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For Iran

June 19, 2009 in politics | No comments

There’s a firestorm in the blog teacup around Iran at the moment. Anything beyond the basic expression of solidarity with the protestors would be futile and presumptuous, and the most insightful thing that I’ve read relating to the protests was also the simplest. This quoted on the Prospect blog post by Nasrin Alavi, author of the excellent We Are Iran:

I will take part in the rally tomorrow. It might become violent. Perhaps I may be one of the people who is meant to die. I am listening to all the beautiful songs that I’ve ever heard before…. I always wanted to thin out my eyebrows… I am looking through all my family photo albums from the start. I have to call my friends and say goodbye. I just have two bookshelves full of books to my name in this world; I have told my family who to give them to. I have two units to go before I get my degree, but the hell with that… I just wrote these scattered sentences so that the next generation knows that we weren’t irrational and emotional. So that they know we did what we could to make our lives better… but we refused to give in to oppression.

The Shi’ite preoccupation with martyrdom comes through clearly, but what comes through more clearly is that this is a person with something to lose: not their life, but their hopes.

Like swatting flies (update)

June 1, 2009 in politics, religion | No comments

When somebody acts on their beliefs, you may disagree with those beliefs, the actions that result from those beliefs or both; but at the very least, their actions reveal their convictions more honestly than their words. So when somebody shoots an “abortion doctor”1 I disagree with their beliefs, condemn their actions but praise their conviction, because at least we know where we stand with those people.2 Spare a thought for the many cheerleaders for this murderer, though – all of those who support the act, but lack the conviction to ever do it themselves. Their lives must be a hell of cognitive dissonance, righteously enraged at the world they find themselves in but too spineless to do anything about it.

  1. Unspeak, naturally – he was medical director of a women’s health care clinic. [↩]
  2. And usually we stand in a court of law, watching them being sentenced for a good long time. [↩]

Like swatting flies

May 24, 2009 in politics, religion | 1 comment

If rational debate is an airplane, then religious discussion on the web is a flock of birds right in your jet engine. This is partly the nature of religion and partly the nature of the web, and my general rule that nobody ever had their mind changed by debating their views applies. Having acknowledged that, I will now attempt takeoff.

Your attitude towards abortion will be largely determined by a single factors: your view about whether a foetus constitutes a full human person, with all the rights that go with that. If the foetus does not possess the right to life – or possesses a circumscribed right to life – then abortion may be morally acceptable. Unfortunately if you do believe that the foetus possesses a full right to life, then you’re unlikely to be convinced by somebody who doesn’t share that belief, as illustrated by a savant going by the name Diogenes1:

I see nothing wrong with swatting flies.

Let’s say that you have a different opinion. You think the lives of flies are sacred, and therefore you think that swatting flies is grossly immoral. You hold this view with the utmost sincerity. Unfortunately for you, I’m making the rules. And I say:

* You can’t refer to fly-swatting as “murder.” That would be “hate speech,” inciting others to violence.
* You can’t interfere when I swat flies.
* You must contribute to the purchase of fly swatters.

Now, with those ground-rules established, let’s begin a civil discussion of the morality of swatting flies. There’s no need for anger, recrimination, or name-calling. We have a sincere difference of opinion. Let’s– oh, wait, excuse me a moment [thwack!]– find some common ground.

This seems straightforward enough on the face of it – clever enough for some approving comments and links from other blogs – yet the analogy exposes the most basic problem with a “pro-life” position that abortion is murder.  Let’s say that I do believe that flies are sacred, and that swatting them is essentially murder. If I was sitting in front of Diogenes trying to have this discussion, and he started to swat flies, wouldn’t I be obliged by my beliefs to stop him? Equally, if somebody proclaims that they believe that abortion is murder, and is fully aware that murders are being regularly carried out in their vicinity, don’t they have an obligation to go out and put a stop to it as soon as possible, no matter the risk to their own lives?

Yet presumably Diogenes – and the vast majority of pro-life advocates – take no such action, and in such a case, there appear to be two possibilities. The first is unpleasant to contemplate: that the person who sincerely holds this belief but fails to act on it is a coward, a hypocrite and (in their own eyes, at least) an accessory to murder. I don’t think that everybody who holds this belief is such a character, however, so the second possibility seems more likely: that they don’t actually believe that abortion is murder. If the latter is true, the inevitable conclusion is that they don’t in fact believe a foetus is a full person.

Circumstantial evidence suggests that this is the case: take for example one of the commenters on Diogenes’ post, a fellow named Exaudi nos2:

All we would have to do to end this argument about flies is to line the dead ones up on the side walk in front of the establishment that brought on their demise and after the pile gets pretty deep, I think the common ground would be found.

This is a common trope on the anti-abortion side: if only people were aware of the true nature of abortion, they’d all come out against it, and therefore it’s acceptable to publicly exhibit the process and results of abortion.3 Now I have a problem with the idea of exhibiting corpses in public, especially for political purposes, and it seems that most people share this feeling: I wouldn’t, for example, suggest that we pile up the corpses of victims of traffic accidents to make a case for more cycle paths.

Exaudi nos’ suggestion implies that either he believes that it would be acceptable to do such a thing, or that he doesn’t believe that an aborted foetus has the same status as a corpse. If it’s the former, one has to wonder why he doesn’t propose such tactics for other political campaigns – but if it’s the latter, then the only conclusion we can draw is that, if he believes that an aborted foetus does not possess the same status as a dead person, then he neither believes that a live foetus possesses the same rights as a live person.

  1. I really, really hope that pseudonym is meant to be ironic. [↩]
  2. ”Hear us” for those of you who skipped Latin class and/or aren’t Catholic. [↩]
  3. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that anti-abortion campaigners enjoy posting videos that graphically show aborted foetuses, but some of them do seem to take a certain grim satisfaction in it. I won’t link to any videos, but they’re easy enough to find. [↩]

Now lie in your linguistic bed

April 24, 2009 in balkans, politics | 2 comments

New Kosova Report carries an opinion piece entitled God has stopped speaking Serbian. It’s a polemic against Serbs not learning Albanian, disguised as concern for the future of Serbs in Kosova. Thus,

If before Serbs did not really have to learn Albanian because Albanians could and had to speak their language, now learning Albanian is a must to function economically in Kosovo. Otherwise, there won’t be any future for Serbs here. While Serbian is an official language along with Albanian across Kosovo, this is barely essential if only 6% of the population is Serbian… The key for prosperity for all the minorities in Kosovo – Serbian, Roma, Turkish and Bosniak – is being able to function in the dominant language – in this case Albanian.

This is a fairly moderate view in Kosova, acknowledging at least that Serbs (and other minorities) have a place in the country – but even moderation has its limits in Kosovo.1 The basic limit of that moderation is that Kosova is Albanian, and anybody who wants a piece of that future – no matter how long their communities might have lived there – needs to buy into that.

Linguistic chauvinism was one of the factors that drove the conflict in Kosovo prior to 1999, and continues to be a hot topic in the region (particularly in countries with Albanian minorities), but the notion that Serbs must learn Albanian is of course bullshit. If Serbs are citizens of the new Kosova, and  Serbian is one of the official languages of Kosova – both of which the article agrees with – then it’s up to the majority to make the necessary accommodations to the minority. Given how many Kosovar Albanians have lived (and continue to live) in Switzerland, I’m surprised that they haven’t noticed this rather basic requirement of a multilingual state.

Switzerland isn’t the best example – the Swiss-German continually chafe at the fact that they need to learn French to work in the government, while the Swiss-French seem to have little requirement to learn German. However they don’t use this as an excuse to force the Swiss-French to learn German, or to deny that they can be citizens if they don’t. This seems like common sense to me, but that’s not how we roll in the Balkans, unfortunately. And so the merry-go-round continues, with language used as a club to bash people with.

Depressing. If you want some more positive news about Albanian-Serb relation, then this report in Balkan Insight will warm the cockles of your heart. Serbs visiting Pristina? Astonishing:2

… of course I was reluctant to speak Serbian openly at first. But whenever someone overheard me speaking it in a café or restaurant, the only reaction was pleasant surprise and genuine joy. Most Albanians in those situations will squeeze out as many words of Serbian they know (be it a lot or just a little), smile, ask how are things in Belgrade, or even play some music commonly considered as “naša” (covering a wide array from Serbian turbo-folk over Bosnian sevdalinke to Croatian soft pop, but that’s an altogether different story). It seems they don’t think we eat little children for breakfast. Which is food for thought, if you can pardon the pun.
  1. See how I used both language variants of the country name in one sentence? Genius. [↩]
  2. Note: this is sarcasm. [↩]

Tough on pirates, tough on the causes of pirates

April 14, 2009 in politics | 3 comments

If I was a terrorist, I’d be angry that pirates are grabbing the headlines. Perhaps people would have taken piracy more seriously sooner if we’d been referring to them as “terrorists of the seas”? Everybody loves pirates except for the French and the Americans, who have decided to start shooting pirates in the head,1 unleashing a wave of speculation about how to deal with the tricky devils.

Over at the Danger Room, Nathan Hodge lays out the options, which include killing more pirates, arming crews, forming convoys and so forth, before concluding that there are few good options. John Robb, a more lateral thinker, believes that the eventual policy that will be adopted is a “Somali Coast Guard“, i.e. a Sons of Iraq style militia whose bills will presumably be paid by governments on behalf of their shipping companies. On a million different blogs you can also find people whose main recommendation is to bomb Somalia back to the Stone Age – ironic, given their opinions of the current state of Somalia.

Military solutions have a monetary cost and a strategic cost. In this case the monetary cost will be high but bearable, but the strategic cost – well, we’ve already paid that. Some people believe that killing more pirates will have a deterrent effect against future hostage situations occurring. This is wrong. Killing pirates will ensure that, in future, hostage situations will be more likely to end in the deaths of the hostages, particularly if those hostages are American (or French). So killing pirates – especially taking the killing to the pirate lairs, i.e. impoverished Somali fishing villages – scores 11 on the stupidometer.

Abdullahi Lami, one of the pirates holding a Greek ship anchored in the Somali town of Gaan, said: “Every country will be treated the way it treats us. In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying. We will retaliate… the killings of our men.”

“Oy Paul,” I hear you cry, “always with the negative! What do you suggest we do about this terrible situation?” Well, first, everybody should calm down. The cost of these kidnappings should be borne by shipping companies, but there’s a danger that, with national governments involved, there may be even less incentive for shipping companies to invest in anti-piracy measures.2 The obvious suggestion is that companies keep paying the ransoms and accept it as an operating cost, particularly if they’re cutting corners in order to cut costs:

The merchant ship-owners are also recommended to keep their vessels 600 miles away from Somalia’s eastern seaboard from where most of the pirates emerge. Not all the merchant ships, however, conform to the rules. Some fail to use the transit routes, and others give scant attention to installing anti-piracy defences.

Second, perhaps we could look at the reasons that Somalis become pirates? It’s easy to dismiss Somalia as a basket case filled with well-armed maniacs, but this would be a mistake. Johann Hari notes that there are legitimate grievances amongst coastal Somalis, particularly since, in the absence of a state, foreign vessels have been dumping toxic waste, fishing out local stocks and generally taking advantage.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply… At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers.

Some pirates have claimed that they’re already acting in the public interest, although it’s a thin line between that, banditry and good business sense:

We don’t consider ourselves [pirates]. We consider [pirates] those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard…. We don’t want these weapons to go to anyone in Somalia. Somalia has suffered from many years of destruction because of all these weapons… We are not going to offload the weapons. We just want the money.

So third, we should recognise that being a pirate is a lifestyle choice that makes sense when you are dirt poor:

Generations of children followed their fathers to sea and a lucrative career in fishing. They still want to go to sea. Only now they dream of being pirates. “I want be a pirate, they have cool cars and lots of money,” said a boy, 13, staring out to sea.

Who are we to deny that little boy his dream? Who are we to stifle his ambition? Piracy is big business:

Last year Somali pirates mounted 111 attacks and captured 42 ships, according to the International Maritime Bureau. Ransom demands have ranged from $1 million to $8 million, earning the modern-day brigands an estimated $30 million in ransom payments in 2008.

The way to deal with piracy is very simple but completely unacceptable. It’s to invest in coastal Somali communities, with the international community providing:

  1. Tighter regulation of commercial shipping, including making anti-piracy measures compulsory for all shipping along hazardous routes;
  2. Increased security to guarantee Somali fishing waters and prevent abuse of the coastline, including (for agreed periods) naval patrols;
  3. Improved capacity for Somali fishermen, including training in fishing techniques and re-training for those unable to make a living from fishing;
  4. Guaranteed market value for the fish caught by Somali fishermen – basically, buy their fish at a fair price on a consistent basis.

This of course should be on top of general development investments in Somalia – but that’s a whole other tricky kettle of sly fish, unlikely to yield much in the way of results. John Robb’s idea of a Somali Coast Guard might also work for a limited period, but a more sustainable solution is (in addition to the above) community education programmes to increase social pressure on people not to become pirates. All of these measures could contribute towards a solution, but we have to recognise two limitations here: first, some people just love being a pirate, so you’ll never eliminate it completely; and second, killing people is easier than helping them, so it’s probably the stupid people who will carry the argument in this case.

  1. In the case of the French, they appear to have shot one of the hostages in the head as well, so possibly it was a broader inclination towards head-shooting. Or a terrible accident. [↩]
  2. Please bear in mind that there are no comparisons here with the bank bail-outs currently doing the rounds. [↩]

Plus ça change

April 11, 2009 in politics | No comments

Doctors attached to various torture centers intervene after every session to put the tortured back into condition for new sessions. Under the circumstances, the important thing is for the prisoner…to remain alive. Everything – heart stimulants, massive doses of vitamins-is used before, during, and after sessions to keep the Algerian hovering between life and death.

- Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 1959

The 40-page confidential report, written in 2007, describes how medical staff working for the CIA monitored prisoners’ vital signs to make sure they did not drown while being subjected to waterboarding, during which water is poured over a cloth placed over a person’s nose and mouth… As well as the monitoring of specific methods of ill-treatment, the report said, other health personnel were alleged to have directly participated in the interrogation process. One detainee alleged that a health person threatened that medical care would be conditional upon cooperation with interrogation.

- CIA medics joined in Guantánamo torture sessions, says Red Cross, 7 April 2009

Taliban to crowdsource mining operation

April 5, 2009 in politics | No comments

The Daily Times:

SHANGLA: More than 70 Taliban attacked the famous Gojaro Kalay emerald mine in Shangla on Wednesday and took control of the mining operations…

The Taliban took positions around the mine on Wednesday after the security guards fled. They announced to take control of mining operations and offered the locals to work with them and share the profits. They bought mining equipment from the nearby Kotkay Bazaar…

Sher Bacha, the nazim of the area, and the locals confirmed the report and said more than 1,000 people worked on the mine on Wednesday. Only 100 people worked at the mine before the Taliban takeover.

Here Comes Everybody!1

  1. Apart from women. [↩]

Cursing NATO

March 26, 2009 in politics | No comments

The ever-entertaining Belgraded posted on the inventive curses carried by national television during the NATO bombing campaign. My favourites were “Tomahawk Democracy in Warrior Adventure”, “Goebbels-persistent Villains” and “Mongoloid Conglomerate”, but the list is endlessly entertaining….

Ten years of nothing

March 25, 2009 in politics, war | 1 comment

In an interesting but patchy essay from 2004, Goran Stefanovski wrote:

It is street wisdom in the Balkans that it is impossible to be born and die in the same country. Within one’s lifetime, the house will fall on your head and you’ll have to start building again.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia. I was against the repression of Kosovar Albanians by state and state-sponsored institutions, I was against the NATO bombing campaign and I was against the killing and cleansing of Serbs from the province by Kosovar Albanians. Generally speaking, I’m against things that increase the sum of human misery, and all three of those things fall into that category. Could i make my position any clearer?

In the beginning, the first few days, it was scary because nobody knew what to do in this situation… ou decide after a couple of days that this bombing is not so terrible after all. Schools are out, university too, almost nobody goes to their jobs. It’s a big party on the streets… But after a while, it starts to get boring, and towards the end it really gets intolerable. Not even the pirated films on the TV and endless arguments over the internet represent much joy to you. So you are really glad it’s over.

- Belgraded

Yet I get more angry with the Serbs than I do with the Kosovar Albanians or NATO. I like Serbs, and I think they were royally screwed during the breakup of Yugoslavia, but it astonishes me that ten years later there still doesn’t seem to be the will to face up to their situation. It was always fairly clear (if not always explicit) that NATO hoped the Kosovo campaign would lead to Milosevic’s downfall (which it did, eventually); meanwhile, the Kosovar Albanians were usually honest and unapologetic about their desire to extract revenge on the provincial Serbs who stayed behind after the bombing (which they did, immediately).

… others said the action would prevent a humanitarian catastrophe resulting from Serbian attacks on Kosovar Albanians. (in 1999 there were 81% ethnic Albanians and 11% Serbs in Kosovo…so how realistic are these theories?!)… Yugoslavia had been attacked because it had used its sovereign right to fight terrorism and prevent the secession of a part of its territory which had always belonged to Serbia and Yugoslavia.

- Nothing Against Serbia

Yet as I watch Serbian and Montenegrin television (with my comically limited Serbian), I can’t help but notice that there seems to be very little mention of the reason/excuse (take your pick, as if I care) that NATO had for bombing in the first place. When talking with Serbs, you sometimes feel that they believe that the bombing campaign came out of nowhere – almost an act of god – with a casualty list that seems to include a lot more people than the ones that actually, you know, died.1 The NATO campaign emphasised the positive aspects of the Serb character (such as their dark sense of humour) but also exposed the negative aspects, particularly the victim mentality.

There is a saying about Serbs, that we always forgive but never forget and this is very true… For most of us, the war and the hatred towards the West ended with the last bomb that fell in Serbia… We come back to this and many other events every year, to remember the fallen and drop a swear or two on our miserable lives, but that’s pretty much it.

- PećkoPivo

Perhaps it isn’t forgetting that’s Serbia’s problem, but remembering – at least, remembering the decade that preceded the NATO campaign. Ten years ago their house fell, and I would argue that Serbia has barely begun the difficult task of rebuilding that house. Raise your glasses to the dead of the past ten years, both Serbian and Albanian, and then let’s get on with the job of construction.

UPDATE: Phew, it’s not just me, Nenad Pejic spotted it as well.

  1. Amusingly extended to include Albanians who were actually killed by Serbian military and paramilitary forces, as if that was NATO’s fault – “Don’t make me beat you!”, as my old boss used to say. [↩]

You want theories, we got theories

March 24, 2009 in Uncategorized, politics, war | No comments

The sector of military-political thinking that deals with “small wars” is particularly fertile right now – an entire generation of soldiers, scholars and soldier-scholars can thank Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush for giving them something to write about. Obviously not all of it is rubbish – in fact, some of it is excellent – but sometimes it’s easy to suspect that much of the theory is about securing uncertain funding rather than unstable countries. David Axe (whose writing generally falls into the “not rubbish” category) is contributing to a new book on “fifth-generation warfare”:

The “fourth generation” of war entailed irregular combatants fighting for an ideological cause, seeking to remake society according to their ideals. Fifth-generation war, or 5GW, now coalescing, is less clearly ideological but just as sweeping in its goals. 5GW is when a party exploits or encourages an existing or emerging crisis to achieve strategic goals that those most directly involved in the crisis might not even be aware of.

To be honest, that sounds a bit like the Cold War (at least the version I studied at university) than some entirely new phenomenon, but fifth-generation warfare is a widely-accepted concept. The beauty of this particular concept is that – rather excitingly! – it lacks any clear definition. This means that absolutely anybody can write absolutely anything about it – truly a gift horse for the military-academic complex. I wonder what we would see if we looked the gift horse in the mouth – the remote possibility that none of this theory seems to be helping anybody to win any wars?

The Yorkshire Ranter has suspicions regarding similar rumblings about “CyberWarfare 2.0″, suspicions which lead him to conclude that the concept is of more value to the accountant than the academy. I wouldn’t go so far to say that about “fifth-generation warfare” – oh, alright. I would.

Fiction, Truth stranger than, Balkans Edition

February 19, 2009 in politics | No comments

If you still thought that Ramush Haradinaj was a bit dodgy, despite being acquitted of charges at ICTY, then your heart may sink when you hear this news:

KAMPALA (AFP) — Muslim rebels in Uganda said Wednesday they wanted Kosovo’s former premier Ramush Haradinaj to mediate peace talks with the Kampala government. Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) spokesman Assad Mukasa said they chose Haradinaj, recently acquitted of war crimes charges by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, because “he has passed through a lot.” Mukasa told AFP that Haradinaj had experience “of rebels and difficulties.”

Indeed he does, although I’m not sure it’s particularly relevant experience. While not wishing to impugn Haradinaj’s character, I can say with some confidence that he’s no Martti Ahtisaari.

The horns of the genocide dilemma

February 17, 2009 in politics | No comments

The discussion about Darfur – and more specifically about the work of the Save Darfur coalition – is interesting to me because it goes right to the heart of why I chose to work for humanitarian organisations – a choice that I wrestle with every day, but that’s another discussion entirely. Following on from my previous post, both Michael and Michelle have written new posts, while David Sullivan at the Enough Project and Steven Bloomfield (the journalist whose interview with John Holmes started this whole discussion) has now also weighed in.

Steven is closest to my line of thinking when he explains that

My problem with describing it as a genocide is that genocides have have simple solutions. You stop the genocidaires… the crisis in Darfur won’t stop if the janjaweed and Bashir’s armed forces are forcibly disarmed or if the Khartoum government is overthrown. It is a nasty, messy war with many players.

We can debate the finer points of his examples of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, but this is fairly near to my thinking. David Sullivan, on the other hand commits the cardinal sin of argument without evidence:

…when Michael suggests that neither the U.S. nor Europe has the leverage to bring peace to Darfur, I wonder how he’s come to such a conclusion. Nobody knows exactly how much leverage the United States, Europe, or any combination of governments may have against Khartoum and the Darfur rebels, because there has been no consistent effort to use that leverage and lead a viable peace process, such as that which helped to resolve Sudan’s North-South civil war.

To sum up: nobody knows how much leverage any external actors have, but the Save Darfur coalition is prepared to expend huge amounts of time, money and effort on trying to get those actors to bring that leverage – if it exists – on to the government and various armed groups of Sudan. This summarizes the problem I have with Michelle and  David’s argument (and by extension with Save Darfur as a project) – the lack of evidence to support their case is obvious to anybody who cares to look. Yet Michelle also has a point – what do those who question the work of Save Darfur propose?

In the possibly apocryphal words of Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, and nobody likes standing around doing nothing.  I could propose a purely humanitarian response – save as many lives as possible and forget about intervening in the politics of another country altogether – which would probably please David Rieff but few others. I could make a radical proposal like splitting Sudan into relatively stable pieces, something which is likely to happen sooner or later in any case. I could make an even more radical proposal for state-established corporations to buy as much of Sudan’s natural resources as possible and then hold the government to ransom. Or we could have a laugh and suggest a more robust peacekeeping force.

All of these? None of these? The truth is that we are on the horns of a genocide dilemma – whichever way we turn, we’re likely to get gored by a bull called unintended consequences. Rwanda is what got me into this mess, but preventing the genocide would have left the social pressures that lead to it in place, still boiling away. Yet that doesn’t mean the genocide was a necessary evil, the expulsion from the body politic of toxins – we can’t mutely accept these things without throwing away a piece of our humanity. This calculus is impossible, you see.

The truth is that we need to take action on these things long before they come into view, but we’ve also constructed a political system that is chronically myopic and consistently unprepared. We can see the seeds of future Darfurs right now, if we look hard enough – and they’re all resource wars rather than ideological wars – but we do very little to prevent them from blossoming. The price we pay for a Dayton is a Kosovo; but Kosovo is further on in our ride through the House of Horrors, after our politicians have gotten off the ride. I don’t have the cure, but I suspect that Save Darfur is a placebo.

I’m not surprised that its supporters defend it so vigorously, given how much they’ve invested in its success; they have true faith, which is something that I’ve always – unfortunately – lacked.

Saving Darfur

February 1, 2009 in politics | No comments

Over at Change.org,  Michael and Michelle are getting in to a fairly heavy question: can the Save Darfur campaign in fact save Darfur? Michael argues No, while Michelle argues Yes, and I come in strongly on Michael’s side of the argument. This might surprise people who know that I started my working life working in human rights, coming to it from an interest specifically in genocide prevention.

There are two reasons why don’t I support Save Darfur, with a possible third hiding in the background. The first is that I believe that real social change in a country has never been caused by external actors, and only in few cases has external change . As Michael points, the only people who can save Darfur are in Darfur, in Sudan or (possibly) in the region. One critical problem is that absolutely none of those actors – whether political, militia or civic groups – appear to have a clue how to save Darfur, so it’s hard to know exactly who we’re supporting with our advocacy.

My second reason is that I’m severely disillusioned about the efficacy of mass-mobilisation advocacy in post-industrial societies, particularly following the complete failure of the Iraq anti-war demonstration of February 2003 to have any impact on government policy. The more demonstrations I attended in my life, the more I felt that  the real motives for most demonstrators (not all, mind you) were largely internal motives, questions in an individual’s life that they were working out in the public square.

What worries me a little about the sort of advocacy that Save Darfur coalition is involved with is that it is no-cost to the participants. If nothing happens as the result of their advocacy, that can be incorporated into the narrative, but it won’t affect them personally in the least (again, this doesn’t apply to all – there are Darfuri/Sudanese involved). On the other hand, they will invest sufficiently in the process that it might blind them to its flaws – a common problem in any endeavour. The question in the end is simple – what impact does it have? All the activities that Michelle cites – Sudan divestment, Ask the Candidates, Team Darfur – what’s been the outcome of those activities, exactly? Michelle says

Darfur gets significant attention now because of thousands of advocates kicking up the dust, shouting to sky, grabbing everyone who will listen (and even some who won’t) and saying, “This must end NOW.”

What must end now, exactly? Does anybody still believe that there is a genocide happening in Darfur (if there ever was, which most people actually working on the ground never believed, as far as I know)? What does “ending” it mean, exactly – what does a post-genocide Darfur look like? “Significant attention” is nice, but it doesn’t really mean jack to the people of Darfur, or to the government of Sudan or various armed groups who are simply not that interested in what the US has to say. The onus is on the Save Darfur coalition to show that its efforts lead to significant and lasting change in Darfur/Sudan (or, more weakly, in US policy towards Darfur/Sudan) – but I don’t see them doing that, or even trying to do that. All that remains are slogans and platforms and a sense that doing something is better than doing nothing.

Preventing and ending genocide are truly worthwhile goals, but in the case of Save Darfur, I’m not convinced a) that genocide is happening, or that it ever was, and b) that an external actor such as Save Darfur can have significant impact. I can definitely change my mind on both of these issues, but I need to see better arguments than Michelle gives us.

The Death Star will be completed on schedule

January 26, 2009 in politics | No comments

Joshua Foust is a smart guy who writes smart things, particularly about Afghanistan. But this?

I’ve at least made friends with the servants here [at Ali Al Salem air base in Kuwait]. “The who,” you might ask? I’m referring to all the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Filipinos who work as the base’s (and all of CENTCOM’s, it seems) second-class citizens. They don’t get bonuses like we do, but they work their tails off to send money back home to their families. They also seem to be held in utter contempt by a depressing number of people here, uniform or no. That idea, of importing servants to do our dirty jobs, may be just how things work, but it is a bit depressing.

It’s never pleasant when the inner workings of an imperial project are exposed, because those inner workings nearly all involve poor people doing all the work and getting treated like shit. Although it’s late in the game, I hope that Josh will make the connection between the way we run things in Ali Al Salem and the entire project of Afghanistan.

The missing state

January 26, 2009 in UK, politics | No comments

On Global Dashboard, Alex Evans asks what are we missing? He’s been doing the rounds of “an extensive series of horizon scanning events to feed into the current revision of the National Security Strategy“, and has ended up here:

Having been to a few of these events, I must admit to being less than convinced that the sessions are really breaking out of the comfortable groupthink that can so easily characterise futures work… For me, the really stand-out risk that barely got a mention in the events I attended was the possibility that serious erosion of states’ capacity and legitimacy undermines their ability to respond to all the global trends that we were discussing… there is nonetheless a worrying set of drivers on the table that raises questions about whether, in (say) 5 years’ time, we’ll be starting to think that states just don’t have the legitmacy and capability they need to manage 21st century challenges.

The problem is simple. The National Security Strategy is a state product, and these consultations are happening within the state framework – and this means that these discussions assume the state and proceed from there. Non-state actors (whether corporate, non-governmental, criminal or private individuals) don’t assume the state – they assume their own interests and start from there. Never the twain shall meet, and that’s why this round of discussions is leaving Alex cold.

The state is a means to an end. If it is no longer an effective means – if it’s not possible to reach your end solely within the state framework – then people are obliged and entitled to seek alternatives. Now that might (and often does) lead to outcomes that are not desirable for the state because they further undermine its legitimacy, but that’s a byproduct. The problem with state-led discussions of these challenges is that they mistake the byproduct for the main aim, and then proceed to treat the actors involved correspondingly.

Needless to say, there have been people who did not believe that states have “legitimacy or capability” ever since states began to form. That the state does have legitimacy and capability is merely a story that the state tells its citizens – it might be true or it might be false, but it isn’t an inherent feature of the state that it possesses either, and once the facade slips, there may be no going back…

There are outsiders, and then there are …

January 24, 2009 in art, politics | 2 comments

Whimsley is rarely wrong1, and today he skewers the outsider manoeuvre. It’s a tedious form of self-justification posing as self-deprecation, offering the artist a flabby excuse for their art. Plenty of artists aren’t outsiders, plenty of outsiders aren’t artists; the link between the two is weak, to say the least. The existence of Outsider Art suggests that many claims to outsider status may be a bit premature unless you spend a fair amount of time being physically restrained or chemically sedated.

Which brings us neatly to politics. Claims to outsider status are the symptom of an individual building a narrative about themselves. Where the artist is concerned, this narrative is mainly for themselves, as well – but where the politician is concerned, the narrative is definitely for public consumption. American politicians are particularly susceptible to this, and apparently the American electorate is as well – claims to be marching on Washington, prepared to sweep aside the old order with a new broom, a broom that only an outsider can wield – these sorts of claims play very well indeed.

You can see the hard form in John McCain’s rhetoric about being a “maverick” or Sarah Palin’s entire persona:

I’ve stood up to the old politics as usual, to the special interests, to the lobbyists, the big oil companies and the ‘good old boy’ network… If you want change in Washington, if you hope for a better America, then we’re asking for your vote on the 4th of November.

but the softer form is also present in Barack Obama’s speeches, when he says things like “Change doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington” – and means every word.2 The point is not whether these statements are true or false – it’s that the speaker believes them to be true, and wants you to believe as well.

Whimsley is right that we should never, ever trust these claims, no matter who makes them. Claims to outsider status are true or not depending only on where you draw the line of outsider status, but usually people who make such claims are trying to sell you something – whether it’s a film or a presidential campaign.

  1. By which I mean that I nearly always agree with what he writes, of course, rather than making any epistemological claims on his behalf. [↩]
  2. Andrew Keen points out the flaws in this argument with his usual panache. [↩]

Not speaking truth to power

January 18, 2009 in politics | No comments

Sunday is traditionally a day for DIY and reflection. I’ve done the DIY for today, so now it’s time for some reflection. As Barack Obama is sworn in1, our media overlords are in reflective mood as well, but often not for the better. Witness David Ignatius at the Washington Post:

Journalists probably shouldn’t have heroes, but [Ryan] Crocker is one of mine. We first met in 1981 in Lebanon, and I’ve watched over the years as he took on the toughest challenges in the Foreign Service and became a superstar diplomat without ever losing his mordant sense of humor or his determination to speak truth to power.

All fairly innocuous stuff, except for that last part about Crocker having the determination “to speak truth to power”. I know that this is a much over-used phrase, despite which most people who use it are unaware of its Quaker roots. Ryan Crocker is a living, breathing example of that “power”, and the “truth” refers to the pacifism of the Quaker faith.2 Later in the piece:

The key to success in Iraq, insists Crocker, was the psychological impact of Bush’s decision to add troops.

Ignatius couldn’t have found a more inappropriate use for the phrase if he had tried.

  1. Yawn. No matter who you vote for, the government still gets in. [↩]
  2. If you want an example of speaking truth to power, see this post. [↩]

RIP Lasantha Wikramatunge

January 14, 2009 in politics, south asia | 1 comment

Lasantha Wikramatunge, the editor of the Sunday Leader in Sri Lanka, was gunned down on 8 January this year. Even if the civil war that has plagued Sri Lanka comes to an end in the next few months (and we’ve heard those promises from various governments before), the damage done to Sri Lankan society by years of conflict has been immense. In his long career as a journalist, Wikramatunge saw this perhaps better than anybody else, to the extent that he’d written a column for publication after his death.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader’s 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty.

The column is worth reading in full, not just in the specifics of Sri Lanka but in the context of a world where journalism becomes an ever more dangerous occupation; and as a statement of the role that a free press should play.

That would be that Greater Albania they’ve been talking about

January 13, 2009 in balkans, politics | No comments

Well this is interesting:

Kosovo and Albania said they will soon sign an agreement creating a ‘mini-Schengen’ zone allowing free movement across their borders, a deal that could lead to a wider no-border zone in the region…

With signature planned withing two months, the two leaders said the agreement would be then sent to other states in the Balkans as an example of trade liberalisation and integration on the way to the European Union.

“This mini- Schengen of South East Europe would be followed by Montenegro and Macedonia,” Sejdiu said.

Of course, the first comments to go up on this news follows the well-worn paths of Balkan paranoia – specifically, the spectre of Greater Albania. It’s true that the countries mentioned in the scheme are those with Albanian populations, and that this scheme is likely to benefit those populations more than anybody else.1 It’s also true that the obvious next step would be – as this article points out – “a unified economic and external policy between the four, following the model of the Benelux countries.” Greater Albania, here we come!

Except of course, we don’t. Freedom of movement doesn’t create a Greater Albania, and neither does an economic area2 – unless you think that Albanians will outperform everybody else economically in that area3 but it does offer a way of stimulating economic activity across the region, which I would have thought would be something to welcome in these recessionary times. The only problem here would probably be Kosovo, whose economy is unlikely to take off any time soon and might drag the others down with it.

So why stop with those four countries? Invite everybody to the party! We could call it Not-Yugoslavia.

  1. Amazingly, the number of Montenegrin Slavs that I know who have visited Albania is zero, despite the fact that Tirana is only 4 hours’ drive from Podgorica. [↩]
  2. about which Fatmir Sejdiu is necessarily vague, probably because he doesn’t really understand what it would entail [↩]
  3. Which personally I think is a possibility, but isn’t the sort of thing that anybody else would be prepared to admit. [↩]

Scoreline: Justice 1, Genocidaire 800,000

December 18, 2008 in politics | No comments

Indubitably good news from the ICTR, even if it has taken them a ridiculously long time to get there. Every conviction at ICTR places another brick in the wall of our defenses against future genocide, even if we’re still not dealing very successfully with large-scale rights abuses in the present day…

The uneven distribution of human rights

December 13, 2008 in politics | No comments

On 9 December 1948 the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly; on 10 December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was likewise adopted. (The General Assembly was busy that week, hey?) Despite continued breaches of both of these documents – which if we’re brutally honest, was fairly predictable – they have shaped global political discourse ever since – not just in the field of human rights, but much more widely.

I want to write more about human rights, but I fear that anything I write will be reduced in the writing of it. These two documents – but especially the Genocide Convention – are cornerstones of the reason I do the work that I do, building blocks of the person that I am. I fear pressing against them too hard – not because they might collapse, but because I might collapse. So instead I will post this story about Raphael Lemkin, architect of the Genocide Convention and one of my heroes, who, by the time the Convention was adopted, had lost his entire family except his brother.

He walked the halls every day from the spring of 1946 until Dec. 9, 1948, when the General Assembly, in Paris, adopted a resolution approving his convention. That day reporters went looking for him to rejoice in his triumph. But we could not find him until, hours later, we thought to look into the darkened Assembly hall. He sat there weeping as if his heart would break. He asked please to be left in solitude. Then this Lemkin came back to the corridors for years, pleading with delegation after delegation to follow through on the U.N. resolution by getting their countries to sign the treaty… But he died alone on Aug. 28, 1959, without medals or prizes, in a hotel in New York. There were seven people at the graveside when Raphael Lemkin was buried.

Lemkin’s fate – persecuted, ridiculed and ignored – tragically mirrors the experience of many, many human rights activists over these years. Progress is not guaranteed, and never secure, and so we keep working in the hope that one day human rights are distributed more evenly, from America to Zimbabwe.

Pirates in the Balkans!

December 6, 2008 in balkans, pirates, politics | No comments

Now at last I can hold my head up high on International Talk Like A PIrate Day, because it’s now official. Pirates from Serbia attack Bulgarian ships on the Danube:

About 40 unstaffed ship convoys were attacked and robbed in the past two years at the Serbian port of Smederevo, located to the east of Belgrade… Although the Serbian pirates’ attacks are not as spectacular as those taking place in Somalian or Indonesian waters, as the former usually don’t have any casualties, they nevertheless attack ships with armed men and steal cables and various goods, such as metals, coke, wheat, and sugar.

There’s a lot less glamour involved, obviously, but also less chance of having your vessel sunk by the Danish navy.

In other news, Prva Banka Crne Gore asked the Montenegrin government for a €40 million bail-out to get it through the financial crisis that the government insists isn’t a problem. Prva Banka is of course 30% owned by Aco Đukanović, who happens to be the older brother of Milo Đukanović, Prime Minister of the government that Prva Banka is asking for money from. Oh, and did I mention that Capital Invest – owned by Milo – has a 7% stake in Prva Banka as well? Hopefully the bail-out package will be approved and the Đukanović family’s long nightmare of financial insecurity will be over.

If all this news of pirates and financial crisis is getting you down, you could do a lot worse than buy a copy of Scurvy Dogs, a comic book about pirates in a financial crisis. Here the team face off against a posse of monkeys, “the pigeons of the seas”.

the pigeons of the seas

“Pain Tyme” indeed.

Your DNA should thank the ECHR

December 4, 2008 in UK, politics | No comments

People should be dancing in the streets at the news that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled unanimously that an individual’s DNA should not be kept on record if they have not been convicted of any offence. However it’s likely that – like most of the news relating to the government’s attempts to gather more and more data on citizens – it won’t register on most people’s radar.

Predictably Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said that she was “disappointed”, and went on to claim that

DNA and fingerprinting is vital to the fight against crime, providing the police with more than 3,500 matches a month. The government mounted a robust defence before the Court and I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice.

This is the usual line from the government – the law and order cover story always plays well to the tabloid gallery. Unfortunately her belief that a comprehensive DNA database will help to solve more crimes has – as far as I’m aware, and I welcome any correction – never been supported by any evidence, while the Nuffield Council on Bioethics consultation suggested that

Britain has the biggest DNA Database in the world, but making it bigger is not helping to solve more crimes. Collecting more DNA from crime scenes has made a big difference to the number of crimes solved, but keeping DNA from more and more people who have been arrested – many of whom are innocent – has not. Since April 2003, about 1.5 million extra people have been added to the Database, but the chances of detecting a crime using DNA has remained constant, at about 0.36%. (via Genewatch)

If you want to do something about this yourself, I strongly recommend joining NO2ID, who pursue this issue tirelessly, although not in a creepy stalker-ish way, and watch out for people who claim that they’re going to keep you safe by treating you like a criminal.

Mumbai’s terror in the mirror

November 29, 2008 in politics, religion, war | 1 comment

Like everybody else, I read about the terror attacks in Mumbai. It’s fascinating how much this has become a global story; partly because of the terror elements, partly because of the new technology. To a large extent, however, these attacks matter because India matters. On the one hand this gladdens me – because India does matter – but it also saddens me, because other parts of the world matter just as much.

The other aspect of these events that stand out is the way in which each observer – however intelligent, however well-informed – is unable to escape their own perspective. Thus Butterflies and Wheels sees “horrible horrible horrible people who like hurting and killing people”, the Long War Journal sees “Foreign assault teams that likely trained and originated from outside the country infiltrated a major city to conduct multiple attacks on carefully chosen targets”, a contributor on Wikipedia states with confidence that he has”both Pakistani and Indian friends here in Toronto, they is a difference of NIGHT and DAY. All the Indians in our company are dark skinned and of short stature. The Pakistanis are always the opposite in physcial looks.”

The internet is no cure for a lack of imagination, which appears to be the single biggest stumbling block in combating terrorism. We all want the enemy to be clearly visible, to be clearly distinguishable, although most of all we want the enemy not to be us.1 Yet for most outsiders, ignorant of the history of Kashmir, blind to the intersection of crime and communalism (so brilliantly sketched in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City), unconcerned by the legacy of partition in all its forms, these attacks are an opportunity mainly to entertain their own prescriptions. It’s understandable; but it’s not enough.

My thoughts are with the victims of these attacks, rich and poor; but my concern is for the future victims. India has a terrible track record of communal violence triggered by key events, and these attacks are likely to have the opposite effect that the terrorists wanted – (Hindu) mob vengeance against innocent (Muslim) citizens. The question is not whether India can combat terrorism, but whether it can combat the communal tensions that provide continual fuel for that terrorism.

  1. Most interesting blog post so far: a transcript of India TV’s interview with one of the terrorists at How I Learned to Stop Worrying. [↩]

Death comes to the Barefoot

November 25, 2008 in philosophy, politics | 3 comments

I don’t always agree with the Barefoot Bum, but there are few philosophy bloggers whose writing is as lucid and uncompromising, and that’s something I can get with. In a response to some posts on communism by dbzero, he puts forward a possible defense of communism – or more specifically of the USSR and the PRC – that uses a balance sheet approach.

To what degree are the people who died under Stalin or Mao (especially Mao) offset by those that were saved? Compared to both societies before their revolutions, what was the improvement in material standards of living and medical care, both of which profoundly expect both life expectancy and quality of life?

While these questions are valid, this defense will not work well for one simple reason. While balance sheets do have a useful role in judging success and failure, but they are notoriously difficult to use when human lives are involved. This is not because human life is invaluable, but for precisely the opposite reason – because we do place a concrete value on individual human lives, even if we can’t articulate the precise amount of that value.

This can be seen in peoples’ responses to the death of a child versus the death of an old person; nearly everybody would agree that the loss of a child is the greater loss (including old people, of course). Balance sheets run into difficulties not because human lives are valuable, but because that sense of value is subjective. Nobody will agree on how much a human life should be valued at, partly because we’re afraid that this will expose our express belief that human life is invaluable (and therefore sacrosanct) as a sham. Nobody wants to be the first to shout the emperor has no clothes in this particular instance. (Possible exception: Peter Singer, who’s practically made a career out of it.)

How might we deal with this problem, especially in the company of people such Massimo Pigliucci’s repugnant dinner companions? Well, one could argue that any excess mortality in the service of political goals is unacceptable – but then that lands all of us in the same boat, and also overlooks the fact that heroic sacrifice for the fatherland / motherland / country of choice often makes such excess mortality voluntary (as well as being widely respected). Excess mortality alone makes for good headlines, but is not in and of itself a measure of culpability – which is presumably what we’re after in this case.

I propose that we must subdivide excess mortality into three distinct types. This will enable us to avoid comparing apples with oranges, although we may in fact find that the line between apple and orange is a little blurred. The three types are deliberate, incidental and accidental and I’ll explain the distinctions in my next blog post when I stop blogging about Batman R.I.P.

Canute in Bosnia

November 19, 2008 in balkans, politics | No comments

Following through on yesterday’s post on Paddy, I turned to his recent Guardian editorial A Bosnian Powder Keg, co-written with Richard Holbrooke. It’s fair to say that these two have been amongst the most visibly influential people involved in the effort to build a viable Bosnia, but it’s also fair to say that their efforts have been largely futile – hence the need for them to write an article warning that “we are sleepwalking into another Balkan crisis”.

Noticing this, Daniel Korski at Global Dashboard has written a short post, Curing the Bosnian blues. which reprints the recommendations provided by a recent DPC report, itself alarmingly titled Sliding toward the precipice. These recommendations are all well and good, but they stand about as much chance of stopping the disintegration of Bosnia as Canute had of holding back the ocean.

No, while “A destructive dynamic is accelerating, and Bosnian and Croat nationalism is on the rise”, the problem is not the rise of nationalism. It’s the rise of the wrong sort of nationalism – we want them to build up their nation, as long as it’s the nation that we want them to build. At the same time the Bosnian Serbs can look across to Kosovo and wonder why the international community breaks up one state on ethnic lines while forcing another to stay together despite the same sort of division.

Actually, they don’t wonder that at all. No matter what their other flaws, the Serbs have never been under the illusion that the international community operates under any principles except those of realpolitik. So instead of trying to stop the tides of nationalism, Canute should recognise that he can’t stop the tides, get off his throne and work out a better way of keeping his feet dry.

NATO’s ARRC

November 18, 2008 in politics, war | 2 comments

While working on Exercise ARRCADE Fusion 2008, I was told that NATO is like Noah’s Ark – they always order two of everything. It was funnier when everybody was a bit drunk and there were bagpipes and an oompah band playing in the background (don’t blame me – it was Germany). Hence the title of this blog post, even though that’s not what I wanted to write about. Strike two for coherent blogging.

The special guest for this simulation exercise was the Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon Paddy Ashdown, former UN High Representative to Bosnia and probably the only man to be crossed off Hamid Karzai’s christmas card list (which is pretty hard to do – even Mullah Omar is back on it, for pity’s sake). Now personally I don’t think that Ashdown’s experience is necessarily a useful guide to anything much, but that experience has been hard-won and his book will be a staple on many university courses for years to come.

Naturally I took the opportunity to hear Lord Ashdown’s evening talk in a draughty and badly-lit metal shack, but I was equally interested to see the reaction of the 150-odd other people who were attending. Apart from about 10 of us, everybody in the room was a uniform, and nearly all officers, and mainly British. These are not people with a necessarily nuanced views of the world, although they do have a broader range than most people would expect (certainly wider than I expected when I first started working alongside the military in 1999).

Ashdown’s an excellent speaker, but I’m not going to go into the detail of the talk. It’s probably NATO-classified anyway. He started out by telling us that he was going to say some contentious things, but frankly they’d only have been contentious if you hadn’t picked up a copy of The Economist in the last 5 years. Although he delivered a nice synthesis of how global trends are likely to impact on the international community, the UK and the military, with a clear focus on war and peace operations, this was fairly routine stuff.

About halfway through the talk, however, I was struck by how much of a challenge the future presents for somebody like Paddy Ashdown. When he talks about the rise of Asia, I see the white scared of the rising tide of colour. When he talks about the lawlessness of the new cities, I see the rich running from the poor mob. When he talks about the loss of national identities and borders, I see the politicians watching their natural habitat being worn away. When he talks about how we might preserve western liberal values in a world where the west no longer gets to make the rules, I see the powerful watching power slip through their fingers.

I freely admit that I could be wrong about this, and I’m fairly certain that Ashdown himself would deny it (although somehow I doubt he’ll be posting a comment on this blog). Yet it remainsl the case that everywhere you look, fear is palpable, fear based on uncertainty – which is also why so much hope is being vested in President-elect Obama (most of this hope is misplaced, but that’s another post for another time). Listening to Ashdown, I realised that what we’re missing right now are people who can think outside the traditional parameters of left and right, black and white, church and state, yet still present a coherent vision of what’s to come.

There are some who think they’re doing that sort of thinking, but generally they’re only reacting to these existing concepts, not moving beyond them; and writing from a position from which power is slipping away, rather than a position to which power is moving. We need to acknowledge that the ascendancy of Ashdown Man was not pre-ordained. Nation states aren’t the natural order of things; the white west doesn’t have any cast-iron claims to superiority; the current distribution of wealth was nice while it lasted, but was never going to last that long; and so on. Once we can get those blinkers off, we might be able to generate the visionary thinkers that we need to navigate this new world in which we find ourselves.

Unlike ARRCADE Fusion, this isn’t an exercise.

Escaping scrutiny

October 27, 2008 in Sought My Company Voluntarily, Now Regretful, UK, iraq, politics | No comments

When reading about government proposals to peer ever more deeply into the lives of their citizens, I suggest that you apply a variation of Rawls‘ original position to decide whether any given measure will be for the better, or for the worse. The question is this:

If you did not know whether the government proposing this measure was a benign liberal democracy or a malign totalitarian dictatorship, then would you want this measure to be implemented?

All is well when cuddly-wuddly New New Labour proposes these measures, and people nod and hum and let it slide. If it was the Burmese military regime, I wouldn’t be so bloody sanguine about it, would you?1 The question to ask is not whether your government is benign or malign, but whether this the sort of information that you think the government should have in the first place.

  1. Perhaps you would. [↩]

Why I’ll never be a successful pundit

October 10, 2008 in kosovo, montenegro, politics | No comments

Montenegro recognises Kosovo, and I take back everything I said previously about the likelihood of this happening. This is of course deeply ironic considering my previous post on Doug Muir’s admission of error regarding the fruits of independence – at least his predictions were good for two years, whereas mine lasted for about two months.

What’s amusing about this is the timing. The summer season finished a couple of weeks ago, which means that the moderate numbers of Serbs who still holiday in Montenegro have all gone home, and less potential for any “citizen action”, “boycotts” or the like. Montenegrin Serbs are incensed – but in the Balkans, which club would you rather be a member of: the friends of Kosova or the friends of Serbia? In the latter case, membership has distinctly fewer advantages.

A big man for Montenegro

September 29, 2008 in montenegro, politics | No comments

It takes a big man to admit that they were wrong. Doug Muir is a big man. Two years ago Doug was arguing that independence for Montenegro was a bad idea, but this past week he has recanted that heresy and now admits that maybe it wasn’t as much of a bad idea as he originally thought. Certainly his admission is slightly grudging – pointing out that Montenegrin government is still “corrupt, inbred, intolerant of criticism, and deeply linked with regional criminal elites” is clearly not unqualified support. Doug, I salute you!

However I think he is fair to point out that there’s still time for things to go wrong. If the tourism continues to dry up, the construction boom will be over; if global recession takes hold, the garment trade is going to go down the toilet. If the economy in general tanks, then dissatisfaction means that Serb and Albanian nationalism will both start to grow – which means that political class will find it increasingly hard to keep the boat from rocking. Suddenly Montenegro won’t look so appealling, investment will start to dry up and it could turn into a long spiral down.

I hope that doesn’t happen, personally. One thing I’m sure of; no matter what happens in Montenegro, Podgorica is never going to be a nice place.

Still no black in the Union Jack

July 23, 2008 in UK, politics | No comments

The soaraway Sun: touchingly incompetent with Photoshop or just plain racist? You decide.

Not only has The Sun removed the skipper on the left, they’ve also removed the boat’s engine. Prince William, drifting around the Caribbean during a hurricane. Extra laughs:

Prince William’s campaign to try on every uniform Britain has to offer is a wow - next week it’s baker, then butcher, then cub scout, before a week as a traffic warden in Slough, then a few days as a Beefeater before ending the summer as a lap dancer.

HT: The Daily (Maybe)

Karadzic: Giving Beards a Bad Name

July 23, 2008 in politics | 1 comment

Radovan Karadzic was arrested at the weekend – a great day for justice but a bad day for beards. Check out one of the most bizarre before and after shots ever:

Recent posts have exposed me as a big fan of the taste of “international justice” and Karadzic’s arrest fits right into my pot. The destabilising effects predicted by critics of the indictment of Omar al-Bashir in Sudan are minimal in this case; thanks to the passage of time, the Karadzic arrest is unlikely to be much more than another arrow in the political quiver of a particular section of Serbian politics, rather than a focus for mass mobilisation.

The news is more interesting in terms of the timing – shortly after the formation of the new Serbian government and the replacement of Bulatovic as the head of the intelligence services. Karadzic is just a pawn in the chess game of Serbia’s political rehabilitation, which is perhaps the hardest thing for his supporters – and him – to stomach. That’s perhaps part of the role of tribunals such as ICTY – not just providing justice, but also showing people that their “heroes” have feet of clay and their “monsters” are (in the end) a sad old man with a novelty beard.

However the most important aspect of this news is that Karadzic – under his pseudonym of Dr Dragan Dabic – had his own website, which I urge you to visit at http://dragandabic.com/. Turns out that the initial website that circulated via such illuminated truthseekers such as the BBC and Reuters was a spoof - Dabic’s real website was the New Age car crash PSY Help Energy. In spite of that, I still found the homilies at the bottom of the spoof page quite entertaining, this one was particularly poignant in light of his history of hair:

You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.

He’ll have plenty of time to reflect on that in the next few years, and possibly to face in court some of the people from Bosnia who had very little choice about where the birds of sorrow built their nests.

POSTSCRIPT: In other news, Karadzic was my neighbour! Human Quantum Energy! Also smuggles endangered animals (in hat)! Ratko to go down swinging!

From Exposure To Closure

July 19, 2008 in politics | 2 comments

Chris Blattman disagrees with me on the ICC indictment of Omar al-Bashir, which I think is a defensible position (and one which I would probably have held myself previously). However he links to Alex de Waal’s post All Quiet in Sudan? and suggests that Alex’ arguments may show that the ICC indictments are backfiring. I think this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the ICC indictments are intended to achieve.

Although Luis Moreno-Ocampo may well be a loose cannon, as Chris believes, the ICC indictments have one aim and one only: to bring Omar al-Bashir to trial for his role in the conflict in Darfur. While we need to take account of the political realities, the only way that they can backfire is if they put Omar al-Bashir out of reach of criminal proceedings – or possibly if they lead to more crimes against humanity in Sudan. There’s nothing in Alex’ analysis to suggest that this is the case or that it’s likely to be the case in future.

However the points that Alex makes are all dead on – and expose the real fault lines in the international system, cracks which are nowhere near the ICC itself. For example,

The second strand of the [Sudanese] government strategy has been to seek solidarity from regional organizations including the League of Arab States, the African Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. By last weekend, it was clear that the regional organizations all had strong objections to the ICC’s move. Many African states, including Egypt, have been early and strong supporters of the ICC, and their lack of support for this move by the Prosecutor reassured Khartoum. The AU’s new Chairperson, Jean Ping, was particularly outspoken.

It’s often been noted that African leaders have a tendency to turn a blind eye to the excesses of their peers, but at least you can say that they’re consistent. Support for the ICC was always going to evaporate as soon as national governments realised that it wasn’t just going to go after their enemies, so none of this should come as any surprise – nor does it show that the indictments are a mistake. In terms of the remit of the ICC, exposing this is surely the opposite of backfiring – it demonstrates that those regional governments are now aware that they are not out of reach of the law.

One step forward, one step back

July 14, 2008 in politics | No comments

Last week: Britain and the US have condemned Russia and China for vetoing a draft UN Security Council resolution to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe’s leaders.

Particularly amusing was UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband saying the veto “would appear incomprehensible to the people of Zimbabwe” – surely they’re used to nobody charge to the rescue by now? The doomsayers railed against the inability of the United Nations to address human rights at all – a charge which has some legitimacy when you look at the charade that the Human Rights Council threatens to become, but has less credibility when you remember that the United Nations has usually been the vehicle for those rights in the first place; and it was the UN that approved the Responsibility to Protect, of which this would have been a fine outing.1 The UN (unfortunately) is large, it contains multitudes; the truth is that the Security Council will never be able to address these issues without reforms that the permanent members will never agree to – the removal of the institution of permanent membership itself and the end of their veto.2

This week: The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor charged Sudan’s president on Monday with masterminding a campaign of genocide in Darfur, killing 35,000 people and using rape as a weapon of war.

For discussion about Darfur, I can’t recommend Alex de Waal et al.’s Making Sense of Darfur blog highly enough and, sure enough, they’ve provided in-depth analysis of what this means. If you wish to understand the situation in Darfur, you will not find better on the web; and their coverage of the ICC decision is as usual excellent, although unfortunately it’s a temporary feature. The main point here is that – regardless of whether you agree with the decision or not (and tragically the blogosphere doesn’t have much more to offer in terms of commentary than those two) -  the ICC has taken a major step in advancing the status of human rights on the global stage by indicting a sitting head of state in an ongoing conflict,3 which is also an excellent counter-balance to the continuing bad news from Zimbabwe. It also shows that the future of human rights lies not with the old order – the Security Council, one of the oldest institutions available – but with more recent international institutions such as the ICC.

For what it’s worth, I come down strongly for sanctions against Zimbabwe, combined with more vigorous diplomatic pressure – not on Zimbabwe itself, which remains oblivious, but on Zimbabwe’s enablers, particularly South Africa. It is long past time for African governments to stop defending each others actions at the expense of the well-being of their peoples, and long past time for others to stop tolerating it. I come down weakly in favour of the Bashir indictment, because the threats that Sudan may descend into “mayhem” as a result ring slightly hollow when you look at the actual state of Sudan and wonder if “mayhem” would possibly be an improvement4 and I think the potential benefits outweigh the imagined disadvantages.

The reason that I support the indictment is mainly for the service it does in advancing the debate on human rights globally. While it may in itself be quite toothless, it changes the terms of that debate – and that may indeed be the strategic reasoning behind it. It’s only through these discussions that we advance the cause of human rights, which is after all a series of discussions between different groups about power and responsibility – even if part of the backdrop to those discussions is the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe.

  1. The irony meter goes off the charts when you realise that Mugabe himself was at that meeting. [↩]
  2. On the other hand, there’s a case to be made that those two factors are what prevents the Security Council from descending into utter irrelevance. [↩]
  3. Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor previously, both in circumstances slightly but critically different. [↩]
  4. Joke. [↩]

My heart’s in Darfur

July 7, 2008 in politics | No comments

Wow, it’s a big blogging day, isn’t it? I must be ill or something. Ethan asks

If Darfur is one of the best examples of people in the developed world paying attention to events in a developing nation, and if drawing attention to Darfur has involved an oversimplification of the conflict which may be damaging and misleading, should be be looking at the Darfur movement as an exemplar for how to draw attention to developing world issues, or should we be avoiding it like the plague?

Ethan has already answered the first part of his own question in the post. Darfur is a good example of people paying attention to an constructed narrative that they feel invested in, rather than in the actual situation. This is normal – we all bring something different to the table – but Darfur is interesting because it’s scaled up far larger than anybody (including me) ever expected. Of course the impact of that large scale has been a big nothing for the people of the Darfur, but that doesn’t seem to worry most of the people involved – so all credit to Ethan for asking these questions.

Personally I think we should look at the Darfur movement as an example of how to mobilize people – if that’s what you want. It’s not a good example of how to educate people, which I think is more important than mobilizing them. If people want to mobilize, they’ll mobilize themselves – but they can only do that if they have good information with which to make their decisions. The reason why you’d want to draw attention to developing world issues (or “issues”, as they call them in the developing world) is the one that interests me, as previously noted – not because it’s a bad thing in itself, but because participation without purpose is not a good use of anybody’s time.

In other words, is it possible to get people interested in African stories without oversimplifying them? Is it possible to solve “the caring problem” too well, convincing people to care too much and in the wrong directions? For those of us trying to get more attention to the rest of the world, how do we strike this balance between too much and too little?

Wow, that’s a lot of questions there. Short answers:

a. No.

b. Yes.

c. You should start by asking why you’re trying to get more attention to the rest of the world. Once you know why you’re doing it, you’ll be able to work out the right approach.

A better patriotism

July 7, 2008 in politics | No comments

Here’s a thought. Martin Bento says in comments:

Particularly in the US, where the country is almost synonymous with the government (most countries have existed under various governments), it makes people feel that the government may be wrong, but its motives must be good.

Where the country is almost synonymous with the government is the part that made me think. Patriotism in the US is constructed on an unbroken chain of governance since the inception of the country – with a possible exception made for the Civil War? – with the added weight that the country itself did not exist prior to the formation of that governance mechanism. This leads many Americans to view that governance mechanism as one of the essential attributes of the country, as well as locating it in the mostly unquestioned belief that the American Way (of life, of politics, of economics) is the right way of doing things.

Other countries lack this unbroken chain of governance. Moments of interruption, whether long or short; complete and wholesale changes in regime; a story as a nation that goes back further than the story of the country itself; borders that change and shift with historical fortune; competing subnational narratives within the attempt to construct a new patriotism. All of these things influence the nature of patriotism (read: nationalism?) in the rest of the world (compared with the New World, and particularly compared with the US) and consequently give us a radically different historical perspective on issues like governmental authority.

Notes from under water

July 3, 2008 in politics | No comments

Christopher Hitchens is waterboarded for Vanity Fair1 and comes up for air to proclaim

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Well, quite; but I still find it astonishing that anybody questions whether waterboarding is torture, or that Hitchens needed to be waterboarded before he realised something that should be blindingly obvious to anybody paying attention. The chronically stupid are likely to wheel out their usual protests, which is that any procedure that somebody like Hitchens would volunteer for can’t possibly be torture.2 A quick glimpse at the indemnification contract that he had to sign should set their minds at rest:

“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.

So where does that leave us? In absolutely the same place as we started. Kudos to Hitchens for going through with this, but it’s not going to change the mind of anybody who’s already put their chips in with torture, and it’s too late to undo the damage that’s been done by admitting waterboarding into the repertoire to begin with.

The truly insidious nature of torture is only hinted at in Hitchen’s piece:

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured.

It’s not about what torture can do for your country, it’s about what torture does to your country; but maybe that’s not a concern for people who would trade in their security for a taste of the action.

  1. Presumably they quizzed him about his expenses claims. [↩]
  2. You can read more monkey at the comments on Harry’s Place, with delightful insights such as “It is an interesting and fair question, though, if waterboarding qualifies as torture, but you’d need to get the answer from tough people, people who have been trained to resist captors and pain” – because apparently you need to be an trained expert to tell if you’re being tortured. [↩]

My nose, my face, my country

June 23, 2008 in politics | 1 comment

Many Balkan politicians have very firm principles. They’re prepared to make great sacrifices for those principles, but they’re more often prepared to sacrifice other people for them. People don’t seem to have as much of a problem with this as you’d expect – look at how many Serbs continued to follow Milosevic as he lead the country into utter ruin. It’s to the credit of the Serbian people that eventually they pulled themselves out of that collective descent, but the tendency remains firmly embedded in Balkan politics.

For a contemporary example, look no further than the report on Serbblog on the possibility that Montenegro might recognise Kosovo. Now this is something that’s unlikely in the extreme but which makes great political hay for pro-Serbian politicians in Montenegro – Andrija Mandic captured 19% of the vote in the recent elections by playing up to it. Mandic recently made a visit to Kosovo and has clearly decided that this is the issue that’s going to get him the most mileage:

Mandic suggested that ordinary Montenegrins take to the streets in protest, especially now during tourist season (tourism represents nearly 25% of the Montenegrin economy) should the Montenegrin leadership even consider such a traitorous move.

Apparently the Montenegrin government needs to be prevented from even thinking about recognising Kosovo (thoughtcrime!) and the best way to do that is to cripple the one part of the economy that’s actually growing. The fact that, if successful, the short-term impact of such a strike would damage the average Montenegrin more than anybody else, and that the long-term impact would probably kill the tourist industry in the cradle, seems to have escaped Mandic (and Serbblog, who supports the idea). Or maybe it hasn’t escaped him, and he genuinely believes that cutting your nose off to spite your face is a sensible policy position?

UPDATE: Okay, now Djukanovic has said in public that recognition of Kosovo independence is inevitable. Strike, Andrija, strike! (Of course, this is from New Kosova Report, and Djukanovic apparently specifically used the passive voice, and didn’t actually say that Montenegro is going to recognise Kosovo any time soon, etc, etc. Mileage may vary.)

Prancing Interventionists

June 18, 2008 in politics, war | No comments

Norm Geras is smarter than me, but sometimes smart people can be just plain silly.

Opposing the war Hall, like the rest of the many Iraq-war smugwits in the camp of those who opposed the war, favoured the continuation, sine die, of a regime of torture and murder.

It is a truism, of course, that many (although not all) of the pro-war camp were surprising muted in their opposition to Saddam Hussein while he was busy committing genocide against the Kurds, and for an extremely long time thereafter. Presumably this means that at that point they also favoured the continuation of a regime of torture and murder – perhaps Norm could tell us what changed their minds?

Meanwhile Oliver Kamm descends into self-parody, proclaiming “Bush made the world a safer place”. Witness:

The most fundamental decision in western security policy in the past seven years… has been the recognition that the most voluble adversaries of western society… are a reactionary, millenarian and atavistic force with whom accommodation is impossible as well as intensely undesirable.

Back in the real world, Israel and Hamas agree a ceasefire pending negotiations on re-opening the Rafah border crossing. It is noticeable that those who decry the slightest hint of jaw-jaw and bray most loudly for war-war are frequently those who are unlikely to ever suffer the consequences of war-war. The result is that, while Israel desperately but understandably seeks accommodation with its opponents, professional satirists such as Kamm are busy apparently telling them that they shouldn’t – for their own sake.

Those readers unfamiliar with this brand of satire may require some help understanding passages like this:

For all Bush’s verbal infelicity, diplomatic brusqueness, negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq, and insouciance regarding standards of due process when prosecuting the war on terror, the world is a safer place for the influence he has exercised.

“Verbal infelicity” = lying. “Diplomatic brusqueness” = war of aggression. “Negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq” = completely dropping the ball at the most critical point. “Insouciance regarding standards of due process” = heavily editing the Geneva Conventions and sanctioning torture. “The world is a safer place” = pretty much as it sounds, unless you’re an Iraqi citizen.

I’m under no illusions that my opinion counts for anything with either Norm or Oliver, but I truly wish that the pro-war camp would just face their truth. Iraq has been a terrifying mess since the beginning (although the results of the surge have been a welcome relief in terms of the human cost) and pretending otherwise is just a fool’s penny in the fountain. Opposing that war – and wars to come – doesn’t make you an apologist for genocide; it can simply mean that you’ve seen how these games tend to play out on the ground.

Look How Much The Internet Cares

June 10, 2008 in politics, writing | 1 comment

While reading this post, you should be listening to Perfect Bird by Hexstatic and Missalu Aduna by Omzo.1

Dave Steinberg writes a column on How much do we have to care about? with annotations by Ethan Zuckerman. Both of these men are very intelligent, both write very well and both are concerned with how the internet can improve the human condition. So why are both of them so egregiously wrong?

MAKE ME THE OTHER

Dave and Ethan’s worries can be divided into two questions:

The population of Nigeria roughly equals the population of Japan. Yet, the amount of space given to Nigeria by the US news media makes it about the size of Britney Spears’ left pinky toe. Why?

Because Nigeria has virtually no historical connections to the US, almost no strategic value in relation to US interests, and is a long way away. It’s also because the US news media is a terrifying joke, but that’s a more general observation than the topic under discussion.

How can we get past our homophily — the love of that which is like us — to get to xenophilia, which is Ethan’s term for the love of that which is different. How can we change the media agenda?

Of course, the media agenda is not responsible for our homophily – my hunch is that they’re only tenuously related for the purposes of effecting change, since homophily is about as deep-rooted a human instinct as it’s possible to find. It’s not the only deep-rooted human instinct, though, on which more, later.

In fact, they don’t mean how can we love that which is different. In the cosmopolitan stretches of the world, we already love that which is different (what authentic ethnic cuisine would you like tonight?) to such an extent that we forget that most of the world isn’t like that.

THE POWER OF PLACE

What we have difficulty with is that which is distant – that which happens outside our line of sight. But what is inherently good about loving that which is distant? If we invest in this, we run the risk of diminishing our love of that which is closest – our own culture. Given my professional and personal interests, you’ll have a hard time persuading anybody that I’m xenophobic – but I’m not so egocentric that I think that my interests should be everybody else’s interests.

The power of place will continue to exert a hold on human psychology because humans have to live in a physical world where distance and difference matter. The internet may not see those distances (although I think that the internet just reconfigures those distances rather than eliminates them) and the internet may help those already predisposed to xenophilia to get their fix – but the internet isn’t going to make people care more.

CARING IS NOT ENOUGH

Ethan adds:

You might add something about why this “circle of not-caring” matters. My stock examples for this are the genocide in Rwanda, and terrorist training camps in central Asia. We don’t care about these places until it’s too late…

This is where my alarm starts to go off. Who is this mysterious “we” that Ethan is talking about? It would be nice to think that “we” is the community of humanity, but in reality it means “people like me”, which elides into “a particular type of American”. Quite a lot of people cared about the genocide in Rwanda – I understand that most of the population of Rwanda itself got involved – just the “right” people (i.e. those with the power to do anything about it) and not in the “right” way (i.e. to turn caring into a workable policy).

The Save Darfur Coalition has made a huge number of people in the US care about Darfur – yet as far as I can tell, it’s had absolutely no impact on people of Darfur, except possibly to ensure a constant stream of celebrity access). There’s a danger in thinking that caring means anything, because the bad news is that caring – whether a little or a lot – doesn’t mean anything. Acting can mean something, but there’s a danger in action that is just a form of externalized caring – which is what I’d argue a lot of the Save Darfur campaign is.

CURSING THE FAMILIAR

Kwame Appiah’s book, “Cosmopolitanism”… observes that this opportunity to care about fellow creatures in far-flung parts of the world is very, very new. Two hundred years ago, only the most learned city-dwellers would regularly interact with people of other “tribes”.

I’m looking forward to reading Cosmopolitanism at some point in my hopefully long life, but this argument strikes me as being nonsense. The history of civilisation is the history of contact – Europe has been a patchwork of competing factions (tribal or otherwise) for most of its history, as has most of the world. It strikes me that what this idea overlooks the simple facts of history in order to set up a strawman that supports a philosophical theory – but I haven’t read the book yet, so I could be wrong.

I call this “cursing the familiar” because it underplays the significance of local differences purely because they are so familiar. All those differences between different countries, different groups, different towns – they’re simply not different enough. We need something more exotic to get our juices flowing, right? Our own cultures, our own histories, are fascinating enough and need as much attention as Nigerian ninjas (or whatever you find exciting).

This isn’t an argument for parochialism; it’s an argument for recognizing that the familiar is important as well, particularly in a society such as ours where novelty is emphasized at the expense of continuity.

JESUS CALLED, HE WANTS A REFUND

This idea that we might need to care about all of humanity – or at least tolerate them in our interactions – is brand new, and starkly conflicts with basic human impulses – care for our family and tribe and fear the outsider.

This is nonsense. Christianity is 2000 years old, and has exactly this message; so do almost all of the world religions in some form, some more than others, some older than others. I agree that it conflicts with our basic impulses, which is why it hasn’t been particularly successful. However human society and economy are built on tolerating outsiders, so unless Ethan wants to argue that the last several thousand years of human history didn’t happen, it doesn’t seem a particularly strong argument.2

What was so exceptional about Nelson Mandela wasn’t that he was an amazing and vocal leader for black South Africans – it was that he showed compassion and understanding for white South Africans, including deKlerk. Figures who can care across borders are heroes in a very particular and recognizable fashion.

This isn’t quite true, and it reflects a common misperception about what it means to care about the world. We admire people who “care across borders” because of our philosophical and religious legacy. The Christian model of the martyr is the Christ figure, who sacrifices themselves for others – but there’s no value in a sacrifice if it doesn’t actually make things better for other people. Mother Teresa is a good example – widely admired, caring across borders, etc, and demonstrably an utter loss in actually improving people’s condition. We should admire people who make a significant difference in the material condition of the human race, not just those who fit a discredited religious model.

EQUALITY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

But Ethan is not arguing that newspapers ought to cover every village and every family. Rather, our newspapers should equally cover places that are of equal significance, or at least not be so blatantly out of balance. Nigeria’s population is as big as Japan’s, and while its economy is not on a par with Japan’s, it’s of growing importance to us. So, why the disparity? And, more important, how do we remedy it?

“Equally cover places that are of equal significance” is meaningless. What is “equal significance” for economists might not be of equal significance for environmentalists; what is “equal significance” for musicians might not be of equal significance for mountaineers. If there are more musicians out there than economists, does that mean that the musicians’ definition give their interests more significance? The reason why coverage of Israel and the surrounding countries is so prevalent in the US media is precisely because so many people find it significant – you may disagree with them, but what makes your view more “significant” than theirs?

The strength of the internet is to provide a platform where all these slices of significance can be found – and if they can’t be found, you can create your own slice of significance. Saxophone-playing members of the Austrian school who like base-jumping can (and do) generate their own content. But the message is – it’s not up to you, me or anybody else to remedy the imbalance on behalf of anybody else, no matter how offensive we might find that imbalance. The most we can do is to improve the chances of the victims of imbalance to strike back (which is something that I think Global Voices Online does quite nicely).

But, there is a serious dilemma here…Our interest is determined not by what we should be interested in but by what we happen to be interested in.

I find this frankly odd. I’m not sure why this is supposed to be a problem – if our interest isn’t determined by what we happen to be interested in, then what should it be determined by? Who judges what we “should” be interested in – people like Dave and Ethan, who have a higher state of consciousness? For somebody who’s a big believer in the power of collective individual action, Dave doesn’t seem convinced that the wisdom of crowds is working well in this instance, because it collides with his own perceptions.

MORE TRUE THAN ANYTHING ELSE IN THE ARTICLE

Thus, if newspapers or their online replacements become more proportionally accurate reflections of the world, we’ll just skip the sections we don’t care about. That’s what we do already: Everything you ever wanted to know about Nigeria is online, but you haven’t read hardly any of it, have you? Me neither.

You have just answered your own question about why there isn’t more coverage of these places, haven’t you? If you guys, of all people, aren’t interested enough to follow up on Nigeria, then why on earth do you expect the broadcast media to follow it up?

Maybe one conclusion to draw is that good writing is harder than we thought. Or maybe there is more good writing around than we think, but we need help finding it.

I think it’s safe to say that good writing is harder to find than you think. The vast, vast majority of writing on the web is banal dross, cattleprod cant or porn.

As is so often the case, the question isn’t whether the Web has solved a problem but whether it’s helped.

Absolutely true, and it seems clear that it has helped and will continue to help.

But on the Web there are multiple, overlapping personal and social agendas. Which results in there not being an agenda. There is thus no one putting broccoli on our plates and telling us to eat it.

Yet here you are, telling us that we’re not eating enough from the xenophile buffet?

I don’t want to dismiss Dave and Ethan’s concerns, because they are smart and they are engaged and that’s important – yet if I was being cruel, I would have to say that this whole piece smacks to me of annexing the world in the name of entertaining Americans. Mostly, their complaint is that other people don’t share their particular interests – even while they acknowledge that even they don’t share their particular interests (they haven’t read most of the online material about Nigeria, remember).

There’s nothing wrong with being a xenophile, but you shouldn’t expect everybody else to be a xenophile as well. Even if there are Nigerian ninjas involved.

  1. However I couldn’t upload them today, so you’ll have to wait. Read anyway. [↩]
  2. If he’s taking a long-term evolutionary view, then you can argue that several thousand years is still brand-new, but I don’t think he is arguing that. [↩]

Wooster in Iraq

May 27, 2008 in politics | No comments

David Runciman on Orwell’s defences of hypocrisy:

What Kipling and Wodehouse had in common for Orwell was that there was a kind of integrity to their double standards, though of very different kinds. Kipling deliberately concealed something of himself, but did not seek to conceal the truth about the nature of imperial power; Wodehouse exposed himself, and thereby inadvertently exposed something of the double standards of the system of power in which he unthinkingly believed. But it is also true that what rescued Kipling and Wodehouse in Orwell’s eyes was that they did not share the other’s vice. The easiest way to illustrate this is to consider what would have happened if their positions had been reversed. It is inconceivable that if Kipling had found himself in Wodehouse’s position, broadcasting for the Nazis for the sake of a quiet life, then Orwell would have defended him; there was nothing innocent about Kipling, and therefore there was no way of imagining that he might have been self-deceived in such circumstances. Stupidity might just retain its integrity in the face of totalitarianism, but knowingness never could. Equally, it is impossible to imagine Orwell defending a PG Wodehouse view of British imperialism, because there was nothing innocent about imperialism, and political naivety in that context was always culpable. Kipling could write about empire because he was in no sense naive about it; what made Orwell despair of British imperialism was that it was not on the whole staffed by Kiplings, but by Bertie Woosters.

Ditto the invasion of Iraq, which has been brought to you entirely by Woosters, when all we needed was a Kipling.

My panopticon is broken

May 21, 2008 in politics, technology | 2 comments

While reading this post, you should be listening to

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by Coldcut.

Ah, those were the days, when I would hang out with Rockwell and shoot cans off the top of Germaine’s afro. Everything’s different now, of course – Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Panopticon:

Conceived of as a theory of social control by the 20th century’s Michel Foucault, the Panopticon was originally the design of the 19th century’s Jeremy Bentham for a prison in which all the inmates would force themselves to behave because they would assume that every moment and act was being observed. Foucault argued that state programs to monitor and record our comings and goings create imaginary cages that limit what citizens do out of fear of being observed by those in power…

So far, so non-significant – the Panopticon is regularly trotted out in discussions about law and order, civil liberties, surveillance and so forth. Yet Vaidhyanathan questions whether the concept has any explanatory power:

… people tend to act out and get weird regardless of the number of cameras pointed at them. There are thousands of surveillance cameras in London and New York, yet those cities do not lack for the eccentric and avant-garde. Long before closed-circuit cameras, cities were places to be seen, not to be not seen… There is no empirical reason to believe that awareness of surveillance limits the imagination or cows the creative in a market economy under a nontotalitarian state.

This is where your doubts start to grab the sides of the kayak and start rocking, because I’m not sure that either Bentham or Foucault were worried that the Panopticon might prevent maverick art installations. The genius of the Panopticon is that it disposes of the need for the obvious trappings of totalitarianism – you didn’t need to keep an eye on people all the time when they’re disposed to keeping an eye on themselves on your behalf, even when you’re not actually watching them. Vaidhyanathan gets back on track though:

Basically, the Panopticon must be visible and ubiquitous, or it cannot influence behavior as Bentham and Foucault assumed it would.

But wait! We hear news (in our kayak) of the complete failure of the Panopticon from the UK, where Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office at New Scotland Yard tells the world:

CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure. Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.

So even when the Panopticon is visible and ubiquitous, nobody cares. How’s that for rad irony? Foucault was wrong; he was also French, and now he’s dead; three strikes against his credibility. Vaidhyanathan now plumps for the Nonopticon (or latterly, Cryptopticon):

The Nonopticon describes a state of being watched without knowing it, or at least the extent of it. The most pervasive surveillance does not reveal itself or remains completely clandestine (barring leaks to The New York Times). We don’t know all the ways we are being recorded or profiled. We are not supposed to understand that we are the product of marketers as much as we are the market. And we are not supposed to consider the extent to which the state tracks our behavior and considers us all suspects in crimes yet to be imagined, let alone committed.

It’s none of those things – it’s just that we don’t care. All of this information is accessible, it’s just that most people can’t be bothered to track it, and the reason for that is twofold.

  1. We don’t care that we’re the product of marketers because the marketers sell us shiny things which help us get our buzz on. The invisibility of this is partly what appeals to us, because it helps to maintain the illusion that we’re choosing our purchases and pleasures freely. Our illusion of control is more appealing than control itself.
  2. We don’t care about the state considering us all suspects because our particular state has repeatedly shown itself unable to organise the Olympics a piss-up in a brewery. When you hear about human rights abuses attributed to surveillance technology, it always turns out that somebody somewhere dropped the ball and got embarrassed.

Of course all that changes if our state started to turn into that other type of state – you know, like the one I saw in that film about leftwing bedroom DJs – but in that film, the surveillance was ubiquitous and invisible, and the mixing was crap. Remember what I wrote earlier about the genius of the totalitarian? The real power of the panopticon lies precisely in its invisibility – you know that somebody might be looking but you have no idea if they are. The surveillance state that you see in The Lives of Others shows this perfectly – you don’t know if they’re watching or listening, or even who they are.

With a jarring shift in tone, Vaidhyanathan ends on a rousing chorus:

We must demand to know the terms of surveillance by our state and its partners in the private sector. We must be allowed to be agents in the construction of our reputations. We must insist on fairness, openness, and accountability in those institutions that commit such widespread surveillance. Otherwise we will cease being citizens. We will be subjects, mere fodder for our watchers, means instead of ends.

That’s all very inspiring, and of course I agree, but it misses one key point. Following the information revolution, we cease being citizens and become data points, the inevitable outcome of the layer of technology that’s being added to our societies and our lives. Bentham and then Foucault were absolutely right about how the Panopticon fitted their respective times, and the Panopticon is still with us.

In fact, the Panopticon is us.

(HT: Eric Rauchway at Crooked Timber.)

Crossing Burma

May 16, 2008 in politics | 2 comments

Since Cyclone Nargis struck Burma, there’s been much discussion about the wherefores and the whyhows of forcing assistance upon the military junta that runs the country. Rosemary Righter’s words summarise the argument:

The junta is not, of its own volition, going to let in anything like the volume of aid required, at the speed required, to prevent a natural disaster turning into a monstrous, and manmade, humanitarian catastrophe… Governments with the power to help must insist on doing so, with or without the junta’s co-operation – with the approval of the UN Security Council if they can, and without it if they must.

Bernard Kouchner weighed in, invoking the droit d’ingerence1 and the Responsibility to Protect, to which one can only reply – well, he would, wouldn’t he? Kouchner came of age politically as the droit d’ingerence was being born, and since becoming French Foreign Minister (no, I can’t believe that one either) he’s used his position as a platform to promote a more activist approach towards international affairs. In response, Gareth Evans – one of the architects of the Responsibility to Protect – at first expresses concern that the invocation of R2P in this context

had the potential to dramatically undercut international support for another great cause, to which [Kouchner] among others is also passionately committed, that of ending mass atrocity crimes once and for all.

Having said that, Evans then makes the point that

when a government default is as grave as the course on which the Burmese generals now seem to be set, there is at least a prima facie case to answer for their intransigence being a crime against humanity – of a kind which would attract the responsibility to protect principle.

This would mark a tremendous shift in international affairs, even beyond that of the original endorsing of R2P at the 2005 UN World Summit. While in principle I can agree with a statement like that, in practice it doesn’t appear to be workable. The question of who decides when a government is being sufficiently “intransigent”, and what the criteria for intransigence would be, seem to make it of limited use as a policy tool – as with the Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. However I wouldn’t use that as an argument against the Genocide Convention, so I can’t in good conscience use it as an argument against applying R2P to cases such as Burma.

(The implications are wider than that, of course. At what point does intransigence become sufficient to warrant intervention? How incompetent does a government have to be before we push in regardless? Anybody with the slightest interest in these things should recognise that the first argument could have been used against Israel with the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and that the second could have been used against the US federal government in New Orleans. Let it be clear that I am not making these arguments – but you can be damned sure that there are more than a few states that would like to.)

We can argue around the moral and legal arguments around R2P as long as we like. My problem is that many of the arguments for humanitarian intervention don’t take into account the realities of delivering assistance, particularly following a natural disaster in an authoritarian state. Take, for example, Nick Cohen – a man with precisely no experience in this field, but who nevertheless knows exactly what we should do:

Suppose they are wrong, say the realists, and aid workers are met with armed resistance. Is the UN going to start a war for the sake of delivering rice rations? Even the apparently modest proposal to airdrop supplies is, they continue, a violation of Burma’s sovereignty. As always, there are 1,001 good reasons for doing nothing. But I don’t think passivity is an option for the UN.

Well, maybe he doesn’t know exactly what we should do, but he knows we should do something! This is of course the classic humanitarian fallacy, the thought bumble that launched a thousand NGOs, and should be treated with the suspicion it deserves. I couldn’t let this topic go by without allowing Conor Foley (who has taken issue with Cohen in the past) to explain:

The problem with mounting humanitarian operations during complex emergencies such as this is that it is very difficult to separate the effects of conflict, natural disaster and the overall political situation… Some have argued that aid should be made conditional on the government agreeing to meaningful political reform and dialogue with the pro-democracy movement. But if the government rejects this, then refusing aid will simply increase the suffering of the poorest and most vulnerable people.

We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, then – the humanitarian imperative says that we should deliver assistance to people, regardless of the nature of their government, while the political reality is that we can’t even get into the country. The way to break the deadlock, according to Righter and others of that inclination, is to go in with all hearts bleeding and all guns blazing:

If the generals get the message that “no” will not be taken for an answer, they may decide to join what they can’t beat. And if not? Imposing aid is a messy business. Dying for lack of it is messier by far.

Above I mentioned the realities of delivering aid following a disaster, and unfortunately one of those realities is that you can’t “impose” aid. If you don’t have the co-operation of a government that has functional control of the affected areas, then it’s difficult to get anything done.2 Even if you do have the co-operation of a government, it’s often difficult to get things done; there are a thousand ways that a government can make life difficult for aid organisations on the ground, whether through malicious intent or bureaucratic neglect.

So “imposing aid” isn’t just a “messy business” – it’s a logistical impossibility in an environment like Burma. The only hope we have of reaching the communities affected by the cyclone with the aid required – not just this time, remember, but the next time as well – is the course that we’re already on. The diplomatic and humanitarian pressure must be unrelenting, even if it proves to be fruitless, because in the end it’s the only way to actually deliver assistance – which even Kouchner acknowledged (in a joint article with David Miliband):

even in the face of the horror, we have to take into account the Burmese authorities, upon whom we depend to facilitate international action.

People have already died because we haven’t managed to get assistance to them in a timely manner, and many more will die yet. However we must remember that this is not our fault; it’s the fault of the military regime. If we are really serious about relieving the suffering of the people of Burma, then what is needed is not just short-term assistance, but a more effective longer-term strategy for engaging with the government of Burma.3 It is largely because of the absence of interest in Burma and the consequent lack of engagement with the government that we are in the position we are today – stuck on the sidelines, fuming at the fouls.

  1. On a lighter note, I wonder if the French version of Wikipedia suffers from the same defects as the English version, except with more shrugging? [↩]
  2. People who talk about military intervention in the context of providing relief normally don’t have clue one about either military or humanitarian operations. [↩]
  3. This might sound excessively vague, particularly given that I’ve just attacked Cohen for not providing any detail, but that’s another post, when I don’t have so much work to do. [↩]

Can you wrap that turbo prop for me?

April 18, 2008 in iraq, politics, serbia | No comments

The New York Times reports on the difficulties of equipping Iraq’s armed forces without running into incompetence and corruption (two problems which usually go hand-in-hand). The ever-vigilant Talisman Gate dissects the article and points out the key phrase:

Those with knowledge of the Serbian arms deal said they knew of no specific crimes, but warned that with so little transparency and such poor oversight, problems were likely to emerge, as they did with the 2004 deal.

So no actual problems, just the hint of problems to come! It’s a whole new form of predictive journalism over there at the NYT.

All I can think of, however, is that there’s something vaguely yet deeply ironic about one country that we invaded buying arms behind our backs from another country that we invaded. Gosh, anybody would think that the international arms trade was riddled with corrupt practices that undermine efforts to establish transparency and accountability in developing countries, and clearly that can’t be right!

Post-election euphoria in Montenegro

April 6, 2008 in balkans, montenegro, politics | 1 comment

Whoop-di-do. That’s about the level of euphoria I can muster.

As of 11pm this evening, Filip Vujanovic had cleared the 50% threshold required to keep him in the Montenegrin presidency – which of course means that Milo Djukanovic is still the power behind the throne in Montenegro. As I’ve said before, I don’t think that the Djukanovic / Vujanovic administration is the worst option for Montenegro, especially at this critical post-independence pre-EU stage. However this does mean business as usual, and that’s not a terribly good thing. Given that they’ve been in power for the last 17 years (I think), the blame for the host of problems that Montenegro faces can be laid squarely at their door. (Richard Cowper ran down a list of those problems for the Montenegro Times.)

Anti-corruption candidate Nebojsa Medojevic ran an interesting campaign, maxing out his photo opportunities and trying to emphasise that he’s accessible and personable – as opposed to Vujanovic, whose PR always seemed to put him in front of some flags looking presidential. Nobody really thought Medojevic could win – but with 15% of the vote, he’s trailing third behind the main Serb candidate, Andrija Mandic, who scored at least 19%.

This suggests two things. First, the Serb vote is stronger than many observers initially thought it would be – although Mandic played up the Kosovo question (to recognise or not to recognise?) considerably in the final stretch of campaigning. This will have some (but not major) implications for how Vujanovic conducts foreign affairs – it’s not as if Montenegro was rushing to recognise Kosovo anyway. Second, the anti-corruption ticket wasn’t as strong as the PzP were counting on, despite the fact that most Montenegrins recognise the problem of corruption as the most obvious one which intrudes on their day-to-day life. (Freedom House’s Nations in Transit report suggests that in more general terms Montenegro is at best standing still in terms of developing a healthy democracy.)

This was a “safe pair of hands” vote; it seems likely that Vujanovic was the beneficiary of the independence honeymoon, particulary following a few years of rude economic health for the country. That health is likely to worsen considerably in the next couple of years, and the question is only how well the DPS will handle it. I think they’ll handle it quite well in the sense of protecting their own financial interests – which in many cases are not that different from Montenegro’s financial interests – but whether they’ll be able to provide leadership that goes beyond that is another question.

The level of interest in this election internationally appears to be almost zero, which is understandable – there’s plenty more interesting things going on in the Balkans, like Ramush Haradinaj being acquitted and Greece administering a diplomatic beatdown to Macedonia. In the long term, however, this result isn’t good for the health of Montenegrin politics, and that has implications for the entire region – remember that Montenegro neighbours Serbia, Kosovo and Albania, and has its own significant Serb, Bosniak and Albanian minorities.

On the other hand, Madonna’s playing Jaz beach this summer. She’ll be 50, you know. Frightening.

Balkan politics / Kanye lyrics: Ramush Walks!

April 5, 2008 in balkans, kosovo, politics | 6 comments

The bad news about Ramush Haradinaj being acquitted at ICTY: Serbia is naturally outraged, I tell you, outraged, and it seems likely that there was a fair amount of witness intimidation going on, which doesn’t speak too well for the wheels of justice at the Hague. The judgement summary is explicit:

During the trial the Chamber received evidence from almost 100 witnesses. Nevertheless, the Chamber encountered significant difficulties in securing the testimony of a large number of these witnesses. Many cited fear as a prominent reason for not wishing to appear before the Chamber to give evidence. In this regard, the Chamber gained a strong impression that the trial was being held in an atmosphere where witnesses felt unsafe, due to a number of factors set out in the Judgement. The parties furthermore agreed that an unstable security situation existed in Kosovo that was particularly unfavourable to witnesses.

No surprises there. Although Haradinaj (and Balaj) walked, the evidence shows that the KLA was involved in some distinctly unsavoury activities; Brahimaj went down for “cruel treatment and torture”, but the full description of KLA soldier misdeeds includes rape and murder as well. No surprises there either – the standard defense for the KLA offered by Kosovars is “Look what the Serbs did to us”, but if you read through the trial papers, most of the murders that these three were indicted for were of Kosovar Albanian civilians.

The good news about Ramush Haradinaj being acquitted at ICTY: by all accounts, he wasn’t a bad politician for Kosovo, and it’s not as if they have a particularly wide range to choose from. The international community should be happy – Haradinaj was very popular, and a conviction would have stirred up even more distrust between locals and internationals, particularly following Human Rights Watch’s damning report on the state of Kosovo’s own legal system and the international community’s tragicomic failure to rebuild it.

Hopefully this will inject a little bit of life back into Kosovar politics – now that they’re independent they need as much help as they can get. Ramush always seemed to get on better with the internationals than (for example) Hashim Thaci, and the fact that he turned himself in voluntarily to ICTY in the first place will give him major political capital to spend. The problem is that Thaci is now the first prime minister of independent Kosova, so I’m looking forward to some really dirty political combat very soon.

Zimbabwe goes to the polls, Lolcat style

March 29, 2008 in politics, zimbabwe | No comments

Robert Mugabe Lolcat Style

Look how happy Robert is to be exercising his democratic rights! Good luck, Zimbabwe – here’s to another 20 years of declining life expectancy, booming infant mortality, staggeringly high inflation, widespread human rights abuses and tearjerkingly destructive executive rule!

You choose insight, or you choose ignorance

March 28, 2008 in afghanistan, politics, religion, video | No comments

UPDATE: Fitna has been taken down by Liveleak following threats against its staff. This is a sad day for freedom of speech (even if it’s poorly produced speech) and plays into all the fears that Geert Wilders presumably wanted to raise by making it in the first place. Oh well. You can still watch it on YouTube if you really want to.

Fitna appears to be the modern equivalent of the Theatre of Cruelty, minus the creativity. It’s a fairly rudimentary cut-and-paste job – if I can speak bluntly for a moment, if a video doesn’t feature a fighter jet made of biceps, then it’s going wrong somewhere. However clearly my taste is not shared by the rest of the internet; apparently since it was released the video has been viewed 3291470 times (as I write these very words).

More worryingly, Fitna demonstrates almost no insight into the substantial problems of dealing with immigration in post-war Europe. Yes, I know it’s a polemic; however while it’s fairly clear that Wilders is against terrorist bombing and beheading – radical positions, certainly – beyond that it all gets a little fuzzy. Wilders claims that this is “a call to shake off the creeping tyranny of Islamization” but I have difficulty seeing exactly what the average person is expected to do in this heroic struggle.

If you prefer knowledge to fear, you could spend your time more wisely watching the astonishing video interviews with frontline Taliban fighters carried out by Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. This series of interviews covers a range of topics; it’s pretty much essential for anybody who wants some insight into the mindset of the Taliban, and absolutely fascinating even if you only have a passing interest.

The Taliban are not a good guide to the mindset of Muslims in general; but while we’ve been told that they’re Our New Favourite Enemy, most people have no idea who they really are and what they really believe. As the interviews show, these are uneducated men who come from unrelenting poverty, and their understanding of the world is understandably stunted.

It’s by no means good news, but if we want to understand Our New Favourite Enemy – and to improve people’s lives rather than dismiss their culture – then this is the place to start. Needless to say, the web is having a grand mal episode over Fitna, but almost nothing about the Globe and Mail’s report, the “war on terror” having been reduced to schoolboy videos and endless punditry.

Without Christianity, my job is doomed

March 24, 2008 in UK, politics, religion | No comments

Easter Sunday passed without incident here, mainly since it was only Easter for the Catholics, and everybody ignores them. Oh, except I worked out how the Shroud of Turin was formed – Jesus must have been under for 3 weeks rather than 3 days, because my filthy bedlinen has definitely taken on the print of my body.

Too much detail.

Anyway, religion was on my mind last week as I joined the discussion on euthanasia at Cranmer and OurKingdom – and thanks to everybody who contributed to those discussions, particularly David at Britology Watch. As I said in my original post, this is one of the few areas where the religious insist that their views on life be taken as the standard for everybody else, but to their credit most of the commenters on those other threads presented credible non-religious cases against legalising euthanasia.

Paying a visit to Britology Watch, I revisited the “controversial” statements by Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali following Archbishop Rowan Williams’ prolonged bout of stupidity “controversial” statements. Have you noticed that comments by the clergy only get labelled as controversial when they try to say something about politics? That’s probably because of the separation of church and state that we have – no, wait, that’s the US I’m thinking of.

In an interview with Bishop Nazir-Ali, I was greatly amused by these lines:

The real danger to Britain today is the spiritual and moral vacuum that has occurred for the last 40 or 50 years. When you have such a vacuum something will fill it.

That “moral vacuum” metaphor should be put out of its misery as soon as possible, since it manages to be simultaneously banal and meaningless. Read the rest of this entry »

My death is my business, and mine alone

March 19, 2008 in death, life, politics, religion | No comments

Cranmer is more than a little irritated by … bland and oblique moralising

Oh crikey. When Cranmer gets a little irritated, property gets damaged, so imagine that carnage that will ensue now that he’s more than a little irritated. Your Grace, what’s got you so riled up?

While Cranmer agrees that the decriminalisation of suicide in 1961 made a modicum of sense insofar as one could never achieve a successful prosecution of the successful and ought to express compassion toward the unsuccessful, the liberalisation of the law on euthanasia would be a dangerously amoral development, as the Lords Spiritual asserted when the issue was last presented to Parliament.

Aha, euthanasia – always a good way of telling the religious person from the secular. Along with abortion, it’s the last area where the faithful believe that they have the right to impose their views on everybody else in our society. Unfortunately Cranmer is not content to assert that his particular faith group is against suicide / euthanasia – he wishes to demonstrate that

Opposition to ‘do anything which is destructive of life’ is one of the few general rules which unites all of the world’s religions

as well as apparently being against the principles of Enlightenment secularism. Unfortunately the quotations he provides demonstrate exactly why the world’s religions are in no position to dictate what the individual does with their body. Read the rest of this entry »

Selling Balkan History Short

March 11, 2008 in balkans, culture, montenegro, politics | 2 comments

Transitions Online runs an interesting story on that most familiar of Balkan melodies, the rewriting of history. With its independence last year, Montenegro now has to somehow drag itself out from the shadow of big brother Serbia while making too may people angry, a trick which is hard to pull off:

A recent poll suggests that many Montenegrins share Abdomerovic’s moderate nationalism. Conducted in September and October by the independent Center for Democracy and Human Rights, the poll showed that about 35 percent of respondents favored renaming the official language Montenegrin, edging out Serbian by about 5 percent.

There’s a problem with this sort of poll in a country where demographic affiliation can be so contentious. The 2003 census estimated that at least 40% of the population is Montenegrin, while only around 30% are Serbian, and that poll result looks suspiciously like a split along those lines. So many Montenegrins Montenegrins might share that “moderate nationalism”, but they’re likely counter-balanced by Serb Montenegrins who feel short-changed by the whole deal.

The problem is that the Serbian voice isn’t very credible in Montenegro (as far as I know), despite the lack of rancour over the separation of the two countries. A good example of this is given in the article itself, as a Serb intellectual unwittingly demonstrates:

Aleksandar Stamatovic, a pro-Serb historian who lives in Montenegro, said every student in the Balkans should learn one true history, difficult as that might be to reach. Stamatovic would like to take on the job but knows that some of his claims, including that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated, if not made up, would scuttle any such opportunity.

Possibly his lack of job opportunities aren’t related to being pro-Serb, but being an apologist for war crimes, but the idea that there is “one true history” is an interesting one for a historian to make. History is always a matter of interpretations, and anybody who tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

There’s nothing wrong with revising history textbooks, simply on the basis that our understanding of history changes over time. The problem is that such revision implies that the previous history was false and that those who presented it were liars, which is what makes somebody like Stamatovic angry. If only he – and so many other people in the Balkans – could realise that history doesn’t have to be war by other means.

Njegos

Moralising about Climate Change

March 4, 2008 in climate, politics, science | 7 comments

In a Guardian interview, James Lovelock explains why he thinks that there’s no point in most of the environmental activities that we currently pursue. Or indeed, no point to most of the activities that we pursue.

… the current canon of eco ideas… [is] premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

… What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”

Lovelock may or may not be correct that the apocalypse is knocking on our door, but is he correct that these sorts of activities – carbon offsetting, recycling, energy conservation and so forth – won’t make any difference?

No, he’s not, for at least four reasons.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ostrovsky on Azerbaijan

February 29, 2008 in politics | No comments

In the late 1990s, Azerbaijan was one of the strangest places I’d ever been. On the flight over, business class was packed with oil executives, while the seven of us travelling economy had the rest of the aircraft for ourselves. We landed at an airport cocooned in biting fog, and it was only after I was through customs that I discovered that it was one of the few international airports that didn’t have radar. I faced oil fields burning off in the Caspian Sea, the detritus of the Soviet Union slowly crumbling on every corner, and an absolute refusal to serve me anything that didn’t have meat in from every waiter that I met. Staying in the apartment of an absent apparatchik, I fell asleep every night uneasily amongst cheap varnished furniture and the smell of hair oil. I had no idea what the hell was going on.

My favourite bicycle pimp Simon Ostrovsky was based in Azerbaijan for a couple of years and has a far better grasp of what’s going on, although even he tends to look confused in the two reports he’s just filed for Al-Jazeera.

YouTube Preview Image

This first segment is sadly familiar to anybody with an interest in freedom of expression in post-Soviet countries – well, familiar apart from the story of the journalist who sewed his mouth shut as a prison protest – and that familiarity means that it’s unlikely to set the world on fire. Reporters without Borders reports that the “[Azerbaijan] regime frequently uses violence and threats against the media and the country came near the bottom of the 2006 worldwide press freedom index”, and Amnesty has more information on attacks on journalists.

This is bothersome because the Caspian Sea is only going to become more important in the near future, and the lack of a healthy media in Azerbaijan can only contribute to its instability. The internet remains relatively accessible, though, but even Global Voices Online can’t track down any Azeri bloggers; perhaps the forthcoming elections might spur a bit more activity.

YouTube Preview Image

This segment is much more substantial – Iranian broadcasters pushing their signals deep into Azerbaijan in a David and Goliath propaganda war. For those that don’t know, Iran has a substantial Azeri minority – up to a third of the Iranian population and perhaps twice the size of the population of Azerbaijan itself – and Azerbaijan hosts a number of refugees from the Islamic Republic next door. This one has it all – religion, nationalism, technology, oil – and you can probably guess how the story goes from there.

Now, President Ilham Aliyev met with Dubya in April 2006, and the report specifically mentions that the US has been slow to provide media funding as part of its support. So the question for all you conspiracy theorists out there is this: what’s more in the interests of the US right now, considering who lives next door – a corrupt and authoritarian leadership which can keep a tight grip on the country, or a more free but probably equally unstable nascent democracy in the region? Watch this space, and watch the clips – how often does Azerbaijan get 30 minutes on a mainstream news channel?

Discarding Iraqi Employees

February 28, 2008 in iraq, politics | No comments

It’s been all quiet on the Iraq employees front for about two months, but in the background Dan Hardie has been lobbying hard. Despite the progress at the end of last year, the Government has been long on talk and short on actually saving lives. According to Dan,

A small number of Iraqis – fewer than a dozen, according to people close to the operation who are in contact with me- were removed from Iraq in the early autumn of 2007. Since the Prime Minister’s admirable declaration of October, how many Iraqi ex-employees have been evacuated from Iraq? According to all the Iraqis that I am in contact with: none.

Aside from the usual bureaucratic obstacles, which are understandable but objectionable when people’s lives are at risk, Dan describes how

… the policy itself is being used to keep out Iraqis who can prove that they worked for British forces, and who can prove that their lives are at risk as a result. One man, Hamed, worked for British forces on Shaibah Logistics Base for over two years, as the Government accepts. He was threatened by the militias, and gunmen went to his house, so he moved his family to Syria and slept on the base’s floor. He continued to work for the British. Hamed finally was given ‘notice to quit’ Shaibah when the base closed, and fled to Syria, where he cannot legally work and where he and his family are safe (so far) but hungry. The British Government knows who Hamed is. A British Army NCO who knew him has confirmed every detail of his story to me, saying that he knew that Hamed had reported the threats against him to the military authorities. The Government has written to Hamed to reject any claim for help, since he was ‘not directly employed’ by the military.

My last post on Mark Steyn drew a number of comments, one of which accused me of “moral self righteousness” and being a “traitor to reason”. Presumably my interest in saving the lives of those threatened with death – solely because of their own willingness to defend an embryonic democracy, however flawed, and provide for their families – is part of that complex. However if you are also a self-righteous traitor, perhaps you’d like to contact your MP to try and save some lives.

Write a letter to your MP, c/o The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA. If you don’t know who your constituency MP is, go here and type your postcode in. When you’ve sent a letter, follow it up with an email: his or her address will normally be SURNAMEINITIAL@parliament.uk – for example BROWNG@parliament.uk. Two or three days after you have written the letter, call the Parliamentary switchboard on 0207 219 3000 and ask for your MP’s office. Repeat your concerns to the secretary or research assistant you speak to (and be nice: most of these people work damn hard for little reward), check that your letter has been received, and politely request that the MP ask questions of Ministers and reply to you. In your email, your letter, and your phone calls, you must be courteous: insulting an MP or a research assistant will discredit this cause. Talking points for the letter are on Dan’s blog.

Demography clearly matters, although Mark Steyn doesn’t

February 25, 2008 in UK, politics | 26 comments

People who take the idea of Eurabia seriously are almost as dull and pointless as people who take the idea of one world government seriously, and few are as dull and pointless as Mark Steyn, a man who makes me ashamed to wear a beard. However it’s not enough to ignore people like Steyn, because they poison the well of public discourse, undermining our opportunities to really talk about critical issues such as identity and immigration. On the always-interesting Demography Matters blog, Randy McDonald tears down the rich fantasy world which people like Steyn (and more mainstream figures like Mitt Romney in the United States) long to inhabit, and explains why this is a problem:

What’s the problem with all this? For people like ourselves, interested in researching population trends here at Demography Matters and elsewhere, this sort of rhetoric creates yet another set of myths that have to be debunked. It is interesting to trace out some of the likely population futures of different regions, countries and continents, as is determining the different factors operating in different communities within a given territory. Turning a field that could be filled by an ongoing stream of productive research into an endless cycle of disproved popular mythologies would be boring. More to the point, the constant repetition of myths like the ones enunciated by Romney — that the European continent is declining, that Europe is threatened by foreigners — poisons public discourse by legitimating ever more radical statements. If Europeans at large are concerned about the extent to which communities of recent immigrant origin are or are not acculturating to the norms of a wider society and want to influence public policy accordingly, how likely will the debate be calm and rational if many the people who participate seriously believe things scarcely more sophisticated than “OMG the Muslims are going to P3WN Europe”?

My thoughts exactly. Imagine if, in the real world, every discussion you tried to have was dominated by somebody who did nothing but shout in your face about how it was all the Muslims (or Jews, or Hispanics, or blacks – take your pick). It would be utterly unbearable, and people would eventually stop talking about those issues because they couldn’t face the prospect of being harangued by a incoherent belter. That’s Steyn, right there, riding his hobby-horse and protesting that he’s just misunderstood.

Hobbysteyn

 

These are interesting and important issues which need a healthy public discourse, see? Specifically, what it needs is more people like Randy and fewer people like Steyn, otherwise we’ll all end up like the poor benighted souls that Johann Hari wrote about in his classic piece on The National Review cruise. While acknowledging that Johann was always going to be biased against the sort of people who would go on the cruise on the first place, he wasn’t making any of that stuff up:

But facts, figures, and doubt are not on the itinerary of this cruise. With one or two exceptions, the passengers discuss “the Muslims” as a homogenous, sharia-seeking block – already with near-total control of Europe. Over the week, I am asked nine times – I counted – when I am fleeing Europe’s encroaching Muslim population for the safety of the United States of America.

Look, it’s 2008 – forget about my jetpack, all I want is an internet that isn’t an echo chamber for people who would previously have been confined to their bedrooms, where they could safely fulminate about how their genius has never been recognised by ignorant fools such as myself. They were better off there, and so were we.

Happy Independence Day!

February 18, 2008 in balkans, kosovo, politics | No comments

Well, technically that was yesterday, but my internet connection has been out since the middle of last week, and obviously time stops when the internet goes down.

It feels strangely anti-climactic to watch an independent Kosovo paraded on-screen – a mere 9 years after it actually became independent. Everybody’s a winner – the Albanians get their country, the Serbs get another raison de martyre and our governments get to distract us from Afghanistan and Iraq (ooh, contentious lefty jibe!). The real losers are the Kosovo Serb communities that are left – the Kosovar Albanians don’t really want them hanging around, but the Serbian authorities would probably prefer them to stay in limbo to keep the issue live (hey, that reminds me of this great joke about the Palestinians!).

Independence is clearly not a solution to any of Kosovo’s long-term problems, and might even give us a few new ones, but this feels like the inevitable conclusion of a process that started long before the 1999 NATO bombing. Still nobody seems to be prepared to point out in public that Kosovo has no economic prospects of any kind, which I’ve always thought is pretty essential for economic development. I don’t have anything insightful to contribute to that discussion, but I do wonder how long it will take before the Kosovo authorities start blaming the EU for the lack of progress?

Good luck, Kosovo – you’ll need it.

The Churchman and the Lawman

February 8, 2008 in UK, politics, religion | No comments

I’m sorry, but what the hell did you just say?

But Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts – I think that’s a bit of a danger… There’s a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law.”

No there isn’t. People who predict the Islamopocalypse are barking idiots, and my problem isn’t with Williams’ saying that we should accommodate aspects of Muslim law into our legal system. My problem is his assumption that religion has any place in our legal system at all, apart from in measures to protect the freedom to pursue those beliefs – and protect others from those beliefs. Without that separation, the entire legal system is undermined, as we all merrily pursue our own ideas of what the law should constitute and who it should cover.

Of course, that’s a completely separate question to why Rowan Williams, the head of the established Church of England, feels the need to advocate for Islamic law. Perhaps he misread the job description?

UPDATE: I find more intelligences more subtle and profound than I writing about the same issue at Cranmer and Our Kingdom, while Stumbling and Mumbling emphasises that “civil society” has a place in this discussion that goes mostly unnoticed.

The globalisation of fear

February 4, 2008 in politics | No comments

In telephone conversation last week, Cauri referred to fear as “the ultimate commodity”, and – if we grant a little slack to the definition – he’s right. Fear thrives in a bear market, as we try in vain to trade our fear for security; and fear is the currency of war propaganda. There might be a limited demand for fear at the moment, but there’s an inexhaustible supply, as Mike Davis describes in the terrible, beautiful last paragraph of his book “Planet of Slums“:

This delusionary dialetic of securitized versus demonic urban places, in turn, dictates a sinister and unceasing duet: Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side.

Here’s the secret to fear as a commodity – not only can we can export it, but our overseas investment will pay us back richly over time and we can look forward to huge new reserves of fear being discovered. Everybody is a winner, except for those whose labour pays for our potentially insatiable demand for fear.

Too much weltangst for a Monday morning, I know.

“Luz Eterna” (central panel), Ana Maria Pacheco

 

One World Government!

January 18, 2008 in politics | No comments

Being foolish, Tim has agreed to write an essay about global government as part of his course. Being foolish, yesterday I responded to his question on what might be the arguments against a one world government. We had a fine old chat and I forgot about it as soon as I put the phone down. Yet this morning, I was finishing reading Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, and what should I find but this:

New forms of democracy are essential… And any kind of new democracy must encompass not only communities, towns, cities and societies, but humankind as a whole. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how we’ll prosper together on this tiny planet if we don’t eventually have some kind of democratic world government. Of course, many hard-nosed realists would say that this is an implausible and even scary idea. Maybe that’s only because alternatives to our current trajectory remain so difficult to imagine. (p.306)

Count me amongst those hard-nosed realists. I greatly enjoyed – and still recommend – Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap, but this new book is much weaker, and this was one of the points where it just falls apart under the weight of its own presumptions.

People who oppose “one world government” are frequently given to going on (and on and on) about black helicopters and the UN. Needless to say, they are usually colossal bores and not worth listening to. There are serious ideological arguments against such global democratic forms, but they’re weak because if you don’t share the assumptions of the underlying ideology, then you’re unlikely to be persuaded. My opposition to the development of global democratic forms is purely practical – democratic forms simply don’t scale well.

The transaction costs of such forms would be so great that any such organisation would collapse under its own weight. Imagine if you made a human 60 ft high; it wouldn’t be able to hold its weight up and would asphyxiate quite quickly, because we’re just not designed (and no, this isn’t an argument for intelligent design) to be that big. Anybody that’s worked in the United Nations system will be able to attest to the fact that the requirements of getting radically different actors to work in the same system requires a bureaucracy that is barely able to function, let alone function effectively.

More importantly, however, is the simple truth that the larger you make a democracy, the less representative it must be. This is because there are less possibilities for direct links between the constituency and the representative, and therefore less accountability. Oh, it would be possible to construct a complex tower of democracy that started at the grassroots level and ended up representing the whole world – but there would be little to no link between the grassroots and the global, and so the entire point of building such a structure would be defeated.

It surprises me that Homer-Dixon doesn’t pick up on this, because parts of the book are devoted to the diminishing returns of complexity (particularly Joseph Tainter’s seminal work, the Collapse of Complex Societies) – and it’s hard to see how such a global democratic form could be anything other than unsustainably complex.

Killing Bhutto

December 28, 2007 in pakistan, politics | No comments

My family isn’t exactly political, especially at Christmas; but when they found out that Benazir Bhutto had been killed yesterday, everybody knew her name. In the end, that was what made her attractive both to western sponsors and to a large portion of Pakistani society – she was a recognisable brand associated with a particular vision of Pakistani democracy.

I worry that the choice facing the people of Pakistan is stark – they can have a ramshackle democracy laced with corruption or a military regime that can’t deliver a long-term political programme, or they can watch the country turn into Afghanistan. The worst case scenario is all three – a vaguely authoritarian government having little control over large swathes of the country, with those areas relying on traditional rule combined with deobandi influences as state bodies become less responsive to people’s needs.

I didn’t believe that Bhutto was a realistic hope for pulling Pakistan out of this mire over which Musharraf now reigns, but as a focal point for the restoration of democracy, her political value was huge. Now that focal point is no longer there, I’m not all doom and gloom, since there’s enough smart and powerful people in Pakistan to hold the country together – but whether they can do that while maintaining some semblance of the democratic process is questionable.

There’s been a lot of coverage of this, obviously, and no shortage of opinions from people who really don’t have much to say (possibly including me). The most interesting report I saw was John Moore in the New York Times, who was taking photos as the bomb went off. Watch and listen to his report.

P.S. Is it just me, or is a lot of the coverage treating this like a game of Cluedo?  “I think it was al-Qaeda, in the motorcade, with the pistol.”   Jason Burke sketches out the possibilities, but they certainly are sketchy – even if al-Qaeda claims they’re the ones what done it.

Letting Them Die: Iraq translators update

November 26, 2007 in UK, iraq, politics | No comments

As any fule kno, Dan Hardie has been leading the blogging campaign to change the British government’s policy on how we deal with our ex-employees in Iraq. He’s been like an unholy cross between a workhorse and a terrier on this issue, and even though the blogging has been quite light in the last few weeks, he’s continued to lobby and network on the issue.

So far, the campaign has resulted in the Government changing its policy – but the changes weren’t comprehensive enough and are not being implemented quickly enough to make a difference to many of our former employees. So there’s a need to keep up the pressure on the government in order to secure further changes and a more rapid response. Dan has therefore proposed the following:

Your MP’s address is The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA. His or her email address is probably SURNAMEINITIAL@parliament.uk (eg BROWNG<at>parliament.uk ). Please use the talking points below to send an email and a print letter to your MP, and chase them for an answer. And be courteous: an insulted MP will not raise this matter with Ministers, and that will lead to more avoidable deaths. When you get an answer, email me at danhardie.blog<at>gmail.com and let me know what they said.

I agree that it seems egocentric for me to ask you to put your MP in touch with me: but what alternatives do we have? I am in direct contact with Iraqi employees pleading with me to do something to help them. I cannot help them. Members of Parliament- including David Miliband- need to read what these Iraqis are saying.

If you want to take part in this campaign, then you may find the following information useful. However I urge you to read up on the situation for yourself and make your own judgement – this is important not just for individual lives but for the precedent it sets.

  • On October 9th David Miliband announced that the British Government would assist former employees in Iraq, so long as they had worked for it after 1st January 2005 and for 12 months or more. That abandons several hundred Iraqis who have been targetd for murder because they worked for the British before that date- and in 2004 fighting between the Mahdi Army and the British was at its peak- or because they worked for less than that period, often leaving their jobs at the end of a British battalion’s six-month tour. The British Government must help Iraqi employees on the basis of the risk they face, not according to an arbitrary time stipulation. This only affects a few hundred Iraqis, whom we are well able to shelter, and for whom we have a direct moral responsibility.
  • Even those Iraqi employees who qualify for assistance are not being properly assisted. Iraqis in Basra are not able to apply via the British Army in Basra Interational Airbase, since it is ringed with militia checkpoints. Iraqi ex-employees in Damascus are being screened by Syrian policemen guarding the British Embassy and delayed by lengthy bureaucratic procedures when they apply for asylum, although many of them are illegally overstaying their Syrian visas and face deportation back to Iraq.
  • A blogger called Dan Hardie is directly in touch with a number of Iraqi employees via email and phone. He is willilng to brief MPs- as concisely as possible- either over the phone or via email. He can be reached at danhardie.blog@gmail.com.

With all that in mind, what exactly is at stake here? Who are these people that we’re campaigning for? Below the fold, you can read about some of the discussions that Dan has had with former UK government employees in Iraq who have been affected by this situation – and who are not being helped by the current government policy.

Read the rest of this entry »

And then there were two

November 24, 2007 in balkans, kosovo, politics, serbia | 2 comments

I was planning to blog something following the elections last weekend in Kosovo, but it took a Fistful of Euros to jog me into something resembling activity. Douglas Muir has a post up entitled “Kosovo: then what?“, wherein he fisks recent remarks by the Former US Ambassador to Serbia about what Serbia’s reaction is likely to be. It’s worth reading for his dismissal of the options available to Serbia at this point (here’s a clue – they don’t have any), and his own prediction that

Kosovo will get some sort of independence, Belgrade and Moscow will cry foul, there will be a certain amount of huffing and puffing… and then, not much. The borders will stay open; the lights will stay on. The medium-term effect will be to create a sort of Balkan Taiwan, recognized by some states but not by others.

Apart from the lights staying on (regular power cuts are still the norm in Pristina, let alone the rest of the country), he’s spot on. However, given that if enough EU member states recognise Kosovo, it’s likely that all of them will, then it’s unlikely that many other states will refuse to recognise it. States that don’t recognise it are likely to do so because they don’t really care very much one way or the other, rather than because they’re deeply opposed to independence.

As for conflict between Serbia and Kosovo, that will be a storm in the proverbial teacup. Large scale conflict is extremely unlikely, given the vested interests of both the EU and NATO stopping it quickly and forcefully and, if anything, independence is likely to increase tolerance within the province, since the Albanians won’t have anything left to prove. The postscript to a recent BBC report was interesting,

After this story was published, we received this e-mail from Serb musician Ivan Ivanov in Pirot, Serbia: “I recently (7 March) played in Babuka’s club with my band from Bulgaria. Everyone knew I was from Serbia. I had an amazing time. Of course, there were a couple of benign jokes, and a few friendly shouts (”Hey, Serb, come over here”), but I can definitely say that people from Pristina, or at least the crowd that hangs out in Babuka’s place, have moved on, and are looking forward to things getting back to normal. It will take time, it will take effort and compromise, it will take a lot of good will, but it will happen. Cheers to that!

I’ll take that with a pinch of salt, but you get the idea. So, Serbia doesn’t have any cards left to play except for Russia, which is frankly a wild card that they should leave in the box the cards came in (do you see what I did? Extended metaphor!). What about Kosovo? Most of the people I still know in Kosovo – who are English-speaking but hardly members of the political elite – seem to be fairly lacking in any faith in their politicians, and none of those politicians have any real political platform beyond independence. The elections went well, which is a good sign, but once independence is declared, that political elite will have to deliver.

I don’t think they will. I think they’ll fail to implement any significant reforms, and continue to make excuses for their failure to deliver on the most basic responsibilities government. As an example, a recent report on the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network had a gem in the article “Kosovo’s Daily Bread Gets Expensive“, reporting on sharp rises in the cost of flour:

Although grain price rises on the world market have affected the whole region, Kosovo has suffered the most, partly because of its lack of reserves, and partly because the delays to defining Kosovo’s long-term political status mean the government has few control mechanisms to cope with such crises.

Bujar Dugolli, the Minister of Trade and Industry, says that the lack of grain warehouses prevents the authorities from being able to deal with the problem.

“We are renting even the ministry’s premises,” Dugolli complained to reporters last week, making it clear that the government was unable to secure any kind of storage for key commodities.

What kind of feeble excuse is that? If they’re renting the ministry’s premises, why can’t they rent warehouses? It’s not as if any future government isn’t going to need warehouses, and it’s not that difficult to do – you find a warehouse, then you offer the owner some cash. The problem is that most politicians in Kosovo don’t have any experience in actually running anything, since they’ve been substantially carried by the international community since the war. There are good politicians and public servants, but you have to look quite hard to find them.

When I was in Kosovo a couple of weeks ago, I had the good fortune to meet with Jeta Xharra, BIRN’s Kosovo director, who was running a series of televised debates in each of the municipalities as well as a regular weekly show. This was a tremendously good idea, and clearly a shot in the arm for increasing the accountability in the election process, but the candidates’ performances weren’t up to much, according to her colleage Mufail Limani:

It would be good if the top leaders spared us having to put up with such clowns and backscratchers, but the candidates selected appear to represent their parties’ genuine political offer… Many candidates, who were on Xharra’s show, realise that it would have been better if they had not appeared at all.

I predict a lot more feeble excuses to come from assorted “clowns and backscratchers”, unfortunately, and the more the excuses keep coming, the more disillusioned the people are going to become. That’s where the real problems are going to be – not in potential conflict with Serbia, but in the internal conflicts that are likely to surface as frustration grows, particularly amongst young people. Plus, of course, the concern by surrounding countries about whether this sets a precedent for their own Albanian minorities. Is there a way out of this mess? Of course there is, but I’ll leave that for another post…

On Torture?

November 12, 2007 in politics | No comments

A week ago, the Small Wars Journal (which is an excellent site, and an antidote to the ignorance of gung-ho bloggers everywhere) had an article by Malcolm Nance entitled Waterboarding is Torture… Period. The title sums up all you need to know about the article; Nance, a consultant with a bagful of experience in counter-intelligence relating to Our Favourite Enemy.

Nance wrote the article in response to the refusal by Judge Michael Mukasey, a nominee for the position of US Attorney General, to define waterboarding as torture, but with a wider audience in mind.

We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks.

He certainly found that wider audience, but the frightening thing is that there seems to be a huge number of people out there who support the practice. I’m writing this post mainly to clarify this issue for myself, in the face of the two main justifications that I’ve seen proposed in support of waterboarding as an approved method of interrogation for US forces intelligence services. I don’t have high hopes, frankly; far more intelligent and informed commentators have weighed in, but the pro-waterboarding lobby seems resistant to any logic other than that of 24.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Denial is one of the central new Serbian qualities”

October 24, 2007 in balkans, politics, serbia | No comments

There’s a fascinating piece by Vladimir Arsenijevic (the Serbian author of In the Hold) in Sign and Sight, an online magazine about Europe. Entitled “Our negroes, our enemies“, it’s a sketch of Serbian attitudes towards Albanians – specifically Kosovars – and the way in which those attitudes have been both a cause and effect of the poisoning of Serbian society.

This felt particularly relevant to me because I just spent a few days in Kosovo after not having visited for three years, and was interested to note that there is much less surface tension than there was. Shortly after I arrived in 1999, a Bulgarian UN staff member was shot in the street in daylight for answering a question in Serbian; while I was there, I accidentally answered people several times in Serbian, and received nothing worse than a slight look of distaste. While the Kosovars have not by any means forgiven the Serbs, they do seem to be increasingly confident that they’ve won.

And if the Kosovars have won, that must mean that the Serbs have lost. Arsenijevic nails a few things – the Albanians were the “negroes” of Yugoslavia, suffering from a lot of the usual prejudices reserved for threatening out-groups, particularly the classic fear of fertility. There’s some good observations about the cult of victimhood that seems to haunt Serbian politics, the old Yugoslav racism of “sto juznije to tuznije” and how tired the Serbs are of the endless disappointment of politics.

The article is by no means hopeful – he ends by saying “perhaps the only thing left for us is to believe that our grandchildren will be our real children” – but without understanding just how badly the Serbs have been affected by their recent history, it will be impossible for the international community to make any progress on reconciliation with or reconstruction of the country.

What to do about Iraqi translators

October 11, 2007 in UK, iraq, politics | No comments

If you want an update, read the post below. If you actually want to do something about ensuring that Iraqi employees of the British government have the opportunity to protect the lives of their families and themselves, you should do the following (courtesy of the unstoppable Dan Hardie).

Bear in mind that letters, faxes and phone calls to MPs do work. You can get all the contact details for your local MP from theyworkforyou, and you can write to them online at writetothem. Tell other people about this at church or at work, wherever, or write a letter. Here are some bullet points for a letter – don’t send it unchanged, you can edit it so that it reflects your own views. If you write to your MP, include your full address (including the postcode) to indicate that you are a constituent.

Bullet points:

  • David Miliband’s Statement on ‘Iraq: Locally Recruited Civilians’ of 9th October stated that Britain will help to resettle- in the wider Middle East, or in the United Kingdom- Iraqis who can prove that they have worked for this country’s soldiers or diplomats for a continuous period of twelve months.
  • Hundreds of Iraqis have been targeted for assassination for having worked for this country. Some have worked for a period of twelve months exclusively for the British and can prove this. Some have not but have been pinpointed for murder anyway. We have a responsibility to save these people from being murdered for the ‘crime’ of working for the British.
  • There are a lot of local employees who fled their jobs before 12 months precisely because they had been targeted, or who did a 6-month tour for one British battalion and were then told to go and work for the Americans, or who did 12 months or more with interruptions, or who the Army didn’t give proper documentation too.
  • Iraqi staff members must be given shelter not because of their provable length of service but according to whether they have been identified for murder by local death squads. This can be investigated on the spot by Army officers and referred rapidly to London: the process needs to start now.
  • Mr Miliband’s statement did not mention the families of Iraqi employees. As Iraqi militias also murder the families of their ‘enemies’, we must resettle our employees’ families as well. Mark Brockway, an ex-soldier who hired many Iraqis, estimates that we are talking about a maximum of 700 Iraqis to resettle: this country admits 190,000 immigrants net every year.
  • Iraqis have already been targeted for murder for having worked for this country. We will be shamed if we allow more to be killed for the same reason. Our soldiers, who are angry at this betrayal, and our diplomats, will be placed at risk if they gain a reputation for abandoning their local helpers.

There’s a form letter below the fold here. You can make a difference, so do it today.

Read the rest of this entry »

We care about you, but not too much

October 11, 2007 in UK, iraq, politics | No comments

The relationship between an employer and an employee is like any other relationship. For example, if you went to your best friend and said, “Mate, I really need your help – I think somebody’s trying to kill me!” and they told you “Sorry, but we’ve only known each other for 7 months”, you probably wouldn’t be sending them a Christmas card.

Not many birthday cards, then, for Gordon Brown or David Miliband’s from our Iraqi employees. This post could get a bit long and I could get a bit ranty, so I’m just going to focus on the main points here:

  1. An assistance package has been offered to some Iraqi employees, the nature of which is not clearly defined, but seems to be limited to financial assistance. That’s the positive part, but it goes downhill from there.
  2. The package will only be available to staff “who have attained 12 months’ or more continuous service”. I’m not convinced that the militia that are targeting those working for the British government are using length of service as a criteria for selection, and the government should not either.
  3. In addition, the statements make no mention of the families of these staff, who are equally at risk. The offer should be automatically extended to include any members of family that staff also believe to be at risk.
  4. Staff are also able to apply for exceptional leave to enter the UK or to apply through the Gateway programme for resettlement in the UK. A number of people have pointed out that this is utter bullshit – essentially the government is saying that they can apply for refugee status, a right which they already have. The point is not simply to recognise their rights, but to act on them, and quickly.
  5. Former and contracted (as opposed to directly hired) staff may be covered by this offer, but the government makes no commitments in this regard. Once again, I’m not sure that the militias will make this distinction – they tend to be quite inclusive in their death-dealing.

In order to have any impact, this offer needs to be made as widely as possible – the criteria of 12 months should be withdrawn, families should be included and all categories of staff eligible. Of course this sets a problematic precedent – should any future staff also be covered by this, and will that then lead to people applying for jobs solely in order to get out of the country? Luckily I don’t have to worry about stuff like that, because I’m not the one who’s got to implement the policy.

I’m glad that the government is acting on this, but they need to act quickly and comprehensively if this is going to have any impact. As well as the rumbling of the blogosphere, the meeting at Parliament apparently went very well, the Times has been carrying sterling coverage, the BBC has weighed in, the British Army Rumour Service are on it, and there’s a MySociety-style website called weoweittothem. Even the Heavy Metal community is involved, sort of.

I knew this post would go on longer than planned. You probably stopped reading about eight paragraphs ago, didn’t you? So I’m going to break this off and tell you what you can do in a separate post. After a slice of burek and a glass of yoghurt, of course.

Those Iraqi translators have packed their bags – but still they wait

October 8, 2007 in blogging, iraq, london, politics | 2 comments

I don’t want this blog to become monopolized by the “Iraqi translators” story, but if it does, it’s not a huge price to pay. While I was running and then recovering from the Montenegro Adventure Race (of which more later), a number of things have happened.

The venue for tomorrow’s meeting has been changed. It will still take place tomorrow (Tuesday 9th October) at the same time (7-9pm) with the same speakers in a changed venue very close to the original one: the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House. The long-suffering and highly efficient Mette Kahlin will be standing outside the door of the old venue (Committee Room 14 in Parliament) pointing the way to the new venue. To get there, walk to Parliament and find the very ugly building at the corner of Bridge Street and Victoria Embankment, facing Big Ben.

The meeting is still going ahead in order to keep the pressure up on the government. Today, Gordon Brown announced acknowledged the existence of these Iraqi staff (in his words, he “paid tribute” to them – ho ho ho) and announced a new more policy:

Existing staff who have been employed by us for more than twelve months and have completed their work will be able to apply for a package of financial payments to aid resettlement in Iraq or elsewhere in the region, or – in agreed circumstances – for admission to the UK. And professional staff — including interpreters and translators — with a similar length of service who have left our employ since the beginning of 2005 will also be able to apply for assistance.

Apparently more details will follow later this week, but the bloggers involved in this campaign will keep up the pressure to ensure that a) the government follows up on this announcement, and b) that the “agreed circumstances” that Brown mentioned are broad enough to have an impact on the lives of Iraq employees of the government.  Frankly the terms outlined above leave a nice back door for the government, since it’s safe to assume that all locally employed staff will have contracts that are less than 12 months.  Let us join together in holding Mr Brown’s feet to the fire on this one.

Oh, and Dan Hardie is not a doctor.

Iraqi translators – still dying, thanks to British government policy!

October 3, 2007 in UK, iraq, politics | 4 comments

So where are we on the whole Iraqi translators issue?

Let’s put it this way – they’re still dying. There was an interesting podcast on Iraqi asylum from 5Live the other day, which you can listen to here courtesy of Ministry of Truth. The podcast has words from Dan Hardie, the co-ordinator of this campaign, and Mark Brockway, a former UK soldier who hired many of the people who are now persecuted for their employment. It’s fairly depressing stuff, but what will be more depressing is if the UK government fails to live up to its most basic obligations as an employer.

The US Senate has now acted on the issue of allocating visas for Iraqi government employees, much to its credit (and against the efforts of the Bush administration, but now probably isn’t the time for scoring cheap points). Meanwhile the British government is still failing to respond to calls from various campaigners (yes, including the bloggers) to take similar steps for their employees and ex-employees from Iraq.

So the meeting at Parliament will be going ahead on Tuesday October 9th, to call for the British Government to recognise its responsibilities and give shelter to the Iraqis endangered by their work for this country’s troops and diplomats. If you want to support this campaign – and you should, because it is literally a life or death issue – Dan Hardie has a guide to how you can invite your MP, and a form letter you can use to invite them.

Although this is a complicated issue (in terms of what it implies about the situation in Iraq, and setting precedents for refugee claims) it’s not a particularly difficult one from a moral point of view. Let’s hope that this meeting starts to shift the Home Office towards taking some action – or we can expect to see a lot more dead Iraqis whose only crime was to take up a job offer.

(Details on inviting your MP beneath the fold.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Is Montenegro turning into the Western Balkan’s first successful post-modern nation?

September 15, 2007 in montenegro, politics | No comments

Courtesy of Tim, I’ve now discovered the revamped website of the European Stability Initiative. I have an inherent distrust of think tanks, and if you suffer from Balkan Derangement Syndrome then you’ll hate their politics, but I was loving this report which pointed out that Montenegro

is a country without an ethnic majority, two Orthodox churches and no agreed name for the language most of its people speak. The national currency of independent Montenegro is the Euro. Its 620,000 citizens are Orthodox Montenegrins and Orthodox Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic and Muslim Albanians, as well as some Croats and other minorities. Upon re-establishing statehood, Montenegro drastically downsized the armed forces it inherited from the joint state with Serbia to 2,500 and destroyed all except one of its 62 tanks.

If that’s the definition, then I guess Montenegro is indeed a post-modern nation, although I’m not sure that ESI have really understood what post-modern means. Independent Montenegro is a really strange beast, but the Balkans isn’t short on those – Bosnia or Kosovo, anybody?

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More bloody Iraqi translators. Literally.

September 13, 2007 in iraq, politics | No comments

The campaign to ensure that Iraqi employees who have been employed by coalition forces have the opportunity to leave the country before they get killed rolls on.

YouTube Preview Image

They really need to think of a better title for the campaign but, as you know, I feel that there is a certain moral and legal obligation that the British government must address.

Dan Hardie has now sent around an update and a request for anybody who’s interested in supporting the campaign.  The short version follows below, and Dan has more talking points on his blog:

If you’ve already written to your MP, write or email him or her again: and this time, invite them to a speaker meeting at Parliament on the second day of the new session, Tuesday 9th October.

If you haven’t already written to your MP, please do so. You can find out about your MP here.  Outline what’s happening and why we should be concerned, ask them to contact the relevant Ministries (particularly the Home Office but also the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and also invite them to the meeting. Stress to MPs that mainstream print and TV journalists will be present: that is the kind of thing that tends, for some reason, to attract them. And stress that this is the first blog-based campaign in the UK: this is how politics is going, and they need to see what it looks like.

That last point interested me – I hadn’t thought about it in those terms.  To me it feels like the good old days at Amnesty, but with more RSI.  Unfortunately I probably won’t be in London on the 9th – something about a mountain and some guns – but I’ll be cheering from a distance.

North Circular Stories

September 10, 2007 in Sought My Company Voluntarily, Now Regretful, UK, politics, television | No comments

I met Simon Ostrovsky in Berlin, where he sold me a bike that only had one pedal and then disappeared. I forgave him because he makes really interesting documentary shorts, like the recent North Circular Stories that aired on Channel 4 two weeks ago. Obviously I missed them – we don’t get Channel 4 here – but they’ve now been uploaded onto something like YouTube.

The films uncover an underworld of Eastern European migrants in London living in abandoned houses on the city’s infamous North Circular Road, and forming a tight-knit community of Latvian and Lithuanian menial workers, freeloaders and students alike.

 

I love this format – basically these are the documentary equivalent of pop videos, with three minutes to tell the story and a tendency to get under your skin. There’s no time to present an argument or squeeze a moral out – what you get is people’s lives, edited.

 

Perfect for our information-saturated culture. Without further ado, I give you – North Circular Stories.

 

 

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or how the right thing to do can also be wholly wrong

September 1, 2007 in politics | No comments

Oliver Kamm is a phenomenon I have yet to understand. He writes a blog which is generally quite intelligent, even if his writing is frequently verbose and occasionally pompous. I understand from his blog that he sometimes appears on television to provide political commentary, and he also writes columns for the Guardian infrequently. Despite all this, I have no idea who he is or why anybody would want to hear his opinions – well, no more than why anybody would want to hear my opinions.

He recently wrote one such column for the Guardian entitled “Terrible, but not a crime“, referring to the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Naturally this column drew quite a lot of fire from the sort of people who read the Guardian, who can usually be relied upon to react exactly how you expect them to. Kamm has replied to many of the letters that were published and some of the blog reactions as well, so you should read some of those if you want to hear his opinion.

I’d prefer to go back to the original column, a short version of which would read as follows:

There is a widespread conviction that, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America committed acts that were not only terrible but also wrong… This alternative history is devoid of merit.

Kamm believes that the “traditionalist interpretation” of the decision to drop the bomb is entirely correct – that Truman gave it the green light on the basis that it would bring the war to a rapid end and consequently save many lives on both sides. This argument is

founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan’s military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties… we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

Kamm appears to be something of an expert on this issue, and I have no reason to doubt that Truman did drop the bomb for exactly the reasons he gave at the time. However to say that the use of atomic weapons was justified on that basis is mistaken.

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Neil Clark and the denial of humanity

August 12, 2007 in iraq, politics | 3 comments

There’s been a storm in the teacup that is the blogosphere following the publication of Neil Clark’s online column in the Guardian’s Comment is Free section in response to a recently-begun campaign to pressure the British government to grant asylum to Iraqi civilians who have worked for the British forces in Iraq and whose lives and families are now threatened by various factions inside the country.

Clark objects to two things. Firstly, that the bloggers

who cheered on a brutal, murderous assault on a third-world country that was always going to result in mass loss of life would now like us to believe they are concerned over the fate of 91 people. But what I suspect worries the pro-war brigade most is not the future of the interpreters but that future military “interventions” may be jeopardised unless Britain promises citizenship rights to locals who collaborate.

I frankly could care less about Clark’s views on the motives of those organising this campaign. I suspect that there is almost nobody who would have been interested in his views on this issue, had he not yoked those views to his second argument. In his own words, that argument can be summarised as follows:

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On how a cult movie is more insightful than Neil Clark

August 12, 2007 in cinema, politics | 1 comment

Neil Clark has less to contribute to the debate about the British government’s obligation to grant asylum to its Iraqi employees who are now in fear of their lives than the movie Clerks, in which the culpability of the contractors involved in building the Death Star in the original Star Wars trilogy is analysed in a manner both more coherent and more entertaining.

More Pirates!

August 7, 2007 in pirates, politics | 1 comment

I mentioned in my previous post that James Surowiecki ’s article on the pirate papers focused on the role of the captain in drawing lessons for modern CEOs (top-down), rather than the role of the pirates themselves in drawing lessons for supporting democracy (bottom-up).

Leeson’s analysis of pirate governance focusses mainly on the way in which this system deterred self-dealing. But the pirate system was also based on an important insight: leaders who are great in a battle or some other crisis are not necessarily great managers, and concentrating power in one pair of hands often leads to bad decision-making.

Apparently there’s more to Surowiecki’s bias in taking the top-down perspective than just the particular audience he was writing for in the New Yorker:

Bottom-up behaviour seems illogical to Western minds – we have a hierarchical bias against self-organisation … [which is displayed in] our common understanding of how human change happens, especially in organisations. Our popular management magazines are filled with stories of the omniscient CEO or leader who can see the opportunities or threats in the environment and leads the people into the light. [However,] self-organisation is critical to achieving [change].

Westley, F., B. Zimmerman and M. Quinn Patton (2006) Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed, Toronto: Random House.

Peter Leeson has now written a follow-up to his original papers in which he explores more deeply this question of how anarchy leads to order, beating me to the punch and giving some interesting views on how welfare in Somalia is actually better under anarchy than government. That particularly claim clearly needs a little more examination…

(Hat tips to Ben Ramalingam, Harry Lucas, Toussaint Reba, Uncle Tom Longley and all.)

Snakes in Eden

August 5, 2007 in environment, life, politics | No comments

Via Freesteel, Cory Doctorow is roasted over hot coals for peddling techno-porn. No, not the sort of techno-porn where Bjork robots make out with each other, but the kind which

subscribe(s) to the usual techno-myth of a future in which we become immortal beings after our brains have been uploaded into computers for back-up, emulation, and pleasure-seeking downloads into other meat-puppets.

As Julian points out, this is an “interesting” future only insofar as it’s the only future that would let us avoid having to actually live in the future:

Now folks, there are two kinds of futures we can talk about; there’s the fake one which we like to imagine, where our grandfather gets cured of cancer at the hospital and lives forever, and then there’s the real one which we will all eventually be living in, whether we like it or not.

Doctorow stands accused of talking the talk but not walking the walk – touring the planet to preach the gospel of webtopia with a carbon footprint the size of Guatemala. Hell, he’s guilty as charged – but then so am I. In the pay of “humanitarian organisations”, I fly around the world on a regular basis just like Doctorow, paying into the same engine of climate change that is going to be paying out a lot of future disasters.

The irony is that the entire humanitarian sector is pretty much dependent on jetting around the world without much thought for the environmental consequences – and often without a thought for the environmental causes of the problems we’re trying to resolve. It’s not as if we can teleconference in our response to the Indian Ocean tsunami, but if we just invested more in local capacity we probably wouldn’t need to, at least not as often as we do.

Enough of my wailing and gnashing of teeth. Read the whole post for a scabrously funny flight-by-flight analysis as Cory Doctorow

does what he can to make the listener feel inferior and envious of his life, and of the way he can give the same speech over and over again which people want to hear, get passes into secret clubs in Disneyland, and generally have a cool time jet-setting around a world where everybody loves him.

I want to live in the real future, not a webtopian fantasy. Where do I sign up?

The War on Error: the Pew Global Attitudes Survey 2007

July 29, 2007 in politics | No comments

So the Pew Global Attitudes Project released its 2007 Survey (pdf) this week, with some interesting results. Not that interesting, though, which is why they specifically focused on the questions around the “Sharp Decline in Support for Suicide Bombing in Muslim Countries”. Sing it, Pew!

Among the most striking trends in predominantly Muslim nations is the continuing decline in the number saying that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilians are justifiable in the defense of Islam. In Lebanon, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia, the proportion of Muslims who view suicide bombing and other attacks against civilians as being often or sometimes justified has declined by half or more over the past five years.

This is obviously good news, not least because it makes the pig-ignorant bigots at sites like Little Green Footballs look like – well, pig-ignorant bigots, except more so. As far as they’re concerned, every Muslim is a suicide bomb waiting to happen – but these are the kinds of people that think that nuking Mecca is a reasonable policy option, so it’s better just to avoid catching their eye and hope that something shiny distracts them.

However it’s also slightly startling because it suggests – along with the dwindling support for Osama bin Laden that is also reported – that the US might be winning some of those hearts and minds that they’re always going on about. Oh no, wait:

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RASH: A true story about Life, Love and Landmines

July 23, 2007 in Sought My Company Voluntarily, Now Regretful, politics, theatre | 1 comment

Six years ago I travelled to New York for the first time, an innocent abroad with only the clothes on my back, etc, etc. A friend of mine gave me the number of a friend of his, and that was how I ended up sleeping on Jenni Wolfson’s couch for most of the week. Although at that point I wasn’t house trained, she didn’t object too much, and I still see her whenever I visit NY.

The last time I saw Jenni, she was leaving her job at UNICEF (where she’d been for years) and had started to spend more time on writing and performing. The result is that she has now staged her one-woman show RASH, which has received great reviews, has been nominated for the Amnesty International / Big Issue Freedom of Expression Award, and is going to the Edinburgh Fringe this year.

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I haven’t seen it (and I doubt she’ll be touring Montenegro) but the description reminds me of the play “Fever” by Wallace Shawn, which was an influence on me in the mid-1990s – a personal reflection on the friction between expectation and reality as you travel from the rich world to the poor. Political theatre is having something of a resurgence at the moment (and not just in New York), and if you’re going to the Fringe this year, RASH should be well worth going to.

The Jamaica Discipline: how pirates invented democracy

July 9, 2007 in pirates, politics | 2 comments

I’m only two months behind the rest of the blogosphere on this topic, but I like to think that’s because I’ve been giving it careful consideration. In fact, it’s because I only got to reading these academic papers this weekend, after I threw my back carrying a water heater down some stairs. Well, I say stairs, they were more like metal rods. One day they’ll be stairs.

Anyway, Peter Leeson at the George Mason University has made a couple of his unpublished papers available on the world of piracy – An-arrgh-chy: the Law and Economics of Pirate Orgnization and PiRational Choice: the Economics of Infamous Pirate Practices. Far from being cash-in papers (think Freakonomics meets Pirates of the Caribbean), there’s some very interesting stuff in them, particularly the first.

Based on first-hand accounts of pirate behaviour, Leeson concludes that pirates created a form of self-governance that anticipated modern democratic forms, such as installing checks and balances on the power of individual captains. This was borne out of the motivation of the average pirate, which could often be identified as dissatisfaction with their treatment on ships run by the navy or merchant marine. Wishing to avoid the same in their new careers, they were careful to create systems that built in protection against captain predation.

Pirates of the Caribbean also immortalised the idea of a Pirate Code, observed more in the breach than the observation – as Captain Barbossa says, “the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules”. However there were such codes, governing behaviour on board, allocating division of spoils and allowing the possibility of removal of incompetent or corrupt captains. Most interestingly, the commality of interests amongst pirates meant that these “constitutions” were strongly observed, with William Dampier recording but a single theft aboard his ship between 1683 and 1691.

These papers fired a lot of interest earlier in the year, with even the New Yorker picking them up in an article by James Surowiecki (better known for his book The Wisdom of Crowds, which is also worth reading). Of course Surowiecki focuses on the questions of leadership that the papers raise, rather than the rather more interesting point – that democratic forms can emerge out of rational economic decisions.

Plus, pirates were a lot smarter than we give them credit for. Arrgh!

UPDATE: And don’t forget to download the classic radio sketch,

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, which bizarrely turns out to be quite accurate in the light of this research.