North Kivu’s False Peace
By Michael Deibert
February 29, 2012
African Arguments
(Read the original here)
At first glance today, things in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern North Kivu province seem far calmer than in years past.
As recently as 2008, a rebel group, the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) under the command of renegade general Laurent Nkunda, controlled sizable swaths of the territory, especially around the area of Masisi in North Kivu’s south-eastern corner.
Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi from North Kivu’s Rutshuru territory and a former commander in the Rwanda-backed Goma faction of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) rebel group, seemed poised to attack the provincial capital of Goma at any time.
Travelling much beyond the town of Sake, 25 km to Goma’s northwest, was a complicated endeavour, as the CNDP had battled the forces of Congo’s president Joseph Kabila fiercely for Sake in November 2006 before withdrawing in defeat. At the time, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that some 800,000 people had been displaced by fighting in the province.
Since those dark days, much has changed in eastern North Kivu.
In January 2009, Rwanda’s government, long believed to be the CNDP’s key backer in its vying for regional advantage, announced that they had arrested Nkunda on Rwandan territory. This event took place shortly after the CNDP had begun to splinter, with one high-ranking member, Bosco Ntaganda, advocating dialogue and détente with the Kabila government.
Since then, a bitter pill scenario has seen Kabila, in power in Congo since the 2001 assassination of his father, Laurent Kabila, cede influence and control of much of the eastern part of the vast, mineral-rich country to Rwanda and its proxies, with the Rwandan army now allowed to enter Congolese territory in hot pursuit of the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), the main Hutu-led military opposition to Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government. The FDLR has its roots in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide when nearly 1 million Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered by extremist Hutu supremacist elements.
The CNDP, for its part, has now become a registered political party and has seen its forces integrated with the official armed forces, the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), and its chieftain, Bosco Ntaganda, has become an important powerbroker in Goma.
All is not as it appears, however.
Beyond simple integration, the Congolese army in eastern Congo is now dominated by the CNDP, much to the chagrin of other armed groups such as the government’s erstwhile allies in the Patriotes Resistants Congolais (PARECO) – a loose umbrella of paramilitary organizations who also have been gradually entering the official security forces.
A significant breakaway movement, the Alliance des Patriotes pour un Congo Libre et Souverain (APCLS) led by ‘General’ Janvier Buingo Karairi and mostly consisting of members of the Hunde ethnic group, broke off from the larger PARECO configuration in April 2008, and has thus far refused integration.
During Congo’s deeply-flawed general elections last year, which saw Kabila returned to office ahead of his main rival, long-time opposition figure Étienne Tshisekedi, Human Rights Watch recounted how in some villages in Masisi, voters were compelled by the presence of former CNDP rebels at polling stations to vote for Kabila and CNDP candidate Bahati Ibatunganya.
In the run-up to last November’s vote, Fabrice Mumpfiritsa, a well-known Hunde singer, was kidnapped in Goma and found days later, injured but alive. Formerly a Kabila partisan, Mumpfiritsa had grown disenchanted with the president and began vocally supporting Kabila’s local opposition.
Visiting North Kivu again this month, it soon became apparent to me that, after being in office for over a decade, Kabila, though once having strong support in the east, has brought precious little development to this part of Congo.
An entrepreneur in Goma with extensive contacts within both the CNDP and the government told me that “the state has a symbolic presence in North Kivu today, nothing more.” A high-ranking official in an international organization that has long had a presence in the province referred to the system of governance that has been put into place as being “like a mafia…Whoever doesn’t side with (the CNDP), doesn’t agree or says something in opposition will be intimidated, or eventually put under house arrest or killed.”
It would have been hard for the Congolese and Rwandan governments to have found a more poisonous and tainted proxy than Bosco Ntaganda.
In January 2006, Ntaganda was indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for three counts of war crimes that allegedly occurred while he was helping to command the Forces Patriotiques pour la Libération du Congo (FPLC) in Congo’s Ituri region during the early part of the last decade, a time during which he earned the sobriquet “the Terminator.”
The FPLC itself grew out of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC), an armed group that claimed to champion the cause of the pastoralist Hema ethnic group against that of the agriculturalist Lendu, the very kind of apocalyptic ethnic politics that Ntaganda would also engage in with the CNDP in North Kivu.
The fighting in Ituri killed an estimated 60,000 people.
In a letter from the Group of Experts on Congo to the United Nations Security Council dated 18 October 2011, the group found that since his reintegration into the Congolese army, Ntaganda has continued to collaborate “with East African regional networks of dealers selling both real and counterfeit gold to international buyers.”
Troublingly, and as if to underline its occupant’s ultimate fealty to Kigali, Ntaganda’s Goma residence is situated on a lane that crosses directly over a neutral zone to Gisenyi, Rwanda, just across the border. According to a December 2011 United Nations Security Council report, Ntaganda crossed into Rwanda at least twice, in March and September of 2011, despite an ostensible travel ban imposed on him.
As before, the region’s politics remain nothing if not maddeningly complex and unsuited to the international community’s often one-size-fits-all approach to peace-building.
Surrounding Congo, in neighbouring Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni, who in 1986 told his country that “the problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power” now enters his 27th year as the country’s president, having secured his current term through particularly controversial elections in February 2011.
Over the last year, several large scale protests against alleged political corruption and economic mismanagement have occurred in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, many aligned with the Forum for Democratic Change led by Kizza Besigye, a doctor and former soldier as well as a former Museveni ally turned critic.
In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame has solidified a tight-lidded dictatorship over the country based upon what the French academic Gérard Prunier has characterized as “passive acceptance of undivided Tutsi power over an obedient Hutu mass.” Government critics meet either death, (opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, killed in Rwanda in July 2011), exile (former general Kayumba Nyamwasa, wounded in a shooting in South Africa in June 2010) or both (Inyenyeri News editor Charles Ingabire, shot dead in Kampala last December).
Throughout North Kivu itself, things remain tense, and the region’s civilian population continues to be at risk.
This month, around Masisi alone I spoke to residents of displaced person camps such as Kalinga (population 4,551), Bihito (5,742) and Bukombo (3,338), some of whom have been living in the most squalid of conditions for up to five years. Across the border in Kisoro, Uganda, I found around 2,000 refugees who had fled fighting between the FDLR and militia elements in Rutshuru camped in the shadow of Mount Muhabura. It is a situation replicated in hundreds of registered and unregistered displaced persons settlements throughout the province.
In the township of Bisie in North Kivu’s Walikale territory – which remains a stronghold of the FDLR – an illegal mine producing cassiterite, which is eventually turned into tin, has been giving up its bounty to an ever-shifting array of armed groups for a number of years. In villages and displaced persons camps such as those in Masisi, a sense of deep resentment against both the broken promises and lack of development offered by the Kabila government, and what some residents see as the growing Rwandanization of eastern Congo, continues to fester. Armed groups, particularly those flowing from former PARECO elements, continue to form, break apart and re-form in a dizzying array of alliances that the international community, patting itself on the back for its “success” in eastern Congo, seems ill placed to address should the tension once again flare into large-scale open violence.
By turning the other way as North Kivu in general and Goma in particular have become, with Kigali’s connivance, a virtual fiefdom of Bosco Ntaganda’s CNDP, the international community, including the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo (known by its acronym, MONUSCO), are not guaranteeing peace in North Kivu. They are in fact fanning the embers for the potential eruption of a new conflict in the province.
The belief that the more territory held by the Kabila government’s FARDC and CNDP allies equals more stability in the long-term may very well prove to be sadly mistaken, and MONUSCO is currently in danger of being perceived as dangerously partisan to a government and military of questionable popular legitimacy.
By ceding an axis of influence in the east to Rwanda, Kabila may have indeed rid himself of the immediate problem of the CNDP armed insurgency, but the group’s subtle takeover of the province has helped to plant the seeds for enmities and resentment that could lead to an even greater crisis in the future.
It is important that all international actors speak out against the abuses being committed with official sanction in North Kivu today, and to hold the state actors behind them, whether they be in Kinshasa or Kigali, accountable for the crimes of those who act in their name. Without such accountability, lasting peace in North Kivu would seem to remain a distant dream.
Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
In northern Uganda, a difficult peace
26 February 2012
In northern Uganda, a difficult peace
By Michael Deibert
Le Monde diplomatique
(Read the original article here)
Gulu, Uganda — Gazing out from this bustling provincial capital in northern Uganda, a lifelong resident gestured towards the red dirt roads that lead out towards the Sudan border and talked of the changes that have come to this corner of Uganda in recent years.
“We used to not even move from town, going for two miles was a terrible challenge,” says John Lukwiya (not his real name) who works with displaced people in the region. “You thought you may or may not live. But today things are quite okay, development is going on and people are planting their crops.”
The conflict in Acholi — the ancestral homeland of the eponymous ethnic group who stretch across northern Uganda and southern Sudan — raged for the better part of 25 years. But today the region is, however tentatively, starting to get back on its feet.
The Acholi conflict has its roots in Uganda’s history of dictatorship and political turmoil. A large number of soldiers serving in the government of dictator Milton Obote (who ruled Uganda from April 1965-January 1971 and then again from December 1980-July 1985) came from across northern Uganda, with the Acholis being particularly well represented, even though Obote himself hailed from the Lango ethnic group. When Obote was overthrown by his own military commanders, an ethnic Acholi, General Tito Okello, became president for six chaotic months until Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army took over. Museveni became president, and has since remained so, via elections — some legitimate, some deeply flawed.
Upon taking power, the Museveni government launched a brutal search and destroy mission against former government soldiers throughout the north, which swept up many ordinary Acholi in its wake. Some Acholi began mobilizing to defend themselves, first under the banner of the Uganda People’s Democratic Army (largely made up of former soldiers) and then the Holy Spirit Movement.
This movement, directed by Alice Auma, an Acholi who claimed to be acting on guidance from the spirit Lakwena, brought a mystical belief in their own invincibility that the soldiers of the Kampala-based government at first found terrifying: Holy Spirit Movement devotees walked headlong into blazing gunfire singing songs and holding stones they believed would turn into grenades. The movement succeeded in reaching Jinja, just 80km from the capital Kampala, before being decimated by Museveni’s forces.
Out of this slaughter was born the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony, a distant relative of Alice Auma. Kony added an additional element of targeting civilian Acholi to his schismatic blend of Christianity, frequently kidnapping children and adolescents to serve in his rebel movement. The Museveni government responded by viewing all Acholi as potential collaborators, rounding them up into camps euphemistically called “protected villages”, where they were vulnerable to disease and social ills, and had few ways to carry on their traditional farming.
“It was not about enemy confronting enemy, but about controlling civilians to cut off the source of information,” explained Francis Odongyoo, executive director of Human Rights Focus, a Gulu-based human rights organization. “The government said they were failing to defeat the LRA because the population was providing information to them; and the LRA was saying that they were failing to survive well and failing to overtake the government because the civilians were providing the information. The civilians were caught between two fires.”
Many concur that the LRA-Museveni struggle upended life in the region as no other conflict before.
“The impact of this last war was almost universal,” says Ron Atkinson, a history professor from the University of South Carolina who has studied the region for 40 years and authored several books on the Acholi. “Almost everyone was impacted very directly by overt violence, not just from the LRA or earlier rebel groups but from the Ugandan army and government, especially its policy of forced displacement.”
The LRA’s policy of targeting civilians (though not the Museveni government’s draconian measures) eventually drew international condemnation and in 2005 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Joseph Kony and several other seniors LRA commanders for crimes against humanity and war crimes. After peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan government collapsed in 2007, the group decamped from its bases in southern Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
Following the end of negotiations, the Museveni government launched its Peace Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP), an effort to stabilize northern Uganda after years of war. Since then, according to the United Nations 98% of internally displaced persons have moved on from the camps that once sheltered hundreds of thousands of frightened people.
Despite criticisms from the Acholi that the government’s program has been insufficient, local initiatives and the work of some foreign organizations have helped restore a sense of normality and gradual progress to the region, with people returned to their homes and travel between once off-limits parts of the region now facilitated with relative ease.
Now a thousand miles from the cradle of their insurgency, the LRA would appear to have little hope of returning to Uganda, though their potential to wreak havoc on civilians remains little diminished. In Congo’s Haut-Uele province, between December 2008 and January 2009, the LRA massacred 620 civilians and abducted more than 160 children; and a year later they returned and killed 321 and abducted another 250 people in December 2009.
In October 2011, President Barack Obama announced that he was sending 100 Special Forces soldiers to help the Ugandans hunt down Kony. By the end of the year, the Ugandan army confirmed that the troops had moved along with the Ugandan army to Obo in the Central African Republic and Nzara in South Sudan,
Though life remains very difficult for the Acholi, those who have seen the crisis remain cautiously optimistic about the future here.
“Whatever else has gone on, whatever disappointments there are, however hard life is — peace is better than war," says Ron Atkinson.
(This article first appeared in Portuguese in Folha de São Paulo.)
Michael Deibert is a journalist, Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University, and the author of Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, Zed Books, London, forthcoming.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Thoughts on leaving Africa
Photo © Michael Deibert
I write now as I prepare to depart Kampala, Uganda in a few hours for my trip back to the United States. I traveled across Uganda yesterday during an 11 hour bus journey after interviewing several of the circa 2,000 refugees camped out in Kisoro, Uganda, who have fled fighting between the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR) and Mai Mai militias in the Rutshuru territory of Congo's North Kivu province.
While in North Kivu, I spoke to many other displaced people in the sprawling camps throughout Masisi territory such as Bihito, Kilimani and Kalinga, and discovered the worrisome false peace that has descended on the province since the 2009 détente between the Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP) rebel group (now led by accused war criminal Bosco Ntaganda) and the government of Congo's president, Joseph Kabila. I was also able to witness first-hand the tight-lid military dictatorship that currently rules Rwanda even as its president, who is directly responsible for helping to cause so much suffering in Congo, continues to be fêted abroad.
As during my previous visits to Congo, I found so many stories to be told there, so many people who wanted to have their fate be known, not just as a footnote to the larger geopolitical struggles of the Great Lakes Region, but as the living, breathing testimony of those swept up by forces they did not seek out and which they could not control.
It is in the measure that it gives voice to the people such as those pictured above - the residents' council of Kalinga Camp - that this work I do is worth anything. And it is in gratitude for being able to hear and record their stories that I again thank my generous Kickstarter backers and the International Peace Research Association for their support of my upcoming book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books). This research couldn't have been done without you.
Asante sana.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Note from North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo
I have had the most extraordinary trip to Africa thus far.
Conducting final research and interviews for my forthcoming book Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, which will be published later this year by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa, I have traversed Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo over the last several weeks, and the experience reminds me how much I love about this continent.
I have been fortunate enough to examine in detail the history of the Acholi people and the genesis of the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda, explore the reality of oil and politics in Kampala, witnessed the subtle power of Mount Muhabura and Lake Bunyonyi, seen a bit of both the antique and modern faces of Rwanda in Ruhengeri and Gisenyi, and have now returned to North Kivu, the area of Congo that perhaps made the deepest impression on me when I was here before.
There is much to tell, and much to report, but for the moment I am happy just to have had the privilege of having the people of the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa tell me their stories once more. I will do my best to record them diligently and report them honestly.
As I write this, the sound of beautiful Swahili hymns from a local evangelical church is drifting out over Lake Kivu as the sun sets.
Koyémba, Africa.
Conducting final research and interviews for my forthcoming book Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, which will be published later this year by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa, I have traversed Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo over the last several weeks, and the experience reminds me how much I love about this continent.
I have been fortunate enough to examine in detail the history of the Acholi people and the genesis of the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda, explore the reality of oil and politics in Kampala, witnessed the subtle power of Mount Muhabura and Lake Bunyonyi, seen a bit of both the antique and modern faces of Rwanda in Ruhengeri and Gisenyi, and have now returned to North Kivu, the area of Congo that perhaps made the deepest impression on me when I was here before.
There is much to tell, and much to report, but for the moment I am happy just to have had the privilege of having the people of the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa tell me their stories once more. I will do my best to record them diligently and report them honestly.
As I write this, the sound of beautiful Swahili hymns from a local evangelical church is drifting out over Lake Kivu as the sun sets.
Koyémba, Africa.
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Wamala Tombs
Wamala Tombs, situated in Wakiso district about 30 minutes from Kampala, is the sacred burial site of Ssekabaka II, the 29th king of Buganda. Visiting it yesterday to pay my respects, I found the location and the tomb itself to have a profoundly spiritual air, radiating a quiet power.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
A note of thanks to the International Peace Research Association
The International Peace Research Association has been generous enough to award me a modest grant to aid in the completion of my forthcoming book Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, which will be published later this year by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa. As the recipient of a Small Peace Research Grant, which seeks to support systemic observation or study of conflict phenomena and peace strategies, I am humbled and honored to receive this support and, as such, wanted to take a moment to publicly thank the Association here. Merci mingi.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
In Memoriam: Jann Marie Deibert, December 2, 1952 - January 9, 2012
To the woman who first read to me on her knee many years ago, who first introduced me to Civil War history and history in general, who first took me to the state of Florida, who encouraged me to write, who supported me in every endeavour and who was always a comforting and reassuring voice at the other end of the phone no matter how far away I was, thank you for all you did for me. You made me the man I am today. Goodbye. Mom. I'll always love you.
Monday, January 02, 2012
2011: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By
A little later posting this than usual, but nevertheless hopefully a useful review of the subjects that I wrote about over the past year. Welcome 2012, out with the old and in with the new, onward and upward.
MD
Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’ for the Miami Herald (11 December 2011)
Notes on Matthew J. Smith's Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 for Small Axe (November 2011)
Concern Grows Over Plan to Drill for Oil Near Florida Keys for the Huffington Post and Panos Caribbean (4 October 2011)
Ballots and Bullets in Guatemala for the Huffington Post (10 September 2011)
Michael Deibert interview on the United Nations mission in Haiti on CBC's The Current (7 September 2011)
The U.N. in Haiti: Time to Adapt or Time to Go for Truthdig (1 September 2011)
New Orleans' Tragedy and Triumph on 6-Year Katrina Anniversary for the Huffington Post (29 August 2011)
Notes from Haiti's Long Hot Summer for the Huffington Post (23 August 2011)
What James Craig Anderson's Killing Means to America for the Huffington Post (9 August 2011)
On the passing of Jean-Claude Bajeux for AlterPresse (8 August 2011)
Michael Deibert on drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico and Guatemala for You Tube (31 May 2011)
Mladic, Chomsky and Srebrenica: Time for an apology for Michael Deibert’s Blog (26 May 2011)
Mexico’s Cartel Wars for Truthdig (16 May 2011)
Border region lives in fear amid Mexico cartel war for Agence France Presse (12 May 2011)
Note on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return to Haiti for Michael Deibert’s Blog (18 March 2011)
Haiti’s Aristide should be greeted with prosecution, not praise for AlterPresse (17 February 2011)
A Nightmare Returns to Haiti for CNN (19 January 2011)
Guatemala: Caught in the crossfire for the Miami Herald (18 January 2011)
MD
Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’ for the Miami Herald (11 December 2011)
Notes on Matthew J. Smith's Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 for Small Axe (November 2011)
Concern Grows Over Plan to Drill for Oil Near Florida Keys for the Huffington Post and Panos Caribbean (4 October 2011)
Ballots and Bullets in Guatemala for the Huffington Post (10 September 2011)
Michael Deibert interview on the United Nations mission in Haiti on CBC's The Current (7 September 2011)
The U.N. in Haiti: Time to Adapt or Time to Go for Truthdig (1 September 2011)
New Orleans' Tragedy and Triumph on 6-Year Katrina Anniversary for the Huffington Post (29 August 2011)
Notes from Haiti's Long Hot Summer for the Huffington Post (23 August 2011)
What James Craig Anderson's Killing Means to America for the Huffington Post (9 August 2011)
On the passing of Jean-Claude Bajeux for AlterPresse (8 August 2011)
Old Habits Die Hard in New Orleans for Truthdig (20 June 2011)
Michael Deibert on drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico and Guatemala for You Tube (31 May 2011)
Mladic, Chomsky and Srebrenica: Time for an apology for Michael Deibert’s Blog (26 May 2011)
Mexico’s Cartel Wars for Truthdig (16 May 2011)
Border region lives in fear amid Mexico cartel war for Agence France Presse (12 May 2011)
Note on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return to Haiti for Michael Deibert’s Blog (18 March 2011)
Haiti’s Aristide should be greeted with prosecution, not praise for AlterPresse (17 February 2011)
A Nightmare Returns to Haiti for CNN (19 January 2011)
Guatemala: Caught in the crossfire for the Miami Herald (18 January 2011)
Friday, December 30, 2011
Words from the Casa Azul
“Often I feel more sympathy for carpenters, shoe repairmen, etc., than for all that herd of fools who think they are civilized, loquacious, so-called scholarly people.” Frida Kahlo
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Books in 2011: A Personal Selection
During 2011, a year of pretty much unending rough waters, a number of interesting books nevertheless came into my life and. As I have done in years past, I wanted to share my thoughts about some of the more notable ones here.
Best regards and hopes for a 2012 with more love, peace, prosperity and life.
Ayibobo.
MD
A Palace in the Old Village By Tahar Ben Jelloun
A moving and perceptive chronicle of the lives of a Moroccan immigrant and his family in modern France, Ben Jelloun's novel descends into surrealistic absurdity in its final pages but before doing so nevertheless gives us an important glimpse into the experience of the “new” French in their adopted country.
Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983 by Virginia Garrard-Burnett
An important and exquisitely researched book that sheds light on one of the most violent periods of Guatemala’s violent history, this work by University of Texas professor Virginia Garrard-Burnett examines the March 1982 to August 1983 rule of Efraín Ríos Montt. Ríos Montt, a former general, candidate in the 1974 Guatemalan elections (which he likely won but had stolen from him by the same military he had once served) and subsequent founder of Frente Republicano Guatemalteco, seized power from another military man, General Romeo Lucas García, who had presided over what Garrard-Burnett characterizes as “a rapid downward spiral of capricious violence and death.” Those hoping for a break in the country’s civil war, however, - which would only end with 1996 peace accords - were in for a rude awakening. Ríos Montt’s anti-guerrilla campaign, centred largely on indigenous peasant communities, was “more methodical and less chaotic than Lucas García counterinsurgency, but it was also more deadly.”
Ríos Montt’s idiosyncratic populism at the time, propelled forward by his evangelical Christianity, revealed the general to be “anything but a puppet of the far right,” notes Garrard-Burnett. “(He) believed himself to be a prophetic leader, brought by Providence to power at a particular moment in history in which he could lead the people of Guatemala against the forces of evil that besieged them on every side.”
The result was cataclysm, and Garrard-Burnett expertly documents it in great detail here.
Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans by James Gill
A book about the often racially-charged origins of some of the major krewes of New Orleans' storied Mardi Gras (such as Comus, Rex and Momus), this book by a British-transplant living in New Orleans masterfully draws back the curtain on an aspect of the city's carnival revelry that many in its still-ossified economic structure would likely just as soon forget.
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? By Francisco Goldman
A gripping account of the investigation into the April 1998 murder of Guatemalan Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera, this book (written by the Guatemalan-American novelist Francisco Goldman) reads like a detective novel and reveals the corrupt linkages of Guatemala’s criminal and military elements. A compelling picture of the struggles of committed individuals against a diffuse and often lethal enemy, it also contains disturbing suggestions about the activities of Guatemala’s incoming president, former General Otto Pérez Molina.
Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 by William Ivy Hair
More a pogrom against the Africa-American population of New Orleans than a riot, this account by Ivy Hair tells the story of Robert Charles and, along with the work of historians like John Hope Franklin, serves as an important reminder to Americans of the brutal injustices inflicted on African-Americans after the Civil War, all in the name of scuttling the aims of Reconstruction in the American South.
The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge by Paul Preston
Another example of how a military leader viewed a civil war as a moral-religious crusade, this book by one of the best historians of Span’s recent history makes one wonder how Spain’s Francisco Franco escaped his proper place in the annals of history’s great monsters alongside Hitler and Stalin.
The scale of the slaughter by Franco’s forces - 3,000 killed in Zamora, 3,000 in Valladolid, 2,789 in Navarra, and on and on - still shocks, and Preston lays blame where it belongs, on the shoulders of such largely forgotten Francoist chieftains as General Juan Yague. Preston’s deft exposure of Franc’s “notion of a war of moral redemption by terror,” makes one look forward with expectation to his forthcoming book, author of the much-anticipated forthcoming The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain.
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier
An expansive yet nuanced view of the first and second Congo wars, this book is an essential addition to scholarship on the region. Prunier, a longtime observer, analyst and resident of Central Africa, is also an unusually honest and self-critical academic, a fact that adds gravitas to his criticisms of African governments and the international community when dealing with the region’s severe, but by no means intractable, problems.
Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth by Erin Siegal
This debut book by journalist and photographer Erin Siegal has a mystery at its core: What happened to the two young daughters of an impoverished Guatemala woman named Mildred Alvarado, one of whom was literally snatched from her mother’s womb? But the book — comprised of heavy-duty investigative reporting and compelling personal testimony — also examines another mystery: How could so many people in Guatemala and the United States turn a blind eye for so long to an industry that, far from being motivated by the altruistic urge to unite needy children with loving families, has become a world where adults dole out children like cards from a deck and view their young lives as little more than a commodity to be exploited? I reviewed it for the Miami Herald.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns
An interesting book that very laudably seeks to bring the experiences of the Congolese themselves in their own voices to the forefront of an account of that country’s ongoing conflicts. Perhaps a little soft for my taste in its assessments of the failings of the international community and non-governmental organizations operating in Central Africa, but all in all a highly worthwhile read that brings the reality of the conflict home via the eloquent voices of the Congolese who suffered its consequences
Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans by David Stoll
A serious and groundbreaking scholarly work that was unfortunately subject to rather vehemently libelous calumny when it first appeared in 1999, this book sees Stoll - probably the best American anthropologist working on Guatemala - examining both the specifics and broader historical context of the autobiography of perhaps the most famous living Guatemalan. On the way, much as he did with his excellent previous volume, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala, Stoll gives the reader of nuanced picture of the torturous position that Guatemala’s indigenous population found itself in during that country’s long civil war and raises some troubling questions about the veracity of Menchu’s famous autobiography.
Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson
A relic from the days when American cultural and political commentators actually had a brain, this collection of loosely-connected short stories casts a witty and darkly jaundiced eye on the upper-middle classes of a fictional bedroom community outside of New York, and within the city itself during the years between the great wars. Wilson, who had previously made his mark with his history of revolutionary thought in Europe, To the Finland Station, was as original and probing a mind as American letters has produced.
Best regards and hopes for a 2012 with more love, peace, prosperity and life.
Ayibobo.
MD
A Palace in the Old Village By Tahar Ben Jelloun
A moving and perceptive chronicle of the lives of a Moroccan immigrant and his family in modern France, Ben Jelloun's novel descends into surrealistic absurdity in its final pages but before doing so nevertheless gives us an important glimpse into the experience of the “new” French in their adopted country.
Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983 by Virginia Garrard-Burnett
An important and exquisitely researched book that sheds light on one of the most violent periods of Guatemala’s violent history, this work by University of Texas professor Virginia Garrard-Burnett examines the March 1982 to August 1983 rule of Efraín Ríos Montt. Ríos Montt, a former general, candidate in the 1974 Guatemalan elections (which he likely won but had stolen from him by the same military he had once served) and subsequent founder of Frente Republicano Guatemalteco, seized power from another military man, General Romeo Lucas García, who had presided over what Garrard-Burnett characterizes as “a rapid downward spiral of capricious violence and death.” Those hoping for a break in the country’s civil war, however, - which would only end with 1996 peace accords - were in for a rude awakening. Ríos Montt’s anti-guerrilla campaign, centred largely on indigenous peasant communities, was “more methodical and less chaotic than Lucas García counterinsurgency, but it was also more deadly.”
Ríos Montt’s idiosyncratic populism at the time, propelled forward by his evangelical Christianity, revealed the general to be “anything but a puppet of the far right,” notes Garrard-Burnett. “(He) believed himself to be a prophetic leader, brought by Providence to power at a particular moment in history in which he could lead the people of Guatemala against the forces of evil that besieged them on every side.”
The result was cataclysm, and Garrard-Burnett expertly documents it in great detail here.
Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans by James Gill
A book about the often racially-charged origins of some of the major krewes of New Orleans' storied Mardi Gras (such as Comus, Rex and Momus), this book by a British-transplant living in New Orleans masterfully draws back the curtain on an aspect of the city's carnival revelry that many in its still-ossified economic structure would likely just as soon forget.
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? By Francisco Goldman
A gripping account of the investigation into the April 1998 murder of Guatemalan Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera, this book (written by the Guatemalan-American novelist Francisco Goldman) reads like a detective novel and reveals the corrupt linkages of Guatemala’s criminal and military elements. A compelling picture of the struggles of committed individuals against a diffuse and often lethal enemy, it also contains disturbing suggestions about the activities of Guatemala’s incoming president, former General Otto Pérez Molina.
Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 by William Ivy Hair
More a pogrom against the Africa-American population of New Orleans than a riot, this account by Ivy Hair tells the story of Robert Charles and, along with the work of historians like John Hope Franklin, serves as an important reminder to Americans of the brutal injustices inflicted on African-Americans after the Civil War, all in the name of scuttling the aims of Reconstruction in the American South.
The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge by Paul Preston
Another example of how a military leader viewed a civil war as a moral-religious crusade, this book by one of the best historians of Span’s recent history makes one wonder how Spain’s Francisco Franco escaped his proper place in the annals of history’s great monsters alongside Hitler and Stalin.
The scale of the slaughter by Franco’s forces - 3,000 killed in Zamora, 3,000 in Valladolid, 2,789 in Navarra, and on and on - still shocks, and Preston lays blame where it belongs, on the shoulders of such largely forgotten Francoist chieftains as General Juan Yague. Preston’s deft exposure of Franc’s “notion of a war of moral redemption by terror,” makes one look forward with expectation to his forthcoming book, author of the much-anticipated forthcoming The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain.
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier
An expansive yet nuanced view of the first and second Congo wars, this book is an essential addition to scholarship on the region. Prunier, a longtime observer, analyst and resident of Central Africa, is also an unusually honest and self-critical academic, a fact that adds gravitas to his criticisms of African governments and the international community when dealing with the region’s severe, but by no means intractable, problems.
Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth by Erin Siegal
This debut book by journalist and photographer Erin Siegal has a mystery at its core: What happened to the two young daughters of an impoverished Guatemala woman named Mildred Alvarado, one of whom was literally snatched from her mother’s womb? But the book — comprised of heavy-duty investigative reporting and compelling personal testimony — also examines another mystery: How could so many people in Guatemala and the United States turn a blind eye for so long to an industry that, far from being motivated by the altruistic urge to unite needy children with loving families, has become a world where adults dole out children like cards from a deck and view their young lives as little more than a commodity to be exploited? I reviewed it for the Miami Herald.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns
An interesting book that very laudably seeks to bring the experiences of the Congolese themselves in their own voices to the forefront of an account of that country’s ongoing conflicts. Perhaps a little soft for my taste in its assessments of the failings of the international community and non-governmental organizations operating in Central Africa, but all in all a highly worthwhile read that brings the reality of the conflict home via the eloquent voices of the Congolese who suffered its consequences
Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans by David Stoll
A serious and groundbreaking scholarly work that was unfortunately subject to rather vehemently libelous calumny when it first appeared in 1999, this book sees Stoll - probably the best American anthropologist working on Guatemala - examining both the specifics and broader historical context of the autobiography of perhaps the most famous living Guatemalan. On the way, much as he did with his excellent previous volume, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala, Stoll gives the reader of nuanced picture of the torturous position that Guatemala’s indigenous population found itself in during that country’s long civil war and raises some troubling questions about the veracity of Menchu’s famous autobiography.
Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson
A relic from the days when American cultural and political commentators actually had a brain, this collection of loosely-connected short stories casts a witty and darkly jaundiced eye on the upper-middle classes of a fictional bedroom community outside of New York, and within the city itself during the years between the great wars. Wilson, who had previously made his mark with his history of revolutionary thought in Europe, To the Finland Station, was as original and probing a mind as American letters has produced.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
In Memoriam: Sebastian Quezada
Sebastian Quezada, one of my best and dearest friends. Thank you for your friendship, I learned so much from you, see you on the other side, hermano. Cuídate.
The stories of the times that Sebastian and I have had together since our first meeting in 1992 could fill a book, although likely one of the transgressive literature variety. Even when we had gone without seeing one another or speaking on the phone for months, I always counted Sebastian as one of my best friends, the kind of person with whom, when you meet up again, you pick up as if no time at all had passed, the kind of person who would open their door, their wallet and their heart to friends in need without a moment's hesitation and without having to be asked twice. If it wasn't for Sebastian, I would never have been able to even begin living in New York for the seven years I was there, as he was the one who opened up his door to me until I found a job and a place to live just after we had both graduated from college. Given how long that took, most people would have been standing by the door drumming their fingers and waiting for me to leave, but with Sebastian one always felt like a welcomed guest.
But, perhaps ironically, two of the most vivid memories of I have of Sebastian are also among the most wholesome.
One dates back to our days at Bard College. I believe it was the autumn of 1995. Sebastian and I had for some reason ventured down to a set of dorms known as the Ravines, built, as the name would suggest, between a deep ravine and a field that would become a soggy lake at the slightest hint of rain. The weather was overcast and moody, the kind of fall-bleeding-into-winter weather that one so often encounters in the Catskills around that time of the year. We were standing by my car, which was a green 1976 Plymouth Valiant at the time, just enjoying the pensive atmosphere, the wind on our faces, the hint of precipitation in the air. At once the sky was full of several, then dozens, then what looked like hundreds of migrating birds, flooding the grey sky in search of a path to warmer climes.
I don't recall Sebastian and I saying much to one another at that moment - perhaps just an "Oh wow" or something like that - but I think it was a sight that affected us both powerfully. Here we were both nearing graduation and entry into another facet of life and the sight of those birds flying loose and free into the unknown somehow evoked the journey that we both were about to commence on, away from an environment that had become familiar for four years - if only as a point of reference - and into the as-yet-unwritten future of our new lives, with no telling where they would take us. As I write these words that was 16 years ago.
My second vivid memory is from the spring of 2003 when I was living in a nice-and-too-expensive loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn just south of the bridge. You could stand at the window during the cold months and watch the boats go up and down the river, carefully navigating their way past chunks of floating ice. As the weather got warmer, it was decided that a house-warming party was in order and when there was a party to be had, there was no better person to ask cook for it than Sebastian.
We decided to make feijoada, that delicious Brazilian beef and pork stew (Sebastian is probably more responsible than any other single person for my first trip to Brasil in 1999, a country I have since been back to several times and count as one of my favorites). We then went out to buy a suitable pot, which is looking down upon me from my mantle here in New Orleans right now as I write these words. Our system was that I would do the chopping and dicing and Sebastian would do the cooking. We bought the white rice, the black beans, the farofa and Sebastian - who I never tire of telling people was the single best cook that I have ever met - blended it all together perfectly. There was more than enough when we were done to feed the 20 or so people in attendance and suffice to say that I was eating feijoada for many days afterwards.
This memory is for me one that evokes a lot of elements of Sebastian, someone who was as excessive in his generosity as he was in anything else, someone who always wanted to make sure that everyone was fed, everyone was happy, everyone was included. That desire for community is one of the nicest traits anyone can have and on that day my friend Sebastian displayed, as always, that he possessed it in multitudes.
The sound of his laugh - booming, boisterous, all-encompassing - was one of the great things to experience in this life. I still hear it in my ears and with it comes the memory of my strange, generous, extraordinary friend.
Cuídate, Sebastian. Wherever you are, I hope that you are cooking a big pot of feijoada and listening to Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 in the sun right now.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
NOLA Evolution
(With full credit given to Dirty Coast, whose terrific shop on Magazine Street I found only yesterday. MD)
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’
Posted on Sun, Dec. 11, 2011
Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’
By Michael Deibert
The Miami Herald
Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth.
Erin Siegal.
Cathexis.
300 pages.
$14.95.
(Read the original review here)
The debut book by journalist and photographer Erin Siegal has a mystery at its core: What happened to the two young daughters of an impoverished Guatemala woman named Mildred Alvarado, one of whom was literally snatched from her mother’s womb?
But the book — comprised of heavy-duty investigative reporting and compelling personal testimony — also examines another mystery: How could so many people in Guatemala and the United States turn a blind eye for so long to an industry that, far from being motivated by the altruistic urge to unite needy children with loving families, has become a world where adults dole out children like cards from a deck and view their young lives as little more than a commodity to be exploited?
Siegal does a compelling job of sketching out the drumbeat of poverty and fear, born of economic and criminal violence, that makes up the daily lives of so many Guatemalans today, 15 years after a peace agreement ended a 30-year civil war in which some 200,000 people died. Siegal also delves with considerable expertise into Guatemala’s labyrinthine and often corrupt legal system, painstakingly outlining its connections with U.S. organizations, some legitimate and some not.
Early on in the book, then-U.S. ambassador to Guatemala Prudence Bushnell — a diplomat who flits in and out of history from Rwanda to Kenya to Guatemala — warns in a prescient February 2002 memo that if the United States did not “come up with resources to investigate the suspicious (adoption) cases in a timely manner . . . [the U.S. could be] accused of abetting baby trafficking.”
The advice was largely ignored, with the behavior of U.S. embassy staff in Guatemala appearing alternately ham-handed and heartless as Alvarado tries to recover her children. Lax oversight by the Florida Department of Children and Families of the overseas adoption practices of companies operating in the state completes a picture of indifference to the children at the center of the adoption industry. Some practices were allowed to function long after red flags had been raised about criminal conduct.
This pattern continues even in the face of a report by the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-mandated body charged with investigating criminal organizations, that between 2008 and 2010 only 10 percent of children who left Guatemala for adoption were legal orphans.
Some of the details of the dark side of the industry in Guatemala — houses where pregnant women are kept while waiting to give birth, nurseries where children waiting to be adopted are given borderline-starvation levels of sustenance — are Dickensian in their cruelty. But the tone of the book is, perhaps surprisingly, not despairing. Siegal brings welcome attention to the work of the Fundación Sobrevivientes (Survivor’s Foundation), a women’s rights organization founded by an ex-guerrilla, Norma Cruz, that has grown into one of the most important pillars of the country’s fragile civil society.
Upon finishing Finding Fernanda, one realizes that supporting of that very civil society, along with the work of bodies such as CICIG, will advance the cause of justice for victims such as Alvarado. Along with its moving personal story of a family torn asunder, Finding Fernanda can also be read as a call to action.
Michael Deibert is the author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’
By Michael Deibert
The Miami Herald
Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth.
Erin Siegal.
Cathexis.
300 pages.
$14.95.
(Read the original review here)
The debut book by journalist and photographer Erin Siegal has a mystery at its core: What happened to the two young daughters of an impoverished Guatemala woman named Mildred Alvarado, one of whom was literally snatched from her mother’s womb?
But the book — comprised of heavy-duty investigative reporting and compelling personal testimony — also examines another mystery: How could so many people in Guatemala and the United States turn a blind eye for so long to an industry that, far from being motivated by the altruistic urge to unite needy children with loving families, has become a world where adults dole out children like cards from a deck and view their young lives as little more than a commodity to be exploited?
Siegal does a compelling job of sketching out the drumbeat of poverty and fear, born of economic and criminal violence, that makes up the daily lives of so many Guatemalans today, 15 years after a peace agreement ended a 30-year civil war in which some 200,000 people died. Siegal also delves with considerable expertise into Guatemala’s labyrinthine and often corrupt legal system, painstakingly outlining its connections with U.S. organizations, some legitimate and some not.
Early on in the book, then-U.S. ambassador to Guatemala Prudence Bushnell — a diplomat who flits in and out of history from Rwanda to Kenya to Guatemala — warns in a prescient February 2002 memo that if the United States did not “come up with resources to investigate the suspicious (adoption) cases in a timely manner . . . [the U.S. could be] accused of abetting baby trafficking.”
The advice was largely ignored, with the behavior of U.S. embassy staff in Guatemala appearing alternately ham-handed and heartless as Alvarado tries to recover her children. Lax oversight by the Florida Department of Children and Families of the overseas adoption practices of companies operating in the state completes a picture of indifference to the children at the center of the adoption industry. Some practices were allowed to function long after red flags had been raised about criminal conduct.
This pattern continues even in the face of a report by the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-mandated body charged with investigating criminal organizations, that between 2008 and 2010 only 10 percent of children who left Guatemala for adoption were legal orphans.
Some of the details of the dark side of the industry in Guatemala — houses where pregnant women are kept while waiting to give birth, nurseries where children waiting to be adopted are given borderline-starvation levels of sustenance — are Dickensian in their cruelty. But the tone of the book is, perhaps surprisingly, not despairing. Siegal brings welcome attention to the work of the Fundación Sobrevivientes (Survivor’s Foundation), a women’s rights organization founded by an ex-guerrilla, Norma Cruz, that has grown into one of the most important pillars of the country’s fragile civil society.
Upon finishing Finding Fernanda, one realizes that supporting of that very civil society, along with the work of bodies such as CICIG, will advance the cause of justice for victims such as Alvarado. Along with its moving personal story of a family torn asunder, Finding Fernanda can also be read as a call to action.
Michael Deibert is the author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
Monday, December 05, 2011
Sonia Pierre 1963-2011
Sonia Pierre, you were the greatest patriot that the Dominican Republic could ask for, one of the greatest advocates for human rights in the Americas and a hero to us all. Your work and your example live on. Domi byen, fanm vanyan.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
We made it! Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair reaches funding goal on Kickstarter
We made it!
Thanks to a pledge from Jean R. Laraque and increase in the pledge of my old friend Matthew Moran, today - Sunday morning - we reached and exceeded our Kickstarter goal of $3,500 for a grand total of $3,512. This means that now - as pre-election violence has claimed at least for lives in Kinshasa in the run-up to today's contest between President Joseph Kabila and challenger Etienne Tshisekedi - I will be able to return to Central Africa in February to conduct a final round of interviews and research for my upcoming book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, which will be published next year by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa.
All of us who have spent time in Congo have not failed to be moved by it: By the incredible resourcefulness of the people, by the varied and dramatic landscapes covering the heart of the African continent, and by the terrible violence with which its citizens have been forced to contend, buffeted back and forth by political and economic currents that are often far beyond their control.
Thank you to everyone who chose to back this project, with a special thanks to Hilary Wallis for the use of her evocative photograph on the fundraising page. In the writing of Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, I will do my best to earn your support and to do justice to this very complex story that has continued to progress largely out of the international community's field of vision for so many years.
I thank you all again.
With sincere gratitude from New Orleans,
MD
Thanks to a pledge from Jean R. Laraque and increase in the pledge of my old friend Matthew Moran, today - Sunday morning - we reached and exceeded our Kickstarter goal of $3,500 for a grand total of $3,512. This means that now - as pre-election violence has claimed at least for lives in Kinshasa in the run-up to today's contest between President Joseph Kabila and challenger Etienne Tshisekedi - I will be able to return to Central Africa in February to conduct a final round of interviews and research for my upcoming book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, which will be published next year by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa.
All of us who have spent time in Congo have not failed to be moved by it: By the incredible resourcefulness of the people, by the varied and dramatic landscapes covering the heart of the African continent, and by the terrible violence with which its citizens have been forced to contend, buffeted back and forth by political and economic currents that are often far beyond their control.
Thank you to everyone who chose to back this project, with a special thanks to Hilary Wallis for the use of her evocative photograph on the fundraising page. In the writing of Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, I will do my best to earn your support and to do justice to this very complex story that has continued to progress largely out of the international community's field of vision for so many years.
I thank you all again.
With sincere gratitude from New Orleans,
MD
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Carlos Castresana responds to the Economist
Carlos Castresana, the former head of the United Nations-mandated Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) - the body charged with investigating clandestine organisations and exposing their relation to the Guatemalan state - responded this week to what I thought was a fairly awful article in the Economist about Guatemala last month.
The Economist piece, titled "Parachuting in the prosecutors," repeated pretty much every slur and innuendo against Castresana that the UN bureaucrats who served as nearly as great a hurdle to CICIG's success as Guatemala's criminals have ever whispered about the Spanish prosecutor in their sleek halls along the East River.
Given what I believe is the important role that CICIG may still play in the fight against the criminal oligarchy whose power is pointed like a dagger at the heart of Guatemala democracy, I thought it worth re-printing Castresana's response in full here.
For my views on that oligarchy, readers can look at my 2008 piece, "Drugs Vs. Democracy in Guatemala," first published in the World Policy Jounal, or my Op-Ed last year in the Guardian, "Guatemala's lonely battle against corruption."
MD
Carlos Castresana
SIR – I want to express my surprise and disappointment at the remarks you made about me in your article on the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which I headed until June 2010 (“Parachuting in the prosecutors”, October 15th). Your description of me as a “clever, cavalier and publicity-seeking Spanish prosecutor” was unfair to say the least. My team and I did our best during three years, risking our families, lives and careers.
I was also offended by your statement that I left CICIG in June 2010 after allegations about my private life. I refer you to a complete and balanced explanation of the circumstances of my resignation in your own pages from an article at the time (“Kamikaze mission”, June 19th 2010).
But more disturbing was your observation that “there was little oversight of Mr Castresana, causing discomfort in New York about how CICIG was operating”. In fact, CICIG was permanently supervised and its accounts audited by the United Nations Development Programme, as that was the agency which managed the donor countries’ trust fund. All substantive matters were exhaustively controlled by the UN Department of Political Affairs and supervised by the secretary-general himself. I sent 314 cables to the UN and reported daily by telephone, and in person in New York every couple of months, as well as filing ten quarterly reports to the secretary-general throughout the three years of my mandate.
Furthermore, while you were publishing your biased report a selection process was under way for an international judicial position for which I was included as a candidate. You might not have been aware of that ongoing process, but surely some of your sources were. I am persuaded that those who made the decision were not influenced at all by your publication, but the fact is that your article appeared just after the interviews, when a decision was being made.
I made many enemies in Guatemala. I am not worried about that, it comes with the job of prosecutor. But on future occasions, before you publish such disinformation, please call me and give me the opportunity to defend my name and my professional work in advance. That way you might get a better and complete story.
Carlos Castresana
Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Spain
Madrid
The Economist piece, titled "Parachuting in the prosecutors," repeated pretty much every slur and innuendo against Castresana that the UN bureaucrats who served as nearly as great a hurdle to CICIG's success as Guatemala's criminals have ever whispered about the Spanish prosecutor in their sleek halls along the East River.
Given what I believe is the important role that CICIG may still play in the fight against the criminal oligarchy whose power is pointed like a dagger at the heart of Guatemala democracy, I thought it worth re-printing Castresana's response in full here.
For my views on that oligarchy, readers can look at my 2008 piece, "Drugs Vs. Democracy in Guatemala," first published in the World Policy Jounal, or my Op-Ed last year in the Guardian, "Guatemala's lonely battle against corruption."
MD
Carlos Castresana
SIR – I want to express my surprise and disappointment at the remarks you made about me in your article on the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which I headed until June 2010 (“Parachuting in the prosecutors”, October 15th). Your description of me as a “clever, cavalier and publicity-seeking Spanish prosecutor” was unfair to say the least. My team and I did our best during three years, risking our families, lives and careers.
I was also offended by your statement that I left CICIG in June 2010 after allegations about my private life. I refer you to a complete and balanced explanation of the circumstances of my resignation in your own pages from an article at the time (“Kamikaze mission”, June 19th 2010).
But more disturbing was your observation that “there was little oversight of Mr Castresana, causing discomfort in New York about how CICIG was operating”. In fact, CICIG was permanently supervised and its accounts audited by the United Nations Development Programme, as that was the agency which managed the donor countries’ trust fund. All substantive matters were exhaustively controlled by the UN Department of Political Affairs and supervised by the secretary-general himself. I sent 314 cables to the UN and reported daily by telephone, and in person in New York every couple of months, as well as filing ten quarterly reports to the secretary-general throughout the three years of my mandate.
Furthermore, while you were publishing your biased report a selection process was under way for an international judicial position for which I was included as a candidate. You might not have been aware of that ongoing process, but surely some of your sources were. I am persuaded that those who made the decision were not influenced at all by your publication, but the fact is that your article appeared just after the interviews, when a decision was being made.
I made many enemies in Guatemala. I am not worried about that, it comes with the job of prosecutor. But on future occasions, before you publish such disinformation, please call me and give me the opportunity to defend my name and my professional work in advance. That way you might get a better and complete story.
Carlos Castresana
Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Spain
Madrid
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
On Kristallnacht and the DRC
Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, as the series of Nazi attacks against businesses owned by Germany's Jews are called, regardless of one's native language. I notice that this grim signpost is receiving a respectable amount of coverage and attention but, deep as I am into the writing of my new book on the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I must confess that I have one strong feeling today.
Over the last decade and a half, as many people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as died during the Holocaust, many as the result of ethnically-based slaughter, all while the West at best largely stood by and at worst actively colluded with the killers. There are places in eastern Congo where as one writer noted one would feels they have stepped into a scene out of the Old Testament. Is it because the Congolese were black and African that so few people know the names of places like Mbandaka, Tingi-Tingi or Kasika? Are we as news writers and news consumers that myopic and that blinded by our own stereotypes of Africa and Africans?
I fear not a whole lot has changed.
Over the last decade and a half, as many people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as died during the Holocaust, many as the result of ethnically-based slaughter, all while the West at best largely stood by and at worst actively colluded with the killers. There are places in eastern Congo where as one writer noted one would feels they have stepped into a scene out of the Old Testament. Is it because the Congolese were black and African that so few people know the names of places like Mbandaka, Tingi-Tingi or Kasika? Are we as news writers and news consumers that myopic and that blinded by our own stereotypes of Africa and Africans?
I fear not a whole lot has changed.
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