Drugs vs. Democracy in Guatemala
By Michael Deibert
World Policy Journal
Winter 2008/09, Vol. 25, No. 4, Pages 167-175
MORALES, GUATEMALA—With shops selling expensive leather saddles and men in cowboy hats strutting through its lanes, this town of 50,000 in Guatemala's eastern department of Izabal has long been the heartland of the country's cattle-raising and farming industries. Situated on a flat plain emptying out into the Caribbean Sea and crisscrossed by the meandering Rio Dulce, Morales has in recent years been the epicenter of a far more lethal trade. It has become ground zero for the country's increasingly violent role as a way station for cocaine bound from South America to feed ravenous appetites in the United States.
There are hints of this in aspects of daily life in Morales—from the visible Glock pistols and Uzi submachine guns sported by men descending from pick-up trucks and sport-utility vehicles with blacked-out windows, to the sprawling and curiously empty new luxury hotels, as well as a body count that usually numbers well over a dozen in the course of a single week.
"There has been a great increase in violence in the area in the last several months, which would suggest that a turf war was going on," says a priest who has been working in the region since the late 1980s but declined to be named for this article out of fear for his safety. "Weekends here are dangerous."
In March, Juan "Juancho" José León Ardón, a local man said to be a drug lord, was killed along with ten other men in a wild shootout in neighboring Zacapa state, where Guatemalan police later recovered 16 semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifles and an M-16. Along with the body of Juancho— who'd fled a Mexican prison in 2001—and several of his bodyguards, were found the bodies of two Mexican nationals, believed to member of Los Zetas, the brutal rogue soldiers who act as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, the Mexican crime syndicate. ("Zeta" comes from the Mexican federal police radio code for high-ranking officers.) Jauncho was believed by local law enforcement officials to have been working as a middle man, helping to bring cocaine from Colombia to Mexico in the service of the Gulf Cartel's arch-rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel of Joaquín "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzmán. Fighting between the two groups has killed hundreds of people in Mexico in recent years.
The level of insecurity in Guatemala has reached such a level that, in impoverished neighborhoods such as the capital's gritty Villa Nueva slum, often the scene of inter-gang warfare, heavily-armed masked men (thought to be off-duty police officers) scoop suspected gang members from the streets, never to be seen again except in city morgues or dumped by the side of the road. For those of more substantial means, there is the world of gates, guards, and highly disciplined movements, an existence that condemns those who live it to dwelling in their own kind of ghetto, and brings no great peace of mind. The links between private security contractors and organized crime are substantial and continuing.
The gun battle that killed Juancho, his men, and the Mexicans was not an isolated incident, nor was it by any stretch the most shocking crime to take place in Guatemala in recent years. According to figures released by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), from 1999 to 2006, Guatemala's homicide rate increased more than 120 percent, from 2,655 homicides in 1999 to 6,033 in 2006, a national homicide rate of 47 per 100,000 inhabitants—though still trailing the murder rates of its neighbors to the south, El Salvador and Honduras. Even given these grim statistics, the UNDP numbers noted that only a fraction of all victims of violence were taken into account by Guatemalan police and justice statistics.
The Zacapa massacre, however, was indicative of a larger pattern. The ability of the Mexican gunmen—who witnesses said numbered at least 30—to pass fully-armed and unhindered across the length of Guatemala, engage in a prolonged and fatal firefight and then simply vanish into thin air made perfectly clear one other central fact of Guatemala's current agony. Official complicity has abetted at every turn the wave of drug-related violence that has cleaved Guatemalan society like a bloody scythe in recent years—ensnaring in the drug war vast numbers of public officials, drug traffickers, gang members, and ordinary civilians. The next casualty, many fear, will be Guatemala's nascent democracy itself.
Roots of War
The roots of the country's current crisis lay in Guatemala's three decade-long civil war, which lasted from 1960 until 1996. Successive Guatemalan governments—often with the complicity of the United States—battled to defeat a leftist insurgency centered in the country's mountainous and jungle-covered recesses. As a series of military dictators built up a sophisticated intelligence-gathering and surveillance capability in the late 1970s and 1980s, members of Guatemala's armed forces, with little regard for human rights, were given free rein to battle rebels in a conflict that eventually claimed an estimated 200,000 lives.
During the regimes of dictators General Romeo Lucas García (1978–82) and his successor General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), in particular, elements of Guatemala's military intelligence services were able to create complex criminal networks that exist more or less intact to this day. Lucas García fled to exile in Venezuela, where he died in 2006. Ríos Montt went on to found the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (Guatemalan Republican Front, or FRG), one of Guatemala's main political parties. In 2003, he even ran, though unsuccessfully, for the country's presidency. He currently serves as the FRG's secretary general and as a deputy in Guatemala's congress.
Often referred to as the grupos clandestinos, or hidden powers, these criminal-military groups represent perhaps the biggest challenge to the government of Álvaro Colom, Guatemala's current president, who also serves as the head of the left-wing Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) party. The activities of the hidden powers are varied and include skimming customs duties, illicitly acquiring government contracts, human trafficking, and increasingly, drug trafficking. A weak Guatemalan state together with broad, and largely unpatrolled, Pacific and Caribbean coastlines combine to provide an alluring middle passage for drugs flowing to North America from points south. A 2003 study by the Washington Office on Latin America titled "Hidden Powers in Post-Conflict Guatemala," asserted that the groups "do not act on their own, but at the behest of members of an interconnected set of powerful Guatemalans...[who] oversee and profit from a variety of illegal activities that they carry out with little fear of arrest or prosecution."
Once used as a tool by Guatemala's tiny economic and political elite to bludgeon leftist opposition in the country, the grupos clandestinos have now taken on a nefarious and powerful life of their own.
"When the oligarchy made the military such a crucial factor during the internal armed conflict, the only presence of the state nationwide was the military," says Frank LaRue, a veteran human rights advocate who currently heads the Instituto Demos, a Guatemala civil society organization.
"The military gained a lot of political power and began making their own economic base, and, obviously, those who were leaving the military, or some of them, began getting connected with drugs, exactly as is happening in Mexico," says LaRue, who served as head of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights in the government of Colom's predecessor, Óscar Berger.
The Brotherhood
Perhaps the best-known and most-feared criminal syndicates in the country are La Cofradía (The Brotherhood) and El Sindicato (The Syndicate), both made up of current and former military officers, according to Guatemalan and U.S. government officials.
La Cofradía is believed to have its roots in the military intelligence wing of the government of former dictator Lucas García, and to be comprised chiefly of those who advocated a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners approach to prosecuting Guatemala's civil war, making little distinction between military and civilian targets. Known at the time as los estratégicos (the strategic ones), the group is said to be chiefly directed by two former generals, Manuel Callejas y Callejas and Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo.
During Ortega Menaldo's time in the armed forces, he served as head of army intelligence when the Guatemalan army was coordinating interdiction efforts with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and so became privy to the organization's methods and modus operandi. At the same time, the American government was financing complex surveillance equipment which enabled Guatemalan military intelligence—not to mention whoever else might be working in the sector—to engage in sophisticated intelligence gathering in the name of combating the country's leftist guerillas and nascent drug traffickers.
Previously a military intelligence official in various capacities during the Lucas García administration and in the 1991–93 civilian government of President Jorge Serrano Elías, Ortega Menaldo became head of the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP), a controversial military unit disbanded in 2003 which had been tied to appalling human rights abuses both before and after the 1996 peace accords brought an end to Guatemala's internal armed conflict. The EMP has been linked to a series of high-profile assassinations over the years, including the 1990 murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack, the 1994 killing of Constitutional Court President Eduardo Epaminondas González Dubón and the 1998 beating death of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi.
In his position with the EMP, Ortega Menaldo continued to work closely with military intelligence until Elías attempted to seize dictatorial powers in May 1993. Though this auto-golpe (self-coup), as it became known, was quickly defeated, Ortega Menaldo was among the military officers supportive of Elías' move, and was heavily marginalized in the government of Ramiro de León Carpio that came after. Ortega Menaldo was dismissed from active duty for corruption in 1996 under the government of President Álvaro Arzú. In March 2002, the government of the United States revoked Ortega Menaldo's travel visa under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizing such action against people who have allowed or conspired in drug trafficking.
According to a report by the Recuperación de Memoria Histórica (Recovery of Historical Memory) project—an undertaking that Bishop Gerardi oversaw shortly before his murder—the members of La Cofradía are linked by human rights abuses committed during the civil war and the "competition and loyalty between men from the same graduating class intermingled and changed according to opportunities of the moment." Similar to the Italian mafia, La Cofradía is said to have an elaborate initiation ritual, which includes placing a medallion engraved with the inductee's name, class promotion, and a magic lamp— the organization's symbol—at the bottom of a glass of whiskey, which the new member must then drink in order to claim.
The Rise of Pérez Molina
The soldiers who graduated from Guatemala's military academy in 1969— "Promotion 73," as the group became known—were thrown into a world of bloody conflict throughout the Americas, but especially in their native country. As happens sometimes among military officers of the same graduating class, loyalties among these men continued throughout their careers. Advocating a strategy of pacification and stabilization during the war, which preferred combining development projects and military objectives as opposed to all-out warfare against the rebels, this group as such often found itself at odds with los estratégicos.
The group's most visible member, Otto Pérez Molina, led the group of military officers that opposed Elías' 1993 self-coup, a position that created a climate of lasting enmity between himself and Ortega Menaldo, who had supported the move. While Ortega Menaldo was sent into the wilderness after the failed 1993 coup, Pérez Molina saw his own star rise with his appointment as inspector general of the army in 1996, a high-profile role as the Guatemalan military's representative at negotiations with rebel forces that eventually led to peace accords and, in 1998, his appointment as head the of the Guatemalan delegation before the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington, DC. But with the rise to prominence of Rios Montt's FRG and the presidency of Alfonso Portillo—an Ortega Menaldo confidant—Pérez Molina retired from military service.
In February 2001, Pérez Molina formed the Partido Patriota (Patriot Party, or PP). Briefly, and perhaps a touch ironically given subsequent events, he also found common cause with Colom's UNE as they jointly denounced Portillo's alleged abuse of power. Later, however, the PP was incorporated into the Gran Alianza Nacional (Great National Alliance, or GANA) coalition of the eventual winner (and Colom opponent) in the 2003 presidential elections, Óscar Berger. In those same elections, Pérez Molina was elected as a deputy to Guatemala's congress for the coalition.
In the 2007 general elections, one of the bloodiest ballots in Guatemala's history with over 50 candidates and activists slain, Pérez Molina ran against Álvaro Colom for the presidency, a ballot that he lost despite his advocacy of a mano dura (strong hand) policy against the country's criminals. During the trajectory of Pérez Molina's political life, both his son and daughter have been the victims of non-fatal attacks by gunmen, and at least eight members of the PP have been slain.
Over the years, however, security analysts and Guatemalan government officials say that Promotion 73 took on another, shadowy, but far more violent, role—that of El Sindicato. The syndicate immediately took its place as one of Guatemala's most powerful clandestine groups, and one whose struggle against La Cofradía must be understood in order to grasp the nature of the country's current demons.
Politics by Other Means
One of the most destructive influences on Guatemala's fragile state appears to have been the rise of the FRG party throughout the 1990s. Founded by former dictator Efraín Rios Montt in 1989, the FRG melded a virulent hatred of Guatemala's traditional economic elite with populist economic and social rhetoric that attempted to cast it as the voice of Guatemala's disenfranchised. This stance was especially ironic given the ghastly human rights abuses against Guatemala's indigenous population that were the hallmark of Rios Montt's tenure as president and the strong element of current and former military officials in the party's ranks.
In 1999, Alfonso Portillo, a former university professor who had killed two men during an altercation in Mexico while teaching there in 1982 (a fact he has never disputed), ran for the presidency under the FRG banner and won, ascending to the office the following year. Though Portillo's rhetoric adhered to progressive social-democratic goals, his tenure was marked by a high degree of corruption and political violence.
In 1996, shortly before Portillo attained the presidency, both he and Ortega Menaldo were implicated in a corruption scandal centering around Salvadoran-born Alfredo Moreno Molina. Originally working on counter-insurgency efforts within the Guatemalan military, Molina later was prosecuted for having set up a sophisticated corruption ring known as the Grupo Salvavidas or Lifesaver Group. Ortega Menaldo was subsequently dismissed from the military for his involvement in the affair, and Portillo admitted taking campaign contributions from Moreno. During Portillo's subsequent tenure as president, Ortega Menaldo served as one of his closest advisors. The power of Guatemala's already weak state, which has only 26,000 national police to control a country of some 13 million, eroded still further as the private security sector swelled to 120,000 individuals. A substantial number maintained links to organized crime.
"Before Portillo, these bodies were just giving security to some organized crime groups, but during Portillo they became contractors of the state," says José Carlos Marroquín, who served as chief strategist for Álvaro Colom during his presidential campaign. Eventually, Marroquín resigned, following threats from organized crime. For his efforts at cleaning up Guatemala's political system, Marroquín's Guatemala City home, where he lives with his wife and children, was raked with automatic weapons fire and set ablaze during a 10-minute assault last year.
"I don't measure the state by its size, I measure the state by its strength," continues Marroquín, who also says that clandestine armed groups have an interest in undermining the state. Waves of what would appear to be carefully organized violence would seem to support this. In February 2008, a dozen bus drivers in the capital were slain, while in November of the same year 15 people on a charter bus from Nicaragua were killed execution-style and their bodies set alight after passing into Guatemala.
Only days after turning over power to his elected successor, Óscar Berger, in 2004, Portillo fled to Mexico, where he remained until October 2008 despite a Mexican government order to extradite him back to Guatemala to face corruption charges. That month, Portillo announced that he would no longer fight extradition as he "trusted" the Guatemalan courts under Colom more than he did under Berger. Though rumors swirled that Portillo had helped fund part of Colom's election campaign from exile, none of these charges have been proven.
Though the FRG suffered badly in the 2007 elections, and its influence in Guatemala's congress has significantly diminished, its activities while controlling the presidency and the congress included extending state largess to former members of civil defense patrols formed as a counter-insurgency tool by Rios Montt a quarter century ago. These patrols have been implicated in gross human rights abuses. In today's Guatemala, some of the same regions where those patrols were the strongest, such as the jungle-covered department of El Petén, have now also become centers of illegal drug activity, with some of the same campesinos who once worked for the civil patrols now seizing land and clearing clandestine runways where drug planes can land. On one government map seen by this reporter, there were 31 such runways listed as existing in El Petén alone.
Add to this mix Central America's indigenous street gangs—particularly the MS-18 and MS-13 in Guatemala—and the terrible strains placed on Guatemala's fragile justice system become quite clear. This toxic brew of politicians, organized crime syndicates, street gangs, and foreign cartels, and the seeming inability of the justice system in Guatemala to address it, has led some observers to point to the Guatemalan state itself as part of the problem.
"There have been a number of cases where [the hidden powers] use the gangs as muscle," says a U.S. law enforcement official who has worked on drug trafficking and organized crime in Guatemala for over a decade, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "[But] there is a lack of in-depth investigations by the judicial sector....The Guatemalans have been slow in reacting to the real threat that exists."
Death in the Afternoon
One midday in June 2008, Vinicio Gomez, Álvaro Colom's Minister of Interior and widely regarded as an honest public official, boarded a helicopter piloted by a veteran of DEA missions in Colombia and Panama. Flying through a light rain over the department of Alta Verapaz, Gomez' helicopter crashed, killing him, the pilot, deputy minister Edgar Hernandez, and one other person. Though there was no major storm in the area, the official cause of the crash was attributed to bad weather.
According to a high-ranking official in the Colom government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in the months before the crash, Gomez had quarreled violently with Carlos Quintanilla, an associate of Ortega Menaldo who was at the time the head of the Secretaría de Asuntos Administrativos y de Seguridad (Secretariat for Administrative Matters and Security, or SAAS), the successor to the EMP responsible for the president's personal security. Those familiar with the conversation say that Quintanilla was vexed at Gomez's plan to deploy hundreds of troops and anti-drug agents along Guatemala's long border with Mexico, where cartel boss Juan Alberto "Chamalé" Ortiz López is thought to have been the first to use the Mexican Zetas in and around the city of Huehuetenango.
With the death of Gomez—a death that not a single government or civilian official I spoke with in Guatemala believes was an accident—an administration already handicapped in asserting its authority was further weakened. Subsequently, an arrest warrant was issued for Quintanilla, after Colom concluded that the security chief had planted surveillance devices in his home and offices at the behest of organized criminal gangs. Quintanilla has since gone to ground.
"Colom's guys are Ortega Menaldo's guys," says one Guatemalan government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, attempting to explain the Faustian bargain that Colom is said to have made for his own security. "He needed them as protection against Pérez Molina."
Such are the implications of political activity in Guatemala—that a long-time social democrat such as Colom might be forced to form an alliance, however temporary, with figures long rumored to be deeply enmeshed in organized crime. As if the suspicious death of Gomez was not enough, barely two months earlier, Victor Rivera, a Venezuelan citizen who had served as a long-time security advisor to several Guatemalan governments, was slain in a shooting in the capital. Dismissed by Colom only a week before for being "too independent," Rivera, though he denied any wrongdoing, was thought also to have been behind summary executions of suspected gang members throughout his tenure, a reputation that gained him as many admirers as critics in crime-weary Guatemala. This past August, the killing continued with the murder of Rigoberto Cucul, the former FRG-affiliated mayor of El Estor, a city near Morales, who perished in a hail of automatic weapons fire. Police had previously raided his home in search of narcotics but said they found only ammunition.
But perhaps no crime has shaken the foundations of Guatemala and its neighbors in recent years as much as the slaying of three Salvadoran representatives to the Central American Parliament, kidnapped and killed along with their driver, while traveling to Guatemala for a parliamentary meeting in February 2007. The victims included Eduardo Jose d'Aubuisson, the 32-year-old son of Roberto d'Aubuisson, an extreme rightist and founder of El Salvador's ruling ARENA party who died of cancer in 1991. The four bodies were found burned almost beyond recognition on a rural roadside after becoming separated from a larger convoy. It appears that the killings were linked to a power struggle for drug trafficking inside ARENA, though the motive is still murky.
The same month, four policemen being held in connection with the slayings were also murdered when gunmen entered the prison east of Guatemala City, where they were being held. The assassins were able somehow to reach their victims despite having to pass through eight sets of locked doors to get to their cells. And this past July, the judge in charge of investigating the murders was also slain. In September 2008, Guatemalan security forces arrested a former congressman and mayor, Manuel de Jesus Castillo, who is suspected of being one of the masterminds of the crime. Castillo had apparently been hiding in plain sight, living for months in his hometown of Jutiapa despite a January 2008 warrant for his arrest.
Added to the mix has been the curious behavior of the Salvadoran government itself. Despite strong statements from El Salvador's President Tony Saca and his public security minister, Rene Figueroa, that the culprits of the slayings of the parliamentarians must be found and punished, as of yet no investigation into the crime has been opened in El Salvador itself
.
Steps Toward Reform?
One hopeful development in Guatemala's struggle against organized crime has been the creation of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG), a United Nations-affiliated body charged with investigating organized crime's links to the state. Operational since the beginning of 2008, under its current mandate, the CICIG has the power to investigate a wide array of violent and organized crime and submit the evidence to Guatemala officials, but not the power to subpoena or indict. Carlos Castresana Fernández, a Spanish magistrate who previously worked for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in the drug-ravaged Mexican state of Nuevo León, and who has a long history of anti-corruption prosecutions in his native country, was appointed to head the body.
"A great problem of impunity exists in this country," Castresana told me in an interview in Guatemala City. "One of the biggest justifications for the creation of this commission is the existence of clandestine security apparatuses [in Guatemala] that have inserted themselves within the state institutions."
While policy makers and law enforcement officials in the United States are largely concentrating their energies on the war going on between narco-traffickers and the government of Mexican President Felipe Calderón, or lauding Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's strides against that country's 40-year-old, drug-financed insurgency, democracy in Guatemala—the most populous country in Central America—is fighting for its life against a rising tide of drug-related violence that has become inextricably linked with the country's political landscape.
The Merida Initiative, a multi-year U.S. proposal aiming to provide equipment, training, reform, and oversight to law enforcement agencies in the region, last year requested an initial $500 million for Mexico and $50 million for all of Central America. During fiscal year 2009, the U.S. government's budget proposal includes $450 million for Mexico and $100 million for Central America.
It is a paltry sum, many Guatemalans feel, given the challenges their nation will confront as it faces down the hidden powers.
"Guatemala is already a weak, almost non-existent, state that does not guarantee security or justice or health or education," says the human rights advocate Frank LaRue. "If the cartels from Mexico begin to move down and Guatemala completely collapses into their hands, then you will have a real problem."
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). He last reported for World Policy Journal from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Politics of brutality
NONFICTION | AN ENCOUNTER WITH HAITI
Politics of brutality
A veteran diplomat explores the minefields of Haiti after the ouster of Aristide
BY MICHAEL DEIBERT
AN ENCOUNTER WITH HAITI: Notes of a Special Adviser
Politics of brutality
A veteran diplomat explores the minefields of Haiti after the ouster of Aristide
BY MICHAEL DEIBERT
AN ENCOUNTER WITH HAITI: Notes of a Special Adviser
Reginald Dumas. Medianet. 313 pages. $24.95.
The Miami Herald
(Read the original article here)
A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Reginald Dumas was a veteran diplomat by the time then-United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed him as his Special Adviser on Haiti in February 2004. Dumas sorely needed those accumulated decades of experience as he arrived in the Caribbean nation only days after the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, with heavily armed factions still poised in opposition to one another and the future of Haiti's eight million-plus people far from certain.
Aristide's overthrow and its immediate aftermath forms the bulk of Dumas' highly readable and incisive examination of the way the international community has tried -- and often failed -- to engage constructively with Haiti in recent years. Though the book occasionally detours into accounts of arcane intra-agency squabbling, it nonetheless represents a welcome example of a Caribbean intellectual writing about Haiti's gifted, resourceful people and often shockingly brutal political culture with a clear-eyed, unsentimental gaze, something that has often been missing in regional discourses on the subject.
Dumas states flatly early on that Aristide ''had done a first-class job of helping dig his own political grave. . . . acquiring for himself a reputation at home which did not match the great respect with which he was held abroad.'' Recounting the burning down of opposition party houses and headquarters following an attack on Haiti's National Palace in December 2001, the collapse of a government-endorsed pyramid investment scheme in mid-2002 and the savage beating of students and faculty by mobs acting in collusion with police in December 2003, Dumas concludes that Aristide was ''engulfed . . . [by] the syndrome of the autocrat'' during his second mandate as Haiti's president, which commenced in February 2001.
In his account of his attempts to smooth the way for a U.N.-sanctioned peacekeeping mission (which currently numbers at around 9,000 and helped provide security for the presidential ballot that saw René Préval return to power in 2006), Dumas does not spare the international community his opprobrium.
Dumas recounts Haiti's long and tortuous relationship with the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM), of which it is the poorest and most populous member. He faults CARICOM for failing to recognize that there might be legitimate opposition to Aristide's rule and (unlike the U.N. or the Organization of American States) for endorsing the disputed May 2000 legislative elections as ``identifying with one of their own.''
Looking on in bemusement as Latin American nations such as Brazil and Chile move into the void left by CARICOM's ineffectualness, Dumas writes that Haiti's current plight is the end result of ''decades of foreign hostility, pillage and intervention, and of despotic and corrupt administration at home,'' to say nothing of the ''vibrant cynicism of the moneyed class'' there.
In using Haiti as a springboard to urge the clarification of future U.N. mandates and rules of engagement for peacekeeping missions, as well as for missions to include the sort of development work necessary for conflict-affected societies, Dumas makes his affection for the country and its citizens clear. Also clear is his frustration at the courtship dance Haiti engages in with the international community every couple of decades, a dance that leaves both sides feeling frustrated and misunderstood. In a plea that such mutual incomprehension not continue, Dumas ends his book with a quote from the British politician Paddy Ashdown, the former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, that ``we must remember that we cannot reconstruct states at the point of a bayonet, only with the support of the people. . . . Without that, we will fail.''
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Thoughts on Gaza from Sydney
Earlier this year, during a March attack against Gaza in which Israeli forces have killed at least 30 civilians, I wrote the following lines:
With that caveat, though. and though I know this comment will be viewed as needlessly provocative by some, the ghastly collective punishment that Israel is currently meting out to the Gazans seems could only seem to be viewed as a sensible foreign policy when one learned military tactics at the feet of Nazi Germany. If there is one thing that I have learned in reporting on conflicts throughout the world over the last decade, it is that you can't continually bomb civilians, kill women and children, drive people off their land, illegally build settlements and an apartheid wall and not expect that those people aren't going to seek revenge some day. And I think that any reasonable person could only conclude that the course Israel has been pursuing over the last 2-3 years, from its disastrous and brutal invasion of Lebanon until now, makes the likelihood of the destruction of the Jewish state in the Middle East greater, not less.
Watching the withering Israeli air attack on Gaza taking place this week, ostensibly aimed at neutralizing the Hamas Islamist government ruling the Palestinian territory (a government committed to Israel's destruction), it is hard to feel any need to retract those words. In attacks which have killed scores of Hamas fighters, as well as many, many civilians, including children, in one of the most densely-populated coastal strips in the world, Israel appears again to be pursuing a policy which is suicidal. In the name of defending its citizens against rockets that have, during recent weeks, killed two people, Israel has killed over 300 people killed in Gaza in the last three days, and has done a good job of playing into the hands of Hamas, who have seemed during recent years only too happy to serve up Palestinian civilians on a silver platter to the Israeli war machine.
It may be naive to hope that, with the incoming Obama administration, the government of the United States will cease pretending that Israeli lives are somehow worth more than Palestinian lives, but I feel that we must continue advocating that course of action, no matter how uncomfortable a spot that puts our new president in.
Though of mixed feelings on Bolivia’s president Evo Morales, I did enjoy one very memorable turn of phrase of his in recent years: If I can’t advance, push me.
Patriotism is sometimes pushing those, even those you greatly admire, to do the right thing.
May 2009 bring the peace to the Palestinians and Israelis that they have yet been unable to forge for themselves.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
2008: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By
I was fortunate enough this past year to report from five continents, something of a personal milestone for me. The work began in Paris and continued throughout Africa, including several months in the Democratic Republic of Congo which left me distressed at the plight of the civilians there and the international community's apparent inability or unwillingness to end their suffering. It continued with a return to Central America, where I was left charmed by Nicaragua, though dismayed at its political situation, and found Guatemala, that most evocative of Latin American countries, seemingly drowning in an ocean of blood and a hail of bullets. The results of my investigation into the causes of the latter will appear in the Winter 2008 edition of the World Policy Journal, published by the World Policy Institute in New York City.
Though such events do not leave one overly optimistic for the future, there was one notable cause for celebration this year: The election of Illinois Senator Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, the first African-American to hold that post. Obama’s election resulted in scenes of jubilation in the United States and beyond, and served as a powerful "answer," in Obama's words, to "anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy." After the eight disastrous years of the administration of George W. Bush, it is my hope that Obama lives up to the slogan that he used throughout his campaign, change we can believe in. The United States and the world at large certainly needs it.
Based in Australia for the next few months, where the affects of climate change are increasingly present, I hope that my travels in the coming year will enable me to report on a more humane, more just and more responsive world, where that which unites us as humanity proves stronger than that which divides us, and we prove ever less susceptible to those who would exploit such divisions.
What follows is my entire oeuvre of reportage from the year 2008. Hopefully it will be of some interest, and the stories of those contained within will hold some resonance.
Much love,
MD
The Cuba problem: A review of The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States and the Next Revolution by Daniel P. Erikson for the Miami Herald (7 December 2008)
Trial of Muslims grips Australians for the Washington Times (30 November 2008)
ECONOMY: EU Involvement in DRC Mining Project Draws Protest for the Inter Press Service (28 October 2008)
Mixed signals: What is an investor to make of Africa? for Foreign Direct Investment (7 October 2008)
Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline for Tierramérica (6 October 2008)
Nicaragua’s poisonous political brew for Folha de Sao Paulo (31 August 2008)
"Haiti Is Going From Catastrophe to Catastrophe": Michael Deibert interviews Chavannes Jean-Baptiste for the Inter Press Service (28 September 2008)
Congo: Between Hope and Despair for the World Policy Journal (Summer 2008)
Distilling the ties between Bacardi and Cuba: A review of Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba by Tom Gjelten for the Miami Herald (14 September 2008)
TRADE-AFRICA: New Technology to Sever Timber's Link to Conflict? for the Inter Press Service (8 August 2008)
CULTURE-ETHIOPIA: Debate Swirls Around Fate of Holy Sites for the Inter Press Service (3 July 2008)
A Glittering Demon: Mining, Poverty and Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo for CorpWatch (26 June 2008)
POLITICS: Is Democracy Dangerous in Multi-ethnic Societies? An interview with Frances Stewart, Oxford University Professor of Development Economics for the Inter Press Service (26 June 2008)
POLITICS-ETHIOPIA : A Tangled Political Landscape Raises Questions About African Ally of the U.S. for the Inter Press Service (21 June 2008)
Ethiopia's Urban Poor Cannot Afford To Eat: Interview with Abera Tola, Director of Oxfam's Horn of Africa regional office for the Inter Press Service (21 June 200*)
TRADE-AFRICA: EU Seeks to Subdue Competitive China for the Inter Press Service (15 May 2008)
RIGHTS: In South Africa, Zimbabwean Refugees Find Sanctuary and Contempt for the Inter Press Service (4 May 2008)
"We Mustn't Think as South Africans That We Have Won the Day": An interview with Bishop Paul Verryn for the Inter Press Service (4 May 2008)
DRC: With Rebel Leader's Indictment, a Tentative Step to Accountability for the Inter Press Service (1 May 2008)
HEALTH-DRC: Water Everywhere, But Is It Safe To Drink? for the Inter Press Service (24 April 2008)
POLITICS-DRC: Cautious Calm Settles Over War-scarred Ituri Region for the Inter Press Service (17 April 2008)
Why I am voting for Barack Obama for Michael Deibert, Writer (15 April 2008)
Extraction from chaos: Embattled by war and corruption but laden with large deposits of diamonds and copper, DR Congo is largely avoided by investors. Might that change? for Foreign Direct Investment (10 April 2008)
The Fruits of Reform: Mozambique, whose history has been blighted by a long liberation struggle and years of civil war, is starting to reap the benefits of recent macroeconomic reforms for Foreign Direct Investment (10 April 2008)
Failure To Renew DRC Expert's Mandate Draws Criticism for the Inter Press Service (1 April 2008)
POLITICS-DRC: In a Governmental Vacuum, Yearnings for a Lost Empire for the Inter Press Service (21 March 2008)
A Review of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment for Michael Deibert, Writer (16 March 2008)
A Humanitarian Disaster Unfolds in Eastern DRC for the Inter Press Service (1 March 2008)
Fidel's view: A Review of Fidel Castro: My Life by Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet for the Miami Herald (27 January 2008)
Though such events do not leave one overly optimistic for the future, there was one notable cause for celebration this year: The election of Illinois Senator Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, the first African-American to hold that post. Obama’s election resulted in scenes of jubilation in the United States and beyond, and served as a powerful "answer," in Obama's words, to "anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy." After the eight disastrous years of the administration of George W. Bush, it is my hope that Obama lives up to the slogan that he used throughout his campaign, change we can believe in. The United States and the world at large certainly needs it.
Based in Australia for the next few months, where the affects of climate change are increasingly present, I hope that my travels in the coming year will enable me to report on a more humane, more just and more responsive world, where that which unites us as humanity proves stronger than that which divides us, and we prove ever less susceptible to those who would exploit such divisions.
What follows is my entire oeuvre of reportage from the year 2008. Hopefully it will be of some interest, and the stories of those contained within will hold some resonance.
Much love,
MD
The Cuba problem: A review of The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States and the Next Revolution by Daniel P. Erikson for the Miami Herald (7 December 2008)
Trial of Muslims grips Australians for the Washington Times (30 November 2008)
ECONOMY: EU Involvement in DRC Mining Project Draws Protest for the Inter Press Service (28 October 2008)
Mixed signals: What is an investor to make of Africa? for Foreign Direct Investment (7 October 2008)
Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline for Tierramérica (6 October 2008)
Nicaragua’s poisonous political brew for Folha de Sao Paulo (31 August 2008)
"Haiti Is Going From Catastrophe to Catastrophe": Michael Deibert interviews Chavannes Jean-Baptiste for the Inter Press Service (28 September 2008)
Congo: Between Hope and Despair for the World Policy Journal (Summer 2008)
Distilling the ties between Bacardi and Cuba: A review of Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba by Tom Gjelten for the Miami Herald (14 September 2008)
TRADE-AFRICA: New Technology to Sever Timber's Link to Conflict? for the Inter Press Service (8 August 2008)
CULTURE-ETHIOPIA: Debate Swirls Around Fate of Holy Sites for the Inter Press Service (3 July 2008)
A Glittering Demon: Mining, Poverty and Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo for CorpWatch (26 June 2008)
POLITICS: Is Democracy Dangerous in Multi-ethnic Societies? An interview with Frances Stewart, Oxford University Professor of Development Economics for the Inter Press Service (26 June 2008)
POLITICS-ETHIOPIA : A Tangled Political Landscape Raises Questions About African Ally of the U.S. for the Inter Press Service (21 June 2008)
Ethiopia's Urban Poor Cannot Afford To Eat: Interview with Abera Tola, Director of Oxfam's Horn of Africa regional office for the Inter Press Service (21 June 200*)
TRADE-AFRICA: EU Seeks to Subdue Competitive China for the Inter Press Service (15 May 2008)
RIGHTS: In South Africa, Zimbabwean Refugees Find Sanctuary and Contempt for the Inter Press Service (4 May 2008)
"We Mustn't Think as South Africans That We Have Won the Day": An interview with Bishop Paul Verryn for the Inter Press Service (4 May 2008)
DRC: With Rebel Leader's Indictment, a Tentative Step to Accountability for the Inter Press Service (1 May 2008)
HEALTH-DRC: Water Everywhere, But Is It Safe To Drink? for the Inter Press Service (24 April 2008)
POLITICS-DRC: Cautious Calm Settles Over War-scarred Ituri Region for the Inter Press Service (17 April 2008)
Why I am voting for Barack Obama for Michael Deibert, Writer (15 April 2008)
Extraction from chaos: Embattled by war and corruption but laden with large deposits of diamonds and copper, DR Congo is largely avoided by investors. Might that change? for Foreign Direct Investment (10 April 2008)
The Fruits of Reform: Mozambique, whose history has been blighted by a long liberation struggle and years of civil war, is starting to reap the benefits of recent macroeconomic reforms for Foreign Direct Investment (10 April 2008)
Failure To Renew DRC Expert's Mandate Draws Criticism for the Inter Press Service (1 April 2008)
POLITICS-DRC: In a Governmental Vacuum, Yearnings for a Lost Empire for the Inter Press Service (21 March 2008)
A Review of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment for Michael Deibert, Writer (16 March 2008)
A Humanitarian Disaster Unfolds in Eastern DRC for the Inter Press Service (1 March 2008)
Fidel's view: A Review of Fidel Castro: My Life by Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet for the Miami Herald (27 January 2008)
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Notes from a southern country
We are settling into life here in Sydney, amidst temperamental weather that provides us with sunshine and blue skies in the afternoon and sweeping, chilly winds in the mornings and evenings. Lorikeets serenade us in the garden out back, we get to know the local butcher, the grocer, the coffee vendor and the like, and, from the perch of a place that I never thought I’d live, I discover the convict history of Robert Hughes, re-discover the songwriting of Paul Kelly and the music of the Warumpi Band, and become enthused with the idea of tracking my way across an immense and sparely-populated continent and elsewhere along the Pacific rim. Across a churn of water, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and beyond .
The world is throwing us some curveballas these days. The events in Mumbai, with their apparent links to Kashmir, continue to reverberate, as I read my good friend Mira Kamdar’s heartfelt and heart-rending article about the deaths of her cousin Reshma and Reshma’s husband Sunil at the Oberoi hotel in last week’s Washington Post. Back in my native land of the United States, factory workers, in a show of unity that I strongly support, are occupying the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago, with president-elect Barrack Obama saying that “The workers are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned. I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy.” In Miami, a city where I lived briefly, the situation has gotten so bad that the group Take Back the Land is relocating homeless people illegally into foreclosed homes. From this quiet street in Sydney, it appears that there still is much to do to make the world whole again, if it ever was.
Christmas approaches these palm-dotted shores, and much work awaits.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
The Cuba problem
Posted on Sun, Dec. 07, 2008
The Cuba problem
By Michael Deibert
The Miami Herald
The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States and the Next Revolution.
Daniel P. Erikson. Bloomsbury. 333 pages. $28.
NONFICTION | THE CUBA WARS
(Read the original article here)
As a chronicle of 50 years of failed foreign policy, Daniel P. Erikson's new book should be studied by officials of the incoming Obama administration lest they repeat the folly of past U.S. governments.
The story of how the authoritarian ruler of a Caribbean island of 11 million people bested 10 U.S. presidents and managed to survive all attempts to oust him serves as an object lesson of how wishful thinking is no substitute for a policy based on facts.
For too long, Erikson argues, a coherent strategy in dealing with Cuba has been subsumed in favor of an ill-conceived ''biological solution'' (awaiting the inevitable demise of Fidel Castro) and a well-organized though numerically small bloc of Cuban-American political operators and their supporters in the U.S. Congress.
''While the death of Fidel will remain an extraordinarily significant political moment when it finally occurs, its impact will necessarily be diluted by the simple fact that he is no longer Cuba's president,'' writes Erikson, referring to Castro's February 2008 resignation.
Despite ample warnings of Castro's failing health, such as a well-publicized fainting spell in 2001, the best response U.S. politicians could muster in recent years was to further curtail trade and the travel of American citizens going to Cuba -- the sort of move the Cuban government long practiced on its own people -- and providing shelter to the likes of Luis Posada Carriles, an anti-Castro militant wanted in Venezuela for his alleged involvement in a 1976 airplane bombing that killed 73 people.
Erikson, who serves as senior associate for U.S. policy and director of Caribbean programs for the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C., argues that such a response was hardly robust enough against a surprisingly resilient adversary.
Erikson does a good job of outlining the Cuban government's ability to manipulate international upheaval to its benefit, such as timing a 2003 crackdown on internal dissent, which saw 75 Cubans sentenced to a total of 1,400 years in prison, so that most of the world's attention was occupied with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
If there is any point that Erikson's book truly brings home, though, it is that the intellectual bankruptcy of U.S. policy toward Cuba cuts across the political spectrum. The Communist regime's supporters in Congress reveal themselves to be every bit as close-minded as some of its most strident critics, and neither side is willing to commit to substantive discussions with the other. Anti-Castro Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the South Florida congressman,speaks knowingly of the situation in Cuba and advocates unyielding policies though he has not lived on the island for decades. But Castro's defenders, such as California congresswoman Maxine Waters, turn absurdly mawkish when they consider the demise of the country's one-party, totalitarian state.
''I like him and consider him a friend,'' Waters says of Castro, admitting that she is ''not psychologically prepared'' to consider the possibility of the Cuban leader shuffling off this mortal coil.
The Cuba Wars has its weaknesses. James Cason, the Bush administration's feisty chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 2002 until 2005, holds forth over many pages, but the insight we get about Cuba's ruling clutch of aging autocrats comes mostly from second-hand allegories and their public statements, which more often than not slide into mothballed revolutionary histrionics. There is also some regrettable sloppiness on detail: The patois dialect spoken in Jamaica is referred to as ''Creole,'' and a famous image by the photographer Robert Capa of a Loyalist fighter falling in combat during the Spanish Civil War is erroneously referred to as depicting ``a journalist.''
Still, The Cuba Wars provides a valuable glimpse inside the U.S. decision-making process with regards to one of its oldest and seemingly most intractable international disputes. When Erikson writes that his book was composed with the hope of making policymakers take ''a hard look at the reality as it is, not as we would like it to be,'' one can only hope that the incoming administration takes those as words to live by, not only for Cuba but also for foreign-policy pursuits far beyond its palm-fringed shores.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.
The Cuba problem
By Michael Deibert
The Miami Herald
The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States and the Next Revolution.
Daniel P. Erikson. Bloomsbury. 333 pages. $28.
NONFICTION | THE CUBA WARS
(Read the original article here)
As a chronicle of 50 years of failed foreign policy, Daniel P. Erikson's new book should be studied by officials of the incoming Obama administration lest they repeat the folly of past U.S. governments.
The story of how the authoritarian ruler of a Caribbean island of 11 million people bested 10 U.S. presidents and managed to survive all attempts to oust him serves as an object lesson of how wishful thinking is no substitute for a policy based on facts.
For too long, Erikson argues, a coherent strategy in dealing with Cuba has been subsumed in favor of an ill-conceived ''biological solution'' (awaiting the inevitable demise of Fidel Castro) and a well-organized though numerically small bloc of Cuban-American political operators and their supporters in the U.S. Congress.
''While the death of Fidel will remain an extraordinarily significant political moment when it finally occurs, its impact will necessarily be diluted by the simple fact that he is no longer Cuba's president,'' writes Erikson, referring to Castro's February 2008 resignation.
Despite ample warnings of Castro's failing health, such as a well-publicized fainting spell in 2001, the best response U.S. politicians could muster in recent years was to further curtail trade and the travel of American citizens going to Cuba -- the sort of move the Cuban government long practiced on its own people -- and providing shelter to the likes of Luis Posada Carriles, an anti-Castro militant wanted in Venezuela for his alleged involvement in a 1976 airplane bombing that killed 73 people.
Erikson, who serves as senior associate for U.S. policy and director of Caribbean programs for the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C., argues that such a response was hardly robust enough against a surprisingly resilient adversary.
Erikson does a good job of outlining the Cuban government's ability to manipulate international upheaval to its benefit, such as timing a 2003 crackdown on internal dissent, which saw 75 Cubans sentenced to a total of 1,400 years in prison, so that most of the world's attention was occupied with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
If there is any point that Erikson's book truly brings home, though, it is that the intellectual bankruptcy of U.S. policy toward Cuba cuts across the political spectrum. The Communist regime's supporters in Congress reveal themselves to be every bit as close-minded as some of its most strident critics, and neither side is willing to commit to substantive discussions with the other. Anti-Castro Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the South Florida congressman,speaks knowingly of the situation in Cuba and advocates unyielding policies though he has not lived on the island for decades. But Castro's defenders, such as California congresswoman Maxine Waters, turn absurdly mawkish when they consider the demise of the country's one-party, totalitarian state.
''I like him and consider him a friend,'' Waters says of Castro, admitting that she is ''not psychologically prepared'' to consider the possibility of the Cuban leader shuffling off this mortal coil.
The Cuba Wars has its weaknesses. James Cason, the Bush administration's feisty chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 2002 until 2005, holds forth over many pages, but the insight we get about Cuba's ruling clutch of aging autocrats comes mostly from second-hand allegories and their public statements, which more often than not slide into mothballed revolutionary histrionics. There is also some regrettable sloppiness on detail: The patois dialect spoken in Jamaica is referred to as ''Creole,'' and a famous image by the photographer Robert Capa of a Loyalist fighter falling in combat during the Spanish Civil War is erroneously referred to as depicting ``a journalist.''
Still, The Cuba Wars provides a valuable glimpse inside the U.S. decision-making process with regards to one of its oldest and seemingly most intractable international disputes. When Erikson writes that his book was composed with the hope of making policymakers take ''a hard look at the reality as it is, not as we would like it to be,'' one can only hope that the incoming administration takes those as words to live by, not only for Cuba but also for foreign-policy pursuits far beyond its palm-fringed shores.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Seven years after radio journalist’s murder, convicted killers still at large
(Note: Two years ago I wrote this regarding the Brignol Lindor case in Haiti. In early 2007, correcting a poorly-worded Amnesty International release, I wrote this regarding the case. At this time next year, will we still sit wondering when justice will be served for the murder of this journalist in Haiti? MD)
HAITI
Seven years after radio journalist’s murder, convicted killers still at large
Reporters sans frontières
(Read the original article here)
Justice has still not been fully rendered in the case of Brignol Lindor, a young radio journalist who was murdered in a particularly barbaric manner in the southwestern town of Petit-Goâve exactly seven years ago today, although two individuals implicated in his murder were given life sentences in December 2007, Reporters Without Borders said.
Seven other people who were convicted in absentia of his murder in January of this year (see 25 January press release) are still on the run, Reporters Without Borders pointed out, adding that it hoped the appointment of Lindor family lawyer Jean Joseph Exumé as justice minister on 7 November will bring complete closure to a case that has dragged on too long.
"The political will demonstrated by President René Préval's government helped to put an end to the scandal of a case in which there was complete impunity for six years, and at the same time there has been an overall improvement in press freedom in Haiti," Reporters Without Borders said.
"But the political and judicial authorities cannot content themselves with the trials of the past year, which left the fate of seven convicted killers in limbo and failed to shed light on the then municipal government's apparent implication," the press freedom organisation added.
A journalist with local Radio Echo 2000, Lindor was stoned and hacked to death on 3 December 2001 in Petit-Goâve by members of Domi Nan Bwa ("Sleep in the Woods"), a locally-based armed group linked to Fanmi Lavalas, the party led by then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Four days before the murder, a press conference was held in Petit-Goâve by several local figures linked to Fanmi Lavalas, including Petit-Goâve mayor Emmanuel Antoine and his deputy, Bony Dumay, who launched into a violent verbal attack on the opposition Democratic Convergence coalition and Lindor, considered to be one of its allies. Another meeting was held three days later, the eve of his murder, this time between municipal officials and members of Domi Nan Bwa.
One of Domi Nan Bwa's chiefs, Joseph Céus Duverger, was attacked the next morning by presumed Democratic Convergence supporters. This incident was used as a pretext for the targeted reprisal against Lindor later in the day. Evidence of this comes from the fact that around 10 Domi Nan Bwa members were on the point of executing Democratic Convergence member Love Augustin at his home but, when Lindor arrived on the scene, they let him go and seized Lindor.
Despite all the evidence, the indictment issued by judge Fritzner Duclair on 16 September 2002 failed to bring charges against any of the presumed instigators of Lindor's murder.
After five years of inaction, the case was revived in 2007 when arrests warrants were issued for the persons named in the indictment. Four were arrested but only two of them were convicted and given life sentences - Joubert Saint-Juste and Jean-Rémy Démosthène. One of the other two, Simon Cétoute, 57, was acquitted because it turned out he had been arrested instead of his son, who had the same first name and who had recently died in the nearby town of Léogane.
And it emerged that the fourth defendant, Fritzner Doudoute, was mistaken at the time of his arrest for Fritznel Doudoute, and had not been named in either the 2002 indictment or in the arrest warrant issued last year. Nonetheless, witnesses identified him in court as one of the people who participated in Lindor's murder. He therefore remained in detention and is to be the subject of a new judicial investigation that could also target Dumay, the former deputy mayor, who was summoned to testify at the trial.
Fritznel Doudoute, also known as Lionel and Nènèl, was one the seven indicted Domi Nan Bwa members who were convicted in absentia on 23 January of this year by Petit-Goâve chief judge Emmanuel Tataye, who also ordered the seizure of all their possessions and assets and the suspension of their civil and political rights. The other six were Maxi Zéphyr, Bernard Désamour, Tyrésias also known as Téré, Fritznel Duvergé, Mackenzi and Belony Colin.
HAITI
Seven years after radio journalist’s murder, convicted killers still at large
Reporters sans frontières
(Read the original article here)
Justice has still not been fully rendered in the case of Brignol Lindor, a young radio journalist who was murdered in a particularly barbaric manner in the southwestern town of Petit-Goâve exactly seven years ago today, although two individuals implicated in his murder were given life sentences in December 2007, Reporters Without Borders said.
Seven other people who were convicted in absentia of his murder in January of this year (see 25 January press release) are still on the run, Reporters Without Borders pointed out, adding that it hoped the appointment of Lindor family lawyer Jean Joseph Exumé as justice minister on 7 November will bring complete closure to a case that has dragged on too long.
"The political will demonstrated by President René Préval's government helped to put an end to the scandal of a case in which there was complete impunity for six years, and at the same time there has been an overall improvement in press freedom in Haiti," Reporters Without Borders said.
"But the political and judicial authorities cannot content themselves with the trials of the past year, which left the fate of seven convicted killers in limbo and failed to shed light on the then municipal government's apparent implication," the press freedom organisation added.
A journalist with local Radio Echo 2000, Lindor was stoned and hacked to death on 3 December 2001 in Petit-Goâve by members of Domi Nan Bwa ("Sleep in the Woods"), a locally-based armed group linked to Fanmi Lavalas, the party led by then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Four days before the murder, a press conference was held in Petit-Goâve by several local figures linked to Fanmi Lavalas, including Petit-Goâve mayor Emmanuel Antoine and his deputy, Bony Dumay, who launched into a violent verbal attack on the opposition Democratic Convergence coalition and Lindor, considered to be one of its allies. Another meeting was held three days later, the eve of his murder, this time between municipal officials and members of Domi Nan Bwa.
One of Domi Nan Bwa's chiefs, Joseph Céus Duverger, was attacked the next morning by presumed Democratic Convergence supporters. This incident was used as a pretext for the targeted reprisal against Lindor later in the day. Evidence of this comes from the fact that around 10 Domi Nan Bwa members were on the point of executing Democratic Convergence member Love Augustin at his home but, when Lindor arrived on the scene, they let him go and seized Lindor.
Despite all the evidence, the indictment issued by judge Fritzner Duclair on 16 September 2002 failed to bring charges against any of the presumed instigators of Lindor's murder.
After five years of inaction, the case was revived in 2007 when arrests warrants were issued for the persons named in the indictment. Four were arrested but only two of them were convicted and given life sentences - Joubert Saint-Juste and Jean-Rémy Démosthène. One of the other two, Simon Cétoute, 57, was acquitted because it turned out he had been arrested instead of his son, who had the same first name and who had recently died in the nearby town of Léogane.
And it emerged that the fourth defendant, Fritzner Doudoute, was mistaken at the time of his arrest for Fritznel Doudoute, and had not been named in either the 2002 indictment or in the arrest warrant issued last year. Nonetheless, witnesses identified him in court as one of the people who participated in Lindor's murder. He therefore remained in detention and is to be the subject of a new judicial investigation that could also target Dumay, the former deputy mayor, who was summoned to testify at the trial.
Fritznel Doudoute, also known as Lionel and Nènèl, was one the seven indicted Domi Nan Bwa members who were convicted in absentia on 23 January of this year by Petit-Goâve chief judge Emmanuel Tataye, who also ordered the seizure of all their possessions and assets and the suspension of their civil and political rights. The other six were Maxi Zéphyr, Bernard Désamour, Tyrésias also known as Téré, Fritznel Duvergé, Mackenzi and Belony Colin.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Trial of Muslims grips Australians
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Trial of Muslims grips Australians
By Michael Deibert
The Washington Times
(Read the original article here)
SYDNEY, Australia | Australians are closely following the trial of five Muslims charged with plotting a terrorist attack on Australian soil.
While few details have been released about the target of the plot, the prosecution says the men tried to obtain sulfuric acid, acetone and other chemicals that could be used in explosives and that they buried weapons and ammunition in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. Police raids on the homes of the five, who were arrested in 2005 and face life in prison if convicted, are said to have turned up a trove of extremist literature and videos.
The trial, which started on Nov. 11 and could last up to a year, is the latest high-profile event to focus attention on the area's Muslim community -- a small minority of Australia's population.
According to an annual International Religious Freedom report released by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, 67 percent of Australia´s citizens considered themselves to be Christian and 1.5 percent identify themselves as Muslim -- slightly more than 280,000 out of a population of 20.5 million.
Sydney, this vast and sparsely-populated country’s most populous city, has long been the disembarkation point for new arrivals to Australia since the first landing by British captain James Cook at nearby Botany Bay in 1770. In recent years, as typified by the Sydney terror trial, it has also become ground zero for the often tense relationships between Anglo-Australians and the country’s Muslim population, who often are of Middle Eastern or Asian descent.
In recent years, as typified by the terrorism trial, it has also become the site of tensions between Anglo-Australians and Muslim immigrants of Middle Eastern and Asian origin. The disputes have sometimes spilled over into violence, particularly among the young.
Three years ago, the seafront Sydney suburb of Cronulla was shaken by mob violence that saw more than 30 people injured and a similar number arrested over a contested strip of beach. Encouraged by some Sydney talk-radio hosts, a crowd of 5,000 Anglo-Australians gathered to "reclaim" the beach at Cronulla, besieging people of Middle Eastern appearance and fighting with the authorities after several off-duty lifeguards were said to have been beaten by a gang of Middle Eastern youths.
Though some fences have been mended since the upheaval, which came on the heels of a gang rape spree by a group of Lebanese-Australian youths in Sydney, and statements by Taj Din al-Hilali. an Egyptian-born, self-proclaimed spokesman for Australia’s Muslim community, that the September 11th attacks in the United States were “God’s work against oppressors,” many fear that a signifiant social fracture remains.
Though relations improved since then, many fear that a significant social fracture remains.
"For a lot of Anglo-Australians, the riots are over and done with, but for Muslim Australians it still has an impact on where they choose to go and spend their weekends," said Amanda Wise, a senior fellow at the Center for Research on Social Inclusion at Sydney's Macquarie University.
"In a sense, the tensions are not as hot as they were, but that's because the groups are not mixing as much as they were. It's more a low-level distrust and disengagement," she said.
This year, on Sept. 11, an online game designed by an Australian programmer titled "Muslim Massacre" was provided free over the Internet. The stated aim of the game is to "wipe out the Muslim race with an arsenal of the world's most destructive weapons."
Australian police promised to investigate whether the game violated counterterrorism legislation or statutes forbidding incitement of ethnic violence, but so far no action has been taken.
The election late last year of Australia's first Labor government since 1996, headed by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and the withdrawal of Australia's combat forces from Iraq in 2008 have failed to reduce levels of distrust significantly.
"In some circles, things have gotten better, and in other areas, the level of apprehension and dislike for Muslims has grown tremendously," said Keysar Trad, a former spokesman for Mr. al-Hilali, who in 2003 formed the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.
International terrorism has had a strong impact on Australia even though no attacks have yet taken place on its shores. The October 2002 attack on a tourist district on the Indonesian island of Bali killed 202 people, 88 of whom were Australian, while a second attack there in 2005 killed four Australians.
The three men convicted of the 2002 bombing were executed by firing squad in Indonesia this month.
Australia's most prominent contribution to the annals of international terrorism came not from the country's Middle Eastern or South Asian communities, but in the unlikely person of David Hicks, a hapless former kangaroo skinner swept up amidst the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Imprisoned for six years in Guantanamo Bay, Hicks pled guilty to the charge of supporting terrorism and training with al Qaeda in exchange for being permitted to serve out the remainder of his sentence in Australia. Released late last year, Hicks is under a court-mandated control order that enforces a midnight-to-dawn curfew and restricts his travel and communications.
Still, many Australian Muslims see their community as unfairly depicted as one of outsiders or agitators.
At a mosque in Sydney's downtown Surry Hills district one recent Friday, hundreds of worshippers were preparing to disperse after afternoon prayers.
"It's all to do with perception. People fear what they don't understand," said Bill Chahine, a 25 year-old Australian of Lebanese descent who works as a project manager for a Sydney real estate firm.
Mr. Chahine, who enjoys cricket and Australian-rules football, said he is comfortable with his dual identity as an Australian and a Muslim.
"I was born here, raised here and educated here," he said. "There's no clash of cultures or values with the Anglo-Saxon community as far as I'm concerned.
Trial of Muslims grips Australians
By Michael Deibert
The Washington Times
(Read the original article here)
SYDNEY, Australia | Australians are closely following the trial of five Muslims charged with plotting a terrorist attack on Australian soil.
While few details have been released about the target of the plot, the prosecution says the men tried to obtain sulfuric acid, acetone and other chemicals that could be used in explosives and that they buried weapons and ammunition in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. Police raids on the homes of the five, who were arrested in 2005 and face life in prison if convicted, are said to have turned up a trove of extremist literature and videos.
The trial, which started on Nov. 11 and could last up to a year, is the latest high-profile event to focus attention on the area's Muslim community -- a small minority of Australia's population.
According to an annual International Religious Freedom report released by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, 67 percent of Australia´s citizens considered themselves to be Christian and 1.5 percent identify themselves as Muslim -- slightly more than 280,000 out of a population of 20.5 million.
Sydney, this vast and sparsely-populated country’s most populous city, has long been the disembarkation point for new arrivals to Australia since the first landing by British captain James Cook at nearby Botany Bay in 1770. In recent years, as typified by the Sydney terror trial, it has also become ground zero for the often tense relationships between Anglo-Australians and the country’s Muslim population, who often are of Middle Eastern or Asian descent.
In recent years, as typified by the terrorism trial, it has also become the site of tensions between Anglo-Australians and Muslim immigrants of Middle Eastern and Asian origin. The disputes have sometimes spilled over into violence, particularly among the young.
Three years ago, the seafront Sydney suburb of Cronulla was shaken by mob violence that saw more than 30 people injured and a similar number arrested over a contested strip of beach. Encouraged by some Sydney talk-radio hosts, a crowd of 5,000 Anglo-Australians gathered to "reclaim" the beach at Cronulla, besieging people of Middle Eastern appearance and fighting with the authorities after several off-duty lifeguards were said to have been beaten by a gang of Middle Eastern youths.
Though some fences have been mended since the upheaval, which came on the heels of a gang rape spree by a group of Lebanese-Australian youths in Sydney, and statements by Taj Din al-Hilali. an Egyptian-born, self-proclaimed spokesman for Australia’s Muslim community, that the September 11th attacks in the United States were “God’s work against oppressors,” many fear that a signifiant social fracture remains.
Though relations improved since then, many fear that a significant social fracture remains.
"For a lot of Anglo-Australians, the riots are over and done with, but for Muslim Australians it still has an impact on where they choose to go and spend their weekends," said Amanda Wise, a senior fellow at the Center for Research on Social Inclusion at Sydney's Macquarie University.
"In a sense, the tensions are not as hot as they were, but that's because the groups are not mixing as much as they were. It's more a low-level distrust and disengagement," she said.
This year, on Sept. 11, an online game designed by an Australian programmer titled "Muslim Massacre" was provided free over the Internet. The stated aim of the game is to "wipe out the Muslim race with an arsenal of the world's most destructive weapons."
Australian police promised to investigate whether the game violated counterterrorism legislation or statutes forbidding incitement of ethnic violence, but so far no action has been taken.
The election late last year of Australia's first Labor government since 1996, headed by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and the withdrawal of Australia's combat forces from Iraq in 2008 have failed to reduce levels of distrust significantly.
"In some circles, things have gotten better, and in other areas, the level of apprehension and dislike for Muslims has grown tremendously," said Keysar Trad, a former spokesman for Mr. al-Hilali, who in 2003 formed the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.
International terrorism has had a strong impact on Australia even though no attacks have yet taken place on its shores. The October 2002 attack on a tourist district on the Indonesian island of Bali killed 202 people, 88 of whom were Australian, while a second attack there in 2005 killed four Australians.
The three men convicted of the 2002 bombing were executed by firing squad in Indonesia this month.
Australia's most prominent contribution to the annals of international terrorism came not from the country's Middle Eastern or South Asian communities, but in the unlikely person of David Hicks, a hapless former kangaroo skinner swept up amidst the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Imprisoned for six years in Guantanamo Bay, Hicks pled guilty to the charge of supporting terrorism and training with al Qaeda in exchange for being permitted to serve out the remainder of his sentence in Australia. Released late last year, Hicks is under a court-mandated control order that enforces a midnight-to-dawn curfew and restricts his travel and communications.
Still, many Australian Muslims see their community as unfairly depicted as one of outsiders or agitators.
At a mosque in Sydney's downtown Surry Hills district one recent Friday, hundreds of worshippers were preparing to disperse after afternoon prayers.
"It's all to do with perception. People fear what they don't understand," said Bill Chahine, a 25 year-old Australian of Lebanese descent who works as a project manager for a Sydney real estate firm.
Mr. Chahine, who enjoys cricket and Australian-rules football, said he is comfortable with his dual identity as an Australian and a Muslim.
"I was born here, raised here and educated here," he said. "There's no clash of cultures or values with the Anglo-Saxon community as far as I'm concerned.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Thoughts on Mumbai from Sydney
I woke up today to blue skies in Sydney and rolled out of bed with a receive-and-transmit section for my new Australia book already in my head. After a bit of writing, I logged on to the internet to find that unspeakable horror had been visited upon Bombay, known better known as Mumbai, while I slept, with places that I knew intimately targeted in an apparently tightly-coordinated series of terrorist attacks that at this writing have killed at least 80 people.
I lived in Mumbai - which I always preferred to call Bombay - for the first few months of 2007, and became quite fascinated the city, which was at once engaging intellectually and visually even as its pollution was often wretched for the health and the grinding poverty on display often brutal to the soul. Yet I have such fond memories of my walks around my old neighborhood of Colaba, of the chai I would have at a Parsi café in the Fort Area, with it great book stalls, and of strolling through the always-crowded Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) as I would head to visit friends out in Bandra, or to the Dharavi slum for reporting work. Despite my keen awareness of the inequalities in India, and the not-infrequent scapegoating of religious and ethnic minorities that the chauvinistic Hindu right often engages in, I was never made to feel anything less than welcome there, and was greeted with great warmth and hospitality by my friends in the city.
And now I read that the Taj Mahal hotel, which I frequently walked by and in whose lobby I paused from time to time, has been turned into a place of slaughter, that, in Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, where I remember poor families with their belongings tied together with rags waiting to take a train and beggars asking for alms, people have been mowed down for some sort of obscene motive, for some absurd political or religious end. Could the weathered pages of the Koran or the Ramayana or the Bible or the Talmud ever condone such actions of cowardice? Is their God so feeble that he would approve of leveling an assault rifle at a defenseless person? Would anything that cowardly be worth worshiping?
I think of these questions, having confronted religious and political fanaticism in various forms in various countries throughout my career as a journalist. Though it is still early, I wouldn’t be surpired to find out that the perpetrators of this crime are cut from the same cloth of those who often (though not always) commit extreme acts in this context: impoverished, disenfranchised and poorly educated, heads filled with visions of glory and martyrdom by someone who always remains in the shadows, and does well to protect his own family from either slaughter or martyrdom.
I think of the people in the city - that panoply of faces from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Kashmir and elsewhere that I met - as I sit here on this sunny morning in Sydney. I can still smell the channa masala and hear the clink of the glass of cane juice as a vendor scoops it out for a street boy to slake his thirst.
Bombay, meri jaan, I hope that you recover.
I lived in Mumbai - which I always preferred to call Bombay - for the first few months of 2007, and became quite fascinated the city, which was at once engaging intellectually and visually even as its pollution was often wretched for the health and the grinding poverty on display often brutal to the soul. Yet I have such fond memories of my walks around my old neighborhood of Colaba, of the chai I would have at a Parsi café in the Fort Area, with it great book stalls, and of strolling through the always-crowded Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) as I would head to visit friends out in Bandra, or to the Dharavi slum for reporting work. Despite my keen awareness of the inequalities in India, and the not-infrequent scapegoating of religious and ethnic minorities that the chauvinistic Hindu right often engages in, I was never made to feel anything less than welcome there, and was greeted with great warmth and hospitality by my friends in the city.
And now I read that the Taj Mahal hotel, which I frequently walked by and in whose lobby I paused from time to time, has been turned into a place of slaughter, that, in Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, where I remember poor families with their belongings tied together with rags waiting to take a train and beggars asking for alms, people have been mowed down for some sort of obscene motive, for some absurd political or religious end. Could the weathered pages of the Koran or the Ramayana or the Bible or the Talmud ever condone such actions of cowardice? Is their God so feeble that he would approve of leveling an assault rifle at a defenseless person? Would anything that cowardly be worth worshiping?
I think of these questions, having confronted religious and political fanaticism in various forms in various countries throughout my career as a journalist. Though it is still early, I wouldn’t be surpired to find out that the perpetrators of this crime are cut from the same cloth of those who often (though not always) commit extreme acts in this context: impoverished, disenfranchised and poorly educated, heads filled with visions of glory and martyrdom by someone who always remains in the shadows, and does well to protect his own family from either slaughter or martyrdom.
I think of the people in the city - that panoply of faces from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Kashmir and elsewhere that I met - as I sit here on this sunny morning in Sydney. I can still smell the channa masala and hear the clink of the glass of cane juice as a vendor scoops it out for a street boy to slake his thirst.
Bombay, meri jaan, I hope that you recover.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
A Plea from Local Organizations and Civil Society in North Kivu, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
A Plea from Local Organizations and Civil Society in North Kivu, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, to the United Nations Security Council and Other International Leaders
Goma, November 18, 2008
Dear Excellencies,
As the representatives of Congolese non-governmental organizations in North Kivu, we come before your authority to request an immediate reinforcement of peacekeeping forces for the Democratic Republic of Congo, reinforcements that would be capable of protecting us. This would help to prevent the atrocities that continue to be committed against civilians on an ever greater scale here in North Kivu, on the border of Rwanda and Uganda.
This letter presents a sad, cynical, tragic and very frustrating situation, which reveals the misery in which the population of North Kivu are immersed. We are anxious, afraid and utterly traumatised by the constant insecurity in which we live. We don’t know which saint to pray to; we are condemned to death by all this violence and displacement. We have been abandoned. Who will protect us? Who will help us? The United Nations says that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, but our dignity and our rights are violated every day with hardly a cry of protest. Do we not deserve protection? Are we not equal to others?
Since August 28, fighting has intensified in many areas, causing deaths, rapes, lootings, forced recruitment and further displacements of civilian populations. The population has thus been immersed in unspeakable suffering. In the last few days, fighting has drawn closer to large populated areas, such as the town of Goma. Fighting has also invaded and torn apart the region of Rutshuru, particularly in the town of Kiwanja, where hundreds of civilian deaths have now been recorded.
The suffering has gone on too long for the population of North Kivu. It is time for the government and the international community to protect the civilians who have fallen victim to the atrocities of the conflict.
We are aware that during several high-level visits to eastern Congo this year, you and your representatives heard many firsthand testimonies which could not have left you indifferent to the tragedy facing the population of our region of the DRC.
The various diplomatic and political meetings held over the last few weeks have demonstrated your commitment to finding an immediate and sustainable solution that would establish peace in North Kivu and thus bring stability to the Great Lakes region. Among the most remarkable developments, we note Rwanda’s direct involvement in the search for a sustainable solution to the crisis.
While we wish to thank you for these supportive visits and for your concerns about the tragedy here in eastern Congo, we also urge you to move from theory to practice, by transforming your kind speeches and messages into action. Diplomacy always takes time, and we understand this, but unfortunately we do not have time. The population of North Kivu is at risk now; with each day that passes, more and more people die.
For more than three decades, eastern Congo has been at war, and those who suffer most are civilians, especially women and children. There have been many attempts to resolve the crisis in the east, but none have succeeded. The most recent initiative to date was the Goma Peace Agreement (the Act of Engagement], signed by all belligerents in January 2008. But today this is no longer respected. Instead of peace, we are witnessing the continuation and exacerbation of the conflict.
In the past several days, the region of Rutshuru has been in the grip of hostilities. The town of Kiwanja has been taken and re-taken by the CNDP, and the population is paying the price. We are witnessing tragedies on a scale never experienced before in history, in which civilian populations are being summarily executed by bullets or blows from machetes, knives, hoes and spears. Corpses line the streets of the city and the odour of decomposing bodies greets passers-by. Indeed, the number of corpses already found is not conclusive, as searches continue, and, according to the latest reports, even more dead bodies are locked inside houses or thrown down latrines.
As the conquering army of Laurent Nkunda gradually takes new areas, the Congolese army takes flight. As they flee, they end up killing, pillaging, raping and stealing, leaving chaos and total disorder in their wake. This is the case in Goma, where more than 20 civilians were killed, several women were raped, and valuable goods were stolen on October 29. Since last week, the towns of Kanyabayonga, Kirumba and Kayna have been invaded in almost the same way as Goma by FARDC soldiers fleeing the fighting.
Forced recruitment has also intensified. In several areas of Rutshuru and Masisi, armed groups, the CNDP in particular, go from door to door to force young boys and adults – aged between 14 and 40 – to go to the front, without any prior military training. Last week, reports documented the recruitment by force of hundreds of civilians by the CNDP, especially in Kitchanga, Kiwanja, Rutshuru and Rubare.
In all of these cases, we, the civilian population, have been held hostage and caught between many lines of fire.
Women are among the first victims. Sexual violence has become dramatically worse since the end of August, as military forces and armed groups have reduced women to a battlefield.
Faced with a sense of abandonment, the people’s reaction has become one of self-defence. We do not know the limits of this. This has been the case of Mai Mai in Kiwanja and in the Kanyabayonga area.
MONUC has fallen short of fulfilling its mandate to protect civilians, openly and publicly, but no concrete action has been taken. Powerless, MONUC witnesses all the atrocities committed by the armed forces and groups. At times, its interventions are delayed, if not ineffective. We can therefore no longer continue to rely on MONUC to protect us. The case of Kiwanja, where civilians are massacred daily near the MONUC base, is a striking example.
We ask you urgently to assist us at this most difficult time. It is absolutely clear to everyone that we need reinforcements of troops capable of protecting civilians effectively and efficiently, with the means to deal with any kind of attacks. This must be done quickly.
We therefore urge you to:
- Immediately send EU troops which can deploy quickly to provide protection and security for civilians as you did for our brothers and sisters in Bunia, Ituri, in June 2003.
- Increase the number of troops for MONUC and provide them with a mandate that allows them to sufficiently protect civilians and to do so as their top priority.
Your Excellencies, you must save our lives now; otherwise it will be too late.
Yours sincerely,
The representatives of 44 Congolese NGOs in North Kivu:
- Action de Promotion et d'Assistance pour l'Amélioration du Niveau des Vies des Populations (APANIVIP)
- Action Paysanne pour la Reconstruction et le Développement Communautaire Intégral (APREDECI)
- Action pour la Promotion de la Participation Citoyenne – Nord Kivu (APPC/NK)
- Action pour la Promotion et la Défense des Droits des Personnes Défavorisées (APRODEPED)
- Action Sociale pour la Paix et le Développement (ASPD)
- Africa Justice Peace and Development (AJPD)
- Blessed Aid
- Bureau d’Information, Formation, Etude et Recherche en Développement (BIFERD)
- CADRE
- Campagne Pour la Paix (CPP)
- Centre d’Observation des Droits de l’Homme et d’Assistance Sociale (CODHAS)
- Centre de Recherche sur l'Environnement, la Démocratie et les Droits de l'Homme (CADERCO)
- Centre de Recherche sur l'Environnement, la Démocratie et les Droits de l'Homme (CREDDHO)
- Centre pour la Paix et les Droits de l’Homme – Peace and Human Rights Center (CPDH-PHRC)
- CEREBA/RDC
- Change Agents Peace Program (CAPP)
- Coalition pour mettre fin a l'utilisation d'enfants soldats en RDC /Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers in DRC
- CODHOP
- Collectif des Associations des Femmes Pour le Développement (CAFED)
- Collectif des ONG de Droits de l'Homme (CODHO)
- Collectif des Organisations des Jeunes Solidaires du Congo (COJESKI)/ Nord Kivu
- Conseil Régional des Organisations Non Gouvernementales de Développement (CRONGD)
- COPADI
- Encadrement des Femmes Indigènes et des Ménages Vulnérables (EFIM)
- GAMAC
- Group d'Etudes et d'Actions Pour un Développement Bien Défini (GEAD)
- Human Dignity in the World (HDW)
- Platform des Femmes du Nord Kivu pour un Développement Endogène (PFNDE)
- Programme de Lutte Contre l’Extrême Pauvreté et la Misère (PAMI)
- Promotion de la Démocratie et Protection des Droits Humains (PDH)
- Promotion et Appui aux Initiatives Féminines (PAIF)
- Réseau Congolais d’Action sur les Armes Légères et le Petit Calibre (RECAAL)
- Réseau d’Organisations des Droits Humains, d’Education Civique et de Paix (RODHECIP)
- Réseau Femme et Développement (REFED)
- Réseau Provincial des ONG de Droits de l'Homme (REPRODHOC)/Nord Kivu
- SAMS
- Société civile Territoire de Rutshuru
- Solidarité pour la Promotion sociale et la Paix (SOPROP)
- SOS/Grands-Lacs
- Syndicat des Associations Féminines pour un Développement Intégral (SAFEDI)
- Synergie des femmes pour les victimes des violences sexuelles (SFVS)
- Synergie des ONG locales pour les Urgences Humanitaires dans le territoire de Rutshuru
- UPADERI
- Villages Cobaye (VICO)
Monday, November 10, 2008
Adieu, Miriam Makeba
Miriam Makeba, the great South African singer who chanted in the key of resistance against the apartheid regime in her native land, passed away today while doing what she did best: Lending her luminous musical gifts in defense of liberty and in defiance of tyranny.
The 76 year-old Makeba passed away from an apparent heart attack while performing at a concert in Italy in support of Roberto Saviano, an Italian journalist whose exposé of the Camorra organized crime syndicate in Naples in his book Gomorrah has earned him death threats and worse.
Coming only a year after the murder of South African reggae legend Lucky Dube, it may seem another terrible blow to the music scene in that country, where I first ventured in a very moving visit that brought me face-to-face with Robert Mugabe's brutality and South Africa's own tortured history earlier this year. But like all eternal voices, such as those of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Woody Guthrie, the music of Miriam Makeba will continue to give succor and sustenance to oppressed and downtrodden people the world over. Amen, Miriam, and ayibobo.
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Thoughts on Obama from Japan
The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski once wrote something to the affect that foreign correspondents who cover the far corners of the earth are a cynical lot used to overcoming obstacles that most people can’t imagine just to do their jobs, and that little can excite them.That may be so to a large degree, but for my own part I have rarely been as deeply elated or moved as I have been by the election of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States, and the scenes that followed it. Obama’s acceptance speech before a crowd of over 200,000 at Chicago’s Grant Park, the scenes of Americans - young and old, rich and poor, black and white and Latino and Asian and Arab, male and female - embracing, cheering and weeping, and the outpouring of emotion in scenes broadcast from around the globe was as resounding message as any imaginable about the ability of the United States to change and that the eight year nightmare of vainglorious militarism, disastrous economic irresponsibility and plain and simple mean-spiritedness was coming to an end.
Having supported Barack Obama in the primaries in my native state of Pennsylvania and written about his presidential campaign frequently in recent months, and having early-voted for Obama in the general election in Pennsylvania this past October, I found myself in Japan during actual election day. I watched as the returns began to come in with my girlfriend in the exquisite city of Kyoto and then raced to the fishing village of Obama, Japan, where banners bearing a manga-influenced drawing of the new president proclaimed “I love Obama.”
The United States has been through so much in the last eight years, from the attacks of September 11th and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and the economic meltdown that occurred this year, which further impoverished a population already beset by often non-existent healthcare, stagnant wages and/or disappearing jobs, and an ever-diminishing international reputation as the windshield cowboy and his cohorts mistook truculence for statesmanship and attempted to set regions of American against one another in a miserable scramble for ever-more power. One of the phrases that most stuck in my mind from Obama’s speech before the throng in Grant Park the other nights ran as follows:
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
Tonight, as I strolled under a sliver of autumn moon through the old Higashi Chaya quarter here in Kanazawa on the Sea of Japan, my thoughts were with my native land, and a feeling of deep pride for what has come to pass this week, and deep responsibility for all that remains to be done. I have a year ahead of me working and reporting from Asia, but I think that, after that, I just might head home to record how this new chapter is being written in this new day.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
EU Involvement in DRC Mining Project Draws Protest
ECONOMY:
EU Involvement in DRC Mining Project Draws Protest
By Michael Deibert
Inter Press Service
LONDON, Oct 28, 2008 (IPS) - The involvement of the European Union in a mining project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has drawn a chorus of protest from local and international human rights advocates. They say the project is rife with problems relating to transparency and accountability.
Located some 175 km north-west of the DRC city of Lubumbashi in Katanga province, the Tenke Fungurume vein is thought to be one of the largest unexploited seams of copper and cobalt in the world.
It has proven alluring to mining companies in recent years as the DRC attempts to extract itself from a civil war during which some six million people have died.
Mining of this resource has fallen to Tenke Fungurume Mining SARL (TFM), a joint concern combining Gécamines, Congo's state mining concern, with Lundin, a Swedish mining company, and the U.S.-based mining concern Phelps Dodge.
The latter merged with gold-and-copper giant Freeport-McMoran in 2007 and has since become Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc.
After construction on the Tenke mining facility commenced in 2007, the European Investment Bank (EIB), the investment arm of the European Union, agreed that same year to help finance the project with a loan of 100 million euros.
It regarded the project as ''highly significant from an economic and developmental point of view'' and that ''environmental and social issues (connected with the project) have been subjected to careful in-depth analysis.'
However, the EIB's move has been criticised both by international bodies, such as the Paris-based Les Amis de la Terre (Friends of the Earth), as well as local organisations in the DRC, such as Action Contre l'Impunité pour les Droits Humains (Action against impunity towards human rights).
Read the full article here.
EU Involvement in DRC Mining Project Draws Protest
By Michael Deibert
Inter Press Service
LONDON, Oct 28, 2008 (IPS) - The involvement of the European Union in a mining project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has drawn a chorus of protest from local and international human rights advocates. They say the project is rife with problems relating to transparency and accountability.
Located some 175 km north-west of the DRC city of Lubumbashi in Katanga province, the Tenke Fungurume vein is thought to be one of the largest unexploited seams of copper and cobalt in the world.
It has proven alluring to mining companies in recent years as the DRC attempts to extract itself from a civil war during which some six million people have died.
Mining of this resource has fallen to Tenke Fungurume Mining SARL (TFM), a joint concern combining Gécamines, Congo's state mining concern, with Lundin, a Swedish mining company, and the U.S.-based mining concern Phelps Dodge.
The latter merged with gold-and-copper giant Freeport-McMoran in 2007 and has since become Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc.
After construction on the Tenke mining facility commenced in 2007, the European Investment Bank (EIB), the investment arm of the European Union, agreed that same year to help finance the project with a loan of 100 million euros.
It regarded the project as ''highly significant from an economic and developmental point of view'' and that ''environmental and social issues (connected with the project) have been subjected to careful in-depth analysis.'
However, the EIB's move has been criticised both by international bodies, such as the Paris-based Les Amis de la Terre (Friends of the Earth), as well as local organisations in the DRC, such as Action Contre l'Impunité pour les Droits Humains (Action against impunity towards human rights).
Read the full article here.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Sarah Palin's hometown paper endorses Barack Obama for president
The Anchorage Daily News, the most widely read newspaper in the home state of Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, this weekend joined such Republican stalwarts as former Massachusetts governor William Weld, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former George W. Bush spokesman Scott McClellan in endorsing Democratic candidate Barack Obama for the presidency.
Noting that the northernmost state's founders "were optimistic people," the paper went on to note in its endorsement that Obama "displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand," witheringly concluding that "Sen. John McCain, is the wrong choice for president at this critical time for our nation." The paper also asserted that McCain's response to the financial crisis showed him "to be ill-equipped to lead the essential effort of reining in a runaway financial system and setting an anxious nation on course to economic recovery."
But there was more. From the newspaper that probably knows her as well as any in the country, the editorial went on to say of Palin that "few who have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth...Like picking Sen. McCain for president, putting her one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time."
Couple sentiments like this with the news in places like my thoroughly blue-collar but often conservative home county of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that the Democratic Committee announced last week that more than 22,000 Democratic voters were registered since last November — a 27 percent increase - one can feel a seismic shift and a moment of great - yes - change coming to American politics. It is a moment than many, both in the United States and beyond, throughout the long, dark night of the Bush years, have long been waiting for.
Noting that the northernmost state's founders "were optimistic people," the paper went on to note in its endorsement that Obama "displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand," witheringly concluding that "Sen. John McCain, is the wrong choice for president at this critical time for our nation." The paper also asserted that McCain's response to the financial crisis showed him "to be ill-equipped to lead the essential effort of reining in a runaway financial system and setting an anxious nation on course to economic recovery."
But there was more. From the newspaper that probably knows her as well as any in the country, the editorial went on to say of Palin that "few who have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth...Like picking Sen. McCain for president, putting her one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time."
Couple sentiments like this with the news in places like my thoroughly blue-collar but often conservative home county of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that the Democratic Committee announced last week that more than 22,000 Democratic voters were registered since last November — a 27 percent increase - one can feel a seismic shift and a moment of great - yes - change coming to American politics. It is a moment than many, both in the United States and beyond, throughout the long, dark night of the Bush years, have long been waiting for.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
A long road to a brief encounter
My good friend Ben Fountain, author of the excellent short story collection Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, is the subject of an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker this month on "late blooming" geniuses. I met Ben on the steps of the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince one day back in 2002, when I was the Reuters correspondent in Haiti. In another life, Ben had been a real estate lawyer in Dallas, but when I met him he was bursting into full flower as a writer of insightful, worldly short stories that would culminate with his collection's publication four years later, a book that would eventually go on to win the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award.
Though Ben's success didn't come in a big way until mid-life, I know how hard he worked to reach this first plateau and must say that I can't think of anyone who more richly deserves the recognition that he is now getting. With too much short fiction these days, in my view, of a particularly insular nature, Ben's stories are not afraid to venture out into the world, the real world with all of its political complexities and conflicted loyalties, that surrounds us. Well done.
It's a rainy day in Barcelona today, and, in only a few days, Japan, a country I have long wanted to visit, awaits.
Though Ben's success didn't come in a big way until mid-life, I know how hard he worked to reach this first plateau and must say that I can't think of anyone who more richly deserves the recognition that he is now getting. With too much short fiction these days, in my view, of a particularly insular nature, Ben's stories are not afraid to venture out into the world, the real world with all of its political complexities and conflicted loyalties, that surrounds us. Well done.
It's a rainy day in Barcelona today, and, in only a few days, Japan, a country I have long wanted to visit, awaits.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Pennsylvania election know-how
As unknowns kept entering my father's yard at night and stealing his Barack Obama campaign signs in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, he and my younger brother came up with a novel solution, as can be seen here.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline
Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline
The Garífuna culture, a "masterpiece" of human heritage according to UNESCO, could disappear as the result of the privatization of Central America's beaches.
By Michael Deibert
Inter Press Service
MIAMI, Honduras, Oct 6, 2008 (Tierramérica).- "The Garífuna were the best sailors in the world," says Jermonino Barrios, standing barefoot on this slender thread of land between the Laguna de Los Micos and the blue Caribbean Sea.
Barrios, 67, a former soldier, speaks proudly of his ethnic group, whose members are scattered across Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
"Before, we had 200 or 300 Garífuna living here; now there are only a few," he tells Tierramérica.
"They went to the United States for work, and other places," he explains with a note of regret, gazing back at the collection of thatched-roof huts lazing under palms trees that front the crashing surf.
In the tumultuous history of Europe's incursion into the Americas and the trafficking of slaves from Africa to its shores, their are few stories as dramatic or moving as that of the Garífuna.
Read the full article here.
The Garífuna culture, a "masterpiece" of human heritage according to UNESCO, could disappear as the result of the privatization of Central America's beaches.
By Michael Deibert
Inter Press Service
MIAMI, Honduras, Oct 6, 2008 (Tierramérica).- "The Garífuna were the best sailors in the world," says Jermonino Barrios, standing barefoot on this slender thread of land between the Laguna de Los Micos and the blue Caribbean Sea.
Barrios, 67, a former soldier, speaks proudly of his ethnic group, whose members are scattered across Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
"Before, we had 200 or 300 Garífuna living here; now there are only a few," he tells Tierramérica.
"They went to the United States for work, and other places," he explains with a note of regret, gazing back at the collection of thatched-roof huts lazing under palms trees that front the crashing surf.
In the tumultuous history of Europe's incursion into the Americas and the trafficking of slaves from Africa to its shores, their are few stories as dramatic or moving as that of the Garífuna.
Read the full article here.
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