entirely different sort of historical record.

The somber and seemingly endless Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial stretches over 172.5 acres on a flat bluff overlooking Omaha Beach, which saw the bloodiest combat during the June 6, 1944 D Day invasion of France by American, British, Canadian and other forces in the opening salvo of what would become the Battle of Normandy, which would eventually liberate France from Nazi occupation. The cemetery contains the graves of 9,387 U.S. military dead, many of who lost their lives in the D Day assault, as well as a memorial to 1,557 soldiers who went missing, and a stroll through the expanse of crosses and occasional Stars of David, powerfully brings home the human toll of war. Strolling over Omaha Beach itself, facing some still-extant German machine gun turrets, gives only the faintest hint of the terror that must have awaited the soldiers once they landed on the beach on the summer morning so many decades ago.

We wrapped up our trip with a visit to a distillery, set behind tall gates and producing alcoholic cider and the region’s distinctive Calvados brandy, oak barrels of which sat marinating inside dusty storehouses. Then, to the strains of M.I.A., we were back on the N13, heading home.

FRANCE: New Employment Law Sets Stage for Showdown

FRANCE: New Employment Law Sets Stage for Showdown

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Sep 3, 2007 (IPS) - On a rainy day in an eastern Paris suburb, members of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), one of France's two largest labour unions, told the assembled press corps at their union hall that the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to "disarm" French workers with a new law aimed at curbing transportation strikes.

Following Sarkozy's strenuous lobbying for the measure, the National Assembly passed a law last month, known in French as the loi sur le service minimum, seeking to ensure a minimum level of service during public transit strikes.

The law, the realisation of a long-held promise by the political right, requires notification by unions of a strike action 48 hours before any walkout, obligates transit providers to notify which trains and buses will be affected, and obliges them to reimburse passengers for any deviation from the announced schedule.

The law produced predictable uproar among employee syndicates.

Read the full article here.

Down to 'The Wire': Thoughts on the end of the only television show worth watching

I watched my first episode of The Wire, the HBO series chronicling the machinations of various law enforcement, drug dealing and political types in the city of Baltimore, while sitting in my modest apartment in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, in 2002.

Chronicling, as I was at the time, the political opportunism, casual brutality, narco-dollar fueled political careers and other characteristics that informed Haiti’s political landscape, something about the The Wire’s depiction of imperfect cops, ruthless and savvy drug lords and the young lives they exploit, and other assorted social elements from the margins to the center of power in one of America’s most violent cities rang very true with me.

More than being a simple cop show, the series, largely the creation of former Baltimore Sun crime reporter and author David Simon and former Baltimore cop Ed Burns, addressed a larger tableau of inner-city life that for much of America must have been a revelation to see, tackling subjects far beyond Baltimore’s criminal underworld to examine themes such as the struggles of longshoreman in the city’s decaying harbor (as exemplified by the tragic saga of the Sobotka family) to the U.S. educational system to larger issues of urban poverty and governance.

Simon’s powerful writing was complimented by one of the most talented casts ever assembled for the small screen, and they gave their all to the rich material he provided them with. Michael Kenneth Williams created an unforgettable character in the openly-gay stick-up man Omar Little, at once as unique as anything put on television and as recognizable as someone you might bump into walking to the corner bodega. The talented British actor Idris Elba’s nuanced portrayal of the drug kingpin Russell "Stringer" Bell, fellow Brit Dominic West’s embodiment of Detective James McNulty, Andre Royo’s heroin-addicted Bubbles and a host of other recurring characters that populated the show over the years are all equally notable and praiseworthy.

Though I almost never had access to cable after returning from Haiti in 2003 (and spent much of the interval between then and now outside the U.S.), the first two seasons of The Wire that I was able to see stayed with me as an example of the medium of television being used with a genuine artistic intent as opposed to merely serve as vacuous entertainment.

This month, The Wire filmed its final episode, with writers, cast and crew deciding, probably wisely, to make a dignified exit while the series was still relevant and at the top of its game. It leaves behind five years worth of images and commentary on American inner-city life the depth of which will not be repeated in the medium anytime soon. Much to it’s credit, The Wire showed the myriad of joys and sorrows in that milieu with an unflinching eye whose lack of sentimentality made it all the more emotionally-charged.

As Bubbles said at one point on the show: “Thin line between heaven and here.”

African Countries Stand Up to EU

African Countries Stand Up to EU

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Servce

PARIS, Aug 28, 2007 (IPS) - Concern over getting too little in return for what they are being asked to give up has led some African nations to say "no" to some proposals for new trade relations with Europe next year.

Read the full article here.

L'Affaire Libyenne Shows a New Policy

L'Affaire Libyenne Shows a New Policy

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Aug 27 (IPS) - When the government of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi freed five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor after eight years in prison last month, it marked not only the latest twist in Gaddafi's idiosyncratic rule, but was seen as the opening salvo of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's new diplomatic modus operandi in Africa and beyond.

Following long negotiations by the European Union (EU) to secure the release of the medical workers, who had been sentenced to death following the Libyan government's accusation that they intentionally infected more than 400 Libyan children with the HIV virus, Sarkozy's wife Cecilia swooped into Tripoli to leave with the six prisoners on a plane to Bulgaria.

EU commissioner for foreign affairs Benita Ferrero-Waldner who was on the plane was left to appear as if she were hitching a ride.

Read the full story here.

FRANCE: Differences Arise Over Education Law

FRANCE: Differences Arise Over Education Law

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Aug 27 (IPS) - The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy announced after it was swept into power this spring that its policies would bring a "tranquil rupture" with many cherished traditions, particularly in education.

With France's National Assembly giving the nod late last month to an overhaul of higher education, the government seems on its way to making good on this controversial refrain.

Read the full story here.

Gassant and the Senate: A pointless showdown with no winners in sight

The current face-off taking place between Port-au-Prince’s chief prosecutor, Claudy Gassant, and Haiti’s parliament has thus far shown signs of almost all of the characteristic weaknesses with which the Haitian state seems content to shoot itself in the foot time and time again: Arrogance, intolerance, accusations of corruption and the plain inability of the parties involved to be able to see past the political considerations of the moment to the broader picture of the health of the state as a whole and the well-being of almost 9 million Haitians. All that is missing now from Haiti’s traditional political tableau is violence. Let’s hope it remains absent.

When Gassant, for reasons thus far clear only to himself, refused to appear with his superior, Minister of Justice René Magloire, before the judiciary committee of Haiti’s senate this week, the senators reacted as has been their wont for recorded memory, like roosters in a yard. Members of the body declared that they would summon Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis to declare a vote of no-confidence and, thus, forcing Haitian president René Préval to form a completely new cabinet at a moment when, for the first time in years, Haiti appears to be making modest progress on both the political and economic front.

Put simply, for the Haitian senate to force the Préval government into this level of crisis because of the actions of one public prosecutor would be suicide for the health of the Haitian state and the poor majority dependant on the executive branch and the senate to work together to do the people’s work, to bring jobs, healthcare, security and peace to this this impoverished and violence-scarred country.

Gassant is by many accounts a difficult though honest man, who since his return to Haiti one year ago has thus far succeeded in butting heads with everyone from his boss Magloire to Police Nationale d'Haïti (PNH) chief Mario Andrésol. Whether he is yet another among a long line of Haitian public figures who begin to suffer from gwo neg (big man) syndrome the moment they get a taste of power I cannot tell from my vantage point here in Paris. But for senators Gabriel Fortuné, Youri Latortue, Rudolph Boulos, Ricard Pierre and Rodolphe Joazile to evoke the possibility of toppling a government over some perceived slight by Gassant is irresponsible and dangerous and seems to show little respect for the millions of people who stood in line last year and voted Préval into office, free to select a cabinet of his choosing.

It does not help the appearance of opportunism that this month Haiti’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, succeeded in ousting Préval’s Minister of Culture, Daniel Elie, because, by many accounts, he was simply not willing to dole out government money in the fashion that the deputies were demanding. Nor does it help the appearance of impartiality that Senator Boulos’ brother, Reginald, is being questioned vigorously by Gassant at the present time.

Nor, must it be said, does it help Gassant’s case that he seems unbothered by the fact that those put into Haiti’s dysfunctional justice system tend to rot in jail for years without trial. The arrest of Haitian businessman Fritz Brandt and his son, David Brandt, sent a tremour through Haiti’s tiny elite but, really, they are only the tip of the iceberg in a system that contains thousands of nobodies who literally spend years in one of the most appalling prison systems in the world without ever seeing a verdict rendered in their cases. This aspect of Haiti’s justice system needs to be addressed energetically and immediately if the authorities ever want anyone to have any faith in the country’s courts. Holding people without trial was wrong under the regime of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, it was wrong under the 2004-2006 interim government and it is wrong now, simple as that.

If the Haitian senate wants to censure or otherwise take steps to remove Gassant from his post in accordance with Haitian law, that is their affair, but they would be advised to tread very carefully, as I fear that, with their threats to topple the Alexis government, they are close to joining their predecessors who, when confronted with their greater mission for the good of their country and the politically attractive opportunity at hand, always chose the latter, to the detriment of Haiti’s long-suffering people.

The ghost of the St. Louis sails through the Negev

In 1939, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States of America, denied permission to the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner, to land in Florida after being refused entrance into Cuba. The St. Louis had as its cargo nearly a thousand Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe, the majority of them German. Later refused entry into Canada, as well, the ship returned to Europe. Though 288 passengers disembarked in England, 619 people found themselves back in continental Europe as the Holocaust commenced and a dark night that would last six long years for European Jewry descended.

Today, in Sudan’s Darfur region, a crisis that initially centered around the Sudanese government's response to two non-Arab rebel groups waging war against the Arab regime in Khartoum has since grown in intensity and scope into a conflict that has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives, mainly civilians, since 2003. Sudanese military and government-aligned Janjaweed militia forces are accused of carrying out war crimes against the civilian population in the region, while the rebel groups themselves have splintered and re-formed with dizzying speed and in an ever-shifting array of alliances. In March of this year alone, Janjaweed forces crossing into neighboring Chad were said to have killed up to 400 people. Many human rights groups have charged that what the government of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashiral is doing in Darfur constitutes a genocide against the region’s non-Arab population.

On Sunday, it was announced that Israel, founded by people like those who had been turned away aboard the MS St. Louis, would henceforth be turning away all refugees from Darfur attempting to cross into the country via its southern border with Egypt. Israel began implementing this policy by expelling 50 Sudanese asylum seekers yesterday. This is in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 which states that a nation “shall not treat as enemy aliens exclusively on the basis of their nationality de jure of an enemy State, refugees who do not, in fact, enjoy the protection of any government.”

Could any Israeli politician stand up and reasonably argue that the refugees huddled on the ground near Nitzana enjoy the protection of the Sudanese state, which has historically been hostile to Israel?

One is glad to to see Israeli human rights organizations such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Hotline for Migrant Workers, as well as student activists, protesting these moves of their government, apparently taken with almost no historical memory of the experiences of persecuted peoples in mind. They might likewise do well to study that advice of the Talmud Yerushalmi, which suggests that "he who saves a single life, saves the entire world."

For more information on the crisis in Darfur, please visit the websites of the Save Darfur coalition in the United States or the website for the Collectif Urgence Darfour here in France.

In defense of Taslima Nasreen

Even as I was perusing my friend Dilip D’Souza’s well thought-out and persuasive rational argument on Kashmir, however, the faces of intolerance and intimidation in India were busy revealing themselves a thousand miles to the south of the lily-speckled Dal Lake, when members of the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) party, including Indian lawmakers, attacked the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen as she attempted to speak at a book release event in Hyderabad, India.

Nasreen, as some readers may be aware, is the celebrated author whose works such as Lajja (Shame) have attracted the ire of Muslim fundamentalists in her home country, leading this former physician in Bangladesh’s understaffed public hospitals to have her books banned, her passport seized, her life threatened and, eventually, being forced to seek exile in Europe and the United States before settling in Kolkata (née Calcutta), where she now resides. Her crime? Daring to write of the struggles of women in Bangladeshi society, criticizing the victimization of that country’s Hindu minority and calling for a more moderate, humanistic and less extremist approach to faith in South Asia in general. For this, Ms. Nasreen has been awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thoughts from the European Parliament (1994), the Hellman-Hammett Grant from Human Rights Watch (1994) and the UNESCO Prize for the promotion of tolerance and non-violence (2004).

As an author of strong political convictions whose own public readings have occasionally been interrupted by largess-bloated, despot-involved lawyers and the like, it's hard not to reflect on how minor my own inconveniences have been in comparison to having tens of thousands of fanatics pouring into the streets demanding that I be killed, as has happened to Ms. Nasreen in her native country in years past.

"I was wondering how they would kill me. Would it be with a knife or a gun? Or would they simply beat me to death.?” Ms. Nasreen is quoted is saying in the Hindustan Times. “They had encircled us. After I escaped from a back door and took shelter in a room, they even broke down one of the doors. I thought I would be dead,…If I have returned alive to Kolkata it is because of mediapersons who fought those men for half an hour and got injured to save me."

The Indian author and lyricist Javed Akhtar, himself a Muslim, has spoken out bravely in Ms. Nasreen’s defense, stating that "the incident was outrageous and shameful. In a civilized society, you have a right to approve or disapprove of anything… What is the difference between (the attackers) and the Hindu fundamentalist organizations.” As someone who has often spoken out against Hindu chauvinism in India, I couldn't' agree more.

Others, however such as Delhi Minorities Commission Chairperson Kamal Farooqui, have called for Nasreen to be expelled from the country and on live television, a Muslim cleric issued a fatwa that someone should “blacken her face,“ for insulting Islam, a euphemism whose suggestions of violence can only be guessed at.

Over a decade ago, another writer who had been the target of murderous religious fanaticism and who at the time was just beginning to emerge from seclusion - Salman Rushdie - was the speaker at my graduation from Bard College in upstate New York. Speaking of the demands for adherence to this or that hierarchy that had been made of him throughout his life, he addressed the issue of fundamentalism and freedom of expression thusly:

It is men and women who have made the world, and they have made it in spite of their gods, The message of the myths is not the one the gods would have us learn - that we should behave ourselves and know our place - but its exact opposite. It is that we must be guided by our natures. Do not bow your heads. Do not know your place. Defy the gods. You will be astonished how many of them turn out to have feet of clay. Be guided, if possible, by your better natures.

Indeed, and be guided, hopefully, to a more just and tolerant world.

An electoral solution for Kashmir

I was very happy to learn this week that the Indian journalist Dilip D’Souza was awarded first prize by the India National Interest website for his compelling essay Free to Choose India, a well-informed and argued article advocating an electoral solution to the conflict in Kashmir.

In the essay, D’Souza posits that the only solution to the now 20 year-old armed conflict in India’s only Muslin-majority state would be to do the following:

Hold a referendum to let Kashmir’s people decide their future…Announce that the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir will vote in the referendum, meaning also what we Indians call Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Announce too that it will be held among all the people who call that state home, including the three hundred thousand who were driven into camps in Jammu and Delhi. Third, remind the world about the terms of the UN resolution that first urged such a referendum (47 of 1948)…Saying that Pakistani forces must withdraw from Kashmir as a first step towards holding the referendum.

The situation in Kashmir is indeed a complicated and bloody one, as I found when I visited the region in February of this year (a trip on which some of Dilip’s contacts in the region proved to be of invaluable assistance), however I think that an electoral solution, following two decades of conflict that seem to have gone nowhere, indeed remains the only one.

The roots of the conflict go back to the twilight of Britain's colonial rule of India and Pakistan, when Pakistan-based tribesmen invaded Kashmir in 1947 and the region’s Hindu maharajah, Hari Singh, sought Indian assistance while also signing an agreement to become part of India. The Kashmiris were promised a referendum on the status of the region, but it was never held.
The 1948 U.N. Security Council resolution that Dilip refers to specified that in a plebiscite, Kashmir should only have the option to join either India or Pakistan, blocking independence or semi-autonomy, a long-cherished goal of many Kashmiris. After subsequent wars, the border between Indian- and Pakistani-administered Kashmir has remained largely at the present Line of Control.

In 1987, when it seemed legislative elections might be won by a collection of Islamic and secessionist parties called the Muslim United Front (MUF), Indian-administered Kashmir carried out mass arrests of MUF candidates stealing the election and leading some young Muslim Kashmiris to opt for armed conflict, with Pakistan only too happy to offer training and equipment.

The bloodshed since has been pervasive. In addition to those killed, tens of thousands have been injured and hundreds of thousands, including many Kashmiri Hindus, have been displaced. An estimated 8,000 people have been "disappeared" by Indian security forces. The people of Kashmir remain caught in a geopolitical struggle between two of South Asia’s most heavily-armed nation with neither country seeming to have the best interests of the region’s long-suffering people at heart.

For all of these reasons, the idea that Kashmiris should have the opportunity to definitively decide their own status via the long-delayed referendum is one that should be seen as worthy of support both in India and abroad.

For more background on the conflict, please see my February 2007 article in the Washington Times, Kashmiri separatist seeks end to armed struggle, (reprinted here on the Indian Countercurrents website), my article The Struggle for Kashmir (Continued), published in the Spring 2007 edition of the World Policy Journal, Humra Quraishi’s excellent 2004 book Kashmir: The Untold Story (Penguin Global) or Dilip D’Souza’s own New Glory: Peace as Patriotism (WISCOMP, 2005).

On the passing of Tony Wilson

Anthony “Tony” Wilson, the Manchester music impresario who was instrumental in the creation of that city’s Factory Records label as well as its Hacienda nightclub, passed away this week.

As a young, white, working-class kid growing up in Pennsylvania in the late 1980s and early 1980s, some of the music that Tony Wilson helped bring to the world, such as the seminal Manchester band Joy Division, served as a real inspiration back in my musical days for what a determined group of musicians could do with a singular vision, loud amplifiers and some grasp of how to subtly use them.

In his love for his home city of Manchester, Tony Wilson also demonstrated how, by simply giving an outlet to the pool of talent already there, one could take an economically depressed former mill city and transform it into one of the most vibrant of Europe’s cultural capitals. As the independent music that Wilson championed metamorphosed into something altogether looser and funkier, he was also, with the Hacienda, instrumental in presiding over what was to be the birth of rave culture, and the redubbing of his beloved hometown “Madchester.”

Wilson, who was known for his razor-sharp wit, was famous for saying “some people make money and some make history” (a sentiment certainly comforting to some of us on the downside of fiscal advantage), but that wit was not enough to save him when facing kidney cancer and Britain’s National Health Service refused to pay £3,500-a-month for a drug which doctors had recommended after Wilson’s chemotherapy had failed. Were he in the United States, where over 46 million people (myself included) lack any kind of healthcare at all, one wonders how much sooner he would have passed on.

Perhaps the best comment on the Cambridge-educated Wilson came in today's Guardian from Paul Ryder, who served as the guitarist for the Manchester group Happy Mondays: "I would still be working at the post office if it wasn't for Tony. He was the one that gave working kids like me and Shaun [his brother, the band's lead singer] their chance."

“Freedom always has a price."

For about two hours this afternoon, I found myself transported to revolutionary-era Iran, Vienna, and back again to Paris under the aegis of Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s stunning new animated French-language feature, Persepolis. The film depicts the evolution of a Bruce Lee-worshipping, Iron Maiden-listening young girl in Tehran concurrently and in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution that ousted the Pahlavī dynasty and replaced it with a theocracy under a sheen of democracy. Based on Satrapi’s comic book of the same name, both film and book take their titles from the name of an ancient Persian city. We follow the trajectory of the main character through the years of the anti-Pahlavī uprising, through the terror of the Iran-Iraq war, an alternately eye-opening and desperately lonely time at school in Europe and back to Iran.

I must confess that, in the wilderness years between watching Bugs Bunny as a small child and the advent of The Simpsons in the early 1990s, I missed out on the whole comic book/graphic novel thing, preferring “real” books, playing guitar in a series of bands and generally being a working-class roustabout. But I must agree with Variety’s Lisa Nesselson when she writes of Persepolis that the animated feature is an “autobiographical tour de force (that) is completely accessible and art of a very high order."

Today, on a blazingly hot summer’s day here in Paris, in movie theater off Boulevard Saint-Germain, I was duly impressed. The movie’s fluid visual vocabulary, its witty skewering of European youth subcultures, its expert juggling of comedy and pathos and most of all its depiction of the fate of fragile humans in the face of powerful, brutal and unyielding state machinery makes it a very rewarding and thought-provoking cinematic experience.

“Freedom always has a price,” a character says at one point. Indeed, but as this film shows us, it if often a price worth paying.

Distasteful politicking in Haiti?

Perish the thought! Thought that was indeed what was evidently behind this week’s successful passage of a parliamentary motion in Haiti of no-confidence against Daniel Elie, the Minister of Culture in the government of Haitian president René Préval.

The move - lead by Deputies Jonas Coffy and Poly Faustin of Fanmi Lavalas, Laurore Edouard of UNION, Accluche Louis-Jeune of OPL and Isidor Mercier of the RDNP - apparently came to pass because, though Elie staged what is by many account the most successful Carnaval that the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, has seen for many years, and a similarly well-received fête in the southern city of Jacmel (site of perhaps Haiti’s most colorful pre-Lentian celebrations), the Minister did not apparently spread the wealth of the Carnaval budget around enough for the politicians’ liking.

The move by the deputies, some of whom in the past have been highly critical of any judicial oversight of their activities, financial or otherwise, preferring to behave more like rooster in in a yard than the representatives of 8 million plus people depending on them to reduce the misery in their lives, has been seen by some as a warning to Préval himself not to forget about the largess that Haiti’s president’s historically shower on parliamentarians to curry favor and the spoils of corruption which often form its core. Seeing how Préval responds to this challenge, as he sets about strengthening Haiti’s judiciary and police, and instituting a rule of law over politicians as well as civilians in a country where impunity has historically reigned for the powerful, is one of the most telling and important questions being posed in Haiti today.

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out.