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)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.