Rioja, flamenco y crispación

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

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

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

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

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

Desde Madrid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From beneath the rooftops of Paris

A good and very productive writing time in Paris thus far. The gray and rainy weather cleared for the last two days into warm sunshine, lending itself to leisurely strolls from Chateau Rouge to Montmartre, but today the damp returned, which lends itself well to literary endeavors and continuing on with my reading of S. Hussain Zaidi’s account of the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts, Black Friday. The book, incidentally, has recently been made into a Hindi-language film which, after being stalled by the Indian government for three years, has been released to rave reviews in Bombay and elsewhere. Though I alas did not get to see it before leaving India, they say Pavan Malhotra’s performance as Tiger Memon is something to behold.

Speaking of books, some fantastic news reached me from stateside as it has been announced that my good friend, the author Ben Fountain, has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for his first collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. I met Ben on the veranda of the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince many years ago, only to find out that we had a mutual friend, the one-of-a-kind Haitian ophthalmologist and intellectual Dr. Frantz Large, and Ben has proven himself to be a fine writer and an even finer man ever since, so the kudos are very richly deserved.

Meanwhile, another amigo, the Indian journalist and author Dilip D'Souza, continues his picaresque journey across the American south, all of which can be followed in great and amusing detail here.

Chateau Rouge

A world away from the mountains and valleys of Kashmir, as well as the pollution-choked streets of Bombay, is the neighborhood of Chateau Rouge in the heart of Paris, where I find myself for the next several weeks, recovering from a sickness that saw me coughing up blood after significant time spent inhaling the assorted pollutants in India’s Dharavi and Dongri slums.

In the 18th Arrondissement of northeastern Paris, Chateau Rouge, with its famous (and often illegal) street vendors crowding the lanes around the Marche Dejean, is like a bit of West Africa dropped down in the middle of one of the world’s most romantic and cosmopolitan cities. It is a neighborhood heavily informed especially by the scents and sounds of Congo, with many originally hailing from that war-battered nation clustering in the inexpensive (by Parisian standards) apartments and hotels along streets like the Rue Doudeaville and the Rue des Poisonniers, video and music shops pumping out a steady soundtrack of soukous and a myriad of call centers offering discount rates to cities such as Kinshasa and Abidjan. It’s a heady antidote to gray and rainy Paris, though the geometry of life in the district is not always so pleasant, as I have witnessed a fair number of street brawls here and one occasionally feels, amidst the cacophonous shouting in coarse Parisian street argot and the rather rough way some of the residents deal with one another, that one is catching a glimpse of the particular desperation that comes with urbanized country folk thrust from the village into the dog-eat-dog mercilessly competitive struggle for survival that is modern city life. Quite by chance, in the apartment I am staying in I found a copy of A Continent for the Taking, the compelling memoir of time spent covering Africa as a journalist by New York Times correspondent Howard French. The book, which focuses to a large degree on the fate of Congo amidst its own legacy of dictatorship and civil war, the genocide in and subsequent military adventurism of neighboring Rwanda, the charnel house of Liberia in the 1990s, the virtual rape of Nigeria by Western oil companies and the continent’s astoundingly resilient civil society and musical and artistic traditions, lays bare, often with more than a dash of bitterness, a grim roll call of failure and destruction , more that not abetted by venal and short-sighted North American and European political and business actors. The book is a worthy successor to The Africans, former Los Angeles Times correspondent David Lamb’s 1990 whirlwind tour of the continent.

Having attended a press conference at the Hôtel de Ville this week announcing the exhibition Esclaves au Paradis: L’esclavage contemporain en République Dominicaine, to be held here in France in May, and having had the great good fortune to meet and chat with Father Christopher Hartley, who has done so much to help Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, my time in Europe appears off to a productive and interesting start.

Kashmiri separatist seeks end to armed struggle

My recent article from Kashmir examining the complex political situation there and interviewng Kashmiri political leaders Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mehbooba Mufti was published in today's Washington Times and can be read here.

"Why do I bother with these morons?"

While perusing the Hindustan Times over chicken vindaloo and mineral water in one of my favorite Muslim restaurants here in Mumbai this afternoon, I found an excellent article reprinted in the editorial section from Guardian columnist George Monbiot. The column was a follow-up to the volcanic and verbose response (777 posts on the Guardian Comment is Free website) that Monbiot’s review of the film Loose Change, which he panned as part of a "virus sweeping the world (that) infects opponents of the Bush government, sucks their brains out through their eyes and turns them into gibbering idiots," elicited some days earlier.

Monbiot, a writer of long-standing left-wing credentials, takes issue, to put it mildly, with the film’s contentions that, on September 11th, the Pentagon was not hit by a commercial airliner, but by a cruise missile, that the twin towers were brought down by means of "a carefully planned controlled demolition," that Flight 93 did not crash, but was redirected to Cleveland airport, where the passengers were taken into a NASA building and never seen again. After their voices were cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories and used to make fake calls to their relatives. Naturally

Having seen the film, I can say that it is a breathy, near-hysterical of hodgepodge of conspiracy theories, attempting to cover all bases by stringing together everything from Bay-of-Pigs era Cuba to a caricature of the gasping Jewish landlord to the neo-conservative agenda of more recent times, repeating groundless allegations as facts, libeling the dead, and wrapping it all up with incredibly irritating, whiny narration and terrible background music that sounds as if it was composed on a $20 Casio keyboard.

"I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into government since the days of the Borgias," Monbiot writes acidly and accurately. "I believe that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by al-Qaeda, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents….I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity provided by the attacks to pursue a longstanding plan to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."

"But none of this is sufficient," Monbiot concludes, referring to the deluge of often highly abusive responses he received after discounting the farcical conspiracy theory at the movie's core.

"To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the twin towers with explosives without attracting attention and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes and induce them all to have kept their mouths shut, for ever. "

As one of the millions of people who was in Manhattan on that terrible September day, now over six years ago, I applaud Monbiot for standing up to a negligible if shrill minority and pushing for honesty in accountability, both from government and in public discourse.

"Why do I bother with these morons?" Monbiot asks, as a handful of readers post comments accusing him of being an agent of MI5 and a "political whore."

Monbiot’s response?

"Because…those of us who believe that the crucial global issues - climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality - are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress, that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy, that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish."
As someone who has seen similar phenomena transpire with regards to debates regarding global issues that I have covered over the years (Haiti, in particular), I think that Monbiot is highly correct in saying that unexamined extremist theories, spun by those with little first-hand knowledge or expertise of the issues they are debating, actually serves to undermine long-term, progressive structural changes rather than contributing to it. Rather than a careful examination of the facts and causes of inequity and injustice, these theories instead seek solace in a feeling of powerlessness, of the inability of the individual to hold governments accountable for their actions. In short, defeatism, which helps nobody.

So, thanks, George Monbiot, for pushing for genuine accountability and debate and not helpless flailing and wild accusations.

The windows are open here in Colaba and it smells like my neighbors have begun burning something again, it’s about that late-afternoon time. The sounds of “Throw Away Your Gun” by Prince Far I are emanating from my laptop speakers and the sun will set in the next few hours on the other side of Bombay island. Time to investigate.

Oh, and if anyone has time, I highly recommend checking out my friend Jens Glüsing's very interesting article, Carnival of Death, in the new edition of Spiegel online.

India begins dispensing justice for 1993 deaths

I have a new article about the Bollywood gangster Dawood Ibrahim in the Washington Times. You can read it here. Ok, so maybe it's not exactly "new," being two weeks old and all but, hey, it's been a busy reportorial season here in India, so cut me some slack.

I walked from the Fort Area all the way home to south Colaba today, always an experience. I also had the pleasure of some fantastic spicy Goan food this evening, which only seemed appropriate give Goa's Portuguese heritage and it being the end of Carnaval and all.

A response to Tom Luce

Recently, I was forwarded an article written about me by Tom Luce, a man who runs something called Human Rights Accompaniment In Haiti, Inc. (Hurah). Generally, I don't respond to these sorts of things. While fringe dwellers and organizations can be an interesting subject in and of themselves, indicative as they are of the often smug condescension and paternalism that wealthy foreigners feel about poor people the world over, an entire article examining them, and their habit of haunting the internet day and night, spoiling for a fight and libeling people, would be an esoteric and tedious undertaking indeed. However, I felt that it might be worthwhile for readers if I took some time to respond to some of Mr. Luce's egregious misstatements and outright fabrications.

Accusing someone of "contributing to a proxy war" is a serious charge, Fortunately, judging by Mr. Luce's ponderous and slanderous diatribe against this member of the press, it evidently does not come from a very serious individual. When Mr Luce writes that my article is supporting "the prolongation of this proxy war, poor people killing poor people, as a way for the more affluent and powerful to keep their hands clean and keep hold of their power," he exposes both an appalling ignorance of the situation on the ground of Martissant and of the article he sets out to critique.

Apparently the statement in my article that "all armed groups in the neighborhood have been implicated in the grossest human rights violations by residents," followed by "the international community must demand human rights for all in Haiti, without distinction for political affiliation, as it is truly the only way forward," suggesting as it does one standard of human rights for all groups to adhere to (echoing my November 2005 Newsday editorial, "Ballots instead of bullets"), isn't explicit enough for Mr. Luce, so I will try and hold his hand a little further.

Visiting Grand Ravine, Ti Bois, and Déscartes with two other journalists in the summer of 2006, we came upon a scene of desolation of violence as bad as anything I have ever seen in Haiti. My colleague Thos Robinson shot hundreds of photos as I interviewed dozens of people (including Esterne Bruner) in all three areas of the community in Kreyol (the tapes are still in my possession). I suppose there is some other explanation for what we saw in Ti Bois - the hundreds of burned homes, the hundreds of people fleeing down the hillside with their meager belongings on their heads and the people who grabbed hold of my microphone to tell the story of rape, murder and arson that Grand Ravine gang leaders such as Wilkens "Chien Chaud" Pierre (whom I also interviewed, and is now deceased) and Dymsley "Ti Lou" Milien (wanted for alleged involvement in the slaying of Radio Haiti-Inter's Jean Dominique) were bringing to their district - so perhaps Mr. Luce should return to Haiti and lecture those poor people on how they are bringing a bad image to the "movement" he holds so dear, to stop spreading these vicious lies and to go back to the ruins of their homes and live quietly so that they do not complicate the rigid ideological view of the world people like Mr. Luce cling to from a safe distance. Are these the "affluent and powerful" people Mr. Luce had in mind? Likewise, when Luce writes that there was "no proof" of inter-gang warfare in the region in 2006, he ignores (or perhaps is unable to read?) the extensive listing of Haitian radio reports I provide in my article, all recorded on the ground, in Kreyol, which attest to the very war whose existence Luce tries to hide.

Luce's reference to "violence on the part of alleged Lavalas people" is pure proof of his intellectual dishonesty. If there was violence committed in the name of the Fanmi Lavalas party, it was by "alleged" affiliates because, naturally, no affiliate of the party whose supposed purity Luce fetishizes to such an extent could ever be guilty of violence. To write that "some Lavalas adherents did take up arms in defense of their lives and property before and after the 04 coup" is a nice way of sanitizing what I and others on the ground during the 2001-2004 era saw: A government policy and program of arming young men, some of them barely into their teens, as a means for one political party to bully and terrorize its opponents into submission. I know this because some of those young men were my friends, and, despite their often violent behavior, I had far greater respect for them and the honor with which they conducted themselves than the rancid politicians or their cynical foreign advocates like Mr. Luce who so used them and continue to do so. As we can see, Mr. Luce continues to use the bodies of those young boys as currency to score political points even today.

Likewise, I am rather sure the courageous priest Max Dominique, whose funeral oration for Pere Adrien in May 2003, where Dominique denounced the repressive system Jean-Bertrand Aristide had put in place and likened the chimere to the attachés and Macoutes of yore (and which resulted in political thugs arriving at his door that night screaming for his head) , must be rolling over in his grave at Luce's attempt to evoke his name to bolster his dishonest and highly partisan attempts to excuse the murder of the residents of Ti Bois because, unlike some of the equally long-suffering residents of Grand Ravine, they were not members of the "correct" political movement. It is a shame that Tom Luce wasn't on hand, as I was, one morning in January 2003 when Dominique delivered the funeral oration for three brothers from Carrefour murdered with impunity by the police, their coffins soon to be taken to the front of the National Palace in protest, and where Dominique thundered "No to impunity! No to insecurity! We demand justice!"

That was a rallying cry worth following.

Michael Deibert

Carnaval from afar

So this marks the first time in two years that I will not be seeing Rio de Janeiro’s just famous bacchanalian Carnaval celebrations first-hand.

It’s hard to describe the cumulative effect of days upon days of events such as participating in the city's blocos (street parties) as they parade through Rio’s sun-soaked avenues. Some of my favorites, such as the journalist’s bloco Imprensa que Gamo, the Escravos de Mauá that cavorts around the Praça Mauá near the docks, the Cordão da Bola Preta ("Black Ball Krewe," so named because its members had been kicked out of all the other samba associations) concentrated in Cinelândia and the Banda de Ipanema with its outrageous drag queens would each easily qualify as “party of the year” in any normal city, but for Rio, they are just part of two weeks’ worth of steam-letting that has a transformative and joyous effect on an often embattled and joyous populace unlike anything else I’ve ever seen anywhere else in the world.

But of course all is not joy in Rio, one of the most violent cities in the world, and I spent a good part of last week one year ago speaking with members of the Comando Vermelho drug cartel in the Zona Norte's Vigário Geral favela, and this week tragedy befell one of my favorite escolas de samba, the Acadêmicos do Salgueiro . In the fall of 2004, I spent many nights watching Salgueiro’s incredible percussion section and dancers (and thousands of supporters) practice in the run-up to Carnaval in a working-class neighborhood in northern Rio. That year, the group’s patron, Waldemir Paes Garcia, known as Maninho or “Little Guy,” a fellow who ran an only semi-legal gambling empire in the city, exited this world in a hail of bullets from (at the time) unknown gunmen. This year, Paes Garcia’s cousin, Guaracy Paes Falcão, was killed in similar circumstances.

Though Rio de Janeiro can often seem like a violent, brutal place (and, having lived basically in a favela for a few months, I can tell you that it certainly is), the cariocas that inhabit the city have a true genius for forgetting about their troubles, living for the moment and savoring what pleasure life has to offer. So, in honor of them, of Rio, my favorite city, and for Thad Blanchette e Ana, Roberta Lemos, Gustavo Pacheco, Carlos Pontual and Mia Tuttavilla, I am posting the lyrics (in Portuguese) of Gilberto Gil’s immortal hymn to Rio, Aquele Abraço.

O Rio de Janeiro continua lindo
O Rio de Janeiro continua sendo
O Rio de Janeiro, fevereiro e março
Alô, alô, Realengo - aquele abraço!
Alô, torcida do Flamengo - aquele abraço!
Chacrinha continua balançando a pança
E buzinando a moça e comandando a massa
E continua dando as ordens no terreiro
Alô, alô, seu Chacrinha - velho guerreiro
Alô, alô, Terezinha, Rio de Janeiro
Alô, alô, seu Chacrinha - velho palhaço
Alô, alô, Terezinha - aquele abraço!
Alô, moça da favela - aquele abraço!
Todo mundo da Portela - aquele abraço!
Todo mês de fevereiro - aquele passo!
Alô, Banda de Ipanema - aquele abraço!
Meu caminho pelo mundo eu mesmo traço
A Bahia já me deu régua e compasso
Quem sabe de mim sou eu - aquele abraço!
Pra você que meu esqueceu - aquele abraço!
Alô, Rio de Janeiro - aquele abraço!
Todo o povo brasileiro - aquele abraço!

Valentine’s Day, Bombay-Style

There is a rather droll editorial by Sujata Anandan in today’s Hindustan Times (sadly not available online as of yet) regarding the frothing reaction of some members of the xenophobic Shiv Sena party - whose personal lives are apparently barren, romanceless, joyless husks of existence - to the arrival of that epochal event of whoredom and Western decadence, Valentine’s Day.

Apparently having graduated from days when they dismantled and burned people to burning people’s property and belongings, on Monday, hundreds of “Shiv Sainiks,” as they refer to themselves, ran amok along the Senapati Bapat Road, trashing a shop that sold Valentine’s Day cards and setting much of the merchandise on fire. Later, evidently still high on the adrenaline rush of their good showing in last month’s municipal elections here in Bombay, the saffron-identified gang them moved on to Deccan Square where they pummeled a large billboard put up by the Indian cell phone giant Hutch which advertised Valentine’s Day with a host of balloons.

"Valentine day like celebrations are all western concepts and has been forced on our society for the commercial purpose,” a Sena youth leader was quoted in the times as saying in the paper. “Shiv Sena will never allow the commercialization of Indian feelings.”

This devotion to the tenderest of human emotions might be more convincing were it not coming from a party the built itself on hate rhetoric to rival anything heard in the segregation-era United States. The party exists more or less exclusively to promote the idea that native Maharashtrians (those born in Maharashtra state of which Bombay is a part and speaking the Marathi language) deserved greater rights here than "foreigners," which in this case means basically Muslims and "southerners" (those from south India). Following the 1993 riots here which killed over 2,000 people, the Srikrishna Commission Report on the violence stated plainly that “from January 8, 1993 at least there is no doubt that the Shiv Sena and Shiv Sainiks took the lead in organizing attacks on Muslims and their properties under the guidance of several ."

So much for the sacredness of Indian feelings.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that a nation which constructed the 800 year-old erotic temples at Khajuraho as well as composed the Kama Sutra could feel at all threatened by such an innocuous holiday, however commercialized, as Valentines Day and, indeed, virtually no one on the streets today seemed bother, with Bombayite gals in fact looking particularly fetching (or perhaps it was just that the perpetually brown, polluted air had cleared enough so I could see them). So it came as little surprise when, in her column, Anandan reveals that the Sena protests against the Valentine’s Day stem not from some deep-seated belief in the sacredness of Indian traditions, but rather in the fact that the party’s boss, Bal Thackeray, had evidently once approached one of the greeting card companies here to sponsor an event for his daughter-in-law, and was curtly rebuffed. Thackeray, not a man to forget such a slight, swore revenge, and thus we have the yearly protests at Valentine’s Day.

For me, my favorite piece of art themed around the day has nothing to do with amour or even India, but is in fact the Australian director Peter Weir’s fantastic and forbidding Picnic at Hanging Rock, which tells the story of three Australian schoolgirls who disappeared on a school trip to that eponymous geological outcropping on Valentine’s Day, 1900. It was the beginning of a roll of terrific films by Weir, including The Last Wave two years later, Gallipoli in 1981 and The Year of Living Dangerously in 1982. But there remains something uniquely great and strange about Picnic, with its strong undercurrents of euphoria, sexuality, mystery and horror. It remains a film that evokes strong emotions in people even though not all that much actually happens in it and people are often hard put into words exactly why the react they way they do. It is just a sensation. As mystery and the unknown are two of the great drivers of romance, it seems like an appropriate note to close on.

Haiti : The terrible truth about Martissant (Op-Ed version)

Haiti: The Terrible Truth About Martissant, an expanded Op-Ed version of a post that originally appeared on this blog, has just been published by AlterPresse and can be read here.

Arrests in Martissant and a Haiti file goes “missing”

In what may be a hopeful sign (although in Haiti these days, it’s sometimes hard to tell), 31 presumed bandits and gang members were arrested over 10-11 February in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Martissant in a joint Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti (Minustah) and Police nationale d’Haïti (PNH) operation. Having allowed the terrible violence in Martissant to fester almost unchecked for nearly eight months, it’s good to see some action being taken to protect the innocent population there from further murder and mayhem, however it remains to be seen whether or not arresting those who were picked up this weekend will actually stem the tide of killing there. And then there is also the matter of the relationship between the police and judicial institutions responsible for actually hearing charges and conducting trials. But one can hope.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady had an interesting piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the disappearance of “a government file pertinent to two civil law suits alleging bribery…(involving) politically influential individuals on both sides of the aisle and a notoriously corrupt former Haitian president that the U.S. supported for a decade.” Readers of this blog will no doubt be able to surmise which individuals and which president she’s referring to. Subscription required by those ruthless capitalist types to read the article at the Journal’s website, I’m afraid, but a free version can be read here.

Families of the disappeared

Yesterday marked the second day here in Srinagar of the hunger strike of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKFL) chairman Yasin Malik, and a sit-in protest against extrajudicial executions and disappearances by Indian security forces. Since the beginning of the conflict here in Kashmir in 1990, an estimated eight thousand people have been “disappeared,” some of them later found buried in unmarked graves far from home, falsely labeled as foreign militants. The draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act, first enacted in 1990 and still in effect, authorizes the state government, governor, or Indian government to declare any part of the state to be a “disturbed area” and empowers the armed forces to “for the maintenance of public order, giving such due warning as he may consider necessary, fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against any person who is acting in contravention of any law or order for the time being in force in the disturbed area prohibiting the assembly of five or more persons or the carrying of weapons or of things capable as being used as weapons or of firearms, ammunition or explosive substances.”

Underneath a tent in the Lal Chowk neighborhood, festooned with images of the dead and greeting passerby with flowing Urdu script reading “Allah loveth not the shouting of evil words in public speech except by one who has been wronged for Allah is he who heareth and knoweth all things,” Malik, once a violent rebel who turned into a Ghandian non-violent leader in 1995, lay on a blanket, his lips chapped, and weakly recounted to me why he had initiated his three-day strike and why dozens of members of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons had gathered in the tent, as well. In addition to those I met in the village of Ganderbal and elsewhere, the number of people I have met in Kashmir missing family members or friends now numbers about 50, and that is just from a casual visit. Malik, who ends his hunger strike today, has vowed that, if the human rights situation in Kashmir does not improve within 45 days, to fast unto death in protest.

These faces were among those searching for their loved ones.

Strike Day, Kashmir

A seriously cold day here in Srinagar, made even more so by the ride in an open autorickshaw to the village of Gandarbal, some 30 minutes to the north. Today is the first day of a three-day strike here to protest the disappearances of locals and the multitude of false “encounters,” the euphemism that the Indian military gives to the killing of suspected Islamic militants. Recently, the Senior Superintendent and Deputy Superintendent of Ganderbal were arrested for their alleged roles in a rogue army and police ring that was responsible for multiple staged killings of non-combatants and disappearances in the district.

One gets the feeling, when leaving Srinagar, of the wildness of Kashmir, the rushing mounatin streams, the snow-covered hills looming over the valley, the horse-drawn carts pulling fire wood and produce down the lanes. And what is also stunning, when speaking to the local Kashmiris, is that virtually everyone knows someone was has either disappeared after contact with the security forces or been murdered. As we paused before a shop selling provisions, men milling about wearing the region’s distinctive flowing faran gown and taking turns smoking the hookah-like jajir, the stories came quickly. Of laborers summoned to police stations, of electrical linemen disappeared without a trace. The security forces are friendly enough to my friend, a Kashmiri attorney, and I, as they sip tea and adjust their AK-47s, but then again there is little danger that we will be fingered as suspected militants, liable to execution by the security forces, or as informers, and thus at risk for murder by the militants themselves.

It has been an eventful trip thus far, meeting with Parvez Imroz, founder and president of the Jammu & Kashmir Coalition for Civil Society (JKCCS), All Parties Hurriyat Conference chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and dozens of others, and I feel lucky to have the chance to glimpse this complex and beautiful land.

Kashmir, 6:24pm

We were sitting, three Kashmiri men and I, in a small tea shop on the Dal Lake, as the sun began setting behind the hills and a damp chill crept into the air that would last well into the next day. I had arrived only that morning, flying over the snow-dusted Himalayas from Bombay by way of New Delhi, to find the brisk air of Srinagar awaiting me after the sometimes choking pollution of Bombay.

The brisk air. And soldiers, everywhere soldiers. Standing in threes and fours at intersections, lackadaisically carrying their weapons as they walked down the street, peering out at the vaguely Persian-looking Kashmiri populace from behind sandbags and barbed-wire. The hotels along Boulevard, once full of tourists in what had been one of India’s tourist hubs, had vacancy after vacancy, the houseboats on the lake that used to attract honeymooning couples bobbed empty on the small waves caused by the mountain winds. The conflict here, which pitted a small but determined group of Islamic militants largely supported by Pakistan against the Indian army, with the vast majority of peaceful Kashmiris - many favoring independence from India - caught in the middle, has killed some 90,000 people in the last 17 years. With both the army and the militants committing awful human rights violations (with those of the army on a far more massive scale), Srinagar has the melancholy feel of a city left to its own devices amidst some terrible brutality. The Indian intellectuals in Delhi and Bombay for the most part aren’t interested in the problem, preferring instead to focus on safer subjects, such as Iraq. It was left to these men, as dusk gathered, to try and count the cost, and wonder why the world isn’t interested.

“There was a garden in a park that the local people in the municipality wanted to make into a graveyard to show the world what is happening here,” said one man, chain-smoking cigarettes. “To show how many people are dying, you see. When one Gujarati laborer was shot by police during a demonstration - he was caught in the crossfire - the people were happy, happy so that they could invest a body in the graveyard and have some kind of claim on it.”

“Me, I was weeping.”

The terrible truth of Martissant

In Haiti’s senate, not even a year old, senator Gabriel Fortuné of the Union party, following up on his promise to elaborate on the corruption which he says is bedeviling the body, accused one of the main shareholders of the Société Caribéenne de Banque S.A. (SOCABANK), Haïtel chairman Franck Ciné, of bribing Haitian senators to vote (18 in favor, 16 opposed) for a negotiated resolution to a complex financial squabble between SOCABANK and the de la République d'Haïti (BRH). Thus far, the response from the executive branch of Haitian president René Préval to the uproar has been muted, but one hopes that a thorough and transparent investigation will soon follow.

In perhaps even more grim news, the Commission Episcopale Nationale Justice et Paix released a report covering the human rights situation in Haiti from October until December 2006 and therein concluded that 539 people were killed by violence in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan region alone in 2006, especially singling out the region of Martissant, where citizens have been at the mercy of warring gangs with varying political affiliations since June 2006. Freelance journalist Jean-Rémy Badio was murdered in his home, evidently by gang-affiliated gunmen from the area, last month.

There have recently been attempts to exculpate one of the street gangs in Martissant - the Baz Grand Ravine loyal to the Fanmi Lavalas party of former Haitian president Jean-Betrand Aristide - from involvement in the appalling violence terrorizing the community there, instead attempting to suggesting the bloodshed comes only from one side, the Lamè Ti Machet (The Little Machete Army), affiliated with the Ti Bois and Déscartes districts of the neighborhood, and said to be loyal to former Haitian police official Carlo Lochard and other political elements. Simply put, this is total, intentional fabrication and ignores the fact that, since June 2006, all armed groups in the neighborhood have been implicated in the grossest human rights violations by residents fleeing attacks speaking to Haitian and foreign journalists brave enough to venture there.

Last summer, the American photojournalist Thos Robinson, a Haitian radio reporter (whose perilous work dictates that he remain nameless) and I spent several days traveling through and interviewing residents of Martissant, during which time we were subject to extremely aggressive and unpleasant questioning by the gangs. The terror we saw that had been created by all the gangs, regardless of political affiliation, killing and burning the neighborhood, was truly an outrage to behold, and we left convinced that the Baz Grand Ravine, like the Lamè Ti Machet, was just another group cloaking their criminality and disregard for the community in the thinnest veneer of ideology, and were guilty of terrible human rights violations.

Those of us who have followed Haiti for many years recall that from 2000 until 2002, the most powerful gang in Martissant was run from Grand Ravine by Felix “Don Fefe” Bien-Aimé, an Aristide loyalist who orchestrated the murder of at least thirteen people when his faction conducted a ghastly all-night siege of the neighboring Fort Mercredi district in June 2001. Following the murders, Bien-Aimé met with Aristide at the National Palace along with what was left of a local Fort Mercredi gang. Under Aristide’s gaze, the gangs signed a joint statement declaring their conflict over. No one was ever arrested for the killings. Bien-Amié eventually scored a patronage job as the director of Port-au-Prince’s main cemetery, and was also said to have been involved in the disappearance of the newborn baby of Nanoune Myrthil from Port-au-Prince General Hospital on February 29, 2000. In September 2002, apparently having outgrown his usefulness (a pattern that would be repeated many times) Bien-Amié was arrested by Haitian police officers and "disappeared," his abandoned car later found burned out at Titanyen, once one ofthe favored dumping grounds for victims of political murders by Haiti’s previous dictatorships.

Though I generally refrain from posting graphic photos on this blog, respectful of the dignity of the human body in death as I am of the sensibilities of readers, I believe that the attached photo, taken by Thos Robinson and chronicling the aftermath of an attack by the Baz Grand Ravine on the neighborhood of Ti Bois, says a whole hell of lot with regards to whether or not the group is involved in violence. There are many more photos just like it. Now, more than ever, I am convinced that human rights must for all in Haiti, without distinction for political affiliation, is the only way forward. It is what we who genuinely care about Haiti, not guided by narrow political ends nor co-opted by the extravagant financial largess of Haiti’s various political actors, need to keep pushing for.

ACM calls for action on Badio killing

January 30, 2007 - The Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) is calling on Haitian authorities to move swiftly to bring the killers of Jean-Rémy Badio to justice and wants the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to do more to end the isolation of this Member State.

Mr Badio was a freelance journalist and photographer and member of SOS Journalistes with which the ACM has communicated in the recent past. He was shot to death at his home on January 19.

It is especially distressing to note that that Mr. Badio’s murder results from his work in reporting on the operations of organised gangs in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Martissant.

This killing suggests that changes in political administration in Haiti have not served to reverse a tendency by criminal elements with political agendas to target journalists and media workers. Firm and decisive action against such acts was recommended by the ACM following our mission to Haiti in 2002 while the murder of Jean Dominique in 2000 was still being investigated without success.

We are concerned that this specific feature of the Haitian landscape has not been suitably addressed by the country’s CARICOM allies, despite representations made on the issue by the ACM.

For example, as far back as January 24, 2002 we informed CARICOM Secretary-General, Edwin Carrington, in writing, that “our Haitian colleagues have stressed the urgency of getting their information out to the rest of the region because there is a belief that the international media have neither paid sufficient attention to nor displayed a high level of sensitivity to their plight.”

We have also used other fora to express concern that while Haiti is being used in the public relations ofthe CARICOM Secretariat as a valuable member of the Community, it continues to be treated as a population of “outsiders” by CARICOM Member States.

This continued isolation even within the CARICOM system can only embolden elements bent on acting with impunity against journalists and media organisations.

In this regard, we call on CARICOM to take measures to bring some relief to this situation.

Dale Enoch
President

We acknowledge the assistance of Michael Deibert in the shaping of this response from the ACM.

Association of Caribbean Media Workers
Trinidad, WEST INDIES
www.acmediaworkers. com
Dale Enoch, President: (868) 628-4955
Peter Richards, First Vice-President
Bert Wilkinson, Second Vice-President
Wesley Gibbings, General Secretary
Nita Ramcharan, Asst. General Secretary
Michael Bascombe
Canute James

Thoughts on the Bombay municipal elections

Proving that bigotry and its oft-handmaiden of poor sartorial flourishes don’t respect geographic boundaries, George Wallace’s spiritual successor here in Bombay, Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray , informed Bombay’s voters that “the city will burn if it is taken away from Maharashtra," this week, days before a civic poll to pick the new members of the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) and other posts in the city.

Readers may remember that Thackeray is the political leader that the author (and native Bombayite) Suketu Mehta memorably described as "the one man most directly responsible for ruining the city I grew up in."

The Shiv Sena (or Army of Shiva, referring to Shivaji) was formed by Thackeray in 1966, promoting themselves as Bhumiputra or "sons of the soil," while propagating that native Maharashtrians (those born in Maharashtra state and speaking the Marathi language) deserved greater rights in their eponymous state (of which Bombay is a part) than "foreigners," which in this case meant basically Muslims (the Shiv Sena also promoted the rather exceptionalist Hindutva philosophy) and "southerners" (those from south India). Following the destruction of Babri Mosque in northeastern India by Hindu extremists in December 1992, Bombay was engulfed in ghastly rioting that left over 2,000 dead , many of them Muslims targeted by Hindu mobs. The Srikrishna Commission Report on the violence, released in 1998, stated unequivocally that “from January 8, 1993 at least there is no doubt that the Shiv Sena and Shiv Sainiks took the lead in organizing attacks on Muslims and their properties under the guidance of several leaders,’ singling out Thackeray for special condemnation.

Yet another example in the world of an individual and a political current promoting that idea that for one group to be uplifted, another group must be crushed.

“In the Bombay I grew up in,” Mehta writes in his book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found “being Muslim or Hindu or Catholic was merely a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. We had a boy in our class who I realize now from his name, Arif, must have been Muslim. I remember that he was an expert in doggerel and instructed us in an obscene version of a patriotic song, “Come, children, let me teach you the story of Hindustan”, in which the nationalistic exploits of the country’s leaders were replaced by the sexual escapades of Bombay’s movie stars. He didn’t do this because he was Muslim and hence unpatriotic. He did this because he was a twelve-year-old boy.”

“Now it mattered.,“ Mehta concludes. “Because it mattered to Bal Thackeray.”

And now, for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet, despite guiding one element of Bombay’s citizenry in an attempt to ethnically purge another element of this great mosaic, Thackeray is still a free man to make statements such as the one above.

Letter regarding Amnesty International release

(I sent the following note to Amnesty International after reading their press release Amnesty International condemns murder of journalist. I received a thoughtful response to my concerns, but believe that some of the issues raised in the original message itself might be of interest to readers. MD)

Greetings. My name is Michael Deibert and I am a journalist who has been visiting Haiti since 1997 and served as Reuters correspondent there from 2001 until 2003. In addition, I have written extensively about the country over the last decade for publications such as Newsday,
The Miami Herald and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

In its most timely and necessary release following the murder of Jean-Rémy Badio, Amnesty International condemns murder of journalist, Amnesty International states the following when chronicling the murders of journalists in Haiti over the last seven years:

Jean Léopold Dominique along with Jean Claude Louissaint, murdered in Port-au-Prince on 3 April 2000;
Brignol Lindor, found dead in Acul (near Petite Goâve) on 3 December 2003;
Abdias Jean, allegedly extrajudicially executed by police officers on 7 January 2005;
Jacques Roche, found dead on 15 July 2005.

I think I am not alone in worrying that, while Jean Léopold Dominique Jean Claude Louissaint and Abdias Jean are quite correctly listed as having been "murdered" and "allegedly extrajudicially executed by police officers," respectively, the journalists Brignol Lindor and Jacques Roche are simply listed as having been "found dead," with no further elaboration as to the circumstances of their murders.

Around this time five years ago, in my capacity as the Reuters correspondent in Port-au-Prince, I reported on the murder of Brignol Lindor by a gang named Domi Nan Bwa (Sleeping in the Woods), who were loyal to then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

On December 3, 2001, Lindor, the news director of Radio Echo 2000 in the provincial town of Petit Goave was macheted and beaten to death by Domi Nan Bwa members following a similar though non-lethal attack against Domi Nan Bwa member Joseph Céus Duverger (in which Lindor had no involvement). Lindor's radio program "Dialogue," which often featured speakers strongly denouncing the Aristide government and local officials, had drawn the ire of Petit Goave's mayor, Dume Bony, a member of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party, who had held a press conference immediately preceding the killing and, seated next to Domi Nan Bwa's leader Raymond Jean Fleury, called for the application of "zero tolerance" to be directed at Lindor. I recall that, shortly after the killing, in his capacity as the secretary-general of the Association of Haitian Journalists, Reuters' current correspondent in Haiti, Joseph Guyler Delva, spoke to the leaders of Domi Nan Bwa, who freely admitted their role in the murder.

Thus there is no mystery whatsoever as to how, when, where, why and by whom Brignol Lindor was murdered.

Likewise in the case of Jacques Roche, there is no dispute as to what befell him, be there as it may dispute over the culprits. An editor at the newspaper Le Matin who had worked extensively to protest the brutal treatment of Haiti's peasants on the country's Maribahoux plain and hosted a television program where members of political parties and civil society groups -- frequently including members of a civil coalition that helped drive Aristide from power in 2004 - would discuss the issues of the day, Roche was kidnapped in July 2005 and his body then found on a road in Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince, his wrists handcuffed, his arms broken and the coup de grace having been administered with a bullet to the head .

Amidst the violence that is still afflicting Haiti today, putting these crimes in the proper context, I would argue, is a very important contribution to the world's larger understanding of how to help end them. It is not a mere matter of semantics, but rather a decision to provide the full information for concerned citizens abroad who seek to genuinely help Haiti in its hour of need, irrespective of political parties and ever-mindful of the worth of every life lost and the need for a full accounting by those in power for their roles, in any, in taking those lives.

I am sure that you share these concerns.

Respectfully,

Michael Deibert

Corruption in Haiti’s senate?

Haitian senator Gabriel Fortuné has leveled a charge most grave that his colleagues in the Haitian body politic were bribed in exchange for voting (18 in favor, 16 opposed) for a negotiated resolution to a complex financial squabble between the Banque de la République d'Haïti (BRH) and the Société Caribéenne de Banque S.A. (SOCABANK). Fortuné, a senator from the Union party, stated that several senators were bribed by SOCABANK officials to vote in favor of the resolution and that, as he has already apprised senate president Joseph Lambert of the situation, he will produce proof of the corruption this coming week.

Fortuné, it may be recalled, while serving in Haiti‘s Chamber of Deputies, survived an attack that killed deputy Jean-Hubert Feuillé in 1995, and was jailed without trial by the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide for two weeks during the latter's second term in office in 2001, Last month, he charged that the former president and sectors of his Fanmi Lavalas party were behind much of Haiti’s plague of kidnappings,

The BRH, readers will remember, is the Haitian state financial institution that was left in a shambles following Mr. Aristide’s 2001-2004 turn as Haiti’s president, with the nation’s public deficit measuring 3% of the country’s GDP and the government having defaulted on two separate contracts designed to provide the Haiti with electricity, totaling $12m.

As Haiti is at such a sensitive place right now, with president René Préval looking to conclude his first full year in office (in May) with some tangible benefit to be shown to Haiti’s long-suffering people, the accusations of corruption are particularly worrisome. One hopes a full, thorough and transparent investigation into the matter will soon follow.

Ailing Health System Defies Easy Fix

With travel and all, it has taken me a little while to post this, but here please find a link to my recent story for the Inter-Press Service titled Ailing Health System Defies Easy Fix, which examines the hurdles faced by the U.S. healthcare structure. As one of the 48 million Americans without health insurance, it is an issue near and dear to my heart.

Haiti: Champions of the Caribbean

It's been a long time that I've been waiting to write those words and Haiti's football team has finally made it possible. Haiti won the Caribbean Cup this week after defeating hometown favorites Trinidad and Tobago 2-1 in the final, which goes down as Haiti's best result in the tournament's 18-year history. Haitian media reports that thousands of deliriously happy fans swarmed the team as they landed at Haiti's Toussaint Louverture airport in Port-au-Prince yesterday evening.

Haiti, which has beset by so much trauma and which only last week witnessed the senseless murder of photojournalist Jean-Rémy Badio for simply doing his job, needed a reason to celebrate something, anything. The Haitian national football team has given them one.

Respè!

Sir Vidia and Shalimar

The critic Namita Bhandare has a very interesting article in today’s Hinudstan Times looking at the differences and similarities between two of India’s most lauded literary sons, Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipual.

Rushdie, Bhandare writes, “even though he held a British passport, was married to a Brit, lived in London and had a family that was based in Pakistan, (he) claimed to be determinedly Indian." Perhaps Rushdie’s best regarded novel, 1980's Midnight’s Children, features the city of Bombay extensively, and during that time “Rushdie pleased us by finding virtues in India. He raved about the Baroda School of Painting, praised our democracy (as distinct from Pakistan’s record of military rule) and even said the right things about Indira Gandhi (he didn’t like her, a sentiment shared by the urban middle-class).”

By contrast, V.S. Naipual, author of one of my favorite novels of all time, A Bend in the River, “missed no opportunity to tell us how much he hated us. He may have hated his birthplace (Trinidad) even more but the land of his ancestors was — in his view — a complete failure. It was, in the Sixties, an area of darkness. And by the Seventies, it had become a wounded civilization.”

Of course, that was over twenty years ago, when both writers were regarded in the prime. Midnight's Children was in that era, The Satanic Verses (which earned Rushdie a fatwa death sentence from the ossified, Koran-thumping theocracy in Iran) arrived some eight years later. Mr., Naipaul’s first book of renown, A House for Mr. Biswas, went even further back, to 1961, the interesting if often unpleasant In a Free State to 1971, and A Bend in the River itself to 1979.

A decade ago, Rushdie was the speaker at my graduation from Bard College in upstate New York, and he spoke about his time in seclusion, and at the demands for adherence to this or that hierarchy that had been made of him throughout his life. It was an address whose words have stayed with me ever since.

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

For his part, Naipaul's A Bend in the River remains one of the great portraits of post-colonial Africa and the alternating absurdities and horrors of a quasi-fascist cult-of-personality state, but Naipaul himself was the subject of a rather distasteful campaign, although one with far less mortal implications, when former friend and vastly inferior writer Paul Theroux lambasted him in a rather ill-considered memoir some years back.

In today’s Hindustan Times article, however, Bhandare notes that, through a strange confluence of events, the lives of Rushdie and Naipual have become in some ways mirror images of one another. Bhandare cites as examples that both authors are now better known for their non-fiction and their political views than for their novels (a conclusion I take issue with), that “both men have hit the social circuit thanks to glamorous and ambitious wives from the subcontinent” (something I couldn’t care less about), that they both continually revisit the subcontinent as a mine for material for their fiction (an astute observation), that they both cast a very skeptical eye over Islamic extremism and that, in Bhandare’s estimation, their respective levels of arrogance are meeting on some high misty plane of self-regard these days.

Bhandare finally speculates about “what is it about being an Indian writer abroad (to the extent that Trinidadians and Pakistanis are part of a greater India) that turns both men into clones of each other? Could it be that they have lived too far away from home for too long? And that they now occupy an imaginary homeland?”

Imaginary homelands? Now there's a sobering and intriguing thought for any expatriate.

Othwerwise, in very sad and decidedly non-literary news from Haiti, it was revealed today that freelance photographer Jean-Rémy Badio was murdered in the southern Port-au-Prince district of Martissant Friday by some of the same gangsters who have been terrorizing that neighborhood since this past July. Badio’s apparent crime? He had photographed the gunmen a few days before. Far from being imaginary, the violence in Haiti continues to be all too real.

Salaam Bombay

I saw them from the taxi on the ride back from Bandra last night, as we were passing through Worli and getting ready to make the arc out onto Marine Drive, where the city meets the sea. Among the estimated 100,000 people in Bombay that are officially designated as homeless (as opposed to the 7.5 million people that live in the city's slums), they had taken refuge for the evening on a traffic island amidst a swirl of motor cars that was cacophonous in its noise even at this late around (around 10:30pm) on a Sunday night. The tableaux was jarring in its intimacy and familiarity: Two small children stretched out, a man who appeared to be their father tucking them both in with blankets, tousling their hair, entreating them to sleep well. But this was no child's bedroom, the pallet was concrete in a public space set amidst the glare of headlights and noise of strangers. There was no pillow for their young heads

These are the people that, in the words of the Times of India group's rather asinine estimation, "are the leash," keeping the country from reaching its development potential. Last evening, they certainly did not appear to have the power to restrain anyone but rather that, as with the 700,000 citizens of the Dharavi slum, they were in fact the ones who had been roundly failed by successive governments here in India and that now, sixty years after independence, some in the country wished nothing more than they would go away so as not to detract from the pockets of affluence here, in New Delhi or in Bangalore (where riots erupted this weekend). I think not.

The day before, I received in the mail a copy of , Asia Society Associate Fellow Mira Kamdar’s upcoming book Planet India: How the Fastest Growing Democracy is Changing America and The World (Scribner). Along with some books by Amartya Sen, Suketu Mehta and Humra Quraishi, among others, it should make an interesting literary companion on my travels.

Haiti's Mythical Man

I'm not usually the type to make more than one posting in the course of a single day, but the Miami Herald published my review of novelist Madison Smartt Bell's new biography of Haiti's independence hero Toussaint Louverture today.

I mostly liked the book with one or two reservations, and I particularly enjoyed the skill with which Bell countered the misconception that the leaders of Haiti's revolt were ''a gang of supposedly ignorant, illiterate and generally uncivilized blacks,'' Bell brilliantly evokes the bitter eloquence of the writing of Haiti's revolutionary leadership, as is evidenced in a passage from a July 1792 letter signed by the rebel generals Jean-Francois and Biassou (as well as, curiously, Louverture's 14-year-old nephew Belair) to the representatives of the French government:

Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to see what barbarity you have treated men like yourself -- yes, men -- over whom you have no right except that you are stronger and more barbaric than we are. For too long we have borne your chains without thinking of shaking them off, but any authority which is not founded on virtue and humanity, and which only tends to subject one's fellowman to slavery, must come to an end, and that end is yours.

Read the full review here.

Adivasis, Naxalites and the future of India

I attended a very interesting lecture at the Nehru Centre in Worli by the noted Indian writer and academic Ramachandra Guha on the subject of adivasis, naxalites and the future of India. For those unaware, the adivasis are the “tribal” people of India, making up some 70 million members of peninsular India's population

Guha's talk centered on the eastern adivasis, centered on the states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, as opposed to their northern counterparts, and on the relationship these groups have with both the Indian state and the Naxalite Maoist insurgency here that is presently thought to contain some 10,000 regular fighters and several hundred thousand supporters in 13 of India's 28 states. Violence from conflict between the Maoists and the Indian government - both of whom stand accused of arming young adivasi men and boys to fight - claimed over 700 lives - including dozens of adivasi villagers slain by the rebels this past spring -in the last year alone.

Among Guha's most poignant observations were that "adivasis have gained least and lost most in six decades of Indian independence "as a result of exploitation and dispossession at the hands of successive Indian governments. Likewise, he said, the Naxalites offer "no long-term solution" to the plight of the tribes.

An important subject and one I will revisit in the future.

On another note, there is a highly interesting article by Bill Berkeley on Persian blogging in the Spring edition of the World Policy Journal.

A shabby little affair

As a progressive journalist who seeks to hold governments of all ideological stripes accountable for their actions towards their citizens, I pretty much assumed at some point MediaLens and NarcoNews (a bit like MediaLens' more unwashed, ayahuasca-dabbling cousin) would get around to elevating me to the level of Guardian writer Peter Beaumont, New York Times Bogota correspondent Juan Forero and the Miami Herald Caracas scribe Phil Gunson, by adding my colleague and friend Jane Regan and I to their ever-expanding list of enemies. I can only hope that salary considerations will soon follow suit. The choice of a "graduate student" named Jeb Sprague and some of his fellow travelers to recently print the texts of their email exchanges with Inter-Press Editor Katharine Stapp on the MediaLens website without first obtaining her permission or informing her of their intent to do so, a rather large violation of etiquette, is not surprising. My personal criteria for publishing private emails has always been to get the author's explicit permission (see my response to Dominican diplomat Roberto Alvarez), except in the case of abusive emails, in which case I will publish - if the moment seems appropriate - the author, the email and the author's contact information. The present moment is such a case.

In November 2005, shortly after the publication of my book, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press), to the general public, I received the following email (unsolicited) from Sprague (whom I had never met or corresponded with) along with a graphic picture of the bullet-riddled, blood-soaked bodies of a Haitian mother and her children (bad punctuation in the original):

From Jeb Sprague jebsprague@mac.com
To michaeldeibert@gmail.com
Date Nov 22, 2005 4:26 AM
Subject Haiti - read your book
mailed-by mac.com

Wow. Just finished reading your book. I got it at a library so I would not have to pay for
it. =-)
I thought it was horribly written with numerous factual errors. A very biased and elite look at the situation in Haiti. It looks like the World Bank funded Inter-American dialogue will provide a good place for you to promote this smear campaign of the elected government of Haiti.
Maybe USAID or the NED could take some of its yearly $3 million "democracy enhancement" program in Haiti away from the GROUP 184 grantees to promote your book tour??
But well I guess since the embargo has been lifted, since we have a pro-u.s. dictatorship now in Haiti things are great for you.
HEre is a photo of the suffering you cover up in this slanted propaganda. Thousands of dead in Haiti while Michael Diebert profits off the misery.
The Photos can't be covered up. You can't stop the truth...
-Jeb Sprague
Graduate Student, Long Beach CA

I was left shrugging that perhaps Sprague suffered from some sort of mental illness, as he viewed the dead mother and her toddlers appropriate material for the smiley--face emoticon he placed in his message, easy game for the cheap joke. Writing for various fringe publications, Sprague later went on to attack, in chronological order:

-Batay Ouvriye, one of Haiti's most militant and effective labor unions, for receiving funds from the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center after the departure of the government of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004. In truth, my attitude has always been, with things as dire as they are in Haiti, any Haitian governments should accept help from anywhere they can get it, whether it be Brussels, Caracas, Havana or Washington. Batay Ouvriye has consistently sided with the Haitian working class, whereas siding with the nouveaux riche class politique that Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party came to typify would have paid them much better (it certainly paid well for the government's lobbyists in the United States, who made millions over the years from a desperately poor country).

-The press solidarity group Reporters sans frontières (RSF), for supposedly receiving money from the International Republican Institute (IRI). When Sprague was unable to produce proof of this claim, RSF News Editor Jean-François Julliard, responded succinctly "We do not receive any funding from the International Republican Institute. This is a pure figment of the authors' imagination. Your readers can check our certified accounts on our website, rsf.org. "

-The Haiti Support Group, a London-based solidarity organization that has been working at a grassroots level in Haiti since 1992. In an article co-authored with one Joe Emersberger and which appeared in the magazine Counterpunch, Sprague by all accounts falsely and libelously claimed that Haiti Support Group head Charles Arthur (who I have often been at odds with) encouraged people to harass an apparently bogus "researcher," who published a highly questionable human rights study in the British medical journal, The Lancet. Arthur later wrote that "The statements about me in the Counterpunch piece are pure fiction. "

Of course, Sprague like his cohorts like Emersberger and Diana Barahona, residing comfortably in North America, would seem rather ill-suited to lecture groups of impoverished peasants and factory workers on where they are and are not allowed to accept aid from. At the same time, in the face of such campaigns, grassroots organizations like Batay Ouvirye, the Plateforme haïtienne de plaidoyer pour un développement alternatif (PAPDA) and Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen (SOFA), with little money on hand and few tools to defend themselves (not to mention, often, a shaky grasp of English), are left to deflect time from their work on behalf of Haiti's poor majority in to respond against a small, bitter, delusional, virulent elite, one that has shown repeatedly that it has precious little original thought to occupy its time, so it must instead rely on attacking the work of others. There is, sad to say, an amount of professional jealousy here which should inspire only pity, no doubt, when they look with envy at the work of someone like Jane Regan who, in addition to proving her mettle as a correspondent over many years and in many harrowing situations in Haiti, wrote In Bondage to History? an article which I and many others think is probably the single best piece written on the inferno of violence that consumed Haiti following September 30, 2004, for the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) .

In conclusion, to say that this small group are liars would mean that one was convinced that they indeed still had the ability to discern between reality and the ever more-multilayered fantasy world they have constructed for themselves and I, for my part, am not at all convinced that is the case. But what has always been a characteristic of weak and feeble minds, whose arguments are so fragile that they can barely support their own weight let alone that of an informed dissenting voice, is the desire to not only to make sure that their own voices are heard (fine with me), but to silence the voices they disagree with. Unfortunately with this current of thought from mostly well-off, white progressives, Haitians are interesting only insofar as they can either be lauded as heroes or damned as villains, with no acknowledgement for any of the grey areas in between, and with no appreciation that, particularly in a society as impoverished, and wracked by violence as Haiti, human beings are creatures of complex motivation, not easily summed up by the empty sloganeering this current is reduced to for lack of any real understanding of the country.

The Haiti I know and love is full of people who, in their everyday struggles, display twenty times the heroism that any politician I have seen in the country ever has: A man working late hours at his media support group despite the danger of being kidnapped if he is late returning home; a father, out of work for three years, who dutifully gets up to pound the pavement every day in order to search for a job to support his family and restore his sense of dignity, and his wife, who braves strikes, demonstrations and the daily threat of violence to go teach school at a facility often lacking the basic instruments for education such as books, pens and paper; the woman fleeing a gang war sheltering in the parking lot of a Baptist mission who has nothing in mind more than keeping her children safe from the struggle for miserable power. These are the real heroes of Haiti, not the politicians.

Of course, there are people engaging in those everyday struggles all around the world, and I, for one, have to go out and report on them today.

L'Union fait la force.

Sunrise in Colaba

Having made the decision to shift my accommodations from the colorful but filthy and almost dizzyingly polluted Fort Area to a flat in the southern tip of Bombay, I am treated to the sound of waves splashing against my rocks beneath my window at night, and views like this one when I wake up come morning, which, I must say, goes a long way to re-charging one's batteries following long-term stints in the Dharavis of the world. Likely off to either Panaji (aka Panjim), the former capital of Portuguese Goa, and supposedly the repository of some fine colonial architecture, or perhaps the hill station of Matheran, which will no doubt make a nice change from Bombay's often rather gritty air.

Saddam to the gallows, more troops to Iraq and more maximum city

I am a bit late getting around to talking about it, of course, but, for anyone who has been living under a rock for the last several weeks, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein - former Reagan administration client, author of the genocidal Al-Anfal Campaign campaign that killed up to 180,000 Iraqi Kurds from 1986 until 1989, and instigator of the brutal repression that killed a similar number of Shiites following a 1991 revolt centered on the cities of Basra and Nasiriyah - was hanged by the neck until dead on December 30th, bringing an end one of the bloodiest histories that any modern ruler has written upon the face of the earth. While I am in principle opposed to the death penalty (even in this case), I must say that I shed no tears over the end of this appalling tyrant who, along with his two maniac sons and his quasi-fascist Baath party, had ruined the lives of so many millions of people for so long, and left his country that shattered, divided inferno that it currently is (helped along by the arrogant hubris of the Bush administration in the latter count).

As if to underscore the man’s moral turpitude, recordings have recently surfaced where Hussein discusses the Al-Anfal Campaign in great detail with subordinates, dispensing, among other pearls of wisdom, that "Yes, in areas where you have concentrated populations, that would be useful," in reference to plans to have Soviet-built aircraft carry containers packed with 50 napalm bombs each to the be rolled out of the cargo decks and dropped on Kurdish towns. Later in the same set of tapes, Hussein praises the merits of chemical weapons - such as those that decimated the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 - while speaking with his vice-president, the fugitive Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri.

If any regrets may be voiced about Hussein’s exit, as with that of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet earlier that same month, it is that the deed was done before Hussein was made to answer for the full measure of his crimes and the manner of his death - as a Sunni taunted by partisans of the Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army”militia while on the gallows - will only serve to further inflame the scorching ethnic violence that is currently making Iraq such a hellish place for its citizens. In the final analysis, it is also appalling that Hussein was executed for the killing of 148 Shia Muslims in the town of Dujail and then, post mortem, charges against him stemming from the Al-Anfal Campaign were dropped and those from the 1991 campaign against the Shia shunted aside. Hussein should have been on trail for the rest of his life for his crimes against the Iraqi people and now, for all of those victims, there will probably never be a full accounting of the state machinations that lead to such ghastly excess. As my friend Sutton Stokes observed, “The saddest thing about his execution is the way the amateurs running it allowed him the final victory of seeming like the only civilized person in the room, when in fact…”

Amidst all of this, my country’s president - who hopefully one day will have to face a trial or two of his own - has announced his plan to send 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq, including five brigades deployed to Baghdad. While completely distrustful of Bush’s motives and not at all convinced that he has learned the lessons of a presidency that has thus far been a tragedy for America as it has been for the world, it does seem that it would be the height of irresponsibility and callous self-interest, having unleashed the poltergeists of ethnic cleansing on a civilian population, for the U.S. to leave Iraq before we have done something to try and halt the violence there.

On this issue, where it seems like the only choices are bad and worse, I must say that I largely agree with The Economist’s 7 December observation that “What will not help is scuttling from Iraq before exhausting every possible effort to put the country back together.”

“The Baker-Hamilton group is right to say that America should neither leave precipitously nor stay forever.,” the editorial goes on. “Leaning harder on Iraq's politicians is an excellent idea. But setting an arbitrary deadline of early 2008 for most of the soldiers to depart risks weakening America's bargaining power, intensifying instead of dampening the fighting and projecting an image of weakness that will embolden enemies everywhere.”

Bhenchod, this isn’t over yet.

As for me, following a great dinner with author Dilip D'Souza and his charming family and an even better Bandra party, I again spent the day today in Dharavi, Asia's largest slum, home to some 700,000 souls, intervieiwng people who make their living by breaking apart plastics and recylcing bags which are then melted down and sold as raw material. For their effort they make 60 rupees a day (about $1.20). I am still feeling the effects of inhaling all that pollution this evening.

The Train to Bandra

Yesterday, visiting an Indian journalist, I ventured out to Bandra, an increasingly chic Bombay suburb that is worlds away in look and feel from the urban rush and pollution of my own Fort Area neighborhood. Passing through the somewhat hallucinatory Indo-British fusion that is Victoria Terminus (renamed Shivaji Terminus by Hindu zealots in the mid-1990s in honor of a 17th century Maratha king), I hitched a ride on the sweltering working-class commuter train for the 45-minute journey.

As we sped by, hot wind blasting through the cars, leaving the Fort’s Victorian-via-Bollywood buildings in various stages of decrepitude and bazaars behind, the poverty on display from the railcar, even by Haitian standards, even following my visit to the Dharavi slum (Asia’s largest) in my first hours in Mumbai, was staggering. Amidst the engine of India’s economic success story were lean-to shacks with tin roofs built right up to the edge of the train tracks which shuttered as we rode by, vast ponds of fetid, mosquito-breeding still water amidst hundreds of fragile human dwellings and the overwhelming smell of raw shit that flooded the car at regular intervals despite the speed at which we were traveling.

And everywhere: people, people, people. One can only really appreciate the idea of a city of 20 million people when you realize that one can never venture into the street without their eyes immediately taking in 500 other souls going about their lives.

But still amidst the want, as has been characteristic since my arrival in India, color burst forth from all sides: Advertisements for Indian soap operas, multi-colored washing hung from windows, garlands of flowers hung out of the windows of trains passing in the opposite direction by Hindu religious pilgrims. And, such a change from much of Latin America, peacefulness. Despite the crush of people, despite the poverty, there is a strange calm that pervades things. Going back to the train station in Badra last night, through the twilight streets, on an auto-rickshaw, or walking home through the Fort Area, despite the night and the inequity, there was no charge of menace, no feel of impending potential violence such as I have felt in certain sections of Port-au-Prince or Rio de Janeiro at various moments. Of course, I am writing this here in Bombay the same week that separatist militants from the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) killed at least 71 Hindi-speaking migrants in attacks across Assam state in India's north, and the conflict in Kashmir continued to grind onwards. And of course my driver to Dharavi - a supporter of the xenophobic Shiv Sena political party - treated me to a long discourse in fractured English about how Bangladeshis, Muslims and “southerners” (those from South India) were to blame for the poverty that I was witnessing. But, nonetheless, in terms of examples of urban tolerance, Bombay thus far seems to be an interesting example.

A word on etymology: Bombay was in fact first called Bom Baia by early Portuguese explorers. In recent years, the Indian author Suketa Mehta wrote in his very interesting book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, that the re-naming of the city “Mumbai” was “not just a process of decolonializaion but of de-Islamicization. The idea is to go back not just to a past but to an idealized past, in all cases, a Hindu past…Bombay was created by the Portuguese from a cluster of malarial islands, and to them should go the baptismal rights. The Gujaritis and Maharastrians always called it Mumbai, when speaking Gujarati or Marathi, and Bombay when speaking English. There was no need to chose. In 1995, the Sena demanded that we chose, in all our languages, Mumbai.”

In deference to the extraordinary tapestry I have encountered here in the last week - long-bearded kufi-chapeaued Muslims, Kashmiris with their wares spread out before them on the streets of the Fort, serious and industrious Paris still practicing the Zoroastrian religion of the forbearers - I will refer to the city as Bombay in conversation and on this blog but, in a nod to an unfortunate political reality, as Mumbai in my articles.

First posting from Mumbai

Saffron, incense, sewage, exhaust and sundry spices have never blended in such an intoxicating aroma.