Darfur - The world still does nothing (Eric Reeves)

An important statement by the tireless Eric Reeves, posted on the very useful Darfur-focused website "Passion of the Present." As I've indicated before, Reeves is a Smith College professor who has taken a leave of absence to focus on the Darfur crisis and has turned himself into a widely recognized expert. He's one of the best informed, acute, and passionately engaged people currently writing about the Darfur atrocity (in a range of publications that have included the New York Times, Dissent, In These Times, the Nation, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and various newspapers outside the US--in addition to his own website, which is an invaluable source of ongoing information).

The statement below is a bit long (though worth reading in full, carefully), but the central message is pithy enough:

Indeed, the irony became savage today when Annan went on to invoke Edmund Burke's famous declaration, "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." For "nothing" is precisely what Annan and the US administration of Bill Clinton engineered in response to the desperate plea for intervening troops from Lt. General Romeo Dallaire, UN force commander at the time of the genocide in Rwanda.

Moreover, "nothing" also comes perilously close to defining what the international community is providing in the way of means for halting current genocide in Darfur...

[....] After two years of brutal warfare, reflecting Khartoum's unmistakable genocidal ambitions in Darfur, the regime faces no real consequences for its systematic counter-insurgency policy of "deliberately inflicting on the non-Arab or African tribal peoples of Darfur conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part" (from the language of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).

These fundamental realities will not change without a significant international humanitarian intervention, with all necessary military support. Either humanitarian operations and transport routes are afforded much more robust security, or their reach will contract. Extremely vulnerable civilians populations must be protected or they will continue to fall victim to ongoing military attacks and Janjaweed predations. Indeed, especially in the wake of a north/south peace agreement (Nairobi, January 9, 2005), Khartoum will calculate with a vicious shrewdness just how much international "good will" it has purchased, and how far this is likely to translate into diminished pressure over ongoing genocide in Darfur.

We may be quite sure that the National Islamic Front regime---which remains the only national authority in Sudan, despite the January 9th agreement---will do only the minimum required to ensure that international consensus does not gather around a robust course of action. With continuing strong diplomatic support from the Arab League, China, and much of the Islamic world, Khartoum clearly has no fear of the sanctions that were first proposed half a year ago by the US in a July 30, 2004 UN Security Council resolution (No. 1556).

[....] You are right, Mr. Secretary General: "At this moment, terrible things are happening today in Darfur, Sudan." And it is no less true today than in the late 18th century: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." But evil is triumphing in Darfur---the evidence is everywhere.

--Jeff Weintraub

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http://www.passionofthepresent.com/
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Passion of the Present
January 25, 2005

Eric Reeves on Kofi Annan's statement on Darfur, Sudan at the UN remembrance of the Holocaust.

Eric Reeves, who I personally consider the most important commentator on Sudan and Darfur today, writes a long, detailed, and powerful message that just arrived by email.

"At this moment, terrible things are happening today in Darfur, Sudan"---
Kofi Annan, January 24, 2005, to the UN General Assembly

Eric Reeves
January 24, 2005

Kofi Annan's statement today of this long conspicuous truth must still gain significance from its extraordinary context. For Annan was addressing the UN General Assembly and world leaders on the occasion of an unprecedented UN commemoration of the Holocaust of World War II. There could be no more powerful reference to human evil and mass destruction. Moreover, the Secretary-General did not shy away from naming other genocides, including those in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. He was powerfully echoed by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who painfully observed, ""if the world had listened, we may have prevented Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and naturally Rwanda," (Reuters, January 24, 2005).

But a grim and disconcerting irony stalks Annan's comments. For it was Annan who headed UN peacekeeping operations during the Rwandan genocide, and who bears much responsibility for international failure to stop the unspeakable carnage. Indeed, the irony became savage today when Annan went on to invoke Edmund Burke's famous declaration, "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." For "nothing" is precisely what Annan and the US administration of Bill Clinton engineered in response to the desperate plea for intervening troops from Lt. General Romeo Dallaire, UN force commander at the time of the genocide in Rwanda.

Moreover, "nothing" also comes perilously close to defining what the international community is providing in the way of means for halting current genocide in Darfur...

.. Though aid organizations continue heroically to confront the challenges of the world's greatest humanitarian crisis, insecurity has severely attenuated the reach and efficacy of assistance. This is insecurity orchestrated by Khartoum, with a clear understanding of its implications for humanitarian access and transport. This is insecurity that deliberately impedes humanitarian aid delivery and is fully consistent with Khartoum's larger genocidal ambitions in Darfur as revealed by almost two years of savagely destructive counter-insurgency warfare.

To be sure, there are occasional reports that fighting has diminished in some areas within Darfur; but other accounts indicate continuing intense violence and village destruction (see below). And in much of Darfur there is simply nothing left: almost all the non-Arab or African villages have been destroyed and civilian populations have been virtually entirely displaced. There is nothing to support either civilians or insurgents; the agricultural economy has totally collapsed. The consensus within the Dafuri diaspora, among those who have significant contacts within Darfur, is that 90% of non-Arab/African villages have now been destroyed. And while some previously closed roads and humanitarian corridors may now again be open, others remain closed; moreover, the risk of further attenuation of aid deliveries is extremely high.

NOTHING WILL COME OF NOTHING

And yet there is no international plan to enhance security for humanitarian operations in Darfur; there is no prospect of diplomatic settlement in next month's reconvened talks in Abuja, Nigeria (Khartoum ensured the collapse of the last round of talks [December 2004] by mounting a sustained military offensive immediately prior to the opening of negotiations); there is no effective monitoring force in place for a cease-fire that is merely notional (see below); Khartoum is not abiding by its formal commitment to halt offensive military flights over Darfur; there is nothing in place, or contemplated, that can stop what has become the inexorable logic of genocide by attrition. A ghastly status quo has descended upon Darfur, reflected in the significant diminishment of on-the-ground news coverage, and the growing lack of effective attention to Darfur in the wake of the north/south peace agreement.

Perversely, at this very moment of paralysis and diminished attention, the scale of human destruction in Darfur's catastrophe is finally being recognized in some news quarters. In general, however, there remains an intellectually slovenly refusal to report data and evidence that strongly suggest total mortality in Darfur and eastern Chad, over the course of two years of extremely violent conflict and displacement, now exceeds 400,000 human beings (see January 18, 2005 mortality assessment by this writer).

[The Associated Press, to its immense credit, has begun the process of assessing this evidence and data; see Appendix 1 for an analysis of the January 20, 2005 AP report on violent mortality in Darfur.]

To gather an appropriate sense of urgency, we must bear in mind that the data and evidence available also suggest that monthly mortality has been approximately 35,000 human beings throughout the greater Darfur region (including Chad and inaccessible rural areas of Darfur), and according to UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland, this number may rise to 100,000 per month if continuing insecurity forces humanitarian organizations to suspend their operations in Darfur (Financial Times [UK], December 15, 2004).

Food insecurity also continues to grow more severe, as had been predicted by the International Committee of the Red Cross (October 2004) and other humanitarian organizations. The US Agency for International Development-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) has warned that "the situation in North and West Darfur [is] extremely food insecure" (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, January 20, 2005).

But despite the clear and growing risk to a conflict-affected population that now numbers approximately 3 million human beings (for estimates of monthly mortality and conflict-affected population, see), there is no evidence of a willingness to intervene, either on the part of the UN in New York or other actors in the international community. After two years of brutal warfare, reflecting Khartoum's unmistakable genocidal ambitions in Darfur, the regime faces no real consequences for its systematic counter-insurgency policy of "deliberately inflicting on the non-Arab or African tribal peoples of Darfur conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part" (from the language of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).

These fundamental realities will not change without a significant international humanitarian intervention, with all necessary military support. Either humanitarian operations and transport routes are afforded much more robust security, or their reach will contract. Extremely vulnerable civilians populations must be protected or they will continue to fall victim to ongoing military attacks and Janjaweed predations. Indeed, especially in the wake of a north/south peace agreement (Nairobi, January 9, 2005), Khartoum will calculate with a vicious shrewdness just how much international "good will" it has purchased, and how far this is likely to translate into diminished pressure over ongoing genocide in Darfur.

We may be quite sure that the National Islamic Front regime---which remains the only national authority in Sudan, despite the January 9th agreement---will do only the minimum required to ensure that international consensus does not gather around a robust course of action. With continuing strong diplomatic support from the Arab League, China, and much of the Islamic world, Khartoum clearly has no fear of the sanctions that were first proposed half a year ago by the US in a July 30, 2004 UN Security Council resolution (No. 1556).

Certainly the regime is well aware of China's explicit threat to veto any sanctions measure against Khartoum's genocidaires (the threat was made publicly by the Chinese ambassador to the UN following passage of a second UN Security Council Resolution [No. 1564] on September 18, 2004). There seems no will even to impose targeted sanctions on key members of the regime (including travel bans and asset freezes); and the vague threat of such sanctions has been fully anticipated by the regime over the many months of their being mooted.

PERCEPTIONS IN KHARTOUM

In assessing the UN's commitment to Darfur, Khartoum has been guided above all else by the inability of the world body to secure any compliance with the singular "demand" of the July 30, 2004 Security Council resolution, viz. that the regime disarm the Janjaweed and brings its leaders to justice. (This "demand" formalized what the National Islamic Front regime had explicitly promised Kofi Annan on July 3, 2004 in a "Joint Communiqué" signed in Khartoum.) Half a year later, the Janjaweed face no threat of disarmament, and no Janjaweed leader has been brought to justice. Can we possibly doubt that there is anything but contempt on Khartoum's part for UN "demands" or threats?

This is the context in which to assess Khartoum's response to an impending report from a UN-appointed commission of inquiry (created by the September 18, 2004 Security Council resolution). This report was to have been issued tomorrow (January 25, 2005), announcing its findings and possible referrals to the International Criminal Court (ICC). But it now appears that the report will be deferred, possibly until next week or later. It is clearly enmeshed in UN politics, as well as the international politics that surround the ICC.

Given this political context, the report will most likely find that massive war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in Darfur, but will not announce a determination of whether genocide has been committed. This will be a reticence growing not out of an assessment of the evidence in light of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, but rather what might be called "the politics of genocide." Here, for example, the demurral or refusal to speak honestly about genocide in Darfur---by the Arab League, by the African Union, and by influential AU leaders (such as President Obasanjo of Nigeria)---will have far more to do with what is said than the overwhelming evidence of the crime of genocide. The expedient calculation is likely to be that given a referral to the ICC on the basis of "crimes against humanity," there is no need to roil the international diplomatic waters with the searing honesty of a genocide determination.

The politics of the ICC also govern this report, especially as defined by the attitudes of three key permanent (veto-wielding) UN Security Council members: the US, China, and Russia. Though much recent opinion writing has focused on whether the US will block a UN Security Council referral to the ICC (necessary when a country, like Sudan, is not party to the Rome Statute that created the ICC), the real issue is whether China will allow such a referral to move forward. China is distinctly less enthusiastic about the ICC than the Bush administration (and for good reason), and has plenty of diplomatic support from Russia. Given China's appalling human rights record, its history of savage repression in Tibet, the legacy of Tiananmen Square, and its general vulnerability to criminal prosecution, Beijing is highly unlikely to acquiesce in a UN Security Council referral to the ICC. Russia's unease over its ghastly brutality in Chechnya likely ensures another killing vote against referral to the ICC.

And would such a referral make a difference in any event? And in a way that responds to the urgency of continuing, massive genocidal destruction? Though some observers claim that the Khartoum regime is genuinely fearful of referral to the ICC, this is mere speculation---a wishful assessment of the diplomatic "body language" of a ruthlessly survivalist regime that has proved extraordinarily adept at evading international censure and meaningful consequences for past genocidal actions.

Until there is in place a fully credible set of consequences for its failure to halt massive, ethnically targeted human destruction in Darfur, Khartoum will continue to act as it has for the past two years and more. And the regime will continue to be guided by the assumption that the international community is too eager to preserve the success of a north/south peace agreement to issue ultimatums over Darfur. There is little reason to quarrel with this assessment.

THE FAILURE OF THE AFRICAN UNION FORCE IN DARFUR

Khartoum has also been powerfully encouraged by international willingness to accept, by default, the African Union monitoring force as the sole guarantor of security in Darfur. For it is now fully clear that the AU force in Darfur remains---months after initial deployment---woefully inadequate, logistically incapable, and unable to conduct timely investigations of many of the most egregious violations of the cease-fire re-negotiated (under AU auspices) in Abuja, Nigeria on November 9, 2004.

Though Western assistance (including provision of military/logistical contractors) to the AU has been less than fully robust or aggressive, the last month of painfully slow deployment is largely the responsibility of the African Union itself. Months after securing (highly limited) terms of deployment from Khartoum, there are still fewer than 1,300 AU personnel in the field, and not nearly enough equipment, especially transport and communications gear. Most significantly, the AU has no peacekeeping mandate: it is meaningfully charged only with monitoring violations of the cease-fire by parties to the cease-fire (notably, this does not include the Janjaweed).

At the same time, Khartoum has grown increasingly canny in exploiting the weaknesses and lack of capacity on the part of the AU, and has been especially emboldened by AU inability to conduct an appropriate number of field investigations and issue prompt assessments of responsibility for violence. Though some AU personnel are attempting to expand the de facto mandate of the mission, and though some AU officers are leading as effectively as possible under virtually impossible constraints, Khartoum clearly sees that no real pressure derives from AU reporting, and indeed, that the international community is increasingly content with a new "moral equivalence" between the insurgency movements on the one hand, and Khartoum and its Janjaweed militia allies on the other.

The insurgency movements have much to answer for over the past two to three months, especially in failing to do more to alleviate insecurity for humanitarian organizations. But the expedient assertion of "moral equivalence," made explicitly and implicitly by the UN and other international actors, convinces Khartoum that its most mendacious assertions, its most absurd charges, will result in the stalemate of international judgment.

In a particularly brazen example, Khartoum declared (January 23, 2005) that "a group of Darfur rebels attack al-Malam areas on the borders of North and South Darfur states. They burnt eight villages and killed many people." (Reuters [Khartoum], January 23, 2005).

But this account is unlikely in the extreme: there have been no confirmed reports of such attacks on villages and civilians by either of the major insurgency groups during the course of the war. Moreover, the statement to Reuters came from "an armed forces official, who declined to be named" (Reuters [Khartoum], January 23, 2005). If Khartoum is doing anything other than trying to deflect blame from itself, why wasn't this statement issued by an official who allowed himself to be named and held accountable, should the AU investigate this incident? This statement gives all signs of being an effort on the part of Khartoum at "preemptive exculpation."

That the regime is engaged in such efforts is made clear in an important dispatch today from the New York Times (dateline Labado, South Darfur). Labado was the site of a brutal attack by Khartoum's military forces on December 16, 2004 in which many civilians were killed and an aid worker for Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) was "murdered" (the word choice is that of MSF in its press release on the occasion of Khartoum's air- and- ground attack on Labado). Dozens of other MSF workers scattered into the bush with the attack, and not all have been accounted for. Many civilians were killed, and Labado was laid waste.

The New York Times dispatch offers a terrifying picture of pure mendacity put in service of deflecting blame for the war crimes defining the attack on Labado:

"Government soldiers began moving on Labado in early December, camping several miles outside of town. Then, according to the commanding officer of the troops that took the town, SLA rebels mounted a surprise attack on their camp, killing several soldiers. On December 16 [2004] the soldiers retaliated, pounding Labado with helicopter gunships and mortar fire. When the smoke cleared, nearly 100 people were dead, according to village leaders. More than 20,000 town residents fled with the 20,000 residents of a refugee camp at the edge of town." (New York Times [Labado], January 24, 2004)

But the account of the attack from civilians is markedly different:

"Moussa Ahmed Ibrahim, the sheik of the town, said the rebels had been there, living among them, but had fled at the first sign of an attack by Arab militiamen, known as the janjaweed."

And the victims of the Labado attack, humanitarian workers report, were overwhelmingly civilians:

"In Muhagiriya [near Labado], Ran van der Wal, coordinator for the health program run by Doctors Without Borders here, said virtually all of the patients treated for war wounds were civilians. 'We are seeing women, we are seeing children with shrapnel wounds,' Ms. Van der Wal said. 'It is not a war between armies. It is a kind of war on civilians.'" (New York Times [Labado], January 24, 2005]

In defending these military actions, Khartoum's commanding officer at Labado offered a transparently absurd explanation:

"Major Morhi el-Din, a senior officer of the government force that led the charge on Labado, said the fires that burned the huts had been started by bullets fired at SLA fighters hiding in the town---an explanation that seemed to defy logic. 'We shot at them in self-defense, and that started the fires,' Major Din explained. 'We did not start these fires.'" (New York Times [Labado], January 24, 2005)

That such patent absurdity is even offered suggests that Khartoum fears no consequences from its actions; and unsurprisingly, there is still no authoritative account of the Labado attack from the AU monitoring force. The AU helicopter sent to investigate was fired upon while flying over territory militarily controlled by Khartoum and returned to base.

Moreover, there have been numerous other attacks on villages by Khartoum's forces that have yet to receive adequate investigation, giving the regime the inevitable impression that it may operate with essential impunity. For example, Reuters recently reported the observation of UN spokesman George Somerwill:

"Somerwill said the United Nations had reports of attacks by armed tribesmen in four villages in South and North Darfur, with heavy casualties inflicted in one attack on January 9 and 10, [2005]. The attacks had yet to be confirmed by the African Union, responsible for monitoring a shaky April ceasefire in the region." (Reuters, January 19, 2005)

Such belated investigations ensure that Khartoum's sense of impunity, along with that of its Janjaweed militia allies, only grows. Indeed, we have further evidence of precisely this development in today's dispatch from the New York Times (currently an almost singular news presence in Darfur):

"As many as 25 [villages] have been burned to the ground in recent days in this restive patch of Darfur, a vast arid region roughly the size of France. On January 14, [2005], an attack on the town of Hamada left more than 100 people dead, including many women and children, said foreign military and aid officials in Darfur. Thousands more have fled their homes, adding to the two million people pushed into tattered camps in Sudan and neighboring Chad by the conflict." (New York Times [Labado], January 24, 2005)

The Sudan Organization Against Torture (SOAT), an increasingly important source of information from the ground in Darfur, also reported recently on the Hamada attack:

"On 16 January 2005, the air forces and the Janjaweed militias attacked and destroyed Hamada, Birgid tribe village, 50 km northeast of Nyala, Southern Darfur state using Antonov aircrafts. Reportedly, at least 69 civilians were killed and 10s were wounded during the attack including five children. The details of the civilians killed and wounded are as followed [SOAT lists the names of many of those killed and wounded]." (SOAT, "Darfur: Hamada Village Destroyed," January 19, 2005)

These are clearly attacks by Khartoum's regular military forces and the regime's murderous Janjaweed militia allies. They are not the attacks of the insurgency groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement Army (SLA) or the Justice and Equality Movement [JEM], or even the groups that have split from the main insurgency movements. These military actions, including aerial assaults, continue a fully established pattern of undeterred violence that has been in evidence for over 20 months: non-Arab or African villages and civilian populations have been relentlessly, deliberately attacked by Khartoum's forces and militia allies, with comprehensive destruction the inevitable result.

This has been the engine of massive human displacement and destruction in Darfur, and it signifies the deepest disingenuousness for the clear historical record of these past 20 months to be ignored in assigning blame for attacks like that on Hamada. Certainly the present inability of the AU to monitor in effective fashion the nominal cease-fire does nothing to change this historical record.

Moreover, the Khartoum regime has continued to harass and arrest humanitarian aid workers. This will inevitably have severe and unfortunate effects on recruitment efforts in the future. Reuters recently reported from Khartoum ("Darfur aid agencies complain of staff arrests," January 19, 2005):

"Aid agencies in Sudan's Darfur region are concerned at systematic arrests and harassment of their staff working in the strife torn region, a UN official said on Wednesday. The United Nations had raised the issue with authorities in South Darfur state, one of the most insecure areas in the remote western region, UN spokesman George Somerwill told reporters in Khartoum. 'The incidents have been harshest towards local staff,' he said. 'It has been particularly bad in South Darfur.'" (Reuters, January 19, 2005)

This deliberate disruption of humanitarian operations has been part of Khartoum's genocidal strategy since December 2003, when UN special envoy for humanitarian affairs Tom Vraalsen first reported the regime's "systematic" denial of humanitarian access to areas in which the Fur, Massaleit, Zaghawa, and other non-Arab/African tribal groups were concentrated. Present tactics of arresting and harassing Sudanese nationals working for aid groups are especially significant, since these people constitute approximately 90% of the humanitarian staff throughout Darfur.

"CONDITIONS OF LIFE CALCULATED TO BRING ABOUT PHYSICAL DESTRUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART"

Human Rights Watch today (January 24, 2005) released a new report on Darfur, "Targeting the Fur: Mass Killings in Darfur." The report reiterates findings from 2004, including,

"the round-up, detention and execution in March [2004] of more than 200 Fur farmers and community leaders in West Darfur's Wadi Saleh and Mukjar provinces." (Human Rights Watch release, January 24, 2005)

Human Rights Watch also documents how, in the same period,

"thousands of Fur men, women and children in the South Darfur province of Shattaya were attacked by Janjaweed militias and detained, raped, tortured and kept in inhuman conditions in Kailek camp. In both West and South Darfur, local government officials were deeply implicated in these crimes."

[See also originating reports on Kailek death camp by this writer: "'Ethnic Cleansing' or Genocide in Darfur?" and
"African Auschwitz: The Concentration Camps of Darfur"]

Moving to the present, Human Rights Watch reports:

"An overwhelming majority of the tens of thousands of displaced Fur in these areas remain all but imprisoned in the larger government-held towns due to continuing violence in rural areas. Despite the fact that there is no active conflict in the area, government-backed militias on almost a daily basis continue to attack and rape women and girls when they leave towns to work in the fields or in search of firewood." (Human Rights Watch release, January 24, 2005)

These are the realities that the international community is now prepared to countenance. And though the plea from Human Rights Watch that these atrocities be prosecuted is of course fully warranted, it is transparently insufficient to stop acts of genocide and crimes against humanity from continuing.

We may be just as sure that the threat of prosecutions will not improve the character of humanitarian aid in Darfur. The most recent UN Darfur Humanitarian Profile (No. 9, December 1, 2004) is forced to acknowledge that even among accessible populations within Darfur, 54% have no clean water, almost half are without sanitary facilities, and 36% are without any primary health care. These people, in terribly overcrowded conditions, remain extremely vulnerable to disease. And though the UN World Food Program was able to reach 1.5 million people in Darfur during December 2004 (with 23,600 metric tons of food), this represents approximately half the total number of conflict-affected persons in the greater Darfur humanitarian theater. Many hundreds of thousands of people continue to go without food, or with severely inadequate food rations---especially in inaccessible rural areas. They are slowly starving to death, or succumbing to diseases related to severe malnutrition. There is no end in sight.

You are right, Mr. Secretary General: "At this moment, terrible things are happening today in Darfur, Sudan." And it is no less true today than in the late 18th century: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." But evil is triumphing in Darfur---the evidence is everywhere.

Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063

413-585-3326
ereeves@smith.edu
www.sudanreeves.org
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Appendix One: The Associated Press and global mortality in Darfur

In a moment of impressive journalistic integrity, the Associated Press (January 20, 2005) has responded to evidence of violent mortality in Darfur that has been continuously cited by this writer since September 15, 2004 (see "DARFUR MORTALITY UPDATE: September 15, 2004; Current data for total mortality from violence, malnutrition, and disease"). The Associated Press thus becomes the first news-wire organization to suggest the massive scale of violent mortality in Darfur (see dispatch).

At the same time, perhaps inevitably, AP fails to discuss a key epidemiological report bearing on violent mortality published in The Lancet, the UK's most distinguished medical journal (The Lancet, October 1, 2004, "Violence and mortality in West Darfur, 2003-04"). This study, the only one of its kind, finds that well over 90% of the displaced populations in Darfur (in particular, two large camps for the displaced in West Darfur) have been violently displaced. The conservative assumption by this writer has consistently been that only 80% of the total displaced population in Darfur have been violently displaced.

AP first notes:

"Fritz Scheuren, president of the American Statistical Associations, said the [Coalition for International Justice] survey methods were correct, and Juan Mendez, the U.N. envoy for the prevention of genocide, called it comprehensive. Smith College professor Eric Reeves, a researcher into the conflict, said if the figure held for all of Darfur's 2 million displaced the implication would be 200,000 killed."

AP then proceeds to observe:

"However, there is no certainty that the experiences of the displaced in Chad---the group the sample came from---are the same as those of other refugees who did not reach Chad, or of all of the 6 million people of Darfur.

But the key governing assumption for the figure derived by this writer---of over 200,000 violent deaths---is in fact considerably more conservative than that suggested by the only study speaking to the issue of violent displacement as a percentage of total displacement. This is evidently not understood in the AP analysis.

Moreover, AP takes insufficient account of the randomizing techniques used in the key larger study in question ("Documenting Atrocities in Darfur," by the Coalition for International Justice):

"Furthermore, projecting a precise death toll estimate from the survey is problematic because there is no certainty about the size of the group each refugee would consider to be 'family'---a key element in the calculation. Refugees included extended family---such as uncles and cousins---in their answer." (AP, January 20, 2005)

But in fact, even if the "family" in question were an extended rather than a nuclear family, the randomizing techniques used by the Coalition for International Justice (CIJ) ensured almost no overlap in familial reporting on mortality:

"Refugees were selected using a systematic, random sampling approach designed to meet the condition in Chad. Interviewers randomly selected a sector within a refugee camp and then, from a fixed point within the sector, chose every 10th dwelling unit for interviewing. [ ] One adult [from the dwelling unit] was randomly selected [for interviewing]." ("Documenting Atrocities in Darfur," page 5)

More significant is the fact that those conducting interviews for the CIJ found that interviewees often reported more than one family member had been killed, often several more than one. Yet the statistical derivation offered by this writer presumed that only one family member has been killed among the 61% who reported seeing (at least) one family member killed.

Secondly, the CIJ study could take no account of the number of families in which all members were killed, and who thus had no reporting presence in the camps where interviews took place. Further, the CIJ study reports that 28% of those interviewed "directly witnessed" persons dying from the consequences of displacement before reaching Chad. These deaths must be considered the direct consequence of violence, if not violent deaths per se, and would significantly increase violent mortality totals.

Given these statistical considerations, a figure of more than 200,000 violent deaths has a much greater plausibility than the Associated Press is able to suggest.

January 25, 2005 | Permalink

John Powers - "A Vision of Our Own" (LA Weekly)

[UPDATE - 11/15/2005: This piece by John Powers was written in January 2005, but the issues it raises are more timely than ever. There are signs lately that the Bush administration may be starting to implode—in part because its fundamental incompetence, dishonesty, and irresponsibility are finally beginning to dawn on much of the electorate—and there is increasing public disillusionment with the coalition of big business and the Republican hard right who have been shamelessly and disastrously misgoverning the country. But by itself, that's not enough to dislodge them from power, let alone to save the republic and bring about real improvements. It's also necessary to be able to offer a workable, genuinely better alternative. Any assumption that the Democrats, "progressives," the "left," or some combination of these categories have such an alternative vision worked out, ready to offer and put into practice, would be a dangerous illusion. In that respect, we really need to get back to basics—and confronting the issues raised here is a necessary part of that effort. —Jeff Weintraub]

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I would quibble with some aspects of the argument in this piece. But overall I think the advice that John Powers offers here to American democrats and progressives, including what now passes for an American "left," is largely correct and important. Especially the following (and especially points #1 and #2):

1. It must reclaim virtue. After the election, you heard endless talk about how Bush won on "values." This wasn’t true — the so-called values vote was no more powerful in 2004 than in earlier years. But what is true is that conservatives are scarily comfortable talking about morality, while the left (still influenced by "scientific" socialism) is made nervous by moral language. Because of this, our political culture’s idea of virtue has been whittled into a sad, mingy thing, a question of private behavior. Yet one historic strength of the left was its belief that morality is also a matter of public virtue — justice, equality, generosity, tolerance. The loss of this idea has been catastrophic. While Republicans rouse their troops by attacking Clinton’s immorality or gay marriage, Democrats couldn’t make hay from the moral outrage of corporate executives (who make 1,000 times their employees’ wages) selling off stock options for top dollar while letting pension funds collapse. Morality should be our issue, not theirs. Where’s The Book of Liberal Virtues?

2. It must reclaim freedom. One of the left’s glories has been its tradition of heroic internationalism, still alive in the anti-globalization movement’s insistence on workers’ rights around the world. (Typically, though, "anti-globalization" sounds negative rather than positive.) But when it comes to foreign policy these days, the left appears lost. I get depressed hearing friends sound like paleocon isolationists or watching them reflexively assume that there’s something inherently tyrannical about the use of American power. It’s not enough to mock Norman Podhoretz’s insistence that the battle with Islamic terrorism is World War IV. Just as the left lacked a coherent position on what to do with murderous despots such as Milosevic and Saddam — it won’t do to say, "They’re bad, but . . ." The left now needs a position on how best to battle a Muslim ideology that, at bottom, despises all the freedoms we should be defending. America should be actively promoting the freedom of everyone on the planet, and the key question is, how would the left do it differently from the Bush administration?

3. It must reclaim pleasure. For the last 30 years, the right’s been having fun — Lee Atwater playing the blues, Rush Limbaugh giving that strangulated laugh, The Weekly Standard running those mocking covers — while the left has been good for you, like eating a big, dry bowl of muesli. This isn’t simply because leftists can be humorless (a quality shared with righteous evangelicals), but because, over the years, they’ve gone from being associated with free love and rock & roll to seeming like yuppified puritans; hence the Gore-Lieberman ticket talked about censoring video games and brainy leftist Thomas Frank tirelessly debunks the pleasure of those who buy anything Cool or find Madonna meaningful. (Clinton was an exception — he enjoyed a Big Mac and an intern as much as the hero of a beer commercial — and he was the one Democrat in recent years that most average Americans really liked.) While the left is correct in talking about the gas-guzzling horror of SUVs, it’s a losing cause to tell a nation full of proud drivers that they should feel guilty about the car they love. Rather than coming off as anti-consumerist puritans in a consumerist culture, the left should be fighting on the side of freedom and pleasure — for instance, arguing that ordinary people should have more time off from the endless hours of work that increasingly devour our souls. This is the kind of idea we should own — and force the right to argue against.

4. Finally, and above all, it must try to reclaim utopia. Back during the horrors of mid-20th-century Germany, the great Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, "This is not a time to be without wishes." He knew that any successful political action had to begin in hope and dreams. The same is true as we enter the second Bush administration. The right controls the machinery of government and isn’t shy about using it to change the world to make it fit the twin religions that drive it — Christianity and untrammeled free-market economics. To fight such a radical, all-encompassing vision, we need an equally big countervision of our own. I’m not talking about some mad fantasy of heaven on earth (those usually lead to death camps), but a dream bigger than hopes that the Democratic Party will come back into power four years from now. To create the world we want, we have to regain the hopeful belief that we are trying to create a world thrillingly better than the one we now live in. Promising more prescription drugs for seniors just won’t cut it.

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub

=============
LA Weekly
January 21-27, 2005

A Vision of Our Own
Four ideas for the left to redefine itself
by John Powers

In The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein tells the story of Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the House, listening to a pre-Monica State of the Union address. As the Man From Hope effortlessly dominated the chamber — in part by appropriating conservative ideas as a cannibal might eat the biceps of his strongest rival — Gingrich found himself thinking, "We’re dead. There’s no way we’re going to beat this guy."

It’s become easy to feel the same about George W. Bush. As he begins his fifth — fifth! — year in office, nearly half the country is still struggling to accept that he won a second term, much less that his re-election confirms him as the dominant political figure of our time. (Slick who?) Despite occasional noises about wanting to represent all the people, no president has been less shy about saying things guaranteed to get his opponents’ goat. When the Washington Post recently asked him why nobody in his administration was held accountable for the botched occupation of Iraq, Bush replied, "We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections. The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me." So, there.

Within minutes of the Post story hitting the wires, my Outlook Express was flooded with teeth-gnashing e-mails noting that winning the presidency by a disputed nose in Ohio doesn’t exactly mean America thinks Rummy’s work in Iraq is just swell. I agreed with their point, but I also found it faintly depressing that so many on the left are still obsessed with anger at Bush. It’s time to get over it. Loathing the guy may have filled Kerry’s campaign coffers — and fattened Michael Moore’s wallet — but it wasn’t enough to beat him. In fact, it may have even cost the Democrats the election. Growing fixated on one man is bad politics.

I know it’s hard to give up hating Bush. I myself enjoyed bristling when Bush said the election gave him "political capital," the same MBA-inflected lingo that led him to dub NASA astronauts "space entrepreneurs" (this last word obviously being his highest accolade). But if George W. Bush disappeared tomorrow, kidnapped by Alan Colmes in a Che Guevara beret, everything awful about his presidency would still be in place. Oil entrepreneur Dick Cheney would simply change offices (if not roles). Pest-control entrepreneur Tom DeLay would still be infesting the House. Medical entrepreneur Dr. Bill Frist would still be running the Senate like some ghastly HMO asylum in which sensible conservatives like Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel enjoy less favor than loony morality entrepreneur Rick Santorum. And war entrepreneur Rumsfeld would still be fondling his big stick in front of the whole world. True, Alberto "Quaint Electrodes" Gonzales might not be nominated for attorney general, but I doubt Cheney would nominate anyone less scary.

Put simply, George W. Bush is more a symptom than a one-man juggernaut. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out in their zesty book, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, the Bush administration’s radicalism is actually a kind of culmination. It was born of the right’s deliberate act of reinvention in the ’50s and ’60s, a long, slow process of arguing, thinking, fund-raising and organizing that, after years of defeat, has finally produced what some movement enthusiasts call "the conservative New Deal" — no matter that FDR had a mandate and Bush doesn’t. Whether it’s rewriting the tax code or privatizing Social Security to solve an imaginary "crisis," the right has become the agent of change.

In contrast, the left has become — there’s no other word for it — reactionary.

Still unable to accept that the right has dominated our national life for the last quarter-century, the left hasn’t done the hard, slow work of thinking through what it means to be progressive during an era of ultraglobalized capitalism in which the only successful Democratic president in the last 35 years, Bill Clinton, followed policies that even he compared to Dwight Eisenhower’s. Far from proposing bold new ideas that might seize the popular imagination, the left now plays the kind of small-ball that Dubya disdains. Even worse, it’s become the side that’s forever saying "No."

To be fair, if any party has ever given one reason to shriek "Stop!" it’s Bush’s Republicans. But today’s left remains mired in a reflexive, defeatist negativity that became obvious after the election. The Nation’s subscribers sent letters calling Bush voters racists, homophobes, warmongers and yahoos. Peter Beinart wrote a much-bruited New Republic piece saying that the Democrats needed to purge polarizing figures like Michael Moore (as if Karl Rove didn’t thank God, er, Beelzebub, every single day for the presence of right-wing firebrands like Rush and Sean). Meanwhile, the blogosphere was filled with "Fuck the South" e-mails and lazy ruminations on the "red states," a cliché that manages to insult one's intelligence and the people it supposedly describes. Much of this was rhetorically disastrous, smacking of contempt for the very people the left is hoping to persuade. Reading such things, I was often reminded of that famous old Brecht poem, "The Solution," in which he slyly suggests that if the East German government is unhappy with its citizens’ behavior, it ought to dissolve the people and elect another.

Short of replacing the American electorate with the Canadian one, the left needs three things if it is to have any chance of wresting power back from the right: ideas, money and organization. Thanks to Bush, it has begun to get the latter two. Dubya’s face not only launched a thousand attack books, it helped spawn such marvelous fund-raising engines as MoveOn and prompted the Democrats to stage a smoothly organized campaign. The left is more structurally sound than it’s been in years, although it badly needs some well-funded think tanks. (I suspect it’s easier for MoveOn to raise $250,000 for an anti-Gonzales commercial than seed money for a left-wing Heritage Foundation. Over to you, Mr. Soros.)

Of course, money and organization can only take any political movement so far. In the wake of Kerry’s defeat, you often heard it argued that the candidate himself was the problem, that he lacked the charisma to put across ideas that most of America would agree with. Now, if only Barack . . .

Yet Kerry, too, is a symptomatic figure. Voters couldn’t tell what vision of America he stood for. And his vagueness was his party’s vagueness — indeed, the whole left’s vagueness — in a hypercapitalist world in which socialism can no longer be used as a threat or a promise.

What the left lacks is not a galvanizing messenger but a positive message, a set of energizing ideas and values. It’s not enough to oppose the invasion of Iraq or Bush’s plans for Social Security. That’s merely to react against someone else’s agenda. We must reverse the great (and startling) historical flip-flop in our political iconography. Forty years ago, the left represented the future — it crackled with pleasurable possibility — while the right symbolized the repressive past, clinging to dead traditions like shards of a wrecked ship. Change means movement, said the great organizer Saul Alinsky, and during the ’60s, the political counterculture had the passion to get things moving.

These days, all that has been stood on its head: In the wake of September 11, the right claims it wants to free oppressed people — why, democracy is on the march! — while the left is too often caught saying "I told you so" about the mess in Iraq, even as that country speeds toward an election that any decent human being should hope goes well. In 1968, who would have believed it possible that the left would be home to the dreary old "realists" while the right would be full of utopians?

For this to change, the left needs to do what the right did. It needs to define what it stands for. And it must be willing to fight for what it believes over the long haul, even if it means losing some elections. In particular, it must begin to take back four things that it has ceded to the right.

1. It must reclaim virtue. After the election, you heard endless talk about how Bush won on "values." This wasn’t true — the so-called values vote was no more powerful in 2004 than in earlier years. But what is true is that conservatives are scarily comfortable talking about morality, while the left (still influenced by "scientific" socialism) is made nervous by moral language. Because of this, our political culture’s idea of virtue has been whittled into a sad, mingy thing, a question of private behavior. Yet one historic strength of the left was its belief that morality is also a matter of public virtue — justice, equality, generosity, tolerance. The loss of this idea has been catastrophic. While Republicans rouse their troops by attacking Clinton’s immorality or gay marriage, Democrats couldn’t make hay from the moral outrage of corporate executives (who make 1,000 times their employees’ wages) selling off stock options for top dollar while letting pension funds collapse. Morality should be our issue, not theirs. Where’s The Book of Liberal Virtues?

2. It must reclaim freedom. One of the left’s glories has been its tradition of heroic internationalism, still alive in the anti-globalization movement’s insistence on workers’ rights around the world. (Typically, though, "anti-globalization" sounds negative rather than positive.) But when it comes to foreign policy these days, the left appears lost. I get depressed hearing friends sound like paleocon isolationists or watching them reflexively assume that there’s something inherently tyrannical about the use of American power. It’s not enough to mock Norman Podhoretz’s insistence that the battle with Islamic terrorism is World War IV. Just as the left lacked a coherent position on what to do with murderous despots such as Milosevic and Saddam — it won’t do to say, "They’re bad, but . . ." The left now needs a position on how best to battle a Muslim ideology that, at bottom, despises all the freedoms we should be defending. America should be actively promoting the freedom of everyone on the planet, and the key question is, how would the left do it differently from the Bush administration?

3. It must reclaim pleasure. For the last 30 years, the right’s been having fun — Lee Atwater playing the blues, Rush Limbaugh giving that strangulated laugh, The Weekly Standard running those mocking covers — while the left has been good for you, like eating a big, dry bowl of muesli. This isn’t simply because leftists can be humorless (a quality shared with righteous evangelicals), but because, over the years, they’ve gone from being associated with free love and rock & roll to seeming like yuppified puritans; hence the Gore-Lieberman ticket talked about censoring video games and brainy leftist Thomas Frank tirelessly debunks the pleasure of those who buy anything Cool or find Madonna meaningful. (Clinton was an exception — he enjoyed a Big Mac and an intern as much as the hero of a beer commercial — and he was the one Democrat in recent years that most average Americans really liked.) While the left is correct in talking about the gas-guzzling horror of SUVs, it’s a losing cause to tell a nation full of proud drivers that they should feel guilty about the car they love. Rather than coming off as anti-consumerist puritans in a consumerist culture, the left should be fighting on the side of freedom and pleasure — for instance, arguing that ordinary people should have more time off from the endless hours of work that increasingly devour our souls. This is the kind of idea we should own — and force the right to argue against.

4. Finally, and above all, it must try to reclaim utopia. Back during the horrors of mid-20th-century Germany, the great Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, "This is not a time to be without wishes." He knew that any successful political action had to begin in hope and dreams. The same is true as we enter the second Bush administration. The right controls the machinery of government and isn’t shy about using it to change the world to make it fit the twin religions that drive it — Christianity and untrammeled free-market economics. To fight such a radical, all-encompassing vision, we need an equally big countervision of our own. I’m not talking about some mad fantasy of heaven on earth (those usually lead to death camps), but a dream bigger than hopes that the Democratic Party will come back into power four years from now. To create the world we want, we have to regain the hopeful belief that we are trying to create a world thrillingly better than the one we now live in. Promising more prescription drugs for seniors just won’t cut it.

Battle of Algiers redux

As many of you are no doubt aware, Gillo Pontecorvo's remarkable 1965 film "The Battle of Algiers" has been re-released on DVD. If you've never seen it (or if you last watched it it several decades ago), this film is worth a look. It's one of the few really serious films I know about revolution and counter-revolution--and, specifically, about revolutionary terrorism and counter-terrorism and how they work.

I don't mean this as an unqualified endorsement of Pontecorvo's perspective. This film was unquestionably brilliant, powerful, and illuminating. But even back in the 1970s I found it in some ways a morally and politically troubling film, even a dangerous one. Fundamentally, Pontecorvo's sympathy lies with the revolutionary terrorists of the Algerian FLN. But the political history of Algeria since independence, which has hardly been inspiring, should provoke some reflection on the position shared in the film by the FLN militants and the French counter-revolutionary officer, "Colonel Mathieu"--namely, that in life-and-death politics, the end justifies the means (terrorism on the one side, torture on the other). For example, it's not implausible that the horrifying character of the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, marked by massive atrocities on all sides, was at least partly rooted in the political experience through which independent Algeria came into being. And in the historical context of the 1970s and early 1980s Pontecorvo's film (like the popularity of Franz Fanon's writings, also linked to the Algerian revolution) helped contribute to a pervasive romantic cult of revolution, and especially of urban guerrilla terrorism, that had a lot of unpleasant consequences not just in the Middle East but also in Latin America, western Europe, and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, part of what makes Pontecorvo's film important is that it genuinely tried to confront the moral and practical dilemmas posed by revolutionary terrorism (perhaps more than some people who saw the film). And its treatment of the logic of both political terrorism and and counter-terrorism was penetrating and sophisticated. I recommend it.

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. I also recommend the three pieces below, which are all worth reading (whether you agree or disagree).

P.P.S. In his piece below, Charles Paul Freund makes an interesting point that has struck me ever since I first saw "The Battle of Algiers" three decades ago. The character of Colonel Mathieu, the leader of the French counter-terrorist campaign in Algiers, "is by far the best-realized character in the film; his is the only role filled by a professional actor." It so happens that the same was true for a later film that Pontecorvo made about revolution and counter-revolution, "Queimada" (released in the US, apparently somewhat truncated, as "Burn"). The most fully realized character, even more central to the film than Mathieu in "The Battle of Algiers," was the counter-revolutionary figure Walker (played by none other than Marlon Brando).

P.P.P.S.  Pontecorvo's movie is based in part on a book by Saadi Yacef, who participated in the actual battle of Algiers as an FLN revolutionary. Yacef helped produce the film and acted in it, playing a character roughly modeled on himself. A 2004 interview with Yacef is also worth reading:  “I killed people. I did it for my country”

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Slate.com
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2003, at 4:59 PM PTThe Pentagon's Film Festival
A Primer for The Battle of Algiers.
By Charles Paul Freund

A column in the Washington Post reported yesterday that the Pentagon's special operations chiefs have decided to screen The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 classic film of urban terrorist insurgency, for Pentagon employees on Aug. 27. The decision to show Algiers, David Ignatius writes, is "one hopeful sign that the military is thinking creatively and unconventionally about Iraq." He even quotes from a Pentagon flier about the movie:

How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. ... Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

It's welcome news that the military is thinking creatively about the American role in Iraq, but the lessons and pleasures of The Battle of Algiers are a lot more ambiguous than this Pentagon blurb implies. To praise the film for its strategic insights is to buy into the 1960s revolutionary mystique that it celebrates; it is the collapse of that very mystique that has contributed to the film's current obscurity and made screenings "rare."
Even so, The Battle of Algiers remains a fascinating artifact of its time. But when the film came out, viewers required a lot of context to understand it properly. Here's a primer about this famous and controversial film, and about how the ever-shifting moral of its story relates to the Battle of Baghdad.
What is The Battle of Algiers?
The Battle of Algiers was the premier political film of the 1960s. It was studied by the campus left for its lessons in revolutionary-cell organization and was obligatory viewing for Black Panthers.
The first part of the film depicts the campaign of terror launched by the National Liberation Front (FLN, called "the organization" in the film) against French colonial rule in 1956.* The story is built around a criminal-turned-revolutionary known as Ali La Pointe, and it details his political epiphany and his terrorist career. The movie's second half concerns the reaction by the French military, which consists primarily of a campaign of torture and murder, and focuses on the leader in charge of that campaign, "Col. Mathieu." Mathieu is by far the best-realized character in the film; his is the only role filled by a professional actor.
From its first release, the film was extremely controversial: When the film was finally shown in France, theaters were bombed. In Italy, viewers were attacked.
Is the movie accurate?
Within broad limits. Ali was indeed the hero of the Casbah, the Muslim section of Algiers; as the film suggests, his death marked the end of the real battle for the city. The French did torture and murder their way to tactical victory. Mathieu, for his part, is based mostly on the real-life Gen. Jacques Massu, who devised the counterterrorist strategy. Many sequences are meticulously accurate, such as the famous one referred to by the Pentagon in its flier, in which Algerian women put on Western clothes and makeup and then plant bombs at civilian French targets. Unsurprisingly, many characters are composites, and numerous details are fudged, made up, or altered. Among them is Ali's powerful last line in the film, directed at the French: "I do not negotiate with them." The line is actually appropriated from a speech by then-Interior Minister Francois Mitterand, who had directed it at the insurgents.
Is there anything important that the film leaves out?
The film leaves out the insurrection that was taking place in the rest of Algeria, which makes it impossible for viewers to judge how the FLN finally succeeded in driving out the French, much less what was wrong with French military strategy. (Even now, some blame defeat not on the military but on Charles de Gaulle.) The movie also omits the struggle between the FLN and other anti-French factions for control of the revolution. It took an Algerian filmmaker, not a European, to tell the story of insurgents killing each other (Okacha Touita's 1982 film, The Sacrificed).
Instead of offering an explanation for the ultimate triumph of the FLN, Pontecorvo offers a poetic picture of Algeria's revolutionary resilience. "Even though some rivers seem to disappear," he once told an interviewer, "they run underground instead and always reach the sea." That's an appealing metaphor, but it's neither politically nor militarily instructive.
What does any of this have to do with Baghdad?
Terror. The Mideast learned the efficacy of insurgent terror from Algeria. The PLO, Hamas, and other groups are indebted to the Algerian strategy of so-called "people's war." Its lessons are now apparent in Iraq, too. Yet the film treats the Algiers terror campaign as a failure: Its later bombings and shootings are made to appear increasingly desperate and strategically pointless. "Wars aren't won with terrorism," says one key revolutionary. "Neither wars nor revolutions." But that depends at least in part on how the other side reacts to terror, whether the other side is France in Algeria or the United States in Iraq. Wars may not be won with terror, but they can be lost by reacting ineffectively to it.
This is where The Battle of Algiers is potentially most valuable and most dangerous as a point of comparison for the U.S. military. While The Battle of Algiers has next to nothing to say about overall French strategy in Algeria, its most obvious military lesson—that torture is an efficient countermeasure to terror—is a dangerous one in this particular instance. Aside from its moral horror, torture may not even elicit accurate information, though the film seems to suggest it is foolproof.
The French military view of torture is articulated by Col. Mathieu in the course of a series of exchanges with French journalists. As reports of torture spread, the issue becomes a scandal in France. Mathieu, however, is unwavering in defense of the practice: To him it is a military necessity. Informed that Jean-Paul Sartre is condemning French tactics, for example, Mathieu responds with a question that would warm Ann Coulter's heart: "Why are the liberals always on the other side?" [JW: That rendering of Mathieu's line is approximate.]
At one point Mathieu challenges the hostile French reporters with a question of his own: "Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer 'yes,' you must accept all the necessary consequences." Mathieu might as well be addressing the American military and the American public. Is the United States to remain in the Middle East? If so, what are the "necessary consequences"? Do they include working with former members of the Baathist secret police, as recent news stories have suggested? Do they include the night-time invasion of Iraqi homes and the inevitable shooting of innocent civilians?
To raise such issues is not necessarily to condemn the continued presence of troops in Iraq; there would be disastrous "necessary consequences" to an American withdrawal, too. But moral compromise, according to the film, was inherent in France's position in Algeria. The United States is not France, Iraq is not Algeria, and whatever the sources of resistance in Iraq, none is the equivalent of the FLN. But to listen to Mathieu is nevertheless to be challenged on whether moral compromise is also inherent in the American role in Iraq.
Moral compromise, finally, was also inherent in the FLN's campaign, and not only as a result of terror. Although the FLN was a group of secular revolutionaries, it frequently tried to rouse Algerians with Islamic rhetoric, mostly to appropriate the anti-French movement led by Algerian clerics for decades. And yet upon taking power, the FLN betrayed the promises they'd implicitly made to Muslims. (The Islamists engaged in the current civil war in the country represent a different, Wahhabized strain of Islam.)
So who ultimately won the Battle of Algiers?
No one. The French won the battle, but in 1962 they lost the war. French soldiers, most of whom hated the idea of torture, were tainted by the association. Algerians got rid of the French but in their place got an authoritarian regime that, before it fell, was itself guilty of torture. In the meantime, French interests maintained substantial control of the nation's resources. The revolutionary left got another regime that lost the support of a culturally suffocated and economically deprived populace. The triumphant FLN was even at war with itself; in 1965 one faction surrounded another with tanks and ousted it from power.* The people of the capital literally thought another scene was being shot for The Battle of Algiers.
Ultimately, the film evades answering its own moral challenge. It justifies its support of FLN terrorist murder over French torture by rewriting history. According to the film, terror was futile; it didn't work. What finally drove France out, it suggests, was a spontaneous explosion of popular resistance. That scenario, however, is a fantasy. What drove France out was sustained and bloody insurrection.
As a portrait of revolution and of a war of ideas, The Battle of Algiers suggests that the French went wrong by denying they were foreigners; they treated Algeria as an extension of France. At least one lesson for the United States seems obvious: A liberal Iraqi order is going to have to develop within Iraqi terms, and only the Iraqis themselves can establish those terms.
Correction, Aug. 28, 2003: This article originally stated that the first part of The Battle of Algiers was set in 1954. In fact it was in 1956. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Correction, Aug. 28, 2003: The article also noted that one faction of the FLN had ousted another in 1967; in fact the ousting occurred in 1965. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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Interestingly, the man who was in charge of torture in Algiers, Gen. Paul Aussaresses, has recently published his immensely controversial memoirs (The Battle of the Casbah), and in that he offers alternative versions of several of the film's events. The most astonishing claim he makes concerns the betrayal of Ali La Pointe. Ali, writes Aussaresses, was betrayed by a comrade, Saadi Yacef. As it happens, Saadi is in the film; he plays Ali's FLN mentor. Moreover, Saadi was the film's Algerian co-producer. Aussaresses offers no evidence for his claim, and Saadi has dismissed the charge.
Charles Paul Freund is a senior editor at Reason magazine. He writes regularly for Beirut's Daily Star about cultural issues in the Middle East.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/

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Slate.com
Posted Friday, Jan. 2, 2004, at 10:57 AM PT

Guerrillas in the Mist
Why the war in Iraq is nothing like The Battle of Algiers.
By Christopher Hitchens

Having been screened by the special operations department of the Pentagon last August (see Charles Paul Freund's piece in Slate), The Battle of Algiers is now scheduled for a run at the New York Film Forum. Unless I am wrong, this event will lead to a torrent of pseudo-knowing piffle from the armchair guerrillas (well, there ought to be a word for this group). I myself cherished the dream of being something more than an armchair revolutionary when I first saw this electrifying movie. It was at a volunteer work-camp for internationalists, in Cuba in the summer of 1968. Che Guevara had only been dead for a few months, the Tet rising in Vietnam was still a fresh and vivid memory, and in Portuguese Africa the revolution was on the upswing. I went to the screening not knowing what to expect and was so mesmerized that when it was over I sat there until they showed it again. I was astounded to discover, sometime later on, that Gillo Pontecorvo had employed no documentary footage in the shooting of the film: It looked and felt like revolutionary reality projected straight onto the screen.
When I next saw it, in Bleecker Street in the Village in the early 1970s, it didn't have quite the same shattering effect. Moreover, in the audience (as in that Cuban camp, as I later found out) there were some idiots who fancied the idea of trying "urban guerrilla" warfare inside the West itself. The film had a potently toxic effect on Black Panthers, Weathermen, Baader-Meinhof, and Red Brigade types. All that needs to be said about that "moment" of the Left is that its practitioners ended up dead or in prison, having advanced the cause of humanity by not one millimeter.
Those making a facile comparison between the Algerian revolution depicted in the film and today's Iraq draw an equally flawed analogy. Let me mention just the most salient differences.
1) Algeria in 1956—the "real time" date of the film—was not just a colony of France. It was a department of metropolitan France. The slogan of the French Right was Algérie Française. A huge population of French settlers lived in the country, mainly concentrated in the coastal towns. The French had exploited and misgoverned this province for more than a century and were seeking to retain it as an exclusive possession.
2) In 1956, the era of French and British rule in the Middle East had already in effect come to an end. With the refusal by President Eisenhower to countenance the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt at Suez in November of that year, the death-knell of European colonialism had struck. There was no military tactic that could have exempted a near-bankrupt France from this verdict. General Massu in Algiers could have won any military victory he liked and it would have changed nothing. Frenchmen as conservative as Charles de Gaulle and Raymond Aron were swift to recognize this state of affairs.
Today, it is Arab nationalism that is in crisis, while the political and economic and military power of the United States is virtually unchallengeable. But the comparison of historical context, while decisive, is not the only way in which the Iraq analogy collapses. The French could not claim to have removed a tyrannical and detested leader. They could not accuse the Algerian nationalists of sponsoring international terrorism (indeed, they blamed Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt for fomenting the FLN in Algiers itself). They could not make any case that Algerian nationalism would violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty or even threaten to do so. Thus, French conscripts—not volunteers—and Algerian rebels were sacrificed for no cause except the lost and futile one of French reaction. The right-wing generals of the Algeria campaign, and some of the extreme settlers, actually did conduct an urban guerrilla rearguard action of their own, in Paris as well as Algeria, and did try to bring off a military coup against de Gaulle, but they had been defeated and isolated by 1968.
I would challenge anybody to find a single intelligent point of comparison between any of these events and the present state of affairs in Iraq. The only similarity that strikes the eye, in point of guerrilla warfare, is that the toughest and most authentic guerrilla army in Iraq—the Kurdish peshmerga—is fighting very effectively on the coalition side. Not even the wildest propaganda claims of the Baathist and jihadist sympathizers allege that the tactics of General Massu are being employed by General Abizaid or General Sanchez: [Unfortunately, this is no longer quite so straightforward--JW] Newspaper and political party offices are being opened not closed, and just last month the Saddam ban on Iraqi pilgrims making the hajj to Mecca was rescinded.
If one wants to make a serious Algerian analogy, however, there are far more recent events on which to base a comparison. During the 1990s a very bitter war was fought, in the casbah of Algiers and Oran as well as in the countryside, between the FLN (now an extremely shabby ruling party) and the forces of Islamic jihad. A very great number of people were slaughtered in this war, which featured torture and assassination and terror of every description. I have seen estimates of deaths that exceed 150,000. The FLN eventually won the war with the backing of three forces: the Algerian army, the secularized urban middle class, and the Berbers or Kabyles who make up one of the Arab world's largest non-Arab minorities. It wasn't very pretty, and it involved the use of some repulsive measures, but if Algeria had fallen to the fundamentalists the bloodbath would have been infinitely worse and the society would have been retarded almost to the level of Afghanistan. Millions of people would have left or tried to leave, creating a refugee crisis in France and perhaps giving M. Jean-Marie Le Pen (a brutish and boastful veteran of the first Algerian war) an even better shot at the presidency than he managed in his upset first-round triumph in 2002. Fascism would have been the all-round winner.
That "Battle of Algiers," not Pontecorvo's outdated masterpiece, is replete with examples and parallels that ought to be of great interest and relevance to ourselves. Can an Arab and Muslim state with a large non-Arab minority and many confessional differences defeat the challenge of a totalitarian and medieval ideology? In this outcome, we and our Arab and Kurdish friends have a stake, whereas in the battles of the past (as of the present) one can only applaud the humiliation of French unilateralism and neocolonialism, whether it occurs on-screen or off.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to Slate. His most recent book is Love, Poverty and War. He is also the author of A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq and of Blood, Class and Empire.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2093381/

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New York Times Magazine
November 14, 2004, Sunday
Late Edition - Final , Section 6 , Page 50 , Column 1
The Terrorist as Auteur
By Michael Ignatieff
When you turn on the television news these days, you often see a new kind of home video: hooded men with guns and knives in the background and, in the grainy foreground, figures on their knees begging for their lives. They plead, they weep, they bow their heads and then, more often than not, they die. It has been like this since Daniel Pearl was made to repeat "My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish" before being decapitated. Thanks to the news editors, we rarely if ever see the footage to its gruesome conclusion, but the full versions of these films, reproduced on CD's, sell by the thousands in the marketplace in Baghdad. Apparently the executioners wear gloves. They do not want to stain their hands with the blood of infidels.
The Chechen rebels seem to have been the first to film these grotesque parodies of Islamic justice. Now there is a market in such bloody spectacles, with criminal gangs supplying the crucial actors: abducting foreigners in Iraq and selling them to terrorist groups like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad. Terrorists have been quick to understand that the camera has the power to frame a single atrocity and turn it into an image that sends shivers down the spine of an entire planet. This gives them a vital new weapon. Before Iraq, there had been plenty of vicious insurgencies -- in Algeria against the French, in Kenya against the British, in Vietnam against the Americans -- but none of them used the camera as an instrument of terror. Kidnapping had been the weapon of choice for armed groups in Lebanon since the 1970's. But they didn't put their captives on the nightly news.
We now have the terrorist as film director. One man taken hostage recently in Iraq described, once released, how carefully his own appearance on video was staged, with the terrorists animatedly framing the shot: where the guns would point, what the backdrop should be, where he should kneel, what he should be scripted to say.
Using video cameras as a weapon may be new, but modern terrorists have always sought to exploit the power of images. The greatest film ever made about terrorism -- Gillo Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers" (1965) -- was actually shot at the instigation of a terrorist. Saadi Yacef, the leader of the insurgent cell in the Algiers Casbah that the French crushed in 1957, survived capture and, after Algerian independence, approached Pontecorvo to make a film, based on his own life story. Yacef helped to produce the film and actually played himself on-screen. Had it been up to Yacef, the result would have been pure propaganda. Pontecorvo held out for a deeper vision, and the result is a masterpiece, at once a justification for acts of terror and an unsparing account of terror's cost, including to the cause it serves.
Yacef was only the first impresario of terror. After him came Lutiff Afif, or Issa, as he was known, leader of the gang that captured Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. He strutted around in his shades and broad-brimmed hat, using the world's television cameras to orchestrate a spectacle of horror that forced the entire world to attend to the Palestinian cause. By the time he died in a botched fusillade at a German airport, death held no terrors. He had scored a propaganda triumph.
Besides the terrorist as impresario, let us remember that we also have the torturer as video artist. The Abu Ghraib pictures were never just for private use. Some were meant as a spur to other torturers. And some were supposed to be shown to other prisoners to warn them what awaited if they did not cooperate. The digital image -- moving or still -- has become an instrument of coercive interrogation.
In Iraq, imagery has replaced argument; indeed, atrocity footage has become its own argument. One horrendous picture seems not just to follow the other but also to justify it. From Abu Ghraib to decapitation footage and back again, we the audience are caught in a loop: one atrocity begetting another in a darkening vortex, without end.
The old questions about the war in Iraq -- Was it legal? Was it necessary? Was it done as a last resort? -- now seem beside the point. The issue now is whether there is any way out of the vortex itself, mutually reinforcing barbarism that ends . . . where?
Thinking about this is hard. We know we are trapped in a vortex, but we do not even understand the churn that is dragging us down. All we see clearly is our own coarsening complicity. TV news editors still screen the worst moments out, but over the past 25 years, they have spared us less and less: now we see actual human beings begging for their lives. This is terrorism as pornography, and it acts like pornography: at first making audiences feel curious and aroused, despite themselves, then ashamed, possibly degraded and finally, perhaps, just indifferent. The audience for this vileness is global. A Dutchman who runs a violent and sexually explicit Web site that posts beheadings notes, in his inimitable words, that "during times of tragic events like beheadings," his site, which usually gets 200,000 visitors a day, gets up to 750,000 hits.
The degrading impact of these images may not be the most important issue. A more relevant question is how we think politically about this new kind of reality show. In marketing terms, the videos are recruitment posters for the Iraqi insurrection. A gang's videos announce that it sets the standard in barbarity, and this both pulls in recruits and encourages the capture of victims.
The videos also announce that in an occupied country there are no innocent foreigners. The French victims may have thought they were innocent because they believed their nation's policy had been innocent; the Italian victims may have thought they were innocent because they were simply humanitarians who had been against the war all along. Muslim victims might well have believed they were innocent because they were Muslims. One of the most recent victims -- Margaret Hassan, country director for CARE International -- had a remarkably strong claim to innocence. Her husband is an Iraqi, and she has lived in the country for 30 years, building clinics, setting up a spinal-injuries unit. Patients in her own clinics got into their wheelchairs and went into the streets with banners in Arabic calling for her release. If anyone is entitled to what the Geneva Conventions call "civilian immunity," it is Margaret Hassan. But her innocence was the point of her kidnapping. Her video was a bomb hurled at our hope that it is possible for foreigners to do good things in Iraq. Given that Margaret Hassan is married to an Iraqi, the video of her begging for her life also warned Iraqis tempted to work with decent people like her: no one associated with an infidel is innocent, either.
The rituals of humiliation these videos enact -- some captives are shown in cages, others are chained, still others are depicted wearing the same orange jump suits worn by detainees at Guantanamo -- are intended to gratify that portion of the Arab audience raised on the rhetoric of Muslim humiliation. This propaganda reframes a millennium of complex interaction between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds as a long litany of shame, inflicted first by the Crusaders, then by the French and British imperialists and finally by the Israelis and their American paymasters. The snuff video is payback. The only way to end humiliation, these videos say, is to inflict it upon someone else. This message plays well in the bazaars of Baghdad.

You might hesitate to say that humiliation justifies decapitation, but a lot of people think it explains it. In "One Day in September," a documentary that tracked down the last surviving member of the Palestinian gang that seized Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, the decrepit terrorist wanted us to understand that the act grew out of his humiliating childhood in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. Grim footage of refugee life was duly shown. But what exactly is being explained here? Such footage might explain why he joined up, but does it help us understand why he was able to stand and watch while an Israeli athlete, wounded in the shootout, slowly bled to death on the floor? Does it explain why, with all his comrades dead, and the Palestinian cause advanced not one iota toward statehood, the aging terrorist says that he would do Munich all over again? Apparently, the only thing humiliation actually justifies is never having to say you are sorry.
The new videos of retributive humiliation and vengeful, purifying executions take "justification" to a new level. They are fundamentally in the business of handing out entitlements, by lowering the natural human thresholds of repugnance. See what we have done, the hooded figures seem to say: we have beheaded someone on television. Now see what you can do. These videos use the humiliation of the infidel to manufacture a sense of entitlement. After seeing one of these videos, a young Iraqi can say to himself: truly, everything is permitted.
At this point, if you are still reading, you may have had enough. Why, you may be thinking, do we have to understand any of this? Why can't we just call acts by their proper names and conduct ourselves accordingly? The name for this is evil.
Many people bridle at this word and think it inhibits understanding the deeper grievances that fuel resentment and violence. They are right in that it would help us if we understood the deep roots of Muslim humiliation, and understanding is unlikely if we only feel like condemning. But it is worth holding the line that separates understanding from justification, the line that divides understanding from explanation. That is the work that the word "evil" does. It holds the line.
In any event, full understanding is God's work alone. It's just too hard -- and in some sense not important -- to understand why one human being can actually take a knife to another person's throat and lift off his head. All you can say is that human beings do this, always have, always will. As Shakespeare had one of his characters say, murder is man's work.
The question we can answer is why beheading -- and all the other instruments in a terrorist's armory, like driving bomb-laden cars into Iraqis lining up for jobs as policemen -- makes political sense. And it does.
An accomplished terrorist -- al-Zarqawi is undoubtedly one -- understands us better than we seem to understand him. He knows that the only chance of forcing an American withdrawal lies in swaying the political will of an electorate that, already divided and unwilling, has sent its sons and daughters there. This is where his images become a weapon of war, a way to test and possibly shatter American will. He is counting on our moral disgust and on the sense of futility that follows disgust. Moral disgust is the first crucial step toward cracking the will to continue the fight.

Now let's not be sentimental about American virtue or scruple. Democracies can be just as ruthless as authoritarian societies, and Americans haven't been angels in the war on terror, as the images from Abu Ghraib so plainly show. But the willingness of American democracy to commit atrocity in its defense is limited by moral repugnance, rooted in two centuries of free institutions. This capacity for repugnance sustained the popular protest that eventually took us out of Vietnam. Al-Zarqawi is a cynic about these matters: the truths we hold to be self-evident are the ones he hopes to turn against us. He thinks that we would rather come home than fight evil. Are we truly willing to descend into the vortex to beat him? He has bet that we are not.
But his calculation is that either way, he cannot lose. If we remain, he has also bet -- and Abu Ghraib confirms how perceptive he was -- that we will help him drive us into ignominious defeat by becoming as barbarous as he is. He is trailing the videos as an ultimate kind of moral temptation, an ethical trap into which he is hoping we will fall. Everything is permitted, he is saying. If you wish to beat me, you will have to join me. Every terrorist hopes, ultimately, that his opponent will become his brother in infamy. If we succumb to this temptation, he will have won. He has, however, forgotten that the choice always remains ours, not his. Michael Ignatieff is the author of ''The Lesser Evil'' and director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

The Iraqi elections (Normblog)

Guest-posted on the website of Norman Geras (Normblog)
January 17, 2005

The Iraqi Elections (by Jeff Weintraub)

As the scheduled date for the Iraqi elections approaches, there have been a number of suggestions - by outsiders and by Sunni Arab political figures in Iraq - that the elections should be postponed, due to the ongoing violence and insecurity in Iraq and the likelihood of widespread non-participation in the so-called Sunni Triangle. So far, frankly, I have found almost all of these suggestions a bit unreal, even when they have been made in good faith (as opposed to postponement being used as a way to prevent elections from happening at all).

It is certainly true that right now the conditions for holding national elections in Iraq are terrible, and their legitimacy will be undermined if a large proportion of the Sunni Arab minority either boycott them or are intimidated from voting by the Sunni insurgents. These are valid concerns, and they point to genuine and serious problems attributable in large part (though not exclusively) to the spectacular incompetence of the post-Saddam US occupation of Iraq. But why on earth should delaying the elections at this point help solve any of these problems, or improve the conditions for successful and more representative elections? I have been waiting to hear a half-way plausible case for this proposition, but in vain.

On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that postponing the elections at this point would only make matters worse. The collection of fascists, Sunni irredentists, Islamist fanatics, and foreign jihadists that make up the Sunni 'insurgency' are determined to prevent the elections from ever taking place, and have been waging a ferocious campaign of terrorism and disruption to block them. It's pretty obvious that postponing the elections as a result of their campaign would only encourage them to re-double their efforts.

Opposition to the elections also has some wider support among the Sunni Arab minority (probably about 15-20% of the population), including people who are not Ba'athists, terrorists, and/or religious fanatics. There are a number of reasons for this, some of them worth taking seriously or sympathetically, but the fundamental factor is that the Sunni Arab minority has always dominated Iraq, and the sudden loss of their dominant position has been traumatic and disorienting, particularly in conjunction with widespread lack of security and the absence of tangible payoffs from the reconstruction of the country. It is hard for them to come to terms with the idea of an Iraq dominated by the Shiite majority (probably around 55-65%), not to mention the (overwhelmingly Sunni) Kurds (around 20%). A major portion of the Sunni Arab elites, as well as the general Sunni Arab population, simply will not accept this situation if there's any way to avoid it. But that means that these political forces are really opposed, not to elections under present circumstances, but to any (more or less) democratic elections. (And they are supported in this opposition by a very large portion of public opinion in the wider Arab world, which of course is overwhelmingly Sunni and was overwhelmingly hostile to the war that overthrew the Iraqi Ba'ath regime.) Once again, a postponement isn't going to change that.

On the other hand, capitulating to the insurgents at this point would almost certainly enrage and demoralize the majority of Iraqis, who very much want the elections to go ahead. Much of the discussion about the Iraqi elections in the US and Europe seems to assume that pushing forward with the scheduled date is an obsession peculiar to the Bush administration. This completely misses the point. The key reason that these elections have been scheduled is that the Iraqi Shiite leadership, both religious and secular, has demanded that they be held. And unlike the situation among Sunni Arabs (in Iraq and elsewhere), the entire range of political and religious forces in Shiite Iraq - with the partial exception of Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers - are determined to make the elections happen, come hell or high water. To put things in the most basic terms, the really crucial point is not that George Bush wants these elections to go ahead, but that the Ayatollah Sistani (and the whole mainstream Shiite religious leadership, centered on Sistani) has insisted that they go ahead. Every week, sermons in Shiite mosques all over Iraq repeat the message that voting in the elections is both a religious and a national duty, and there is every indication that a large proportion of Iraqi Shiites will actually turn out to vote, despite the threat of being shot or blown up as a result. The Iraqi Kurds are also committed to the election, along with such non-sectarian political forces as the Iraqi Communist Party. (So we're probably talking about a total of roughly 80-85% of the country that wants the elections to take place.)

To an increasing extent, many of the terrorist attacks being carried out by Sunni insurgents - not just on political figures, government workers, policemen, and members of the Iraqi National Guard, but also Shiite religious leaders, religious pilgrims, and ordinary civilians - seem to be deliberately aimed at provoking an all-out civil war between Sunni and Shiite Arabs in Iraq. So far, this civil war has remained mostly incipient and one-sided, in large part because the Shiite leadership has made great efforts to prevent Shiites from responding violently to these atrocities and other provocations. Instead, they have united in pursuing a strategy of gaining power (and, in the longer run, phasing out the US-led occupation) through largely peaceful political means. (Again, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Sadrists have been the exception, but for the moment they seem relatively marginalized.) That means they have been willing to sacrifice a good deal to hold open the possibility of national elections. If the Sunni insurgents are able to derail the elections by means of escalating terrorism and other violence, that Shiite strategy will have hit a dead end, and there's a good possibility that Shiites will opt for violent retaliation, with results that will make the present situation look idyllic.

The first serious case for postponing the Iraqi elections that I have encountered is the one put forward by the political scientist Larry Diamond in this piece and elsewhere. Diamond, who spent some time in Iraq as an adviser to the CPA, knows what he's talking about, and has demonstrated that he's sincerely committed to promoting democratization in Iraq (and elsewhere). He rejects most of the sillier points raised by other advocates of postponement (e.g., that the elections should wait until the terrorists stop murdering people and otherwise disrupting the country), and his analysis plausibly brings out potential dangers of proceeding with these elections as planned. He is absolutely right to emphasize cases where 'badly timed and ill-prepared elections set back the prospects for democracy, stability and ethnic accommodation'.

So this is probably the best argument for postponement available. But on closer inspection, Diamond's argument only underlines the reasons why postponing the elections at this point would be a bad idea. Diamond proposes, not an open-ended delay, but 'a one-time postponement of several months, in order to establish the "necessary conditions" for a fair and inclusive vote'. But, as I asked above, what could such a postponement actually accomplish? It turns out that Diamond's key proposal is to use this period of postponement to fundamentally change the entire electoral system (to an alternative system that Diamond supported from the start), while in the meantime carrying out the first accurate Iraqi census in many years.

In my (non-expert) opinion, this is a total non-starter. In the first place, it is not self-evidently clear that the alternative system favoured by Diamond and others would have been better, on balance, than the one adopted (in negotiations involving Iraqi political forces and the CPA, under the aegis of the UN). As other scholars of constitution-making and possible democratization in Iraq have argued, the system proposed by Diamond and others also had important drawbacks, and could well have been unacceptable to significant sectors of Shiite and Kurdish opinion. (These arguments have been effectively made, for example, by Brendan O'Leary, another political scientist who served as a constitutional adviser to the Kurdistan regional government.) In a more ideal world, the whole framework for political transition could certainly have been crafted in ways that better met some of the reasonable and legitimate concerns of the Sunni Arab minority (and others) - though, of course, there is no guarantee at all that meeting their legitimate concerns would have reduced the violence of the insurgents or the intransigence of rejectionist Sunni elites, and any compromise that went beyond that would have angered Iraqi Shiites and/or Kurds (i.e., the other 80-85% of the population). I think there is weight to the objections raised against the system preferred by Diamond, though I certainly wouldn't claim that the existing system is without flaws - and, anyway, I don't feel entirely qualified to adjudicate these issues.

However, all these arguments were a lot more immediately relevant back in mid-2004. To postpone the election now, at the last minute, and engage in a frantic overhaul of the whole electoral system, strikes me as a sure recipe for disaster - leading to heightened terrorist violence and Sunni Arab intransigence, Shiite and Kurdish outrage, deadlocked negotiations, dismay and demoralization among Iraqis who support elections, and an increased likelihood of all-out civil war... among other problems. If this is the best alternative solution that Diamond can offer, then he's basically clinched the case for going ahead with the elections as presently scheduled.

That's certainly the conclusion I would draw. Yes, the Iraqi elections are set to take place under terrible conditions, they will almost certainly be marked by considerable violence and chaos, and their long-term results are not easy to predict. Some of their political consequences may well be unpleasant. In a lot of ways, the whole process leading up to this point could have been done better - much better.

But at this point it's clear that going ahead with the elections is by far the best (or least bad) alternative from among the realistically available possibilities, and that any delay or postponement will almost certainly make matters worse. That being the case, I think the choice for those of us outside Iraq is clear. Either one supports those Iraqis who are determined to make the elections happen successfully, even under the threat of violence, or one supports those Iraqis (and foreign terrorists) who are determined to kill other Iraqis in order to prevent the elections from taking place. From my point of view, it's no contest.
(Jeff Weintraub)

Posted by Norm at 09:30 PM | Permalink

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New York Times
January 9, 2005, Sunday


EDITORIAL DESK | Op-Ed 1426 words
Late Edition - Final , Section 4 , Page 13 , Column 1

How a Vote Could Derail Democracy

By Larry Diamond
Stanford, Calif.

Iraq is about to reach a point of no return. If, as President Bush insists, it goes ahead with elections for the new transitional government on Jan. 30, Iraq may score a huge moral and political victory for democracy over violence and terrorism. More likely, however, these elections will only increase political polarization and violence by entrenching the perceptions of Sunni Arab marginalization that are helping to drive the violence in the first place. This would not be the first instance when badly timed and ill-prepared elections set back the prospects for democracy, stability and ethnic accommodation. Think of Angola in 1992, Bosnia in 1996, Liberia in 1997.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the problem is not simply that there is too much mayhem and disorder in significant parts of Iraq. Let's face it, at some point Iraq will have to hold elections, and foreign terrorists, religious fanatics and diehard defenders of the old order will try to use violence to obstruct them.

Rather, the problem right now is that the opposition to holding elections goes well beyond these irreconcilable spoilers. It includes a great many other actors - many of them moderate and democratic - who believe that elections this month cannot possibly be fair, and who have therefore resolved not to legitimize them by participating.

These people - encompassing a wide array of Sunni Arab civic, tribal and religious leaders - can be brought into the political process. If they were to participate in elections, the insurgent and terrorist violence plaguing Iraq would be substantially reduced. If their exclusion from the political process is confirmed by elections this month, ethnic and religious animosities will only intensify, and the country could well slide toward civil war.

The most serious calls for postponement come from Sunni political forces that oppose not democracy per se, but rather the structure of the transitional political process. Specifically, they object to the electoral system of proportional representation for the new assembly that will choose a transitional government and write a constitution; seats will be allocated not based on geography but on the national vote results. With violence and instability much more pervasive in the Sunni provinces, they worry that polling will be disrupted, hurting Sunni slates' chance of winning enough votes to qualify for seats.

If turnout is much heavier in the Shiite south and Kurdish north than in Sunni provinces like Al Anbar (which includes Falluja) and Salaheddin (whose capital is Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit), the Sunnis, who account for about 15 percent to 20 percent of the population, may win only a tiny percentage of the seats. Then, they fear, their bid for a fair share of power and resources in the new system would be crushed. (That the Kurds and Shiites have been subjected to such treatment by the central government for decades doesn't justify their perpetuating it.)

Sunni political and social leaders are not calling for an open-ended cancellation of the election. They are requesting a one-time postponement of several months, in order to establish the "necessary conditions" for a fair and inclusive vote. They want a more transparent electoral commission. They want citizens to be better informed about the electoral process. They worry that some who have registered to vote are foreigners (mostly Iranians) recruited to back the more militant Shiite parties.

Most of all, however, these Sunnis want electoral districts to be established (perhaps along the lines of the existing 18 provinces), so that each province can be assured of some minimum representation in Parliament, based on its estimated share of the national population. Proportional representation would give each party or coalition a share of the seats in each province equivalent to its share of the provincial vote. (In fact, a version of this electoral system is precisely what I and other experts recommended to the Coalition Provisional Authority early last year, but our suggestion fell on deaf ears.)

Yes, Sunni opposition forces have made other requests that cannot be fully accommodated, including the withdrawal of American forces from Iraqi cities within a month of the election and the restructuring of the current interim government. But the need now is not for pure concession or pure rejection, but rather for negotiation.

Fortunately, it is no longer true, as has often been argued, that there is no one to negotiate with. Over the last few months, Sunni religious, tribal, civic and political leaders have begun meeting and forming alliances. At a conference in Tikrit on Dec. 23, Sunni representatives from seven provinces met, released a statement articulating their concerns and requests, and elected an "executive body" to negotiate on their behalf.

The group's leadership committee includes Hatem Mukhlis, the surgeon who met with President Bush in the Oval Office two months before the invasion of Iraq and is now a member of Iraq's interim advisory council, and Saleh Mutlaq, a former senior Iraqi Army officer who was sentenced to death by Saddam Hussein in 1978 for refusing to suppress the Shiite community, then was spared and became a successful businessman. Also prominent in this new coalition is the Association of Muslim Scholars, the principal body of Sunni Muslim clerics, and another recently formed group, the Iraqi National Founding Congress, whose spokesman is a Baghdad University political scientist, Wamid Nadmi.

The members of this Sunni coalition are varied. Some of them are moderate, with democratic credentials. Some are extremely anti-American - Arab nationalists and Islamists who have openly sympathized with the insurgency. The Bush administration is adamant that it "will not negotiate with terrorists" - and will not condone the Iraqi authorities doing so either. But in conditions approximating civil war, you are not going to find many Mother Teresas. You negotiate with agents and sympathizers of violence who decide that they are ready to take a different path.

The Sunni coalition leaders have said that if the voting is postponed and their concerns are addressed, they will call on their followers to participate in the rescheduled elections. Otherwise, they are committed to a boycott, which in the existing climate of violence and fear would likely depress voter turnout to minuscule levels in their provinces.

While Prime Minister Ayad Allawi last week reiterated the call for keeping the elections on schedule, an ever-growing group of Iraqis is now coming to recognize that they must be postponed. This includes two respected Sunni politicians who were members of the Iraqi Governing Council: Adnan Pachachi, who led the drafting of Iraq's liberal interim constitution, and the moderate Islamist politician Mohsen Abdul Hameed. The advocates of postponement now also include an overwhelming majority of Iraq's 33 ministers, and last week President Ghazi al-Yawar discussed having the United Nations reassess whether elections should be held.

What is needed now is for all of Iraq's social and political stakeholders to sit down and talk. The outlines of a compromise are visible. The Sunnis could get a one-time postponement of the vote, an electoral system based substantially on provincial districts, and certain other political and administrative reforms. The leading Shiites, who have drawn together into the United Iraqi Alliance and seem set to win an election no matter when it is held or under what system, could get a commitment on the part of the Sunni opposition groups to end the electoral boycott and to work to reduce the violence, and thus to create a political situation in which their victory will be worth having.

In crises, democracy is not forged through a sudden moral conversion of warring parties to principles of freedom and the rule of law. Rather, bitter antagonists come to see a democratic accommodation as their second-best option - worse than the domination they would prefer, but better than the mutual destruction that they risk through continued strife.

In the coming days, Iraqi political and social leaders have the opportunity to reach across their lines of division and begin to forge such a historic compromise. It is in America's interest to urge them to do so. If, instead, they plunge forward with elections that leave one section of the country excluded and embittered, we will all be the losers.

Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and an editor of The Journal of Democracy, was an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad from January 2004 to April 2004.