As Ahmadinejad Tightens Grip in Iran, Mousavi Faces Tough Choices

By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 29, 2009

TEHRAN, June 28 -- With the opposition visibly weakening in Iran amid a government crackdown, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters have begun to use his disputed victory in this month's election to toughen the nation's stance internationally and to consolidate control internally.

In recent days, they have vilified President Obama for what they call his "interventionist policies," have said they are ready to put opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's advisers on trial and have threatened to execute some of the Mousavi supporters who took to the streets to protest the election result.

On Sunday, news agencies reported that the police broke up another opposition gathering -- witnesses said it numbered about 2,000 -- and detained eight British Embassy staff members, accusing them of a role in organizing the demonstrations.

The actions reflect the growing power of a small coterie of hard-line clerics and Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, Iranian analysts say. Revolutionary Guard members, in particular, have proved instrumental to the authorities since the June 12 election, and analysts say their clout is bound to increase as the conflict drags on.

The emerging power dynamics leave Mousavi with tough choices. Confronted with increasing political pressure over what supporters of the government say is his leading role in orchestrating riots, he can either acknowledge his defeat and be embraced by his enemies or continue to fight over the election result and face imprisonment.

"Everything now depends on Mousavi," said Amir Mohebbian, a political analyst. "If he decreases the tension, politicians can manage this. If he increases pressure, the influence of the military and security forces will grow."

Should he continue to fight, other analysts say, Mousavi and many of his advisers could be jailed, which would mean the end of their political influence within Iran's ruling system. The exclusion of such a large group would end Iran's traditional power-sharing system. Authority would rest in the hands of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and his supporters, leaving the parliament as the lone outpost of opposition voices.

On the other hand, accepting defeat might allow Mousavi to create a political party that, although unable to challenge the rule of Khamenei, could give him an opposition role during Ahmadinejad's second term. Mousavi's supporters, who are still enraged over post-election violence that they blame on the government, would be extremely disappointed by such a move.

The one possible wild card in Mousavi's favor seems to be coming from the holy city of Qom, one of the most influential centers of Shiite learning. There, several powerful grand ayatollahs have issued statements calling for a compromise and, most tellingly, have not joined Khamenei in his unequivocal support of Ahmadinejad.

"Events that happened have weakened the system," Grand Ayatollah Abdolkarim Mousavi Ardabili said during a meeting with members of the Guardian Council, the semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency reported Saturday. "You must hear the objections that the protesters have to the elections. We must let the people speak."

Another grand ayatollah issued two fatwas, or religious edicts, on Saturday, saying Islam forbids security forces from hitting unarmed people. Grand Ayatollah Asadollah Bayat Zanjani said the protests were Islamic. "These gatherings are the lawful right of the people and their only method for informing the rulers of their requests," he said.

Mousavi and another opposition candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, have vehemently refused to recognize the election results, which officially gave Ahmadinejad a landslide victory. They have also declined to participate in recount efforts by the Guardian Council, which must certify the final results Monday but which the opposition insists is biased.

Their refusal plays into the hands of the president's camp, which, strongly supported by state media, has launched a campaign against Mousavi, the protesters and his advisers. According to the official narrative of this campaign, opposition unrest was fomented by Iran's foreign enemies -- including the United States, Great Britain and Saudi Arabia -- in an attempt to overthrow the regime.

The Iranian government and its allies are gearing up to use those accusations to bring to court some political opponents, a move aimed at silencing the opposition for a longer period, analysts here say. The Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights said Sunday that more than 2,000 people are in detention and that hundreds more have gone missing since the election.

"We are very worried about my husband's fate," said Mahdieh Mohammadi, wife of journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi, a government critic. He was arrested the day after the election. "When you know nothing at all for the past two weeks, naturally you start to worry about everything."

State media have rolled out a daily serving of alleged plots and conspiracies involving Mousavi supporters. They refer to the protesters as "rioters" and "hooligans." Mousavi's aides are linked to plans for "a velvet revolution" meant to overthrow Iran's complex system of religious and democratic governance. Some demonstrators have been forced to make televised statements in which they admit to being the pawns of foreigners.

The head of the parliament's judicial commission has said that Mousavi could be put on trial. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a staunch ally of Iran's supreme leader, called Friday for "severe and ruthless" punishments for the "leaders of the agitations," asking the judiciary to try them as those who "wage war against God." Such crimes are punishable by death under Iran's Shiite Islamic law.

Khamenei has said that those organizing the "riots" will be held responsible for the "violence and bloodshed." He has openly supported Ahmadinejad, breaking with the Islamic republic's tradition of the supreme leader being above the fray.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose power mushroomed after the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, is in position to gain even more sway in the government. The 120,000-member corps acts as a praetorian guard, protecting Iran's Islamic ruling system, and its commanders are close to top Iranian leaders. In recent years, the corps has added divisions, expanded its intelligence operations, helped professionalize the voluntary militia known as the Basij and taken greater control of the borders.

"We are now in a security situation. That is increasing their influence," said Mohebbian, the analyst, who is critical of both main presidential candidates. "Mousavi's extremist actions have made it easy for military people to get involved in politics, which is always bad for democracy."

Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an Ahmadinejad rival who supported Mousavi, on Sunday broke his post-election silence and called for an investigation into complaints of election irregularities.

"I hope those who are involved in this issue thoroughly and fairly review and study the legal complaints," Rafsanjani said.

Special correspondent Kay Armin Serjoie in Tehran contributed to this report.

Honduran Military Sends President Into Exile; Supportive Congress Names Successor

By William Booth and Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 29, 2009

MEXICO CITY, June 28 -- Soldiers stormed the presidential palace in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa at dawn Sunday and forced President Manuel Zelaya into exile in Costa Rica. The military-led ouster sparked a regional crisis that thrusts the impoverished banana-growing country onto the international stage and revives painful memories of coup-fueled turmoil in Latin America.

The coup was condemned throughout the Americas. President Obama joined other regional leaders in calling for a peaceful return of Zelaya to office.

But the Honduran National Congress defiantly announced that Zelaya was out, and its members named congressional leader Roberto Micheletti the new president on Sunday afternoon.

The Honduran Supreme Court also supported the removal of Zelaya, saying that the military was acting in defense of democracy.

Zelaya, a leftist ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, told reporters that he was woken by shouts and gunshots early Sunday. While still in his pajamas, the Honduran president said, soldiers took him to a waiting air force plane that flew him to Costa Rica. The coup was mostly peaceful, though tanks and soldiers occupied streets in Tegucigalpa.

Senior administration officials in Washington said Sunday that U.S. diplomats had been negotiating behind the scenes to stop the coup. "We have worked hard to avoid this," a senior Obama official said in a background briefing with reporters. "This has been brewing a long time."

U.S. officials said the Honduran military, which has traditionally maintained close ties with the United States, had broken off contact with U.S. diplomats after the coup. Obama is due to meet Álvaro Uribe, president of regional power Colombia, at the White House on Monday, and Honduras is now likely to be high on the agenda.

Military coups in Latin America have become rare, but Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said Sunday's events in Honduras reminded her of "the worst years in Latin America's history," when coups were common and often led to cycles of violence. The coup draws the Obama administration into its first real diplomatic test in the hemisphere, in a country where people have complex feelings toward the United States. The Reagan administration's contra war against the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was fought from Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, whose fragile economy is supported by remittances from Hondurans living in the United States.

Zelaya was removed from office as Hondurans prepared to vote Sunday in a nonbinding referendum asking them whether they would support a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. Zelaya's critics said he wanted to use the referendum to open the door to reelection after his term ends in January 2010, an assertion that he denied.

The referendum -- which U.S. officials described as more of a "survey" than a true vote -- was condemned by broad swaths of Honduran society as an obvious power grab. The Honduran Supreme Court called the referendum unconstitutional, and leaders of Zelaya's own party denounced the measure.

The scene in Tegucigalpa on Sunday was chaotic, and it was unclear what would happen next. As Zelaya condemned his forced ouster at a news conference in Costa Rica, the Honduran Congress voted to accept what it claimed was Zelaya's resignation letter.

Zelaya denied that he had signed such a letter. A senior U.S. official said, "It is hard to take that letter seriously given how President Zelaya was removed from office."

Zelaya said he was still the legal leader. He said he would attend a meeting of regional leaders Monday in Nicaragua to seek a return to office. But in taking the oath of office as president, Micheletti characterized Zelaya's removal as a patriotic measure designed to restore democracy.

"I did not get here through the ignominy of a coup d'etat," Micheletti told lawmakers after taking the oath of office. "I give thanks to God for this beautiful opportunity."

In Venezuela, Chávez, speaking on national television, called the overthrow the work of "the bourgeoisie and the extreme right." He said Venezuela would "guarantee" that its close ally Zelaya would be returned to power.

"This is a coup against all of us," Chávez said. "We have to do everything to stop it."

Late Sunday, Chávez put his troops on alert and said he would respond militarily if his envoy to Honduras was harmed. Chávez said Honduran soldiers took away the Cuban ambassador and left the Venezuelan ambassador on the side of a road after beating him during the army's coup. A senior U.S. official sought to play down the potential for military action by outsiders, saying, "We don't believe Venezuela is planning on sending any troops."

The United States maintains troops at the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras to assist the Honduran military and police with anti-drug interdiction and other missions.

"This gives Chávez the high moral ground to go on with his narrative about right-wing oligarchs who don't tolerate leftist governments," said Michael Shifter, an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. "There's nobody better at seizing these moments than Chávez."

In Washington, Obama said he was "deeply concerned by reports coming out of Honduras regarding the detention and expulsion of President Mel Zelaya."

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the United States would work alongside the Organization of American States to restore Zelaya, and the official predicted that the organizers of the coup would find themselves isolated and facing stiff pressure to allow Zelaya's return.

But a senior Honduran official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he did not foresee the new government backing down. He said the country's Congress had appointed a commission Thursday evening to investigate whether the president's referendum was in line with the constitution. The commission reported back Sunday afternoon that the president had violated the constitution, and the Congress voted to remove him. That procedure is "within the constitution," said the senior official -- although the coup that occurred hours earlier was not, he acknowledged.

"The decision was adopted by unanimity in the Congress. That means all of the political parties. It has been endorsed by sectors that represent a wide array of Hondurans -- the Episcopal Church, the Catholic Church. And well, of course, the armed forces," he said.

"The difficult part will be for the international community to see things as the Honduran people see them," the official said.

Across Latin America, governments used strong language to condemn the overthrow and demand that Zelaya be returned to office. Those governments included Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador -- all close allies of Honduras in a leftist alliance of nations led by Chávez. Countries such as Costa Rica, which has close ties to the United States, also condemned the coup. Costa Rica's president, Oscar Arias, spoke alongside Zelaya at a news conference in San Jose, the capital.

"This is a lamentable step back, not just for Honduran democracy but for Central American democracy and throughout the hemisphere," Arias said.

In an interview with Spain's El País newspaper before his ouster, Zelaya said a planned attempt to remove him from power had been blocked by the United States.

"Everything was in place for the coup, and if the U.S. Embassy had approved it, it would have happened. But they did not. I'm only still here in office thanks to the United States," he said in the interview, which was published Sunday.

A senior administration official would not confirm that account, but said, "We were very clear . . . that any resolution of the political conflict in Honduras had to be democratic and constitutional."

Forero reported from Caracas, Venezuela. Staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan in Washington contributed to this report.

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality

By Timothy Snyder

Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of their Jewish victims and burn them on giant grates. Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. This we have not done. Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.

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This form of survivors' history, of which the works of Primo Levi are the most famous example, only inadequately captures the reality of the mass killing. The Diary of Anne Frank concerns assimilated European Jewish communities, the Dutch and German, whose tragedy, though horrible, was a very small part of the Holocaust. By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden —were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today's Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.

An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived. About a million more Polish Jews were killed in other ways, some at Chelmno, Majdanek, or Auschwitz, many more shot in actions in the eastern half of the country.

All in all, as many if not more Jews were killed by bullets as by gas, but they were killed by bullets in easterly locations that are blurred in painful remembrance. The second most important part of the Holocaust is the mass murder by bullets in eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. It began with SS Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jewish men in June 1941, expanded to the murder of Jewish women and children in July, and extended to the extermination of entire Jewish communities that August and September. By the end of 1941, the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal of local assistance) had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist.

There were articulate Soviet Jewish witnesses and chroniclers, such as Vassily Grossman. But he and others were forbidden from presenting the Holocaust as a distinctly Jewish event. Grossman discovered Treblinka as a journalist with the Red Army in September 1944. Perhaps because he knew what the Germans had done to Jews in his native Ukraine, he was able to guess what had happened there, and wrote a short book about it. He called Treblinka "hell," and placed it at the center of the war and of the century. Yet for Stalin, the mass murder of Jews had to be seen as the suffering of "citizens." Grossman helped to compile a Black Book of German crimes against Soviet Jews, which Soviet authorities later suppressed. If any group suffered especially under the Germans, Stalin maintained wrongly, it was the Russians. In this way Stalinism has prevented us from seeing Hitler's mass killings in proper perspective.

In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order: Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3 million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another 1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: taken together, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polish and Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jews killed were Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak. If these people are considered, the East European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)

Yet even this corrected image of the Holocaust conveys an unacceptably incomplete sense of the scope of German mass killing policies in Europe. The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.

The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans. They expelled half a million non-Jewish Poles from lands annexed to the Reich. An impatient Himmler ordered a first stage of Generalplan Ost implemented in eastern Poland: ten thousand Polish children were killed and a hundred thousand adults expelled. The Wehrmacht purposefully starved about one million people in the siege of Leningrad, and about a hundred thousand more in planned famines in Ukrainian cities. Some three million captured Soviet soldiers died of starvation or disease in German prisoner-of-war camps. These people were purposefully killed: as with the siege of Leningrad, the knowledge and intention to starve people to death was present. Had the Holocaust not taken place, this would be recalled as the worst war crime in modern history.

In the guise of anti-partisan actions, the Germans killed perhaps three quarters of a million people, about 350,000 in Belarus alone, and lower but comparable numbers in Poland and Yugoslavia. The Germans killed more than a hundred thousand Poles when suppressing the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Had the Holocaust not happened, these "reprisals" too would be regarded as some of the greatest war crimes in history. In fact they, like the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, are scarcely recalled at all beyond the countries directly concerned. German occupation policies killed non-Jewish civilians in other ways as well, for example by hard labor in prison camps. Again: these were chiefly people from Poland or the Soviet Union.

The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.

Auschwitz is only an introduction to the Holocaust, the Holocaust only a suggestion of Hitler's final aims. Grossman's novels Forever Flowing and Life and Fate daringly recount both Nazi and Soviet terror, and remind us that even a full characterization of German policies of mass killing is incomplete as a history of atrocity in mid-century Europe. It omits the state that Hitler was chiefly concerned to destroy, the other state that killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans. Thus when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state. As a general rule, the German regime killed civilians who were not German citizens, whereas the Soviet regime chiefly killed civilians who were Soviet citizens.

Soviet repressions are identified with the Gulag, much as Nazi repressions are identified with Auschwitz. The Gulag, for all of the horrors of slave labor, was not a system of mass killing. If we accept that mass killing of civilians is at the center of political, ethical, and legal concerns, the same historical point applies to the Gulag as to Ausch-witz. We know about the Gulag because it was a system of labor camps, but not a set of killing facilities. The Gulag held about 30 million people and shortened some three million lives. But a vast majority of those people who were sent to the camps returned alive. Precisely because we have a literature of the Gulag, most famously Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, we can try to imagine its horrors—much as we can try to imagine the horrors of Auschwitz.

Yet as Auschwitz draws attention away from the still greater horrors of Treblinka, the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930–1933 and the Great Terror of 1937–1938. It remains unclear whether the Kazakh famine of 1930–1932 was intentional, although it is clear that over a million Kazakhs died of starvation. It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.

What we read of the Great Terror also distracts us from its true nature. The great novel and the great memoir are Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Alexander Weissberg's The Accused. Both focus our attention on a small group of Stalin's victims, urban Communist leaders, educated people, sometimes known in the West. This image dominates our understanding of the Great Terror, but it is incorrect. Taken together, purges of Communist Party elites, the security police, and military officers claimed not more than 47,737 lives.

The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was aimed chiefly at "kulaks," which is to say peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives. A few national minorities, representing together less than 2 percent of the Soviet population, yielded more than a third of the fatalities of the Great Terror. In an operation aimed at ethnic Poles who were Soviet citizens, for example, 111,091 people were shot. Of the 681,692 executions carried out for alleged political crimes in 1937 and 1938, the kulak operation and the national operations accounted for 633,955, more than 90 percent of the total. These people were shot in secret, buried in pits, and forgotten.

The emphasis on Auschwitz and the Gulag understates the numbers of Europeans killed, and shifts the geographical focus of the killing to the German Reich and the Russian East. Like Auschwitz, which draws our attention to the Western European victims of the Nazi empire, the Gulag, with its notorious Siberian camps, also distracts us from the geographical center of Soviet killing policies. If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. More generally, when we contemplate Auschwitz and the Gulag, we tend to think of the states that built them as systems, as modern tyrannies, or totalitarian states. Yet such considerations of thought and politics in Berlin and Moscow tend to overlook the fact that mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.

The geographic, moral, and political center of the Europe of mass killing is the Europe of the East, above all Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States, lands that were subject to sustained policies of atrocity by both regimes. The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.

Historical reckonings that can be seen as objective, such as the counting of victims of mass killing actions, might help to restore a certain lost historical balance. German suffering under Hitler and during the war, though dreadful in scale, does not figure at the center of the history of mass killing. Even if the ethnic Germans killed during flight from the Red Army, expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945–1947, and the firebombings in Germany are included, the total number of German civilians killed by state power remains comparatively small (for more on that, see the box below).

The main victims of direct killing policies among German citizens were the 70,000 "euthanasia" patients and the 165,000 German Jews. The main German victims of Stalin remain the women raped by the Red Army and the prisoners of war held in the Soviet Union. Some 363,000 German prisoners died of starvation and disease in Soviet captivity, as did perhaps 200,000 Hungarians. At a time when German resistance to Hitler receives attention in the mass media, it is worth recalling that some participants in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler were right at the center of mass killing policies: Arthur Nebe, for example, who commanded Einsatzgruppe B in the killing fields of Belarus during the first wave of the Holocaust in 1941; or Eduard Wagner, the quartermaster general of the Wehrmacht, who wrote a cheery letter to his wife about the need to deny food to the starving millions of Leningrad.

It is hard to forget Anna Akhmatova: "It loves blood, the Russian earth." Yet Russian martyrdom and heroism, now loudly proclaimed in Putin's Russia, must be placed against the larger historical background. Soviet Russians, like other Soviet citizens, were indeed victims of Stalinist policy: but they were much less likely to be killed than Soviet Ukrainians or Soviet Poles, or members of other national minorities. During World War II several terror actions were extended to eastern Poland and the Baltic states, territories absorbed by the Soviet Union. In the most famous case, 22,000 Polish citizens were shot in 1940 at Katyn and four other sites; tens of thousands more Poles and Balts died during or shortly after deportations to Kazakhstan and Siberia. During the war, many Soviet Russians were killed by the Germans, but far fewer proportionately than Belarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention Jews. Soviet civilian deaths are estimated at about 15 million. About one in twenty-five civilians in Russia was killed by the Germans during the war, as opposed to about one in ten in Ukraine (or Poland) or about one in five in Belarus.

Belarus and Ukraine were occupied for much of the war, with both German and Soviet armies passing through their entire territory twice, in attack and retreat. German armies never occupied more than a small portion of Russia proper, and that for shorter periods. Even taking into account the siege of Leningrad and the destruction of Stalingrad, the toll taken on Russian civilians was much less than that on Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews. Exaggerated Russian claims about numbers of deaths treat Belarus and Ukraine as Russia, and Jews, Belarusians, and Ukrainians as Russians: this amounts to an imperialism of martyrdom, implicitly claiming territory by explicitly claiming victims. This will likely be the line propounded by the new historical committee appointed by President Dmitri Medvedev to prevent "falsifications" of the Russian past. Under legislation currently debated in Russia, statements such as those contained in this paragraph would be a criminal offense.

Ukrainian politicians counter Russia's monopolization of common suffering, and respond to Western European stereotypes of Ukrainians as Holocaust collaborators, by putting forward a narrative of suffering of their own: that millions of Ukrainians were deliberately starved by Stalin. President Viktor Yushchenko does his country a grave disservice by claiming ten million deaths, thus exaggerating the number of Ukrainians killed by a factor of three; but it is true that the famine in Ukraine of 1932–1933 was a result of purposeful political decisions, and killed about three million people. With the exception of the Holocaust, the collectivization famines were the greatest political disaster of the European twentieth century. Collectivization nevertheless remained the central element of the Soviet model of development, and was copied later by the Chinese Communist regime, with the predictable consequence: tens of millions dead by starvation in Mao's Great Leap Forward.

The preoccupation with Ukraine as a source of food was shared by Hitler and Stalin. Both wished to control and exploit the Ukrainian breadbasket, and both caused political famines: Stalin in the country as a whole, Hitler in the cities and the prisoner-of-war camps. Some of the Ukrainian prisoners who endured starvation in those camps in 1941 had survived the famine in 1933. German policies of starvation, incidentally, are partially responsible for the notion that Ukrainians were willing collaborators in the Holocaust. The most notorious Ukrainian collaborators were the guards at the death facilities at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. What is rarely recalled is that the Germans recruited the first cadres of such men, captured Soviet soldiers, from their own prisoner-of-war camps. They rescued some people from mass starvation, one great crime in the east, in order to make them collaborators in another, the Holocaust.

Poland's history is the source of endless confusion. Poland was attacked and occupied not by one but by both totalitarian states between 1939 and 1941, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then allies, exploited its territories and exterminated much of its intelligentsia at that time. Poland's capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed. These two central examples of resistance and mass killing were confused in the German mass media in August 1994, 1999, and 2004, on all the recent five-year anniversaries of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and will be again in August 2009.

If any European country seems out of place in today's Europe, stranded in another historical moment, it is Belarus under the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko. Yet while Lukashenko prefers to ignore the Soviet killing fields in his country, wishing to build a highway over the death pits at Kuropaty, in some respects Lukashenko remembers European history better than his critics. By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.

Belarusian memories of this experience, cultivated by the current dictatorial regime, help to explain suspicions of initiatives coming from the West. Yet West Europeans would generally be surprised to learn that Belarus was both the epicenter of European mass killing and the base of operations of anti-Nazi partisans who actually contributed to the victory of the Allies. It is striking that such a country can be entirely displaced from European remembrance. The absence of Belarus from discussions of the past is the clearest sign of the difference between memory and history.

Just as disturbing is the absence of economics. Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian utopia in the East, the USSR wishing to overcome its agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic develop-ment. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.

They did so in ways that seem appalling and obscene to us today, but which were sufficiently plausible to motivate large numbers of believers at the time. Food is no longer scarce, at least in the West; but other resources are, or will be soon. In the twenty-first century, we will face shortages of potable water, clean air, and affordable energy. Climate change may bring a renewed threat of hunger.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

The Europe of today is remarkable precisely in its unity of prosperity with social justice and human rights. Probably more than any other part of the world, it is immune, at least for the time being, to such heartlessly instrumental pursuits of economic growth. Yet memory has made some odd departures from history, at a time when history is needed more than ever. The recent European past may resemble the near future of the rest of the world. This is one more reason for getting the reckonings right.

The Expulsion of Germans from the East

Of the 12 million or so Germans who fled or were expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of the war, the vast majority came from Czechoslovakia (3.5 million) or Poland (7.8 million). Most of the second group came from lands taken from the defeated Reich and assigned to Poland by the Allies. About half of the 12 million fled, and about half were deported—though a neat division is impossible, since some of those who fled later returned and were then deported.

In late 1944 and early 1945 some six million Germans fled before the Red Army; it was then that most of the 600,000 or so fatalities among German refugees took place. Many of these were simply people who were caught between armies; some were purposefully massacred by Soviet soldiers or died in Soviet camps. Murders were also committed by Czechs and Poles. Hitler shares responsibility for these deaths, since German authorities failed to organize timely evacuations.

The postwar deportations of Germans, a direct result of Hitler's war, were a Czechoslovak-Polish-Soviet-British-American project. During the war, the exiled leaders of occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia expressed their wish to keep their postwar German populations small, and the Allies agreed that German populations would be removed after victory. Winston Churchill recommended a "clean sweep," and the Allied Control Council issued the official plan for the transfer of six million Germans.

The (non-Communist) Czechoslovak government had Stalin's approval to expel its Germans, but also Churchill's and Roosevelt's. Poland was under Soviet control, though any Polish government would have expelled Germans. Polish Communists accepted Stalin's proposal that Poland should be moved very far to the west, which implied expelling more Germans than democratic Polish politicians would have wished. (It also entailed the deportation of Poles from the eastern half of pre-war Poland, which the Soviets annexed. About a million of these Polish expellees settled the lands from which Germans were expelled.)

From May to December 1945 Polish and Czechoslovak authorities dumped about two million Germans over their borders. From January 1946, Polish and Czechoslovak authorities continued to force Germans to leave, while British, Soviet, and American forces arranged their reception in their occupation zones in Germany. In 1946 and 1947, the Soviets received slightly more than two million Germans in their zone, the British some 1.2 million, and the Americans some 1.4 million. Deportations continued at a slower pace thereafter.

Although the expulsions were a case of collective responsibility, and involved hideous treatment, mortality rates among German civilians—some 600,000 out of 12 million—were relatively low when compared to the other events discussed here. Caught up in the end of a horrible war fought in their name, and then by an Allied consensus in favor of border changes and deportation, these Germans were not victims of a calculated Stalinist killing policy comparable to the Terror or the famine.

Candidates on Defensive Over Weekend

Muninggar Sri Saraswati & Antara

With just 10 days to go before the election on July 8, the presidential candidates were forced to spend the weekend fending off what they labeled as baseless and fabricated allegations.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, speaking at a campaign event at the Bima Cirebon sports stadium in West Java on Saturday, lashed out at what he said were slanderous allegations arising from the “black campaigns” being waged against him and running mate Boediono.

“SBY and Boediono are being attacked from all sides, but nothing is based on tangible facts,” Yudhoyono said.

“We’re concerned about this and I ask the Lord to restore the good senses of the black campaigners, so they stop.”

He said he hoped that his supporters would avoid slinging mud, because it was a sin against God, democracy and the people.

“It is not good for them to reach their goal by any means,” he said.

“They should tell the people what is true, honest and noble. Do not attack, slander and discredit SBY by spreading untrue stories and turning religion upside down.”

The incumbent, heavily favored to win the election, has been on the defensive in response to a number of allegations.

Charges against Yudhoyono include criticism of comments that he allegedly made against the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), as well as vice presidential candidate Boediono’s supposed status as a “neo-liberal.” Some opponents have also suggested that Boediono and his wife Herawati were not Muslim enough.

On Friday, Yudhoyono, who is running on an anticorruption platform, was forced to deny that he had ordered the Development Finance Comptroller to audit the KPK, which drew immediate criticism from anticorruption watchdogs.

The campaign team of presidential candidate Jusuf Kalla — who in the past has himself made comments that could be considered critical of the KPK’s efforts — used the situation to say that the KPK should be improved.

“We hope the KPK becomes more effective in handling the investigation into allegations that certain institutions have caused the state to lose money,” campaign team spokesman Chairuman Harahap said on Saturday.

On Sunday, Yudhoyono lashed out at comments that were apparently directed at Kalla, who criticized Boediono during last Thursday’s presidential debate for not agreeing with his 10,000-megawatt electricity project.

“[How could] internal cabinet meeting issues be disclosed to the public?” he asked, adding that he, in his capacity as president, needed to protect his ministers to support their ability to carry out their government duties.

Boediono, Yudhoyono said, had only asked the government to be careful in approving the development of the 10,000-megawatt electricity project. The government eventually approved the program to prevent a possible energy crisis.

Yudhoyono responded to Kalla, who said in a presidential debate on Thursday that Boediono did not support the project. Kalla repeated his statement several times, noting that he was angry with Boediono.

Kalla’s campaign team, meanwhile, also had to deny allegations that it had engaged in money politics and that the team was involved in the distribution of photocopied news stories saying that Boediono’s wife was a Catholic, during a campaign event in Medan, North Sumatra.

Chairuman said the campaign team had no plans to deliberately smear its rivals. “Our goal in the campaign is to introduce the programs of our presidential candidate to the people.”

Tren Elektibilitas Capres-Cawapres Menjelang Pilpres 2009

Pemilihan Presiden 2009 memasuki fase genting dan menentukan bagi ketiga pasang capres dan cawapres. Waktu yang tersisa menjelang tanggal 8 Juli 2009 menjadi ajang menaikkan elektabilitas kandidat. Hampir semua cara telah dicoba, mulai dengan memaksimalkan “perang udara” dan “perang darat”. Strategi pencitraan dengan memoles kandidat juga telah dilakukan masing-masing tim sukses dan konsultan. Isu-isu panas dan menyengat juga sudah ditebar, saling rebutan klaim keberhasilan, hingga deretan isu-isu kampanye negatif dan black campaign telah mewarnai peta politik sebulan terakhir.

Dalam survei LSI 15-20 Juni 2009, SBY-Boediono dipilih oleh 67%, Mega-Pro 16%, dan JK-Win 9%. Keunggulan jauh yang sedikit menurun ini konsisten dengan sejumlah indikator makro, terutama kepuasan pada JK yang sedikit naik, dan pada SBY yang sedikit turun. SBY-Boediono mengalami penurunan sekitar 3% (dari70%) dalam 20 hari. Bila penurunan ini dibaca secara konservatif, SBY-Boediono sekarang berada pada posisi 64%. Berarti mengalami penurunan sebanyak 4%bila survei sebelumnya juga dibaca secara konservatif (68%, bukan 70%).

Bila penurunan ini linear dan dibaca secara konservatif SBY-Boediono kemungkinan akan turun lagi sebanyak 4% pada hari H, sehingga perolehan suara pada hari H kemungkinan 60%. Penurunan linear ini mungkin terjadi karena tekanan dari lawannya kurang kuat. Mega-Pro cenderung stabil atau bahkan menurun, sedangkan kemajuan JK-Win kurang kuat, hanya sekitar 5% dalam 20 hari bila dibaca secara optimis untuk JK-Win.

Kalau tidak ada peristiwa luar biasa, dan tak terkendali, kemungkinan JK akan naik, secara optimis, menjadi 20%.

Download RILIS SURVEI LSI : RELEASE SURVEI LSI 24 JUNI 2009.pdf

Hospitalized Iranians Seized

(CNN) -- Iranians wounded during protests are being seized at hospitals by members of an Islamic militia, an Amnesty International official told CNN.

"The Basijis are waiting for them," said Banafsheh Akhlaghi, western regional director of the human rights group, referring to the government's paramilitary arm that has cracked down on protesters during the violent aftermath of the June 12 presidential election.

Amnesty International has collected accounts from people who have left Iran and expatriates with relatives there who say the Basij has prohibited medical professionals from getting identification information from wounded demonstrators who check in, Akhlaghi said on Saturday. They are also not allowed to ask how the injuries happened, and relatives are hard pressed to find the wounded.

Once the patients are treated, the militia removes them from the hospital to an undisclosed location, she said.

Iran has restricted international news agencies, including CNN, from reporting inside the Islamic republic. However, CNN has received similar accounts, including that of a woman who arrived in the United States from Iran with a broken ankle and thumb. Watch reports of the crackdown on protesters at their homes »

The woman, who didn't want to be identified for fear of her safety, said she was injured in a rally, but was too scared to go to a hospital. Instead, a doctor came to her home to treat her.

"The point is, when they are being taken to the hospital they don't actually get there," her friend who accompanied her told CNN last week. "Just like the reporters are being told not to report what they really see. Hospitals, administrative levels, are being told to stay out of the public because they're saying you're accusing the regime of being hostile."

Amnesty International is also reporting the detention of at least 70 scholars and eight politicians -- most from former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami's administration -- in addition to several opposition activists and international journalists.

More than two weeks into turmoil, Iran's leaders turned up the heat Friday as a high-ranking cleric warned protesters that they would be punished "firmly" and shown no mercy.

"Rioters and those who mastermind the unrest must know the Iranian nation will not give in to pressure and accept the nullification of the election results," said Ayatollah Ahmed Khatami during Friday prayers in Tehran, according to Iran's state-run Press TV.

"I ask the Judiciary to firmly deal with these people and set an example for everyone," Khatami said.

Khatami also blamed demonstrators for the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who emerged as a powerful symbol of opposition after her death a week ago was captured on a cell phone video. Khatami said the foreign media had used Neda for propaganda purposes.

Human Rights Watch, citing interviews with people in Iran, said Friday the Basij is carrying out brutal nighttime raids, destroying property in private homes and beating civilians in an attempt to stop nightly rooftop chants of "Allahu Akbar" (God is great).

The nighttime chanting is emblematic of the protests 30 years ago during the Iranian revolution, which toppled the monarchy of the shah.

"While most of the world's attention is focused on the beatings in the streets of Iran during the day, the Basiji are carrying out brutal raids on people's apartments during the night," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director for Human Rights Watch.

Residents from northern Tehran neighborhoods told Human Rights Watch that the Basij fired live rounds into the air, in the direction of buildings from which they believed the chants were sounding.

Basij members kicked down doors and "when they entered the homes, they beat" people, a resident said.

The rights group said it had collected similar accounts of violence from several other neighborhoods. Such accounts also are consistent with numerous accounts CNN has received of nighttime roundups of opposition activists and international journalists from their homes. Amateur videos sent to CNN also show members of the Basij, wearing plain shirts and pants and wielding clubs and hoses, dispersing protesters and beating a handful of Iranians at a time.

Unrest in Iran erupted after the presidential elections in which hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner. Ahmadinejad's chief rival, Mir Hossein Moussavi, called the results fraudulent and has asked for a cancellation of the vote. Watch how Mideast cartoonists are capturing the unrest »

Members of Iran's National Security Council have told Moussavi that his repeated demands for the annulment are "illogical and unethical," the council's deputy head told the government-run Iranian Labor News Agency.

On Saturday Ahmadinejad slammed U.S. President Barack Obama, a day after Obama labeled as "outrageous" violence against demonstrators disputing election results.

"Didn't he say that he was after change?" Ahmadinejad asked Iranian judiciary officials in a speech. "Why did he interfere? Why did he utter remarks irrespective of norms and decorum?"

The National Security Council, which includes dozens of political leaders, assists Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's unelected supreme leader. Together, they set the parameters of regional and foreign policies, including relations with Western powers, and the country's nuclear programs.

The Guardian Council, which approves all candidates running for office and verifies election results, has declared that there will be no annulment of the votes. However, it has reminded opposition candidates they have until Sunday to lodge any further complaints about the vote.

The Way We Live Now - The Overextended Family -

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

I would never have pegged my parents as early adopters. At 79 and 82, they are, like most people their age, blissfully uninterested in technology. To them, a BlackBerry is a late-summer fruit; tweeting is something a bird does. So I was unprepared when they called to tell me about their thrilling new discovery: Skype, an online service we could use to video chat. It’s free, my mom explained, eagerly. All we’d have to do is get something put on our computers (translation: download a program) and they would be able to talk to their 5-year-old granddaughter face to face! We could leave the gizmo on all the time, my dad suggested, and they could watch her go through her day. “Maybe you could bring it to her school,” he added, only half-joking. “We could see her classroom!”

Now, I like my parents. A lot. I really do. That’s why I make the 1,500-mile trip to visit them three or four times a year. I did not, however, spend the bulk of my adult life perfecting the fine art of establishing boundaries only to have them toppled by the click of a mouse. If I wanted them to have unfettered access to my life, I wouldn’t have put the “keep out” sign on my room at age 10. I would have lived at home through college. I would have bought the house next door to them in Minneapolis and made them an extra set of keys.

Even they might have found that a little extreme.

But the mere existence of video chat forces me to lay down a whole new set of rules and to rethink, yet again, the line between inclusive and intrusive, the balance between their yearning to shrink the distance between us and my need for limits — something I thought we resolved decades ago to our mutual satisfaction.

So I did what any sensible adult child would do. I stalled.

“Gee,” I said, “setting that up seems awfully complicated. I’m not sure I’d know how to do it.”

o Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, those that result in T.M.I. and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love.

I may curse e-mail for destroying my workday, for turning me into a lab rat on a drug unable to stop clicking on “send-receive.” Yet it has been a godsend in my relationship with my mom: her hearing is severely impaired, much beyond help from aids or amplification, making phone conversations frustrating. E-mail has allowed us to “talk” again more fully, to share complex thoughts and feelings. We sometimes correspond five or six times a day.

Likewise, digital cameras are a boon: the near-instant photos I send to my folks — my daughter’s school play or maiden bicycle voyage — are truly the next-best thing to being there. Each technology strengthens our bond, but each also preserves my privacy. I’m in touch more often than ever before but entirely on my schedule. I manage the flow of information. I set the terms of my self-presentation. Everyone wins.

Apple hints at something similar in one of its “there’s an app for that” iPhone ads, demonstrating how, with the flick of a finger, you can turn an incriminating snapshot into “at least one photo you can show your parents.” The message is that this achieves the elusive balance between access and control in personal communication. But I wonder. Cellphones may be smart, but they’re also tricky. On one hand, you don’t have to answer them if you are, say, in a crowded cafe (and oh so very often, I wish people wouldn’t) but the assumption has become that you will. Depending on your viewpoint, perpetual availability to everyone you know can be a comfort or a shackle, can intensify closeness or subvert it. One of my brothers grabs his cellphone before heading out for his morning run in case his wife or kids want to reach him. My other brother considers that excessive. Let’s just say that it is best to draw the curtain on that dinner-table debate.

The very technology with which we choose to communicate in a relationship has become a barometer of our willingness to reveal ourselves within it. Racy photos, amorous texts and nonstop Skyping may be just the thing for lovers who are separated during the giddy days of new romance. At the same time, all that virtual togetherness may overaccelerate a courtship. There is something to be said for the slow burn, for anticipation over immediacy. I’m relieved not to be single in a time when you can flirt, fall in love, sext and break up with a guy without ever so much as meeting for coffee. And, really, what is more erotic, more personal, more potentially vulnerable than handwriting on a page? My husband won my heart by sending a witty postcard from a film shoot in Hawaii. No return address, no way for me to respond at all, let alone instantly in three platforms. These days, it seems, the only time we put pen to paper is when someone has died.

Every evolution in telecommunication has been greeted with ambivalence. Critics of the early telephone warned that eliminating the physical presence from conversation would increase isolation and undermine the family. Picture phones embody the future in dystopian and utopian sci-fi alike: Heywood Floyd uses one in “2001: A Space Odyssey”; ditto George of “The Jetsons.” When AT&T unveiled a test model at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, visitors lined up for a chance to talk to a stranger at Disneyland. Even Lady Bird Johnson gave it a whirl in Washington. In 1970, the picture phone was introduced for commercial use; the product tanked. Part of it was the expense — a three-minute call between New York and Chicago on the original version cost $27. But there was another reason: Who would want callers to know you were leafing through magazines or never made your bed or were trimming your toenails in the all-together? No one, that’s who.

Video chat, while obviously cheaper, would seem to have the same skewed ratio: too much access, too little control. But that’s speaking from the standpoint of a daughter. My perspective shifts significantly — as it does on so many subjects — when I mull this one over as a mother. It’s one thing to consider how much about me my parents have a right to know; it’s another to contemplate how much about my daughter I have a right to know — or even want to know.

I have friends who scroll through their teenagers’ text messages every night. They say it’s for their children’s protection, but to me it just seems the high-tech equivalent of picking the lock on a diary (something I know my mother never did, because if she had, I’d still be grounded). Their children don’t seem to mind the breach of trust. Maybe that’s because privacy is as foreign to them as analog television. Or because they’ve grown up far more tethered than any previous generation to their parents’ watchful gaze. It’s curious that today’s parents, who in their youth were so adamant about their own independence, are so lousy at fostering it in their progeny, even after the children leave home.

When I took off for college, I called my parents once a week, which was standard. They never saw my dorm room, didn’t meet my friends, had no concept of my schedule. It was My Space — the old-fashioned kind. Has cheaper and more plentiful technology made the difference, or is it something else? According to Quantcast, a service that analyzes Web site traffic, Skype users typically fall into one or more of four groups: white, male, between 18 and 34, and the “less affluent” — which in this case, probably indicates still in school. It could be such lads Skype only one another, but I doubt it. If they’re indeed checking in with Mom, I hope they at least cover up the beer-pong poster first.

Maybe by the time my daughter leaves for college, I, too, will wish for a 24-hour-a-day video feed (or, by then, perhaps, a continuous holograph). Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll be relieved not to see into her room, not to have to tell her for the 832nd time to clean it up. Maybe I’ll remind myself that magic mirrors are best left back in “Romper Room,” that, at some point, she has to figure out how to be her without me. She will need to cut the invisible cord — the phone cord, that is — and I will have to let her.

Doubtless, if circumstance takes her far away from home, my sense of the distance between us will be different from hers. That measure will change yet again — for both of us — should she have children, as it has, since her birth, for my parents and me. The truth is, I consider their tie to my daughter to be as precious as they do; the technology I use, I realize, may no longer reflect that.

So, I agreed to give video chat a try. We downloaded Skype and set a time to connect. They rang. I answered. My daughter waved. And then . . . we stared at each other. Short silences that seem natural on the phone become terribly awkward on video. Suddenly I understood why slumber-party confessions always came after lights were out, why children tend to admit the juicy stuff to the back of your head while you’re driving, why psychoanalysts stay out of a patient’s sightline. There is something exquisitely intimate about the disembodied voice. In my concern over letting my parents too far in, creating a claustrophobic closeness, I hadn’t considered that video chat might do just the opposite.

“Um,” I finally admitted, “I don’t have anything to say.”

That was a few weeks ago; we haven’t tried again since. It looks as if we’ll be among the two-thirds of Skype members who, according to Quantcast estimates, are passers-by who use the service no more than once a month.

“I think I’d rather e-mail,” my mom wrote me.

“Me, too,” I shot back, attaching a few photos of kindergarten graduation before hitting “send.”

Her response, which came instantly, made me smile: “Oh, Pegs,” she wrote. “Thanks so much for the pictures. It was exactly as if we were there with you!”

Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer, is the author of “Waiting for Daisy,” a memoir.

Practical Traveler - The Soaring Cost of Car Rentals

By MICHELLE HIGGINS

WHILE the global recession has sent prices plummeting on airfares, hotels and cruises, it is having the opposite effect on rental cars.

In May, the average rate for a weekly airport rental of a compact car booked seven days in advance was $345.99, up a whopping 73 percent compared with $199.65 for the same month last year, according to the Abrams Consulting Group, based in Purchase, N.Y., which tracks rental rates.

In mid-June, weekly airport rental rates for a compact car averaged $347.44, compared with $210.38 a year ago — a 65 percent jump. “There’s a lot of sticker shock,” said Neil Abrams, president of the consulting group. “People don’t understand. The economy is caving around them,” he said, adding, “so how is it possible that rates are as high as they are for car rentals?”

The reason is basic supply and demand. Although demand for car rentals is down — by roughly 15 percent, according to Mr. Abrams — rental agencies have cut their fleets by even more, essentially creating their own shortage and jacking up prices.

To trim fleets, companies have been selling cars to the used car market and holding off on buying new ones. That doesn’t necessarily mean renters are getting clunkers, but it’s not unusual anymore to see a car with 30,000 miles on it. The average age of a rental car is now about 11 months, compared with about nine-and-a-half months a year ago, Mr. Abrams said.

All of this has changed the booking game for consumers. With many hotel rooms and airline seats empty, travelers have become accustomed to booking trips at the last minute. But with car rentals, that strategy won’t work. A procrastinator risks paying an exorbitant rate for the last car on the lot, assuming there is a car left. Many rental agencies in Manhattan, for example, have been sold out for the busy Fourth of July weekend for weeks.

Besides starting your search early, there are several ways to find a cheaper car. Off-airport locations are typically cheaper than airport locations, which tend to tack on fees that can raise the final price by 30 percent or more. According to an Expedia search in mid-June, an economy car from Enterprise Rent-a-Car from Seattle-Tacoma airport was $110.31 a day, compared with $42.90 for a similar car from the same company in downtown Seattle.

Travelers willing to go farther can save even more. For a 38-day road trip from Portland to Michigan, Ed Immel is saving about $800 by not renting from the airport or even downtown Portland. Instead, he is going to an Enterprise branch in the bedroom community of Beaverton, Ore., about 25 miles outside of Portland. “My advice,” said Mr. Immel, a retired rail planner from Portland, “is to take the airport train downtown and pick up the rental car there or go further.”

Deals can also be found by upgrading. With demand for fuel-efficient cars particularly high, travelers can sometimes find a better deal by booking larger, roomier vehicles. A recent Expedia search, for example, found a full-size van for $90.42 a day at the Budget Rent a Car in Long Beach, Calif., compared with $97.86 for a standard car. While the added fuel costs (not to mention larger carbon footprint) might erase the savings, the extra space and comfort might prevent World War III between siblings in the back seat.

Also, look beyond national chains like Avis or Hertz, to the hundreds of independent car rental agencies. Because of lower operating costs and smaller overhead, mom-and-pop agencies, which can be found at sites like CarRentals.com and CarRentalExpress.com, typically offer rates between 15 and 30 percents less than national agencies.

Willing to gamble? Consider Web sites like Priceline.com and Hotwire.com, which offer deep discounts to travelers willing to be locked into a preset price before finding out the rental car company.

Another option: virtual coupons. Sites like FatWallet.com and CouponWinner.com list discount codes for car rentals, or type in the name of a car rental company and “coupon code” into Google to see what turns up. Good deals also show up on airline Web sites under mileage partner offers. For example, Delta is offering up to 20 percent off with the discount code CDP 165385, and double miles on Hertz rentals in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada. The code brought the weekly rental of a Toyota Prius from Newark Airport in mid-July down to $503.90 from $685.05 — a 26 percent saving.

If you don’t have the time to seek out such discounts, Steve Ellis can do it for you. After his wife pointed out his uncanny knack for finding rental deals, Mr. Ellis, who is a business adviser and frequent traveler, created RentalCarMagic.com to allow customers to pay for his deal-sniffing services. The site, which charges $14.95 to $49.95, sends back a quote in a day or two.

Chris McGinnis, editor of The Ticket, a subscription newsletter for frequent travelers, recently tried RentalCarMagic.com for a trip to Hawaii. After paying a $30 fee, he said, the service saved him $54 on a convertible from Alamo Rent a Car. Though he found the process slightly cumbersome — he still had to go to the rental company’s Web site to book the deal using the discount code provided by Rental Car Magic — he noted in his newsletter that in the end, “it saved us more than we were able to save ourselves.”

African Roots Still Run Deep For Blacks on Mexican Coast

By Alexis Okeowo
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, June 28, 2009

You have to really want to go to Chacahua. The island is nestled along Mexico's Costa Chica, a 200-mile-long strip that straddles the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero on the Pacific Ocean; the nearest hub is Puerto Escondido, a developed beach in Oaxaca.

After your flight from Mexico City or Cancun, the easy part of the trip is over. From Puerto Escondido, you need to reach El Zapotalito, a tiny spot on the coast. The land journey can be done by private taxi or, for the braver, by public transportation. From El Zapotalito you can take a boat to Chacahua.

Luckily, I did want to go. I was on the hunt not only for an idyllic beach getaway, but also for a hidden group of people who call themselves Mexicanos negros (black Mexicans). The end of slavery after Mexico's independence from Spain left black Mexicans throughout the country, but today black towns remain only in remote areas. The African part of Mexican history was neglected by the new Mexican leadership, leaving slave descendants to wonder about their origins.

Yet with the rise of tourism to Costa Chica in recent years, modernity has slowly come to the fishing villages that rest on a sultry, stunning stretch of the Pacific coast. In Chacahua, virgin beaches, glittering lagoons and fresh-seafood-only menus have created an alluring destination that is still little known -- much like its inhabitants.

In Puerto Escondido I squeezed into a colectivo (public van) headed for Rio Grande, not far from El Zapotalito. As the hour-long ride went by, the crowded beaches gave way to lush, neon-green grass; the sun seemed to get brighter and hotter, the waters bluer, the people browner with kinkier hair.

In Rio Grande, I made my way to a taxi stand to cram into another shared car that would take me to the boats. As I walked with the driver to his cab, he smiled down at me. "Hermanas. You two could be sisters," he said, pointing back at the taxi stand. There, a black Mexican woman who was staffing the stall watched me with curiosity.

Chacahua is divided in half by a series of lagoons filled with exotic birds. The surroundings make for a gorgeous ride whether you hire a private boat or take a public ferry to the island. The boat can take you straight to town or you can disembark, as I did the first time, on the island's edge.

I then hopped onto a pickup truck, along with other Chacahuans, for a half-hour's ride on rocky sand past scraggly bushes and cactuses into the village. Once we maneuvered around rams and cows that had decided to congregate in the middle of the road, I had finally reached my destination -- three exhilarating hours after leaving Puerto Escondido. My escapade had begun.

"They say a boat full of slaves, with dark skin like me, was headed for South America," Omar Corcuera told me over lunch the next day at Restaurant Punto de Quiebra. The young surfer, with deep-brown skin and a shock of naturally blond-brown hair, was recounting the far-fetched tale of a wrecked ship whose survivors populated the shore; I would hear it more than once.

What historians know is that the black Mexicans on the Pacific coast hail from the African slaves who were brought by the Spanish to work on cattle ranches during the 16th and 17th centuries. (On the Gulf coast, slaves were mainly deployed on sugar plantations.) Overall, the Spanish brought more than 200,000 Africans to Mexico for slave labor. The residents of Chacahua say they do not know much about their history, and different tales have gotten jumbled together over time.

The community of black, white and mestizo Mexicans (those of mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage) on this island numbers about 700 and has been around for some two centuries.

Nevertheless, Omar said, "I feel that I am African and Mexican."

Nearby, Paulina Marcial, scooping up her curly-haired daughter from an impromptu card game, added: "I just think of myself as Mexican. I don't know anyone anywhere else." Patting her Afro, the petite cook then walked off with a wave.

At least 10 sand-floor, door-less restaurants are on the beach, each with multicolored hammocks swinging in the breeze. At Restaurant Punto de Quiebra, fresh seafood meals fetched $5.50 or less, and breakfasts were all under $3, notably a plate of huge enchiladas with shredded cheese, green tomatoes, chili and cilantro for $2.30. A couple of yards down is Restaurant Siete Mares, where the bungalows are the beach's best, with airy, colorful cabanas.

At least seven of the restaurants have bungalows for rent. On my first night at Punto de Quiebra, the feisty housekeeper, Modesta, led me to my room, demanding to know where I was from and marveling over our shared skin color. I tell her that my parents are from West Africa, but that I was born and raised in the United States. Each day after, I would wave to her as I caught her on a hammock, lazily smoking a cigarette.

At Siete Mares I had a tall tumbler of freshly squeezed orange juice with the owner, Luis Carlos Gutierrez, and Rey Ramirez Gopar, the owner of Cabanas Los Almendros, which is near the lagoons. Various people stopped by our table as the day wore on, first American and European tourists, and then a talkative black Mexican teacher named Angel Saguilan, who offered to buy me a beer.

"They call this Little Africa," Angel said, gesturing to the pale sand, illuminated by a pink setting sun. Children in a dazzling rainbow of colors shrieked as they played volleyball nearby.

"I feel Afro-American more than I feel Mexican," Angel went on to say.

He explained that because his dark skin makes him stand out in Mexico, other Mexicans often joke that he is really from Brazil or Cuba. Angel tells me that he knows he is different from non-black Mexicans, but he is just not sure exactly how.

I later walked down the path into the village, passing by Rey's Cabanas Los Almendros. The gruffly amusing Rey could usually be found drinking a beer at one thatch-roofed structure or the other on the beach, but he and his wife, Eva, built Los Almendros out of love for Chacahua, and the devotion is clear in the massive dark-wood, blue-painted bungalows with glassless windows facing the lagoons. Serene artwork decorates the walls of the rooms.

As I continued into town, I came across two men named Juan.

"Prima!" called out Juan Ortiz. I was having a conversation with another Chacahuan named Juan, but as soon as Ortiz saw me across a construction yard, he dropped his wheelbarrow, yelled the Spanish word for "cousin" and rushed over.

Before I could react, the stout fisherman with burnished brown skin had scooped my face in his hands, kissed me on the cheek and was leading me to his boat for a ride on the lagoons. "Everyone is family in Chacahua," he said.

Chacahua Lagoons National Park is one of Mexico's hidden gems. The lagoons allow for not only a breathtaking ride, but also prime bird-watching. The calm, soothing waters are a welcome contrast to the beach's buoyant waves, which attract surfers from Mexico and abroad. At the helm of his speedboat, Ortiz paused at a dock to take a family to the other side of the lagoons, and then told me what he knew about his community's identity.

"We are Mexicans, but black Mexicans," Ortiz said. "We still have traditions of the Africans, in costumes, in dances." He added that relations between black Mexicans and white and mestizo Mexicans are pleasant. Black Mexicans, he said, often advocate intermarriage in the hope their children will better integrate into society. But as for Mexico's politicians, "The government has forgotten about us." The Afro-Mexican communities are some of the poorest and most rural in the country.

As we docked and the family paid him, Juan pulled the father in for a warm handshake. "Now you know my name is Juan Ortiz, not just 'El Moreno' [the Brown-Skinned Man]," he told them with a laugh.

I decided to head back to my favorite hammock with my book, already planning what kind of empanadas I would order from the pink-frocked Morena who wanders on the beach.

Alexis Okeowo is a freelance writer based in Mexico City.

In Tehran, a Mood of Melancholy Descends

By NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN — An eerie stillness has settled over this normally frenetic city.

In less anxious times, the streets are clogged with honking cars and cranky commuters. But on Saturday, drives that normally last 45 minutes took just a third of the time, and shops were mainly empty. Even Tehran’s beauty salons, normally hives of activity, had few customers; at one, bored workers fussed over one another’s hair.

People who did venture out said they were dispirited by the upheaval that has shaken this country over the two weeks since the contested presidential election, and worried they would get caught up in the brutal government crackdown of dissent that has followed.

Even in areas of the city not known for liberal politics, the sense of frustration, and despair, was palpable. Those who accuse the government of stealing the election said they had lost the hope for change they had during the protests that drew tens of thousands of people into Tehran’s streets. But others also confessed to feeling depressed.

One staunch supporter of the incumbent president, who the government says won in a landslide, said he was distressed by the street protests and the crackdown that, by official counts, claimed more than 20 lives.

“People have been hurt on both sides, and this is disappointing,” said the man, who sells light bulbs in Imam Khomeini Square. “We need to build our country, not engage in these kinds of clashes.”

By late last week, the country’s leaders had succeeded in quelling the massive demonstrations that challenged their legitimacy. But the widespread feeling of discontent — even among those who had no part in the protests — was likely to pose a lingering challenge to leaders’ attempts to move quickly past the vote and return life to normal.

There were further signs on Saturday that the opposition was running out of options in its attempts to nullify the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which has been confirmed by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Expediency Council, headed by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, issued a statement that called the supreme leader’s decision the final word on the election, although it did say the government should investigate voting complaints “properly and thoroughly.”

Mr. Rafsanjani has been one of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s strongest critics and one of the most ardent supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s chief rival in the election. But after the vote, the former president had been quiet, and many Iranians had hoped he would broker some compromise behind the scenes.

And although an opposition Web site carried a new message from Mr. Moussavi, the first in several days, he did not present any new plans for resistance. He instead reiterated demands for a new election, which the government has rejected.

At the same time, those in the opposition were increasingly fearful for the hundreds of government critics who have been jailed.

Amid rumors that the government was beginning to force confessions — a tactic leaders have used in the past to tarnish dissidents’ reputations — the IRNA news agency reported that a jailed journalist had said reformist politicians were to blame for the recent protests.

The journalist, Amir-Hossein Mahdavi, was the editor of a reformist newspaper close to Mr. Moussavi that was shut down before the election.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, responded Saturday to statements by President Obama, who made his most critical remarks of the Iranian leadership on Friday, when he called the government’s crackdown “outrageous” and said the prospects for a dialogue with Iran had been dampened.

Mr. Ahmadinejad suggested that Washington’s stance could imperil Mr. Obama’s aim of improving relations, according to the ISNA news agency.

“Didn’t he say that he was after change?” Mr. Ahmadinejad asked. “Why did he interfere?”

On Saturday, security forces were still on the streets, but uniformed guards had replaced the most feared forces, the Basij paramilitary members, who were involved in many of the beatings and shootings of demonstrators, and the hard-line Revolutionary Guards in their camouflage outfits.

The shops on Baharestan Square, which was the scene of the latest clashes on Wednesday, and on Haft-e Tir Square, where the paramilitary forces attacked people a day earlier, were open Saturday. But shopkeepers said business was limping.

“We used to sell nearly $2,000 a day,” said a woman at an Islamic coat shop on Haft-e Tir Square. “But since the election, our sales have dropped to $900 a day.” She gave only her first name, Mahtab, citing fear of retribution.

Like many others who spoke, Mahtab said she was depressed by what she had seen since the election. She said that she was not a political person and had not even voted June 12, but that the repression on the streets was “beyond belief.”

“I am disgusted, and wish I could leave this country,” she said.

She said she had seen a paramilitary officer outside the shop hit a middle-aged woman in the head so hard that blood streamed down the woman’s forehead.

When Mahtab and her colleagues tried to leave the shop to go home, she said, the forces began clubbing them while shouting the names of Shiite saints. “They do this under the name of religion,” she said. “Which religion allows this?”

Daily life has also been affected.

Although people are still going to work, some parents have been reluctant to take their children to day care, fearing that unrest on the streets would prevent them from picking up their children. University exams have been postponed and many families have traded parties for small get-togethers, where the election is a constant topic of conversation.

“People are depressed, and they feel they have been lied to, robbed of their rights and now are being insulted,” said Nassim, a 56-year-old hairdresser. “It is not just a lie; it’s a huge one. And it doesn’t end.”

Unlikely Ally for Residents of West Bank

By ETHAN BRONNER

SAFA, West Bank — Ezra Nawi was in his element. Behind the wheel of his well-worn jeep one recent Saturday morning, working two cellphones in Arabic as he bounded through the terraced hills and hardscrabble villages near Hebron, he was greeted warmly by Palestinians near and far.

Watching him call for an ambulance for a resident and check on the progress of a Palestinian school being built without an Israeli permit, you might have thought him a clan chief. Then noticing the two Israeli Army jeeps trailing him, you might have pegged him as an Israeli occupation official handling Palestinian matters.

But Mr. Nawi is neither. It is perhaps best to think of him as the Robin Hood of the South Hebron hills, an Israeli Jew helping poor locals who love him, and thwarting settlers and soldiers who view him with contempt. Those army jeeps were not watching over him. They were stalking him.

Since the Israeli left lost so much popular appeal after the violent Palestinian uprising of 2000 and the Hamas electoral victory three years ago, its activists tend to be a rarefied bunch — professors of Latin or Sanskrit, and translators of medieval poetry. Mr. Nawi, however, is a plumber. And unlike the intellectuals of European origin with whom he spends most Saturdays, he is from an Iraqi Jewish family.

“My mother gave birth to me in Jerusalem when she was 14,” said Mr. Nawi, who is 57 and one of five siblings. “So my grandmother raised me. And she spoke to me in Arabic.”

His family has trouble understanding his priorities. His mother says she thinks he is wasting his time. And many Israelis, when told of his work, wonder why he is not helping his own. Mr. Nawi has an answer.

“I don’t consider my work political,” he said between phone calls as he drove. “I don’t have a solution to this dispute. I just know that what is going on here is wrong. This is not about ideology. It is about decency.”

For his activist colleagues, Mr. Nawi’s instinctual connection to the Palestinians is valuable.

“Ezra knows Palestinians better than any of us,” said Amiel Vardi, a professor who works closely with him. “This is not only because of the language, but because he gains their confidence the minute he starts talking with them. He has all sorts of intuitions as to what should be done, what are the internal relations — things we hardly ever notice.”

The difficulties of Palestinian life in the West Bank have been well documented: Israeli military checkpoints, a rising separation barrier and Israeli settlers. But in this area, the problems are more acute. The Palestinians, many of them Bedouin, are exceptionally poor, and the land they bought decades ago is under threat by a group of unusually aggressive local settlers. The settlers have been filmed beating up Palestinians. Settlers have been killed by Palestinians. But Mr. Nawi said that the law inevitably sided with the Israelis, and that occupation meant there could be no equity.

“The settlers keep the Palestinian farmers from their land by harassing them, and then after several years they say the land has not been farmed so by law it is no longer theirs,” Mr. Nawi said. “We are only here to stop that from happening.”

That is not the view of the settlers.

“He is a troublemaker,” asserted Yehoshua Mor-Yosef, a spokesman for Israeli settler communities in the area. “It’s true that from time to time there is a problem of some settlers coming out of their settlements to cause problems. But people like Nawi don’t want a solution. Their whole aim is to cause trouble.”

True or not, Mr. Nawi is now in trouble. Having spent several short stints in jail for his activism over the years, he now faces the prospect of a long one. He is due to be sentenced Wednesday for assaulting an Israeli policeman two years ago during a confrontation over an attempt to demolish Palestinians’ shacks on disputed land on the West Bank. The policeman said Mr. Nawi struck him during that encounter. Mr. Nawi denied it, but in March a judge convicted him.

What is left of the Israeli left is rallying around him, arguing that Mr. Nawi is a known pacifist who would not have raised his hand against anyone.

“Since I’ve known the man for decades and seen him in action in many extreme situations, I’m certain that the charge is untrue,” David Shulman, a Hebrew University professor and peace activist, wrote in the newspaper Haaretz. Of Mr. Nawi, he added, “He is a man committed, in every fiber of his being, to nonviolent protest against the inequities of the occupation.”

Mr. Nawi attributes his activism to two things: as a teenager, his family lived next door to the leader of Israel’s Communist Party, Reuven Kaminer, who influenced him. And he is gay.

“Being gay has made me understand what it is like to be a despised minority,” Mr. Nawi said.

Several years ago, he had a relationship with a Palestinian from the West Bank and ended up being convicted on charges of allowing his companion to live illegally in Israel. His companion was jailed for months.

Mr. Nawi said harassment against him had come in many forms. Settlers shout vicious antigay epithets. His plumbing business has been audited, and he was handed a huge tax bill that he said he did not deserve. He is certain that his phone calls are monitored. And those army jeeps are never far behind.

He is not optimistic about his coming sentencing, although he is planning an appeal. And he says the Israeli news media have lost interest in the work he and his fellow activists do. But he does not stop.

“I’m here to change reality,” he said. “The only Israelis these people know are settlers and soldiers. Through me they know a different Israeli. And I’ll keep coming until I know that the farmers here can work their fields.”