Books for autumn

As we head into fall, and I work on my own pair of new books, several friends of mine have books coming out that are well worth checking out.

It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street , by my good friend Nomi Prins, should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand last year’s financial collapse, centered in the United States but with its repercussions felt worldwide. It outlines how last autumn’s domino-like collapse of banks was linked to Wall Street’s conversion of loans into assets that allowed it to borrow far more than it could ever afford, how bankers gobbled up more than $5 billion in profits while siphoning off more than a trillion dollars in federal bailout subsidies and how, in short, the financial system in the United States has become so rigged that it penalizes ordinary working people with ever-expanding fees and penalties while the barons of commerce like Bank of America’s execrable Ken Lewis get away with barely-disguised theft and extortion on a grand scale.

A former managing director at Goldman Sachs and chief of the international analytics group at Bear Stearns who now serves as a Senior Fellow at the progressive public policy research organization Demos, Nomi knows intimately of what she writes. I highly enjoyed her previous two books, Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America and Jacked: How "Conservatives" Are Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not), and very much look forward to this third installment

Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910, penned by Jeffrey H. Jackson, Associate Professor of History at Rhodes College, is a fascinating account of a natural disaster that befell Paris when the Seine overflowed its banks in January of that year. Combining exhaustive archival research and such primary sources as the diary of the city’s chief of police, the book creates a compelling image of what at the time was viewed as an epochal event in one of the world’s great cities. It shows, in compelling fashion and with shades of Hurricane Katrina, how a city that has been often riven by divisions managed to come together to face a body blow from nature and how the City of Light managed to shine once again.

And finally, Benjamin Moser’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, presents a sweeping and dramatic account of the life of the Brazilian writer, at once iconic and iconoclastic, who overcame hurdles that most people can’t even begin to imagine to become a tremendously important influence on novelists such as Caio Fernando Abreu. Transplanted from the anti-Semitic pogroms of Ukraine to Recife in northeastern Brasil, then to Rio de Janeiro and Europe and beyond, Lispector was a citizen of the world in every sense of the world, and a writer with a very original and powerful vision. Moser does an excellent job of humanizing this at-times inscrutable character who, to paraphrase an old saying, may have made her greatest work of art in the creation of herself.

Gorki Águila canta "El General" en Miami, September 19, 2009

"He sings, sways and shouts in his bloody rock lyrics what others mutter with fear” - Yoani Sanchez

Report of the United Nations fact finding mission on the Gaza conflict

The report of the United Nations fact finding mission on the Gaza conflict has been published and can be read here.

Letter from Senator Edward M. Kennedy to President Barack Obama

Below is the text of the letter from Senator Edward M. Kennedy referenced by the President in tonight’s address to a Joint Session of Congress.

(Read at the White House website here)

May 12, 2009

Dear Mr. President,

I wanted to write a few final words to you to express my gratitude for your repeated personal kindnesses to me – and one last time, to salute your leadership in giving our country back its future and its truth.

On a personal level, you and Michelle reached out to Vicki, to our family and me in so many different ways. You helped to make these difficult months a happy time in my life.

You also made it a time of hope for me and for our country.

When I thought of all the years, all the battles, and all the memories of my long public life, I felt confident in these closing days that while I will not be there when it happens, you will be the President who at long last signs into law the health care reform that is the great unfinished business of our society. For me, this cause stretched across decades; it has been disappointed, but never finally defeated. It was the cause of my life. And in the past year, the prospect of victory sustained me-and the work of achieving it summoned my energy and determination.

There will be struggles – there always have been – and they are already underway again. But as we moved forward in these months, I learned that you will not yield to calls to retreat - that you will stay with the cause until it is won. I saw your conviction that the time is now and witnessed your unwavering commitment and understanding that health care is a decisive issue for our future prosperity. But you have also reminded all of us that it concerns more than material things; that what we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.

And so because of your vision and resolve, I came to believe that soon, very soon, affordable health coverage will be available to all, in an America where the state of a family’s health will never again depend on the amount of a family’s wealth. And while I will not see the victory, I was able to look forward and know that we will – yes, we will – fulfill the promise of health care in America as a right and not a privilege.

In closing, let me say again how proud I was to be part of your campaign- and proud as well to play a part in the early months of a new era of high purpose and achievement. I entered public life with a young President who inspired a generation and the world. It gives me great hope that as I leave, another young President inspires another generation and once more on America’s behalf inspires the entire world.

So, I wrote this to thank you one last time as a friend- and to stand with you one last time for change and the America we can become.

At the Denver Convention where you were nominated, I said the dream lives on.

And I finished this letter with unshakable faith that the dream will be fulfilled for this generation, and preserved and enlarged for generations to come.

With deep respect and abiding affection,

Ted

Brice Hortefeux not a fan of black, blanc, beur

Quand il y en a un, ça va. C'est quand il y en a beaucoup qu'il y a des problèmes.

Classy, huh? About the discourse one would expect from the man who was once "Minister of National Identity," and not at all surprising considering what I wrote about him doing back then.

Quand Brice Hortefeux dérape
par lemondefr

A few thoughts from Paris on President Barack Obama’s healthcare speech to Congress

Barack Obama joue le tout pour le tout, read the first lines of the article in today’s Le Monde concerning the speech on healthcare of the 44th president of the United States to a joint session of Congress last evening. The Guardian newspaper in England declared that the “president issues rousing speech to Congress and promises not to be deflected from universal healthcare plan.”

This was a moment I confess that I have waited for with some trepidation, to see whether or not President Obama, a politician who, as Candidate Obama, was able to inspire even your jaded author as few politicians ever had before, would deliver on his promise of providing affordable, comprehensive healthcare to all Americans. As I have noted on this blog before, the current healthcare system in the United States - if you can call such a patchwork of private insurance schemes absurdly tied to employment status a system - currently gobbles up 17 percent of the U.S. GDP, as opposed to the 11 percent of GDP used here in France, a system that is not gamed by insurance and pharmaceutical companies as our current mode of operation in the United States is, but nevertheless guarantees universal healthcare. The U.S. system, currently ranked 37th in the world, according to the World Health Organization, is corrupt, stupid, brutal, wasteful and as expensive as anything I've ever seen, yet it has powerful forces with an interest in protecting it. I know this not just from statistics but from my own experiences and the experiences of my family and friends. I myself have been ineligible for any type of affordable healthcare since I went freelance full-time in early 2006.

This being the case, and given the vile and sometimes violent eruptions at various town hall meetings across the United States over the month of August, it seemed a reasonable fear that Obama, like many before him, might have been simply outmaneuvered by the frothing craziness and bile of the well-organized and well-funded defenders of the status quo. This, mixed in with a brew of right-wing demagoguery and naked racism, has created a rather poisonous political atmosphere in my native country, where a party that has been in power for 20 of the last 28 years simply cannot seem to get used to being in the political opposition.

However, much to my, dare I say it, joy, President Obama delivered brilliantly, giving what was certainly his best speech since his famous address on race in Philadelphia in March 2008, and perhaps one of the best political speeches I have heard in American politics during my lifetime.

Speaking of an insurance exchange to be created to allow individuals and small businesses to purchase affordable coverage, and a hardship waiver for those individuals who still cannot afford coverage, Obama did not advocate for the single-payer system that I and many who voted for him would have hope for. Nevertheless, his proposal would seem to take a great deal of power out of the hands of insurance company bureaucrats and point towards strenuous government advocacy to create a more just and equitable system that could not help but make Americans’ lives better.

Obama spoke terrifyingly of an Illinois man who lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn't reported gallstones the man hadn’t previously known about. The man subsequently died following delays in treatment. He also mentioned the case of a woman in Texas whose insurance company cancelled her policy as she was about to undergo a double mastectomy because she forgot to declare a case of acne. When she finally regained insurance, the cancer had more than doubled. As Obama said “no one should be treated that way in the United States of America.”

Perhaps the most moving part of the speech came towards the end, when Obama evoked the name of recently deceased democratic Senator from Massachusetts Ted Kennedy, referring to a letter than Kennedy had sent him to be read in the event of his death, and to Kennedy’s own long struggle to reform the health system in the United States:

Imagine what it must be like for those without insurance; what it would be like to have to say to a wife or a child or an aging parent there is something that could make you better, but I just can't afford it....Large heartedness, that concern and regard for the plight of others is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise...

...We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it. I still believe we can act even when it's hard. I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility, and gridlock with progress. I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now we will meet history's test.

Because that is who we are. That is our calling. That is our character.

After fearing for the month of August that Obama had lost control of the debate to the bitter fringe shouting that the sky was falling, THIS was once again the man we elected as president last fall. And once again, finally, it appears that we have a genuine advocate for the disenfranchised in the White House.

An additional note: At one point during Obama’s speech, when he asserted that the healthcare proposal now under consideration in Congress would not provide healthcare to undocumented immigrants in the United States (it doesn’t), Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, screamed “You’re lying” from the audience, a breach of decorum that I can never remember seeing before during a presidential address to both houses of congress.

Beyond the ignorance of Joe Wilson himself, who, judging from his performance, is little more than a repulsive piggish caricature of a good ‘ol boy, faced with Obama’s oratorical eloquence and sound political judgement, the Republican Party as a whole appears to be content to continue down a path of political irrelevance, defining itself as a regional, white, Christian party. It is a rather public political suicide that I think is unique in modern American history. Increasingly in the grip of a clutch of extremists, the GOP, a party that once gave us Abraham Lincoln, now behaves as a group of ill-mannered, uneducated spoiled children might.

If this is the best, most principled opposition to that Republicans can muster, I should think that Obama has little to worry about. And I hope the long struggle for national healthcare in the United States might at last be arriving at its defining moment.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

A few thoughts on the death penalty

Having covered the debate regarding capital punishment in the Western Hemisphere tangentially for a few years now, both in the United States and Jamaica, I was more or less certain that, sooner or later, a story such as the one that David Grann has penned for the current issue of the New Yorker would come to light. Grann’s story concerns Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man who was executed in 2004 for the murder of his three small children in a fire that prosecutors successfully argued that Willingham had set deliberately.

The only problem was, scientific analysis now proves, there was no evidence that the fire had even been arson, let alone set by Willingham, who had refused to accept a guilty plea that would have spared his life. Though by any standards an unappealing character who had battered his wife and was involved in minor scrapes with the law, it seems now proven beyond any reasonable doubt that, in February 2004, the state of Texas executed an innocent man.

I have seen the potential for error in the death penalty close up, in the person of Carl McHargh, a Jamaican man who was convicted and sentenced to death for the shooting deaths of two men on the basis of testimony of a single witness. After an attempt on his life in prison left him with twenty-three stab wounds on his body, McHargh was absolved of culpability of the crime and freed in June 2006, after spending nearly seven years in jail following the 1999 slayings. In the United States, I have interviewed people such as Lorry Post, whose daughter was murdered in 1989, but who nevertheless is a founder of New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

It’s a complicated debate. One can understand how the families of victims would want justice, but when one looks closely at the fact that, since 1976, more than a hundred and thirty people on death row have been exonerated by DNA testing, and at the ghastly miscarriage of justice that was the state-sanctioned murder of Cameron Todd Willingham, one can’t help but think that there must be another way to punish these most heinous of criminals.

For further reading on the imperfections of the ultimate penalty, please visit the website of the Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing.

A further note on the killings at La Scierie

A fellow I hadn't heard of before recently wrote to me in the wake of my highlighting some of the problems with the reportage of Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague for the Inter Press Service on the Ronald Dauphin case in Haiti, given the former's link with paid advocates of Haiti's former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the latter's rather loopy public declarations on subjects Haitian in the past. This commentary in turn had spurred a reply from the ever-opportunistic Kim Ives, late of the Brooklyn-based publication Haiti Progrès, currently of Haiti Liberté. A fellow describing himself as a "friend" of Ives then emailed me (in a thoroughly respectful manner, unlike the apparently unstable Sprague) to ask me a few questions, which I will re-rephrase slightly here, while preserving the correspondent's anonymity.

1) Whether Ronald Dauphin is guilty or not, is it not a violation of human rights to keep someone in prison indefinitely without being charged or put on trial?

2) The Bush Administration circumvented this issue by changing the description of suspected terrorists to detainees in order to rationalize indefinite imprisonment. The overwhelming, humane response has been to set them free or put them on trial. In Haiti, prisoners are simply left to rot. Do you - Michael Deibert - you support this?

3) Are you concerned that if set free until trial, Ronald Dauphin will disappear or commit more crimes? Do you think he is a danger to Haitian society?

My response, which may be of interest to readers as it addresses some important issues, ran as follows:

Hello, and thank you for your email. It addresses an important question, one which goes to the heart of what is happening in Haiti right now.


When I interviewed him in June regarding St. Marc case, Pierre Espérance, the director of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), made a very perceptive statement to the effect that, in Haiti’s broken justice system, the criminal becomes a victim because the system doesn't work.

This, in my view as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in St. Marc, is what is happening in the case of Ronald Dauphin. I really defy anyone to spend a morning or afternoon talking with the many families associated with the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), listen to their stories and not come away with the impression that the combined forces of the Police Nationale de Haiti, the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National and especially Bale Wouze subjected them to something truly horrible during February 2004. Yet, strangely enough (to me at least), in the international Haiti solidarity network, nary a voice is raised to offer these people comfort, solace or support. I think this is something of which all us, as foreigners who claim to care for Haiti, should be ashamed.

According to my own interviews in St. Marc and the interviews of others, Ronald Dauphin, along with former Fanmi Lavalas Deputy Amanus Mayette (freed from prison in April 2007) and the deceased Bale Wouze leader Somoza were three of the most visible architects of the slaughter that took place in St. Marc that month, and the offenses such as the gang rape of women that took place then and afterwards.

Do I think that Ronald Dauphin is a danger to his fellow Haitians? Yes, but that is no excuse for holding him in jail indefinitely without trial. If I, as a journalist, can travel to St. Marc and find people virtually lining up around the block willing to share quite lucid and disturbing tales of the state-sponsored violence that they have been subjected to, then it seems not only possible or desirable but essential that the Haitian state find a way to address their demands for justice.

However grave his crimes, as a citizen Ronald Dauphin has his rights, as well. But what disturbs me most, perhaps, is the incredible arsenal of money and personnel arrayed to not only assure Mr. Dauphin of his rights but to discredit the victims of political violence in Haiti and to deny them their day in court. I thought that it was a national scandal, for example, when those convicted of participation in the April 1994 massacre of Aristide supporters in Gonaives had their sentences overturned by Haiti's supreme court in 2005, but at least the people of Gonaives got their day in court, however sullied it later became. What about the people of St. Marc?

The same actors who prosecuted the Gonaives case during the Préval government’s first mandate - the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) and (now) the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) - now work on behalf of the victimizers in the St. Marc case. It is a seriously complicated question, but I don’t think that the cause of justice in Haiti is served by having one standard of advocacy for former officials and partisans of the Fanmi Lavalas party and another for everyone else in Haiti.

If these groups are genuinely advocating for an equal measure of justice to be applied to all in Haiti, why were none of their voices raised during the 2001-2004 government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, when the prisons were equally swollen with (mostly unknown) defendants who had never seen a judge? Why were no voices raised against the corruption of the judicial process against former dictator Prosper Avril, no matter how distasteful he may be, or against the nakedly political detention of Coordination Nationale des Societaires Victimes spokesmen Rosemond Jean, or against the two-year detention-without-trial of Winston Jean-Bart, aka the famous Tupac of Cité Soleil? Where was their compassion following the horrific slaying of Haitian journalist and poet Jacques Roche? In my view, they were silent then as they are silent now because they see human rights only as an issue to be bandied about when it is politically expedient to do so for the political current they serve, not as a long-term commitment to build a better Haiti.

It is a very thorny problem: How does one give justice to victims while still insuring the rights of the accused? As you correctly point out, it is a debate that still goes on in the United States and in other countries with supposedly functioning judicial systems to this day.

The old adage of following the money is accurate up to a point. Some have pointed out RNDDH’s 2004 award of C$100,000 (US$85,382) from the Canadian International Development Agency, even though, as far as I can discern, most of the group’s funding comes from organizations such as Christian Aid, the Mennonite Central Committee and the Lutheran World Federation. Nevertheless, since that grant,RNDDH has consistently advocated for justice on behalf of a number of Fanmi Lavalas members, including Jean Maxon Guerrier, Yvon Feuille, Gerald Gilles, and Rudy Hériveaux. RNDDH, for me, has shown a commitment to a non-political defense of human rights that BAI/IJDH, linked monetarily and otherwise with Mr. Aristide’s attorney, have never shown.

Perhaps the best we can do as foreigners is to encourage a genuinely non-partisan, non-political development and reinforcement of the Haitian judicial system through institutions such as the newly re-opened magistrate’s school, so that justice can be given to the victims of the human rights abuses and the human rights of perpetrators, accused and otherwise, can also be safeguarded. Perhaps boring and not very sexy, but as a man once told me, the most revolutionary thing you can do in Haiti is to strengthen an institution. I still believe that is true.

I hope this has helped to answer your questions.

Best regards,

MD

Amidst turmoil, Iranian exiles seek to be heard

Amidst turmoil, Iranian exiles seek to be heard

By Michael Deibert

PARIS - When hundreds of thousands of Iranians flooded the streets to protest what they charged was the rigged re-election victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, it was seen by many as one of the most significant moments in the country since its 1979 revolution ended the 38-year reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and replaced it with a theocracy based on the teachings of Shia Islam.

However, as is often the case with internal power struggles in the oil-rich, politically delicate Persian Gulf region, the reverberations from the protests in Iran and the government’s response to them have been felt far beyond Iran’s borders, and have stimulated a whirlwind of debate and lobbying activity among Iranian exiles in North America and Europe.

Between two to three million Iranians are thought to live abroad, with the largest percentage in the Unite States, followed by the European Union, Canada and the United Arab Emirates. In the run-up to June's ballot, the official website of Iran's government said that 304 polling stations had been established in 130 countries outside Iran.

Many voters living abroad are thought to have supported Ahmadinejad’s main opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a supposition that appeared to gain weight with massive pro-Mousavi demonstrations held throughout Europe between the June vote and its formal endorsement by Iran’s designated spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, this August, seven weeks after the election.

Mousavi, who served as Iran’s Prime Minister from 1981 until 1989 (at which point that post was abolished), has run afoul of conservative elements in Iran’s clerical establishment, including Khamenei, with calls for greater civil liberties in the country of 70 million.

A sometimes ally of Ahmadinejad’s, Khamenei’s role in Iran’s political life is specified in Article 107 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a document adopted in a 1979 referendum and modified in 1989. It refers to a “leader” (though not a “supreme leader,” which is an unofficial term of respect), outlining that “the Leader thus elected by the Assembly of Experts shall assume all the powers of the religious leader and all the responsibilities arising therefrom. The Leader is equal with the rest of the people of the country in the eyes of law.”

With Mousavi’s campaign supported by other elements among Iran’s power elite, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (who served as Iran’s president from 1981 until 1987), his partisans have been able to marshall a sustained campaign of protests in and outside of Iran that has little been seen since 1979.

The response of the Ahmadinejad government, chiefly through the Revolutionary Guard branch of Iran’s military and the affiliated Basij militia, has been one of extreme violence and mass arrests, with an unknown number of protesters having been killed and hundreds arrested, many disappearing into Tehran's Evin prison. The death of one protester, Neda Soltan, a 26-year-old music student gunned down during a demonstration, was captured on the camera of a mobile phone, and became something of an iconic image of the protest movement.

“What we are seeing is open criticism of the supreme leader and of the supreme leader’s system, and previously that has been the red line that no one has been able to cross,” says Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington DC, referring to Khamenei. “Both the person and the institution of the supreme leader have been above criticism, and that has now changed.”

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there are an estimated 1 million Iranian-Americans living in the United States, with substantial Iranian-American communities in San Francisco, New York City and the Washington, DC-Baltimore metropolitan area. In Southern California, the most populous Iranian-American enclave (so much that Los Angeles has occasionally received the sobriquet Tehrangeles), community estimates count some 500,000 among the Iranian-American population there, served by 20 Farsi-language satellite television channels.

In addition, the U.S. government also funds Radio Farda, a Persian language radio station based in Washington, D.C. and Prague, Czech Republic. The station's name means "tomorrow" in Farsi, and its content focuses heavily on Iran, a state of affairs which has resulted in its website being blocked by the Iranian government.

Despite their numbers, however, diaspora voices in the United States and elsewhere have yet to articulate a common approach to Iran’s crisis, with opinions spanning the gamut from former monarchists such as Reza Pahlavi, the former Crown Prince of Iran and eldest son of the late Shah, to civil society groupings such as the Washington, DC-based National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

Founded in 2002 and partially funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and the non-profit Tides Foundation, the NIAC’s website states that “the organization currently supports the idea of resolving the problems between the US and Iran through dialogue in order to avoid war.”

“As long as we have a state of flux, the proper path is to do nothing,” says NIAC’s president Trita Parsi, of the proper response of the international community to Iran’s upheaval. “Once you reach a position where a greater consensus has formed, however distasteful engagement might appear, that is the only option the United States hasn’t pursued in the last 30 years. And it has worked to the detriment of the forces of democracy inside the country.”

However, Parsi cautions that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama should “not engage the Ahmadinejad government prematurely” as the true measure of current developments in Iran “may take months or perhaps years, not weeks.”

Many critics of the Iranian government’s response to the protests cite what they charge as its failure to honor the terms of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Article 27 of which states that “public gatherings and marches may be freely held, provided arms are not carried and that they are not detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam.”

In the wake of the crackdown, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the Mousavi campaign’s key backers, told thousands of worshippers at a prayer event in July that the Islamic Republic was in crisis and the Ahmadinejad government had lost the trust of millions of Iranians who didn’t believe that their votes had been counted.

Another former president, Mohammad Khatami, who governed that country from 1997 until Ahmadinejad’s 2005 election, called for a nationwide referendum on the legitimacy of the Ahmadinejad government, though not the Islamic system itself.

“This is not a prelude to a revolution, but a specific demand for civil liberties,” says Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York and a native of the city of Ahvaz in Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan province. “The ruling elite is seriously divided...Everybody has known that there were divisions of opinions and factions within the body politic of the Islamic Republic, but it has never been so open.”

Indeed, as opposed to the Tiananmen Square protests which rocked China in 1989 and were met with a more or less unified iron fist by the Chinese Communist party (and initially, according to the Chinese Red Cross, 2,600 fatalities), today’s dissent in Iran appears to be echoed at the very highest levels of the country’s clerical establishment. Expressions of discontent have be voiced not only by former presidents such as Rafsanjani and Khatami, but also by influential religious leaders such as the long-dissenting cleric Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, based in the holy city of Qom.

The risks run by the clerics and protestors have been signifiant, as Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have tried to label the current power struggle as little more than treason being orchestrated by foreign governments. Staring down at those moved to act, as well, is Iran’s grim human rights record, which, according the New York-based Human Rights watch, has led to Iran being the world’s leader in overall executions, executing more people than any other country except China, with executions having undergone a 300% increase since Ahmadinejad took office in 2005. Iran also leads the world in executing juvenile offenders, persons under 18 at the time of their crime.

Of all diaspora centres in Europe, France has historically been the most vibrant nexus of expatriate Iranian political and cultural life.

Perhaps Iran’s best known author, Sādeq Hedāyat lived off and on in France for much of his adult life, drawing deeply upon the influence of French writers such as Guy de Maupassant before gassing himself in his Paris flat in 1951. Buried in the city's storied Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Hedāyat’s most famous book, Boof-e koor (The Blind Owl), has been heavily censored in modern-day Iran.

In 1978, following his expulsion from the holy city of Najaf, Iraq (where he had lived since 1965) by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s Islamic revolution, spent four critical months strategizing and plotting his return to Iran in the village of Neauphle-le-Château, just outside of Paris.

Today, the Tehran-raised and now Paris-based graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi chronicled her experiences growing up in the Islamic Republic and in exile in Europe in her much-praised works, Persepolis and Persepolis 2.

Following Iran's disputed ballot this year, Satrapi and Vienna-based filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (whose 2001 film Kandahar won the Federico Fellini Prize from UNESCO, and who serves as the the spokesman for the Mousavi campaign abroad), met with Green Party MPs in the European parliament in Brussels. The pair presented what they said was a document from the Iranian electoral commission showing that Mousavi had won the ballot with 19 million votes, a far cry from the official tally that showed 24.5 million votes for the victorious Ahmadinejad and 13.2 million votes for Mousavi.

“We,the Iranian nation, have been taken hostage by the government of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei,” Makhmalbaf said in a speech to the European Parliament in July. “We call on you, the nations and governments of the world, not to give official recognition to the hostage-takers.”

Beyond the passionate artistic dissent of Satrapi and Makhmalbaf, France is also the base for one of the murkiest and most controversial of the exile groups opposing the Ahmadinejad government and Iran’s conservative clerics, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

Founded in Paris in 1981 by Massoud Rajavi, a former supporter of Iran’s Islamic revolution who had fallen out with the Khomeini government, the NCRI grew directly out of the role of Rajavi and his wife, Maryam, as leaders of the Mojāhedin-e Khalq (People's Mujahedin of Iran or MEK, sometimes also abbreviated as PMOI).

With its roots in the firmament of university opposition to the Shah in 1960s Iran and a large portion of its membership female, the MEK blend a peculiar mix of Marxist and Islamic fervor with a rather pronounced and somewhat eerie focus on the Rajavis as objects of public adoration. Leaving Paris in 1986, Massoud Rajavi set up MEK military bases in Iraq for the next two decades with the blessing of Saddam Hussein.

When Massoud Rajavi disappeared in the wake of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (he is now thought to be dead or in hiding), responsibility for the day-to-day running of the NCRI fell to Maryam Rajavi. Following the U.S invasion of Iraq, the MEK was largely disarmed, though its sprawling camps in Iraq’s Diyala Province remained until a violent July 2009 incursion by Iraqi security forces sought to dismantle the camps and evict their residents.

Placed on the U.S. State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations in 1997, the MEK was also placed on the European Union's list of terrorist organizations in 2002, but removed it in early 2009

In a 2005 report titled “No Exit,” Human Rights Watch wrote that former MEK members at the camps “reported abuses ranging from detention and persecution of ordinary members wishing to leave the organization, to lengthy solitary confinements, severe beatings, and torture of dissident members.”

As a measure of the devotion of the group’s followers, when Maryam Rajavi was arrested by French police in June 2003 along with 160 MEK followers on the basis of a court order accusing them of preparing terrorist acts and financing terrorist enterprises from French soil, the group’s supporters staged noisy protests in several European capitals, with several partisans setting themselves ablaze in protest. Rajavi was subsequently released.

The NCRI has apparently taken a page out of the book of the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi exile group whose assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction gained it great influence among Washington’s power elite even though they were later proved false.

In February 2008, the NCRI held a press conference where they charged that Iran was still actively pursuing a nuclear weapons programme, a claim that ran counter the assessment of the US National Intelligence Estimate - the collective wisdom of all 16 U.S. spy agencies - that Iran halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.

Though the group’s links with Saddam Hussein during the vicious 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war are said to have cost it dearly in terms of support on the ground in Iran, the group still has its admirers in Washington.

Tom Tancredo, former Republican member of the United States House of Representatives and failed 2008 presidential candidate, was a vocal supporter of the group during his 10 year stint on Capital Hill, while California Democratic Congressman Bob Filner addressed an NCRI rally in Paris in June 2007, praising the group and Maryam Rajavi in particular. Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee under George W. Bush and a leading proponent of the invasion of Iraq, and Florida Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen are also viewed as being sympathetic to the group.

Among quieter voices in the Iranian exile community, however, is the recognition that Iran is currently passing through a supremely delicate and painful moment in its political history.

Above all, they say, the significance of what is happening in Iran now should not be lost on outside observers of the region, and foreign governments should approach this crisis with a new set of eyes, avoiding a repeat of such infamous moments as the ill-fated 1954 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (carried out with the complicity of British and American intelligence service) or the 2003 Iraq invasion.

While some political players in the West appear genetically disposed to throw their weight behind fire-and-brimstone military scenarios when confronted with the crisis, and while some of those of the intellectual left wrap themselves in ideologically bankrupt slogans about U.S. hegemony far removed from the reality of Iranian risking their lives on the ground, voices in the Iranian diaspora continue to urge, above all things, caution and moderation.

“Any principled person who has a venue and who has a position where they can inform has to be supple intellectually, politically and morally, and be open to the possibility that things can happen beyond our expectations, beyond our theories, beyond our political positioning,” says Hamid Dabashi. “To not allow the facts on the ground as they are unfolding to inform politics and theories, this to me is irresponsible.”

“I think what we are witnessing is not only the rise of national politics into the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf region, but the rise of a civil rights movements quite beyond ideological persuasions or formations.”


Michael Deibert is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.

Michael Deibert in Lonely Planet guide

Heading out to dinner in Paris tonight with my good friend, the writer Ben Fountain, it was nice to find out that my 2005 book, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti, is mentioned on page 272 of the new Lonely Planet guide to Haiti and the Dominican Republic as "a gripping eye-witness account of the chaos of the final years of Aristide's rule up to the 2004 coup." Thanks for noticing, Lonely Planet.

Senator Edward Kennedy, 77, dies

United States Senator Edward Kennedy was a great legislator on behalf of working class, working poor and otherwise disadvantaged and disenfranchised Americans, however flawed he was as a human being, and as powerful a voice for a national healthcare plan as we have ever had in my native country. May the road rise to meet you, wherever you are off to, Teddy.

A note on Jeb Sprague and Wadner Pierre's reporting of the Ronald Dauphin case in Haiti

In an era during which, in my own country, right-wing groups such as FreedomWorks are advising opponents of healthcare reform on how best to disrupt public discussion of America’s appalling healthcare system, it is useful to cast a skeptical eye towards conflicts of interest among those reporting the news. Talking points created by political operatives are then parroted by a compliant media, reiterated by politically-sponsored, ostensibly “grassroots,” groups are then re-reported by sympathetic media outlets as news. It is an old and often surprisingly transparent trick.

Aside from the cable network rantings of Fox News and CNN’s immigrant-hating Lou Dobbs, it is hard for me to think of a more obvious example of the phenomenon of echo chamber news than a recent article on Haiti titled “Calls Mount to Free Lavalas Activist” written for the Inter Press Service by Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague.

The article concerns Ronald Dauphin, a former customs worker in the central Haitian city of St. Marc and partisan of the Fanmi Lavalas political party of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,

Though Pierre and Sprague’s article describes Dauphin as “a Haitian political prisoner,” according to a St. Marc-based group, the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), and a Haitian human rights group, the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), Dauphin was also an enthusiastic participant in a massacre of Aristide opponents and civilians that took place in the town in February 2004.

During that time, Dauphin, who was known in St. Marc as Black Ronald, was affiliated with a pro-Aristide paramilitary group, Bale Wouze ("Clean Sweep"). According to local residents, Bale Wouze, working in tandem with the Police Nationale de Haiti (PNH) and the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN), a unit directly responsible for the president's personal security, swept through the neighborhood of La Scierie, killing political activists affiliated with an armed anti-government group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint-Marc (Ramicos), as well as civilians, committing instances of gang rape, and looting and burning property.

When I visited St. Marc in February 2004, shortly after Bale Wouze's raid into La Scierie, I interviewed USGPN personnel and Bale Wouze members who were patrolling the city as a single armed unit in tandem the PNH. A local priest told me matter-of-factly at the time of Bale Wouze that, "These people don't make arrests, they kill." According to a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited St. Marc a month after the killings, at least 27 people were murdered in St. Marc between Feb. 11 and Aristide's flight into exile on February 29.

On a return visit to St. Marc in June of this year, researching for my article "We Have Never Had Justice," I spoke with individuals such as 49-year old Amazil Jean-Baptiste, whose son, Kenol St. Gilles, was murdered, and 44 year-old Marc Ariel Narcisse, whose cousin, Bob Narcisse, was killed. It is difficult to spend a morning chatting with the people of La Scierie without concluding that something very awful happened to them in 2004, a trauma from which they have yet to recover and for which they still seek justice.

Following the massacre in St. Marc, Dauphin was arrested in 2004. He subsequently escaped from jail, was re-arrested during the course of an anti-kidnapping raid in July 2006, and, like 81 percent those in Haiti’s prisons, been held without trial ever since.

In their recent article, Pierre and Sprague take particular aim at Haiti’s RNDDH human rights group, deferring instead to the U.S-based Institute for Justice and Democracy (IJDH), a group that has been particularly vociferous in its denunciations of possible governmental culpability for the St. Marc killings, and which described Ronald Dauphin in a June 2009 press release as “a Haitian grassroots activist, customs worker and political prisoner,” language curiously mimicked in the Sprague/Pierre article, and which makes no mention of the testimonies of the people of St. Marc.

Though they are never mentioned in the article, the deep and ongoing links between Mr. Aristide, Fanmi Lavalas, IJDH, Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague - links of which the Inter Press Service is aware but has chosen to ignore - have effectively blurred the line between political advocacy, human rights work and journalism.

One needs only to look at the chairman of IJDH’s Board of Directors, Miami attorney Ira Kurzban - also one of the group’s founders - to realize the deeply compromised nature of the organization's work. According to U.S. Department of Justice filings, between 2001 and 2004 Mr. Kurzban’s law firm received $4,648,964 from the Aristide government on behalf of its lobbying efforts, gobbling up from Haiti’s near-bankrupt state more than 2,000 times the average yearly income of the more than 7 million people there who survive on less that $2 per day. Since Mr. Aristide’s subsequent exile, Mr. Kurzban has frequently identified himself as the former president’s personal attorney in the United States. In vintage FreedomWorks fashion, Mr. Kuzban also had to be calmed by security personnel when he hysterically and repeatedly interrupted a reading that I was giving at the 2005 Miami Book Fair.

In IJDH’s 2005 annual report, Mr. Kurzban’s firm is listed in the category reserved for those having contributed more than $5000 to the organization, while in the group’s 2006 report, the firm is listed under “Donations of Time and Talent.”. The American Immigration Lawyers Association, South Florida Chapter, for which Mr. Kurzban served as past national president and former general council, is listed in a section reserved for those having donated $10,000 or more

Though Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague’s elevation of IJDH to an undeserved legitimacy and slander of RNDDH (a group which, despite its advocacy on behalf of the St. Marc victims, has also defended the rights and advocated on behalf of members of the Fanmi Lavalas party) are distasteful, they don’t quite rise to the level of intentional duplicity that another bit of information suggests.

In a stark conflict of interest, Wadner Pierre was once employed by a Haitian legal organization, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, which, according to the IJDH’s own website received “most of its support from the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.” Pierre has also previously contributed text and photographs to the IJDH website lauding the April 2007 release of Amanus Mayette, another suspect of the St. Marc massacre.

Put simply, when writing about the IJDH, Wadner Pierre is quoting his former employer without acknowledging it as such, a sleight of hand that opponents of health reform in my own country, for example, would recognize immediately.

For his part, Jeb Sprague, the article’s other author, first made himself known to me in November 2005, when he emailed me, unsolicited, a graphic picture of the bullet-riddled, blood-soaked bodies of a Haitian mother and her children along with a smiley-face emoticon and a semi-coherent tirade against myself, the World Bank and the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, DC think tank.

Intimations of violence against my person aside, such a display struck me as less than a class act in giving those sacrificed on the altar of Haiti's fratricidal political violence the respect they deserve. Since then, Sprague has graduated to obsessively slandering progressive elements deemed insufficiently loyal to Haiti’s disgraced former president, such as the U.K.-based Haiti Support Group, and now works as a teaching assistant at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Sociology Department, focusing on crime and delinquency, subjects with which his past behavior no doubt gives him a close familiarity.

Taken in total, it is unfortunate that the Inter Press Service, an organization that promotes itself as “civil society's leading news agency,” would allow itself to be used as a front for such propaganda, and throw its weight behind the paid political hacks and human rights abusers who have for too long dominated politics in Haiti. As a fairly legitimate news source, as opposed to, say, the red-faced shouting of Fox News, the Inter Press Service owes its readers, and the people of Haiti, better.

A few words about Kenneth H. Bacon

Kenneth H. Bacon, a courageous advocate for refugees, former assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration and former journalist, passed away this Saturday.

I interviewed him in 2007 about the state of refugees and internally displaced persons fleeing the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region, while he was working as president of Refugees International, a Washington-based organisation that works to generate humanitarian assistance and protection for displaced people around the world. For a conflict as surrounded by posturing and propagandizing as Darfur is, I found his comments refreshingly humane and informed by common sense.

Though I didn't know him personally, I did know his career and public persona somewhat, and he seemed to me like someone genuinely committed to trying to lessen the suffering of the less-fortunate in the world, a distinction that fits fewer and fewer in our public discourse these days, and, as such, he seemed someone who deserves this small note of remembrance from the Loire Valley today, far from the refugee camps in Sudan and Chad.

The Guns of August

The Guns of August

By Michael Deibert

In November 1787, writing to William Smith from Paris, where I live, Thomas Jefferson, future president of the United States and then U.S. Minister to France, penned the following lines:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.

This month, outside a town hall meeting held by President Barack Obama in Portsmouth, New Hampshire to discuss his efforts to reform America’s health care system, a man named William Kostric appeared with a loaded handgun strapped to his thigh and a sign reading “It’s time to water the tree of liberty.”

At a town hall meeting hosted by Senator Arlen Specter, a longtime Republican turned Democrat, which took place in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, about 40 minutes from the working-class, largely conservative enclave of Lancaster County where I grew up, a disheveled man shrieked at Specter, who has represented Pennsylvania in the senate since 1981, that "one day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies.”

In the midst of the debate of overhauling our national health care system, these two eruptions were not isolated incidents. Attendees brought firearms to events held by members of Congress Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and Steve Cohen of Tennessee, both Democrats. Death threats have been sent to four Democratic congressmen: Brad Miller of North Carolina, Dennis Moore of Kansas, Brian Baird of Washington and David Scott of Georgia. Baird’s office received a fax this month in which Obama was depicted as The Joker from the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” with a Communist hammer-and-sickle painted on his forehead and the words “Death to all Marxists! Foreign and domestic!” scrawled beneath. A similar fax was sent to the office of Scott, an African-American, with the added element of Scott, an Africa-American, being denounced as “a nigger” A large swastika was spray-painted across the sign for Scott’s office.

Firing the furnace of such sentiments have been such ideologues for the right as television host Glenn Beck, who appallingly play-acted the murder of House speaker Nancy Pelosi on his nightly show on Fox News, and the radio host Rush Limbaugh with his opining that President Obama is “trying to destroy the private sector as it exists...Let’s face it, President Obama’s black, and he’s got a chip on his shoulder...He’s using the power of the presidency to remake the country”

This is what the debate over health care appears to have been reduced to in the country of my birth. In a nation where some 46 million Americans currently lack any health insurance whatsoever, and millions more have only the most limited access to any kind of coverage, a reasoned, sober discussion on the best way to overhaul our fabulously expensive and fabulously inefficient system comes down to threats of political assassination and vows of divine retribution.

The words of Jefferson, who was writing at the time in defense of the French Revolution and the overthrow of a monarchy, are now used to intimate violence against the man who occupies the office that Jefferson himself once held, a man whom, in one of those exquisite bits of historical justice, is of mixed-race ancestry much like the children that the freedom-extolling Jefferson fathered with a slave, Sally Hemings, as Jefferson’s compunctions about slavery did not extend to not participating in the institution itself.

Today, however, the Republican Party of another storied U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln, which has been in power for 20 of the last 28 years, has been supplanted by Barack Hussein Obama, son of an ethnic Luo Kenyan father and a white American mother from Kansas, a man who seems very earnest about trying to re-tool much that is brutal, wasteful and stupid about American political culture. The party does not seem to be taking to opposition well.

The need to re-haul our health care system could not seem more dire. Knowing, as I do, people in the United States who have gone bankrupt attempting to cover their health care costs, as well as many more who put off going to the doctor, receiving treatment or buying medicine because they simply cannot afford the prohibitive cost, I am also myself a statistic. Despite working 50-60 hours per week as a freelance journalist, I have not had health or dental insurance since early 2006.

The current system, dominated by insurance and pharmaceutical companies and defined by a health-care scheme absurdly tied to employment status, is being portrayed by opponents of change as a triumph of American know-how worth preserving. But compared to the health care system of France, for example, the country where I currently live and from where Jefferson wrote his famous letter, its performance comes up woefully short. Though the French system has consistently been rated among the best in the world (while the U.S. system recently ranked 37th, according to the World Health Organization), the 11 percent of GDP that France spends on it is far below the 17 percent of GDP spent in the U.S., a cost that comes without the vast benefits, safeguards and universal coverage that the French system offers.

However, none of these costs and benefits are currently being debated, nor are the political leaders of the opposition to the new health care reform bill urging any sort of moderation in their discourse.

Former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin took to the social networking site Facebook earlier this month to denounce the “death panels” she charged the bill would create where “bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care,”, a completely false allusion to a provision that would allow Medicare to reimburse doctors providing voluntary counseling regarding end-of-life issues. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa echoed Palin where he told a recent rally that “we should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.” A memo by a volunteer affiliated with FreedomWorks, a conservative organization chaired by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, recently advised protesters on how to "disrupt" and "rattle" town hall meetings. Obama and the advocates of health care reform in the United States are routinely denounced as “socialists,” compared to Nazis and Adolf Hitler and the very legitimacy of Obama’s birth in the United States (which took place in Hawaii in 1961) is questioned.

Seeing the party of Lincoln reduced to a clutch of Talibanesque religious fundamentalists, science-denying climate change skeptics and openly xenophobic racists and bigots might be simply depressing if the implications were not so deadly serious.

A new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center concludes that “after virtually disappearing from public view a decade ago, the anti-government militia movement is surging across the country – fueled by fears of a black president, the changing demographics of the country and fringe conspiracy theories increasingly spread by mainstream figures.” The report echoed in its particulars an April intelligence assessment by the Department of Homeland Security.

In May of this year, George Tiller, a Kansas physician who performed abortions and who had been pilloried by the right and by television host Bill O'Reilly in particular, was shot and killed while attending a church service, allegedly by an antiabortion extremist, Scott Roeder. In June, Stephen Tyrone, an African-American security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, was shot and killed, allegedly by James Wenneker von Brunn, a Holocaust denier and white supremacist with a long history of anti-government militancy.

And, in perhaps a telling echo of the past, the words of Thomas Jefferson that William Kostric alluded to with his sign and gun outside of the Obama appearance in New Hampshire this month where the same ones that Timothy McVeigh, convicted and executed for carrying out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, wore emblazoned on his t-shirt on the day of his arrest.

Having reported in the past on tumultuous political environments in countries such as Guatemala, Haiti and India, I have watched as pseudo-populist demagogues have often proved highly successful at using intemperate rhetoric to whip up groups genuinely or perceiving themselves to be disenfranchised to act against “the other.” I believe that as my country continues forward this August there is a real danger that a union will occur between the violent and shrill political rhetoric currently being spouted and actual physical violence against those who are being so demonized among anti-government elements of the right. I increasingly fear that I have seen this script played out before, always with the same disastrous results.

Much as we hold the intellectual authors and instigators of political violence in foreign countries such as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia culpable for the actions of their underlings even though they themselves may have never carried a weapon into battle, the opponents of health care reform would do well to pause for a breath and look at the political climate they are creating and what its likely outcome will be. And they should remember the oft-forgotten words with which Thomas Jefferson commenced to conclude that famous 1797 missive from Paris:

"I know that there are combustible materials there, and that they wait the torch only."

Michael Deibert is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti. His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.

A sense of Déjà Vu

On the nighttime flight back to Paris from Miami, where I had appeared on a most interesting panel covering Haiti with such scholarly luminaries as the sociologist Laënnec Hurbon and the political scientist Robert Fatton, I was struck by the following passage in a book by the historian Frank Argote-Freyre:

The government of enlisted men and student leaders was surrounded by powerful enemies. [A U.S. Ambassador] was personally embarrassed by the removal of [the president] and would do everything in his power to undermine the new government. The military officers, humiliated by the event of September 4, refused to return to their posts and share power with their former underlings. It was hard for them to imagine that el negro...a guajiro (country boy) from Banes was responsible for their ouster. Their sense of military honor and class superiority posed an obstacle to negotiation and clouded their perception of the new power structure.

The Dominican Republic in 1963? Nicaragua in 1979? Bolivia in 2006?

No, this is Cuba, and not the Cuba of the storied and over-romanticized 1959 revolution, but the Cuba of the 1933 revolution that ousted a dictator, Gerardo Machado, and his successor, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, and was largely led by a low-ranking soldier of origins of desperate poverty and indistinct racial identity named Fulgencio Batista, the same Batista who in later years became another in the island’s long line of reviled despots, and whose ouster paved the way for 50 plus years of communist dictatorship on the island.

Sometimes, people who don’t know the history of places (Haiti, for instance) like to see things in the stark relief of black and white, never allowing their certainty to be clouded by the million shades of grey that inform power, its acquisition, its use and its maintenance.

Reading Argote-Freyre’s riveting book, Fulgencio Batista: Volume 1, From Revolutionary to Strongman, I think back to some of Robert Penn Warren’s musings on the old drama of power and ethics in Huey Long-era Louisiana. Interesting questions are posed in the midst of such dramas, surely, and it is up to us as journalists to answer them as fully and as honestly as we can, as they are not as we wished they would be.

“It is convenient to look at the outcome of an event and then interpret backward to make everything fit a nice and simple interpretation,” Argote-Freyre writes at one point. “But simplicity has its limitations.”

Amen to that.

An interview with Roberto Saviano

I stumbled across this interview with Roberto Saviano, the author of a stunning book on organized crime in Naples, Italy, that I am currently reading. The book Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System, chronicles the activities of the Camorra, and has resulted in the author having to live as a virtual prisoner, with round-the-clock police protection, since its publication. Watching the interview reminded me of the price that some journalists must pay to accurately inform the public of the nefarious activities of those who would rather keep those pursuits hidden.

"How do you actually earn the money?" Saviano asks at one point of the oft-romanticized criminal element in his native country, a question that I find applicable to Haiti, Guatamala and many other countries that I have covered.

Buona fortuna, Roberto.

Another view of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. arrest

A rather thought-provoking take on the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been posted on IReport by my fellow Pennsylvanian DesireG, where she makes some very interesting points on the circumstances of Gates' arrest, the opportunism of politicians and the the role that class, status and privilege play in situations such as this, a fact that many people don't like to talk about. Bringing up the recent but far-less covered assault on Trevor Casey in Toldeo, Ohio and the actual murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, she wonders, where all the outrage was then?

For my part, while what happened to Gates was pretty distasteful, I think the whole incident provides a window on the intense narcissism and self-involvement of the United States in general and academia, in particular. Human beings are butchered like pigs in a slaughterhouse in the countries I report on in numbers greater than I can count, with nary a voice raised in protest, and yet it is the arrest of a privileged professor that causes people to be SHOCKED, SHOCKED.

HAITI: "We Have Never Had Justice"

HAITI: "We Have Never Had Justice"

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

(Read the original article here)

ST. MARC, Jul 21, 2009 (IPS) - Amazil Jean-Baptiste remembers when they came to kill her son.

"They killed my boy and burned my boy," says Jean-Baptiste, a careworn 49-year-old who lives in a dilapidated structure without running water in this bustling port town 80 kilometres north of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. "And I am still suffering."

It was February 2004, and Haiti was in the midst of a chaotic rebellion against the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. North of St. Marc, a formerly loyal street gang known as the Cannibal Army had risen up against the president and, joined by former members of the country's disbanded army, proceeded to overrun police barracks and seize control of towns throughout northern Haiti.

On Feb. 7, a lightly-armed anti-Aristide group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint-Marc (Ramicos), based in the neighbourhood of La Scierie where Amazil Jean-Baptiste lived, took advantage of the chaos to drive government forces from the town, seizing the local police station, which they then set on fire.

Two days later, the combined forces of the Police Nationale de Haiti (PNH), the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN) and a local paramilitary organisation named Bale Wouze ("Clean Sweep") retook much of the city. By Feb. 11, Bale Wouze - headed by a former parliamentary representative of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party named Amanus Mayette- had commenced the battle to retake the La Scierie.

What would follow would raise questions about Haiti's ability to give justice to victims and punish the guilty that persist to this day.

As Amazil Jean-Baptiste returned home, she found her son, Kenol St. Gilles, a 23-year-old carpenter with no political affiliation, groaning with a bullet in each thigh. Taking him to the home of a local pastor for aid, she watched as seven armed men, including three dressed in police uniforms, accused St. Gilles of being a Ramicos militant who had shot at them. He was dragged from the house, beaten unconscious and thrown into a burning cement depot, where he died.

Residents of the town tell of other crimes - the decapitation of unarmed Ramicos member Leroy Joseph, the killing of Ramicos second-in-command Nixon François, the gang rape by Bale Wouze members of a 21-year-old woman in the ruins of the burned-out commissariat - that were allegedly committed during or immediately following the recapture of St. Marc by pro-Aristide forces.

Witnesses recount how several people were slain and tossed into the burning remnants of the Ramicos headquarters, while still others were gunned down by police firing from a helicopter as they tried to flee over a nearby mountain, Morne Calvaire.

"They came here and they massacred people," says resident Marc Ariel Narcisse, 44. "A grenade thrown into my mother's house exploded, and the house caught fire. My cousin, Bob Narcisse, was killed there."

Following those dark days, the victims of the St. Marc killings formed the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES) to advocate on their behalf. But their struggle has exposed the highly politicised and often unresponsive nature of justice in Haiti, a country struggling to build democratic institutions after decades of dictatorship.

Links between armed pressure groups and the spheres of official power have long been a fact of political life here.

Faustin Soulouque, who crowned himself emperor of Haiti in 1852, was supported by groups of impoverished partisans called zinglins, while the Duvalier family dictatorship that ruled from 1957 until 1986 utilised the Tontons Macoutes, a murderous paramilitary band named after a traditional Haitian boogeyman.

The government of Aristide, who returned to office in 2001 after ruling the country for two periods in the 1990s, allied itself with his own armed partisans, often referred to as chimere after a mythical fire-breathing demon.

Of these latter groups, Bale Wouze had a reputation as one of the fiercest, and, by February 2004, its links with Haiti's National Palace were largely indisputable, especially given the presence in St. Marc of the USGPN, a unit directly responsible for the president's personal security.

On Feb. 9, as St. Marc was retaken by government forces, and as security forces and Bale Wouze members patrolled its streets together, Aristide's prime minister, Yvon Neptune, also serving as the head of the Conseil Superieur de la Police Nationale d'Haiti, flew into the city, giving a press conference during which he stated that "the national police force alone cannot re-establish order".

Witnesses in La Scierie describe how one of Bale Wouze's leading members, a government employee named Ronald Dauphin, known to residents as "Black Ronald", patrolled St. Marc in a police uniform, even though he was in no way affiliated with the police.

When the author of this article visited St. Marc in February 2004, shortly after Bale Wouze's raid into La Scierie, he interviewed USGPN personnel and Bale Wouze members patrolling the city as a single armed unit in tandem the PNH. A local priest told IPS matter-of-factly at the time of Bale Wouze that, "These people don't make arrests, they kill."

Interviewed by the Miami Herald in St. Marc in February 2004, Amanus Mayette was surrounded by Bale Wouze members and proclaimed his affiliation with the organisation.

"Amanus Mayette, Black Ronald, Somoza, these people killed my son," Amazil Jean-Baptiste explains in a trembling voice, listing the names of some of those who she says took part in her son's slaying.

Following Aristide's overthrow later that month, several members of Bale Wouze were lynched as they tried to flee St. Marc, while Yvon Neptune turned himself over to the interim government that ruled Haiti from March 2004 until the inauguration of President René Préval in May 2006.

Held in prison without trial until his May 2006 release on humanitarian grounds, a May 2008 decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Haitian state had violated 11 separate provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights in its detention of Neptune, though stressing that it was "not a criminal court in which the criminal responsibility of an individual can be examined".

After being jailed for three years without trial, former Bale Wouze leader Amanus Mayette was freed from prison in April 2007. Arrested in 2004, Ronald Dauphin subsequently escaped from jail, and was re-arrested during the course of an anti-kidnapping raid in Haiti's capital in July 2006. Despite several chaotic public hearings, to date, none of the accused for the killings in La Scierie has ever gone to trial.

"In our system, the criminal becomes a victim because the system doesn't work," laments Pierre Espérance, director of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), which has pushed for criminal prosecutions in the La Scierie case.

Espérance himself survived a 1999 assassination attempt for which no one was ever prosecuted.

"But historically, the authorities here are so involved in corruption and human rights violations they feel very comfortable with impunity," he says.

According to RNDDH figures, nearly 81 percent of Haiti's prisoners are waiting for their cases to be heard before a judge, a situation that some hope may be improved by the re-opening of Haiti's school for magistrates, which recently renewed activities after being shuttered for many years.

Frustratingly for the people of St. Marc, however, the events of February 2004 have become a political football among Haiti's various political actors.

The United Nations independent expert on human rights in Haiti, Louis Joinet, in a 2005 statement dismissed allegations of a massacre and described what occurred as "a clash", a characterisation that seemed unaware of the fact that not all among those victimised had any affiliation with Haiti's political opposition.

Conversely, a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited St. Marc a month after the killings concluded that at least 27 people had been murdered by pro-government forces between Feb. 11 and Aristide's flight into exile.

Their claims are treated with shrugging indifference by the Préval government and the United Nations, and the people of La Scierie appear to be resigned that their struggle for justice will be a long, though hopefully not fruitless, one.

"We need justice, we demand justice, because we have never had justice," says Amazil Jean-Baptiste, as another member of AVIGES stands nearby, wearing a t-shirt reading 'We won't forget 11 February 2004' in Haiti's native Kreyol language.

"I just want justice for my son," she says.

Tentative calm brings optimism to a 'failed' Haiti

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Tentative calm brings optimism to a 'failed' Haiti

Michael Deibert

The Washington Times

(Read the original article here)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti | The dark afternoon clouds that gradually roll over Haiti's capital herald the beginning of the rainy season, but the early-morning bursts of sunshine might more accurately capture the national mood these days.

While the country remains desperately poor, it is more peaceful than it has been in years - no small feat in a place with a volatile political history. Some of the credit goes to the United Nations and President Rene Preval.

A few years ago, the authority of the state did not extend much beyond Port-au-Prince, where armed gangs controlled neighborhoods. Since the inauguration of Mr. Preval in May 2006, however, a fragile calm has prevailed.

The capital's boisterous population again feels safe enough to patronize downtown bars and kerosine-lit roadside stands late into the evening. Billboards that once extolled the infallibility of a succession of "maximum leaders" now carry messages about the importance of respect between the population and the police as well as decry discrimination against the disabled.

Ruled by priest-turned-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide twice in the 1990s and from 2001 until his ouster in February 2004, Haiti saw violent urban warfare between heavily armed Aristide partisans and security forces, who inflicted collective punishment under an interim government in power from 2004 until Mr. Preval's inauguration.

Working with a 9,000-member U.N. peacekeeping mission, known by the acronym MINUSTAH, Haiti's government has made great strides in recent months in professionalizing security forces that were historically brutal and corrupt.

"The capacity of the police has improved quite significantly ... and the image of the police has begun to change within the society," says Hedi Annabi, a Tunisian diplomat who heads MINUSTAH.

"The level of respect for basic freedoms, such as freedom of the press, is at a historically remarkable level," he said.

In addition, according to MINUSTAH, the number of kidnappings has fallen dramatically, from more than 500 in 2006 to about 50 during the first six months of this year.

A projected five-year U.N.-supported police-reform program is in its third year of implementation, providing Haiti with 9,200 police officers - a number projected to grow to 10,000 by the end of this year and to 14,000 by the end of 2011.

The force began with only 3,500, of whom more than 1,500 had to be dismissed for poor conduct.

The surge in police recruits is a far cry from the situation that existed between September 2004 and June 2005, during which a police officer was killed every five days, according to U.N. statistics.

Some observers here credit the leadership of Michele Duvivier Pierre-Louis, a respected civil society activist, who was appointed prime minister in September 2008.

Ms. Pierre-Louis lauds the U.N. mission, which is heavily Latin American, for helping to stabilize the country.

"It's a new paradigm for regional cooperation," she told The Washington Times. "They have their own interests, of course, but let's make the best of the opportunities that are offered to us."

In a country where voting has sometimes boded ill for civil order, midterm elections in April, with a runoff in June, for Haiti's Senate were poorly attended but largely peaceful, with poll workers and observers directing voters and tabulating votes in a professional fashion. The desultory participation, however, led Mr. Preval to warn that Haiti's "political class should wonder about this abstention" as he cast his own ballot at a Port-au-Prince school.

Haiti still faces massive challenges. Largely deforested, the country was battered by Hurricanes Hanna and Ike in 2008, which collectively killed at least 600 people.

Beyond the capital, after the shabby-chic resorts on the Cote des Arcadins, Haiti's Route Nationale 1 is a pot-holed, crumbling wreck long before it reaches the northern cities of Gonaives and Cap-Haitien.

Poverty and the scramble to find basic necessities remain a constant fact of life for the majority of the 8.5 million population. The social peace that has been restored is fragile and could easily fray if tangible gains are not seen in the day-to-day lives of Haitians.

One exception to the national calm are noisy and occasionally violent demonstrations by university students and other political pressure groups in the capital.

Haiti's Senate voted in May to support a law raising the minimum wage to about $4.90 per day, a 300 percent increase. Mr. Preval has not signed the measure, citing his fear that it would jeopardize Haiti's already fragile employment sector. In response, students have held regular protests, during which dozens of cars have been burned and protesters have squared off against U.N. troops and Haitian security forces. Two demonstrators have been killed.

"They chose not to listen to us, and we were obligated to peacefully mobilize about our concerns and the question about the minimum salary," said Beneche Martial, a student at the state university's medical school.

Nevertheless, there is a tenuous hopefulness here for the first time in many years.

In June, the Inter-American Development Bank approved $120 million in grants for 2010 to help Haiti improve infrastructure, basic services and disaster prevention.

Also last month, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank collectively canceled $1.2 billion owed to them by Haiti, erasing almost two-thirds of the country's outstanding debt.

The scourge of HIV/AIDS is also diminishing, with the rate of infection among pregnant women halved from 6.2 percent in 1993 to 3.1 percent, according to the U.N.

A U.N. report in December suggested that revived garment production might point the way for economic revival, saying that "it is striking how modest are the impediments to competitiveness, relative to the huge opportunities offered by the fundamentals" in the country.

For a nation viewed as a potential "failed state" not long ago, such news cannot help but be encouraging.

Barack Obama's address to the Ghanaian Parliament

July 11, 2009

Text of Obama’s Speech in Ghana

Text of President Barack Obama's speech Saturday in Accra, Ghana, as provided by the White House:

Good afternoon, everybody. It is a great honor for me to be in Accra and to speak to the representatives of the people of Ghana. I am deeply grateful for the welcome that I've received, as are Michelle and Malia and Sasha Obama. Ghana's history is rich, the ties between our two countries are strong, and I am proud that this is my first visit to sub-Saharan Africa as president of the United States of America.

I want to thank Madam Speaker and all the members of the House of Representatives for hosting us today. I want to thank President Mills for his outstanding leadership. To the former presidents -- Jerry Rawlings, former President Kufuor -- vice president, chief justice -- thanks to all of you for your extraordinary hospitality and the wonderful institutions that you've built here in Ghana.

I'm speaking to you at the end of a long trip. I began in Russia for a summit between two great powers. I traveled to Italy for a meeting of the world's leading economies. And I've come here to Ghana for a simple reason: The 21st century will be shaped by what happens not just in Rome or Moscow or Washington, but by what happens in Accra, as well.

This is the simple truth of a time when the boundaries between people are overwhelmed by our connections. Your prosperity can expand America's prosperity. Your health and security can contribute to the world's health and security. And the strength of your democracy can help advance human rights for people everywhere.

So I do not see the countries and peoples of Africa as a world apart; I see Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world ... as partners with America on behalf of the future we want for all of our children. That partnership must be grounded in mutual responsibility and mutual respect. And that is what I want to speak with you about today.

We must start from the simple premise that Africa's future is up to Africans.

I say this knowing full well the tragic past that has sometimes haunted this part of the world. After all, I have the blood of Africa within me, and my family's ... my family's own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story.

Some you know my grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him ''boy'' for much of his life. He was on the periphery of Kenya's liberation struggles, but he was still imprisoned briefly during repressive times. In his life, colonialism wasn't simply the creation of unnatural borders or unfair terms of trade -- it was something experienced personally, day after day, year after year.

My father grew up herding goats in a tiny village, an impossible distance away from the American universities where he would come to get an education. He came of age at a moment of extraordinary promise for Africa. The struggles of his own father's generation were giving birth to new nations, beginning right here in Ghana. Africans were educating and asserting themselves in new ways, and history was on the move.

But despite the progress that has been made -- and there has been considerable progress in many parts of Africa -- we also know that much of that promise has yet to be fulfilled. Countries like Kenya had a per capita economy larger than South Korea's when I was born. They have badly been outpaced. Disease and conflict have ravaged parts of the African continent.

In many places, the hope of my father's generation gave way to cynicism, even despair. Now, it's easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict. The West has often approached Africa as a patron or a source of resources rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants. In my father's life, it was partly tribalism and patronage and nepotism in an independent Kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is still a daily fact of life for far too many.

Now, we know that's also not the whole story. Here in Ghana, you show us a face of Africa that is too often overlooked by a world that sees only tragedy or a need for charity. The people of Ghana have worked hard to put democracy on a firmer footing, with repeated peaceful transfers of power even in the wake of closely contested elections. And by the way, can I say that for that the minority deserves as much credit as the majority. And with improved governance and an emerging civil society, Ghana's economy has shown impressive rates of growth.

This progress may lack the drama of 20th century liberation struggles, but make no mistake: It will ultimately be more significant. For just as it is important to emerge from the control of other nations, it is even more important to build one's own nation.

So I believe that this moment is just as promising for Ghana and for Africa as the moment when my father came of age and new nations were being born. This is a new moment of great promise. Only this time, we've learned that it will not be giants like Nkrumah and Kenyatta who will determine Africa's future. Instead, it will be you -- the men and women in Ghana's parliament -- the people you represent. It will be the young people brimming with talent and energy and hope who can claim the future that so many in previous generations never realized.

Now, to realize that promise, we must first recognize the fundamental truth that you have given life to in Ghana: Development depends on good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That's the change that can unlock Africa's potential. And that is a responsibility that can only be met by Africans.

As for America and the West, our commitment must be measured by more than just the dollars we spend. I've pledged substantial increases in our foreign assistance, which is in Africa's interests and America's interests. But the true sign of success is not whether we are a source of perpetual aid that helps people scrape by -- it's whether we are partners in building the capacity for transformational change.

This mutual responsibility must be the foundation of our partnership. And today, I'll focus on four areas that are critical to the future of Africa and the entire developing world: democracy, opportunity, health, and the peaceful resolution of conflict.

First, we must support strong and sustainable democratic governments.

As I said in Cairo, each nation gives life to democracy in its own way, and in line with its own traditions. But history offers a clear verdict: Governments that respect the will of their own people, that govern by consent and not coercion, are more prosperous, they are more stable and more successful than governments that do not.

This is about more than just holding elections. It's also about what happens between elections. Repression can take many forms, and too many nations, even those that have elections, are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty. No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves ... or if police -- if police can be bought off by drug traffickers. No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top ... or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that style of governance to end.

In the 21st century, capable, reliable and transparent institutions are the key to success -- strong parliaments; honest police forces; independent judges ... an independent press; a vibrant private sector; a civil society. Those are the things that give life to democracy, because that is what matters in people's everyday lives.

Now, time and again, Ghanaians have chosen constitutional rule over autocracy and shown a democratic spirit that allows the energy of your people to break through. We see that in leaders who accept defeat graciously -- the fact that President Mills' opponents were standing beside him last night to greet me when I came off the plane spoke volumes about Ghana; victors who resist calls to wield power against the opposition in unfair ways. We see that spirit in courageous journalists like Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who risked his life to report the truth. We see it in police like Patience Quaye, who helped prosecute the first human trafficker in Ghana. We see it in the young people who are speaking up against patronage and participating in the political process.

Across Africa, we've seen countless examples of people taking control of their destiny and making change from the bottom up. We saw it in Kenya, where civil society and business came together to help stop postelection violence. We saw it in South Africa, where over three-quarters of the country voted in the recent election -- the fourth since the end of apartheid. We saw it in Zimbabwe, where the Election Support Network braved brutal repression to stand up for the principle that a person's vote is their sacred right.

Now, make no mistake: History is on the side of these brave Africans, not with those who use coups or change constitutions to stay in power. Africa doesn't need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.

Now, America will not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation. The essential truth of democracy is that each nation determines its own destiny. But what America will do is increase assistance for responsible individuals and responsible institutions, with a focus on supporting good governance -- on parliaments, which check abuses of power and ensure that opposition voices are heard ... on the rule of law, which ensures the equal administration of justice; on civic participation, so that young people get involved; and on concrete solutions to corruption like forensic accounting and automating services ... strengthening hot lines, protecting whistle-blowers to advance transparency and accountability.

And we provide this support. I have directed my administration to give greater attention to corruption in our human rights reports. People everywhere should have the right to start a business or get an education without paying a bribe. We have a responsibility to support those who act responsibly and to isolate those who don't, and that is exactly what America will do.

Now, this leads directly to our second area of partnership: supporting development that provides opportunity for more people.

With better governance, I have no doubt that Africa holds the promise of a broader base of prosperity. Witness the extraordinary success of Africans in my country, America. They're doing very well. So they've got the talent, they've got the entrepreneurial spirit. The question is, how do we make sure that they're succeeding here in their home countries? The continent is rich in natural resources. And from cell phone entrepreneurs to small farmers, Africans have shown the capacity and commitment to create their own opportunities. But old habits must also be broken. Dependence on commodities -- or a single export -- has a tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few and leaves people too vulnerable to downturns.

So in Ghana, for instance, oil brings great opportunities, and you have been very responsible in preparing for new revenue. But as so many Ghanaians know, oil cannot simply become the new cocoa. From South Korea to Singapore, history shows that countries thrive when they invest in their people and in their infrastructure ... when they promote multiple export industries, develop a skilled work force and create space for small and medium-sized businesses that create jobs.

As Africans reach for this promise, America will be more responsible in extending our hand. By cutting costs that go to Western consultants and administration, we want to put more resources in the hands of those who need it, while training people to do more for themselves. That's why our $3.5 billion food security initiative is focused on new methods and technologies for farmers -- not simply sending American producers or goods to Africa. Aid is not an end in itself. The purpose of foreign assistance must be creating the conditions where it's no longer needed. I want to see Ghanaians not only self-sufficient in food, I want to see you exporting food to other countries and earning money. You can do that.

Now, America can also do more to promote trade and investment. Wealthy nations must open our doors to goods and services from Africa in a meaningful way. That will be a commitment of my administration. And where there is good governance, we can broaden prosperity through public-private partnerships that invest in better roads and electricity; capacity-building that trains people to grow a business; financial services that reach not just the cities but also the poor and rural areas. This is also in our own interests -- for if people are lifted out of poverty and wealth is created in Africa, guess what? New markets will open up for our own goods. So it's good for both.

One area that holds out both undeniable peril and extraordinary promise is energy. Africa gives off less greenhouse gas than any other part of the world, but it is the most threatened by climate change. A warming planet will spread disease, shrink water resources and deplete crops, creating conditions that produce more famine and more conflict. All of us -- particularly the developed world -- have a responsibility to slow these trends -- through mitigation, and by changing the way that we use energy. But we can also work with Africans to turn this crisis into opportunity.

Together, we can partner on behalf of our planet and prosperity and help countries increase access to power while skipping -- leapfrogging the dirtier phase of development. Think about it: Across Africa, there is bountiful wind and solar power; geothermal energy and biofuels. From the Rift Valley to the North African deserts; from the Western coasts to South Africa's crops -- Africa's boundless natural gifts can generate its own power, while exporting profitable, clean energy abroad.

These steps are about more than growth numbers on a balance sheet. They're about whether a young person with an education can get a job that supports a family; a farmer can transfer their goods to market; an entrepreneur with a good idea can start a business. It's about the dignity of work; it's about the opportunity that must exist for Africans in the 21st century.

Just as governance is vital to opportunity, it's also critical to the third area I want to talk about: strengthening public health.

In recent years, enormous progress has been made in parts of Africa. Far more people are living productively with HIV/AIDS, and getting the drugs they need. I just saw a wonderful clinic and hospital that is focused particularly on maternal health. But too many still die from diseases that shouldn't kill them. When children are being killed because of a mosquito bite, and mothers are dying in childbirth, then we know that more progress must be made.

Yet because of incentives -- often provided by donor nations -- many African doctors and nurses go overseas, or work for programs that focus on a single disease. And this creates gaps in primary care and basic prevention. Meanwhile, individual Africans also have to make responsible choices that prevent the spread of disease, while promoting public health in their communities and countries.

So across Africa, we see examples of people tackling these problems. In Nigeria, an interfaith effort of Christians and Muslims has set an example of cooperation to confront malaria. Here in Ghana and across Africa, we see innovative ideas for filling gaps in care -- for instance, through E-Health initiatives that allow doctors in big cities to support those in small towns.

America will support these efforts through a comprehensive, global health strategy, because in the 21st century, we are called to act by our conscience but also by our common interest, because when a child dies of a preventable disease in Accra, that diminishes us everywhere. And when disease goes unchecked in any corner of the world, we know that it can spread across oceans and continents.

And that's why my administration has committed $63 billion to meet these challenges -- $63 billion. Building on the strong efforts of President Bush, we will carry forward the fight against HIV/AIDS. We will pursue the goal of ending deaths from malaria and tuberculosis, and we will work to eradicate polio. We will fight -- we will fight neglected tropical disease. And we won't confront illnesses in isolation -- we will invest in public health systems that promote wellness and focus on the health of mothers and children.

Now, as we partner on behalf of a healthier future, we must also stop the destruction that comes not from illness, but from human beings -- and so the final area that I will address is conflict.

Let me be clear: Africa is not the crude caricature of a continent at perpetual war. But if we are honest, for far too many Africans, conflict is a part of life, as constant as the sun. There are wars over land and wars over resources. And it is still far too easy for those without conscience to manipulate whole communities into fighting among faiths and tribes.

These conflicts are a millstone around Africa's neck. Now, we all have many identities -- of tribe and ethnicity; of religion and nationality. But defining oneself in opposition to someone who belongs to a different tribe or who worships a different prophet has no place in the 21st century. Africa's diversity should be a source of strength, not a cause for division. We are all God's children. We all share common aspirations -- to live in peace and security; to access education and opportunity; to love our families and our communities and our faith. That is our common humanity.

That is why we must stand up to inhumanity in our midst. It is never justified, never justifiable to target innocents in the name of ideology. It is the death sentence of a society to force children to kill in wars. It is the ultimate mark of criminality and cowardice to condemn women to relentless and systemic rape. We must bear witness to the value of every child in Darfur and the dignity of every woman in the Congo. No faith or culture should condone the outrages against them. And all of us must strive for the peace and security necessary for progress.

Africans are standing up for this future. Here, too, in Ghana we are seeing you help point the way forward. Ghanaians should take pride in your contributions to peacekeeping from Congo to Liberia to Lebanon ... and your efforts to resist the scourge of the drug trade. We welcome the steps that are being taken by organizations like the African Union and ECOWAS to better resolve conflicts, to keep the peace and support those in need. And we encourage the vision of a strong, regional security architecture that can bring effective, transnational forces to bear when needed.

America has a responsibility to work with you as a partner to advance this vision, not just with words, but with support that strengthens African capacity. When there's a genocide in Darfur or terrorists in Somalia, these are not simply African problems -- they are global security challenges, and they demand a global response.

And that's why we stand ready to partner through diplomacy and technical assistance and logistical support, and we will stand behind efforts to hold war criminals accountable. And let me be clear: Our Africa Command is focused not on establishing a foothold in the continent, but on confronting these common challenges to advance the security of America, Africa and the world.

In Moscow, I spoke of the need for an international system where the universal rights of human beings are respected, and violations of those rights are opposed. And that must include a commitment to support those who resolve conflicts peacefully, to sanction and stop those who don't, and to help those who have suffered. But ultimately, it will be vibrant democracies like Botswana and Ghana which roll back the causes of conflict and advance the frontiers of peace and prosperity.

As I said earlier, Africa's future is up to Africans.

The people of Africa are ready to claim that future. And in my country, African Americans -- including so many recent immigrants -- have thrived in every sector of society. We've done so despite a difficult past, and we've drawn strength from our African heritage. With strong institutions and a strong will, I know that Africans can live their dreams in Nairobi and Lagos, Kigali, Kinshasa, Harare, and right here in Accra.

You know, 52 years ago, the eyes of the world were on Ghana. And a young preacher named Martin Luther King traveled here, to Accra, to watch the Union Jack come down and the Ghanaian flag go up. This was before the march on Washington or the success of the civil rights movement in my country. Dr. King was asked how he felt while watching the birth of a nation. And he said: ''It renews my conviction in the ultimate triumph of justice.''

Now that triumph must be won once more, and it must be won by you. And I am particularly speaking to the young people all across Africa and right here in Ghana. In places like Ghana, young people make up over half of the population.

And here is what you must know: The world will be what you make of it. You have the power to hold your leaders accountable, and to build institutions that serve the people. You can serve in your communities and harness your energy and education to create new wealth and build new connections to the world. You can conquer disease and end conflicts and make change from the bottom up. You can do that. Yes you can ... because in this moment, history is on the move.

But these things can only be done if all of you take responsibility for your future. And it won't be easy. It will take time and effort. There will be suffering and setbacks. But I can promise you this: America will be with you every step of the way -- as a partner, as a friend. Opportunity won't come from any other place, though. It must come from the decisions that all of you make, the things that you do, the hope that you hold in your heart.

Ghana, freedom is your inheritance. Now, it is your responsibility to build upon freedom's foundation. And if you do, we will look back years from now to places like Accra and say this was the time when the promise was realized; this was the moment when prosperity was forged, when pain was overcome, and a new era of progress began. This can be the time when we witness the triumph of justice once more. Yes we can. Thank you very much. God bless you. Thank you.