South Africa’s Poor Demand Basic Services - NYTimes.com

By BARRY BEARAK

SIYATHEMBA, South Africa — This country’s rituals of protest most often call for the burning of tires, the barricading of streets and the throwing of rocks. So when the municipal mayor here went to address the crowd after three days of such agitation, the police thought it best to take him into the stadium in a blast-resistant armored vehicle.

Chastened by the continuing turmoil, the mayor, Mabalane Tsotetsi, known as Lefty, penitently explained that all of the protesters’ complaints would be given his full attention. But by then official promises were a deflated currency, and rocks and bottles were again flying as he retreated.

The reasons for this community’s wrath — unleashed first in late July and again briefly a month later — were ruefully familiar to many South Africans. “Water, electricity, unemployment: nothing has gotten better,” said Lifu Nhlapo, 26, a leader of the protests here in Siyathemba, a township 50 miles east of Johannesburg. “We feel an anger, and when we are ignored, what else is there to do but take to the streets?”

Civil unrest among this nation’s poor has recently gotten worldwide attention, and is often portrayed as unhappiness with South Africa’s new president, Jacob Zuma. Actually, these so-called service delivery protests have gone on with regularity for a long time. They vary in intensity — mild, medium and hot — and their frequency seems to rise and fall without a predictable pattern.

Oddly enough, the protests can be seen as a measure of progress as well as frustration. Since the arrival of democracy 15 years ago, the percentages of households with access to piped water, a flush toilet or a connection to the power grid have notably increased. Those people left waiting are often angry, and so far their ire has not usually been directed at the president — who has been able to use the protests to his political advantage — but at municipal officials they consider uncaring, incompetent and corrupt.

“No one wants to be worse off than their neighbor,” said Kevin Allan, managing director of Municipal IQ, a company that monitors the performance of local government. “People get impatient.”

The places most ripe for unrest are neither the poorest communities nor those with the longest backlog in setting up services, he said. Most commonly, the protests are rooted in informal settlements that have sprung up near urban areas, where the poor who do not receive government services rub up against the poor who do.

Whatever the causes for the protests, the governing African National Congress appears to take them quite seriously. Party leaders have been dispatched to hot spots, where they usually end up investigating their fellow party members. Local government, like national government, is largely dominated by the A.N.C.

In Siyathemba, the emissary from on high was Mr. Zuma himself. On the afternoon of Aug. 4, his helicopter set down on a rocky soccer field, with bodyguards and a BMW waiting. He eventually proceeded to the town of Balfour, the seat of municipal government. Mayor Tsotetsi, at home at the time, rushed back to the office to meet his unannounced visitor. Commentators had a good laugh about that, presuming the mayor a goldbrick who likes to knock off early.

“There is no place that will be hidden from me,” Mr. Zuma announced, leaving the impression he was now a sort of caped superhero who would pop up wherever malingerers were not earning their government paychecks.

Though the president also denounced lawbreaking by protesters, his visit seemed an endorsement to those here who had vented their anger. “Zuma agrees with us, that all these mayors and councilors who are not performing have to go,” said Zakhele Maya, 26, another leader of the demonstrations.

Siyathemba has a population of about 6,000 and an unemployment rate of 82 percent, more than triple the nation’s rate, according to official statistics. Most here live in shacks of corrugated metal, the roofs kept in place with strategically placed rocks. Many of the dwellings sag in the middle as if they were melting in the hot sun.

Clusters of shacks here look about the same, but some are settlements that have been “formalized,” which means that the hovels, however dilapidated, have electricity inside and a water tap and flush toilet nearby. Those people living in communities without this imprimatur must light their homes with kerosene or paraffin and wait in lines, pail in hand, at a single communal spigot.

“This is no way to live,” said Mercy Mbiza, 38. “We have to dig a pit for a toilet, and when it’s full, we dig another. They tell us we are on a waiting list to get services. Whether I will die first, I don’t know.”

Rumors — true or not — are dangerous combustibles in places like this. People are suspicious that money meant for them is being stolen or wasted by the big shots in Balfour. Some goings-on simply make no sense.

For instance, Arlene Moloi’s house has four pillars and a roof and only emptiness in between. The municipality paid someone to construct it in 1996, but the builder suddenly disappeared after starting the job.

“The officials tell me they are waiting for the same man to come back and finish,” said Ms. Moloi, a 54-year-old widow. “But it already has been 13 years.”

The Siyathemba protests began with a meeting of disgruntled young people, some of them members of political youth groups, others players on sports teams. They compiled a list of their many grievances. They wanted more water and electricity, yes. But they also wanted better roads, a local hospital and a police station. Beyond that, they wanted jobs.

This list of demands was left at the municipal hall in Balfour. “Some of these things — hospitals, police stations — these are matters to take up at the provincial level,” said the municipality’s spokesman, Mohlalefi Lebotha. “Where is the money for these things, not just to construct them but to sustain them?”

At first, Mr. Tsotetsi did not meet with the disgruntled. Nor did he call a special session of the municipal council as the protesters had demanded.

This slow, even indifferent response seemed to mock the petitioners’ seriousness. After a mass meeting on a Sunday, many protesters took to the streets. The police confronted them, relying on a rather indiscriminate spray of rubber bullets.

The crowd fought back, shouting “azikhwelwa,” meaning that everything must shut down: no one goes to work, no one attends school.

“People knew how to act from the days of the liberation struggle,” said Mr. Maya, the protest leader. “We sang the songs, telling those who are scared to step aside so the brave can move ahead and advance the struggle.

“In South Africa, the struggle is not yet over.”

Related articles by Zemanta

• S. Africa Embraces Report Critical of Health Policy (nytimes.com)
• Canada challenges SA refugee case (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Zuma calls for time as protests sweep the townships (guardian.co.uk)

A Global Surge in Tiny Loans Spurs Credit Bubble in a Slum

By KETAKI GOKHALE

RAMANAGARAM, India -- A credit crisis is brewing in "microfinance," the business of making the tiniest loans in the world.

Microlending fights poverty by helping poor people finance small businesses -- snack stalls, fruit trees, milk-producing buffaloes -- in slums and other places where it's tough to get a normal loan. But what began as a social experiment to aid the world's poorest has also shown it can turn a profit.

That has attracted private-equity funds and other foreign investors, who've poured billions of dollars over the past few years into microfinance world-wide.

As WSJ's Ketaki Gokhale reports, India's booming micro-loan industry could be headed for trouble as more people seek the loans just to pay the bills -- not start businesses.

The result: Today in India, some poor neighborhoods are being "carpet-bombed" with loans, says Rajalaxmi Kamath, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore who studies the issue. In India, microloans outstanding grew 72% in the year ended March 31, 2008, totaling $1.24 billion, according to Sa-Dhan, an industry association in New Delhi.

"We fear a bubble," says Jacques Grivel of the Luxembourg-based Finethic, a $100 million investment fund that focuses on Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia, though it has no exposure to India. "Too much money is chasing too few good candidates."

Here in Ramanagaram, a silk-making city in southern India, Zahreen Taj noticed the change. Suddenly, in the shantytown where she lives, lots of people wanted to loan her money. She borrowed $125 to invest in her husband's vegetable cart. Then she borrowed more.

"I took from one bank to pay the previous one. And I did it again," says Ms. Taj, 46 years old. In four years, she took a total of four loans from two microlenders in progressively larger amounts -- two for $209, another for $293, and then $356.

Related Articles

• For Global Investors, 'Microfinance' Funds Pay Off -- So Far
  Investing in funds that make small loans to third-world borrowers has been lucrative the past 12 months. But the weak global economy has some investors worried about trouble ahead.
• Group Borrowing Leads to Pressure
  Hasina Bano, a silk reeling factory worker, says the most worrisome aspect of microfinance is that a woman's debts are public knowledge.

Journal Community

• Vote: What is the overall effect of microfinance loans on people in developing nations?

At the height of her borrowing binge, she says, she bought a television set. The arrival of microfinance "increased our desires for things we didn't have," Ms. Taj says. "We all have dreams."

Today her house is bare except for a floor mat and a pile of kitchen utensils. By selling her TV, appliances and jewelry, she cut her debt to $94. That's equal to about a fourth of her annual income.

Around Ramanagaram, the silk-making city where Ms. Taj lives, the debt overload is stirring up social tension. Many borrowers complain that the loans' effective interest rates -- which can vary from 24% to 39% annually -- fuel a cycle of indebtedness.

In July, town authorities asked India's central bank to either cap those rates or revoke lenders' licenses. "Otherwise, the present situation may lead to a law-and-order problem in the district," wrote K.G. Jagdeesh, deputy commissioner for the city of Ramanagaram, in a letter to the central bank.

Alpana Killawala, a spokeswoman for the Reserve Bank of India, said in an email that the central bank doesn't as a practice cap interest rates for microlenders but does press them not to charge "excessive" rates.

Meanwhile, local mosque leaders have started telling people in the predominantly Muslim community to stop paying their loans. Borrowers have complied en masse.

The mosque leaders are also demanding that lenders give them an accounting of their finances. The lenders say they're not about to comply with that.

The repayment revolt has spread to other communities, including the nearby city of Channapatna, and could reach further across India, observers say.

"We are very worried about this," says Vijayalakshmi Das of FWWB India, a company that connects microlenders with financing from mainstream banks. "Risk management is not a strong point for the majority" of local microfinance providers, she adds. "Microfinance needs to learn a lesson."

Nationwide, average Indian household debt from microfinance lenders almost quintupled between 2004 and 2009, to about $135 from $27 or so, according to a survey by Sa-Dhan, the industry association. These sums are obviously tiny by global standards. But in rural India, the poorest often subsist on just a few dollars a week.

Some observers blame a fundamental shift in the microfinance business for feeding the problem. Traditionally, microlenders were nonprofits focused on community service. In recent years, however, many of the larger microlending firms have registered with the Indian central bank as a type of for-profit finance company. That places them under greater regulatory scrutiny, but also gives them wider access to funding.

This change opened the door to more private-equity money. Of the 54 private-equity deals (totaling $1.19 billion) in India's banking and finance sector in the past 18 months, microfinance accounted for 16 deals worth at least $245 million, according to Venture Intelligence, a Chennai-based private-equity research service.

The influx of private-equity cash is the latest sign of the global rise of microfinance, pioneered by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus decades ago. On Wednesday, Mr. Yunus, a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, was one of 16 people honored by President Barack Obama with the Medal of Freedom.

"We've seen a major mission drift in microfinance, from being a social agency first," says Arnab Mukherji, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, to being "primarily a lending agency that wants to maximize its profit."

Making loans in poorest India sounds inherently risky. But investors argue that the rural developing world has remained largely insulated from the global economic slump.

International private-equity funds started taking notice of Indian microfinance in March 2007. That's when Sequoia Capital, a venture-capital firm in Silicon Valley, participated in a $11.5 million share offering by SKS Microfinance Ltd. of Hyderabad, India, one of the world's largest microlenders.

"SKS showed the industry how to tap private equity to scale up," said Arun Natarajan of Venture Intelligence.

Numerous deals followed with investors including Boston-based Sandstone Capital, San Francisco-based Valiant Capital, and SVB India Capital Partners, an affiliate of Silicon Valley Bank.

As of last December, there were over 100 microfinance-investment funds globally with total estimated assets under management of $6.5 billion, according to the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, or CGAP, a research institute hosted at the World Bank.

Over the past year, investors have poured more than $1 billion into the largest microfinance funds managed by companies, a 30% increase. The extra financing will allow the industry to loan out 20% more this year than last, much of it to countries such as the Ukraine, Cambodia and Bosnia, CGAP says.

Here in Ramanagaram, Lalitha Sharma recalls when the first microfinance firm arrived seven years ago. Those were heady times for her fellow slum-dwellers: Money flowed freely. Field agents offered loans to people earning as little as $9 a month.

Ketaki Gokhale/The Wall Street Journal

Ketaki Gokhale/The Wall Street Journal

Lalitha Sharma, top, racked up 10 loans from the many microlenders who have set up shop in her slum over the past few years. Here she helps with her husband's snack stand. Like many of her neighbors in Ramanagaram, India, she can earn about $8 a week, on average, working in the city's silk factories, one of which is shown above.

They came to Ms. Sharma's door, too. She borrowed $126. Under the loan's terms, she said she would use it to finance a small business -- a snack stand she runs with her husband. Many microfinance providers require loans to be used to fund a business.

But Ms. Sharma, a 29-year-old mother of three, acknowledges she lied. "You have to mention a business to get a loan," she says. "There was no other way to get the money." She used it to pay overdue bills and to buy food for her family. Ms. Sharma earns $8 a week, on average, in a factory where she extracts silk thread from cocoons.

Over the next four years, she took nine more loans from three different lenders, in progressively larger sums of $209, $272, $335 and $390, according to lending records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. A spokesman for BSS Microfinance Private Ltd. of Bangalore, another of her lenders, declined to comment on her borrowing history, citing central-bank privacy rules.

This year, she took another $314 loan to pay for her brother-in-law's wedding, again saying the money would be used for business purposes. She also juggled loans from two other microlenders -- $115, $167 and $251 from the Bangalore lender Ujjivan, and $230 from Asmitha Microfin Ltd.

Ujjivan confirmed it issued three loans. An Asmitha official said he had a record of a loan to a Ramanagaram resident named Lalitha, but at a different address.

"I understand that it is credit, that you have to pay interest, and your debt grows," Ms. Sharma says. "But sometimes the problems we have seem like they can only be solved by taking another loan. One problem solved, another created."

Many of the problems in Indian microlending might sound familiar to students of the U.S. mortgage crisis, which was worsened by so-called "no-documentation" loans and by commission-paid brokers. Similarly in India, microlenders' field officers are often paid on commission, giving them financial incentive to issue more loans, according to Ms. Kamath.

Lenders are aware that applicants often lie on their paperwork, says Ujjivan's founder, Samit Ghosh. In fact, he says, Ujjivan's field staffers often know the real story. But his organization maintained a policy of "relying on the information from the customer, rather than our own market intelligence."

He says that policy will now change because of the trouble in Ramanagaram. The lender will "learn from the situation, so it won't happen again," he says.

It's tough to monitor how borrowers spend their money. Ujjivan used to perform regular "loan utilization checks," but stopped because it was so costly. Now it only checks in with people borrowing more than $310, Mr. Ghosh says.

BSS checks how loans are being spent a week after disbursing the money, and makes random house visits, according to S. Panchakshari, its operations manager. The company doesn't have the power to insist that borrowers not take loans from multiple lenders, he said in an email.

Lenders also tend to set up shop where others have already paved the way, causing saturation. There is a "follow-the-herd mentality," says Mr. Ghosh at Ujjivan. Microlenders "often go into towns where they see one or two others operating. That leaves vast chunks of India underserved, "and then a huge concentration of microfinance in a few areas."

In Ramanagaram district, seven microfinance lenders serve 22,500 women (most microloans go to women because lenders consider them less likely to default than men). Loans outstanding here total $4.4 million, according to the Association of Karnataka Microfinance Institutions, a group of lenders.

Lenders in Ramanagaram say the loan-repayment revolt was instigated in part by Muslim clerics who oppose the empowerment of women through microfinance. Most lenders are still servicing loans to Hindu borrowers, but have stopped issuing fresh loans to Muslims. "We can't do business with Muslims there right now," says Mr. Ghosh. "Nobody wants to take that kind of risk."

The irony is that, for years, Indian microlenders have touted themselves as bankers to the nation's impoverished minority Muslim community, which has long been excluded from the formal banking sector.

A 2006 report commissioned by India's prime minister found that while Muslims represented 13% of India's population, they accounted for only 4.6% of total loans outstanding from public-sector banks.

Islam prohibits the paying of interest, but mosque officials don't cite that as the reason for the loan-payment strike. They stressed the overindebtedness of the community, and the strains it's putting on family life.

Ramanagaram's period of wild borrowing irks some residents, both Hindu and Muslim. Alamelamma, a 28-year-old vegetable seller, says that she has benefited from microfinancing and that the profligate borrowers "have ruined it for the rest of us."

One gully away, Ms. Sharma, the heavy debtor, has a different view: She would like to see the microlenders kicked out of the community entirely. "Not just for now, but forever," she says.

—Rob Copeland contributed to this article.

Iraqi Immigrants Struggle to Adjust to Life in the U.S.

By KIRK SEMPLE

Not long after the Iraq war began in 2003, Uday Hattem al-Ghanimi was accosted by several men outside the American military base where he managed a convenience store. They accused him of abetting the Americans, and one fired a pistol at his head.

Now, after 24 operations, Mr. Ghanimi has a reconstructed face as well as political asylum in the United States. On July 4, his wife and three youngest children joined him in New York after a three-year separation.

But the euphoria of their reunion quickly dissipated as the family began to reckon with the colder realities of their new life. Mr. Ghanimi, 50, who has not been able to work because of lingering pain, is supporting his family on a monthly disability check of $761, food stamps and handouts from friends. They are crammed into one room they rent in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a city whose small Iraqi population is scattered. And Mr. Ghanimi’s wife and children do not speak English, deepening their sense of isolation.

“They say, ‘Let’s go back,’ ” Mr. Ghanimi said glumly. “It’s not what they were thinking. I told them, ‘Just be patient.’ ”

For years after the American invasion of Iraq, thousands of Iraqis clamored for admission to the United States and found the door all but closed — until the government reacted to widespread criticism in 2007 by making it easier for more to enter with special visas or as refugees.

But now that Iraqis are arriving in larger numbers, many are discovering that life in the United States is much harder than they expected.

A report released in June by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement organization in New York, said that many Iraqi immigrants have been unable to find jobs, are exhausting government and other benefits and are spiraling toward poverty and homelessness.

Advocates for immigrants in New York and elsewhere say that Iraqis have had more difficulty getting settled than most migrant populations. Many are well educated and arrive with unrealistically high expectations of the life that awaits them. Though most have received assistance from government or private agencies, large numbers have immigrated in the depths of the recession.

Many also need help dealing with the physical and emotional wounds of war.

“I’ve never seen a population where the trauma is so universal,” said Robert Carey, vice president for resettlement and migration policy at the International Rescue Committee.

More than 30,000 Iraqis have been resettled in the United States since the 2003 invasion as refugees, or with special visas for those who worked closely with the American government. At least 1,500 more have been granted asylum, federal officials say.

A vast majority have arrived in the past two years, settling thinly across the country, with larger concentrations in San Diego, Phoenix, Houston and Dearborn, Mich. More than 1,100 have been resettled in the New York region, with at least 100 in New York City.

In Iraq, many worked as doctors, teachers, scientists and interpreters — often for Americans, giving some the hope that they would be rewarded with a comfortable life here. But like accomplished immigrants from other countries, most have found that overseas credentials do not always apply in the American market, compelling them to compete for lower-skill jobs.

Nour al-Khal, 35, who arrived in New York as a refugee in 2007, has been mentoring several Iraqi families. Among the hardest adjustments, she said, is accepting the likelihood that they will not make a lateral professional move.

“We fight over that,” said Ms. Khal, who was shot in Basra, in southern Iraq, in 2005 while working as an interpreter for Steven Vincent, an American journalist who was killed in the attack. Ms. Khal was a senior manager for an American development contractor; in New York, the best job she could initially find was as a receptionist at a real estate firm.

“I just accepted it,” said Ms. Khal, who now works as a translator. “It was so hard.”

The New York region offers notable opportunities for newcomers. Public transportation is good, and social service agencies have a wealth of experience with recent immigrants. But living costs are high, and the Iraqi population — unlike other immigrant groups that have colonized neighborhoods and formed associations — is atomized, fostering an alienation that is aggravated by the city’s relentless pace.

“My life is miserable,” said Dunya al-Juboori, 29, a former hair salon owner in Baghdad who came as a refugee in 2007 and lives in Medford, N.J. She has been working for minimum wage at a salon in the mornings and attending cosmetology school the rest of the day, leaving no time or money to develop a social life. She has not seen her family since 2006, when she left Iraq to seek treatment in Jordan for advanced lymphoma.

“I cry every day,” she said, adding quickly, “Not in the morning, because I’m too busy.”

Ehab, 34, who worked for a development contractor in Baghdad but fled after receiving threats, said recent immigrants from Iraq are in need of profound guidance. (He spoke on the condition that his surname not be published, saying he feared that insurgents in Iraq would attack his family.)

“An Iraqi who is transitioning from a country in war needs a lot of care,” said Ehab, who arrived in New York as a refugee in 2007 and works as a project coordinator for Proskauer Rose, a Manhattan law firm that has helped hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers.

Mr. Ghanimi, the store manager who was shot, is deeply grateful for the free medical care, legal assistance and housing he received while his face was repaired and his family’s asylum applications were processed.

But the tasks still at hand are overwhelming, he said — like finding a new apartment, getting his wife treatment for a variety of physical and emotional ailments and enrolling his children, 21, 17 and 11, in classes.

His most important job, he said, is to convince them all that they are better off here than in Baghdad — at the very least, because their lives are not at risk.

“I told them everything here is beautiful,” he said. “Electricity 24 hours, not like in Iraq. The weather is very good, not like in Iraq. There are many things you can’t get in Iraq. And they come and say, ‘Yeah, but you can’t get it.’ ”

A few days later, he took the family to Times Square at sunset, to experience the full effect of the lights. They were wide-eyed, dazzled by the swirl of activity.

“Maybe it will take time to put everything in place,” Mr. Ghanimi said. “But I feel like everything will be good.”

For Many, Nigeria's Moderate Form of Sharia Fails to Deliver on Promises

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 12, 2009

KANO, Nigeria -- As military rule ended in Nigeria a decade ago, an Islamic legal system was swept into place on a wave of popular support in the country's desperately poor and mostly Muslim northern states. It has turned out in a way few expected.

The draconian amputation sentences warned of by human rights activists and the religious oppression feared by Christians have mostly not come to pass. But neither has the utopia envisioned by backers of sharia law, who believed politicians' promises that it would end decades of corruption and pillaging by civilian and military rulers. The people are still poor and miserable, residents complain, and politicians are still rich.

How the battles over sharia play out could have effects beyond Nigeria, a nation pivotal to West Africa's stability and viewed by the United States as key to stopping the spread of religious extremism in Africa. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to discuss the issue with Nigerian leaders on a visit to the country this week.

"People want sharia. But not this kind of sharia," said Ahmad Al-Khanawy, 41, a reed-thin filmmaker, adding that the most visible signs of Islamic law are new censorship rules banning dancing and singing in movies made in Kannywood, as this city's film industry is known. Sharia-promoting politicians, he said, "want to cover their failure by making noise about fighting immorality. That is it."

Nigeria's moderate form of sharia may not have delivered a Muslim revolution, but it has fueled a growing disillusionment that analysts say has weakened public faith in democracy -- and could, if unchecked, spark religious militancy. That prospect was highlighted last month when a radical Islamist sect called Boko Haram attacked security forces in northern Nigeria, triggering violence that killed more than 700 people. The group draws its members from the ranks of frustrated youths.

"Political space is so limited . . . that the disenchanted are finding little avenues for achieving change through dialogue and peaceful expression," said Nnamdi Obasi, West Africa analyst for the International Crisis Group.

Reforms Missing Mark

So far, analysts say, extremist groups such as Boko Haram remain small and do not have links to international terrorist organizations. In Kano, northern Nigeria's largest city, many say the bigger short-term danger is that people have begun to view this form of sharia -- and the democracy that brought it -- as just another broken political promise.

Kano remains a sunbaked metropolis where electricity is fitful, child beggars swarm on street corners and goats graze in trash heaps. Many of the region's leaders have been accused of corruption, which plagues Nigeria. Against that backdrop, residents say, sharia reforms such as movie censorship and a ban on women riding motorbike taxis seem like window-dressing.

"Sharia is about justice. Where you have sharia, you have development," said Salisu Saidu, 32, standing amid the leather bags he sells in Kano's labyrinthine market. "Nothing has changed. If one relied on tap water, one would die of thirst. We don't even talk of electricity."

Islam has dominated in this region on the edge of the Sahara for centuries, in a tenuous coexistence with the Christianity that is prevalent in more prosperous southern Nigeria. When Kano and 11 other northern states that had long applied Islamic law to civil cases adopted sharia for criminal matters, clashes broke out between Christians and Muslims. Early on, several sentences of death by stoning for female adulterers -- never carried out -- and the amputation of two men's hands for theft drew international condemnation.

But this version of sharia turned out to be fairly temperate, reflecting local sensibilities and religious law's existence within a secular federal system. The harshest sentences imposed under the new system, which applies only to Muslims, garnered little public support. The efforts to ban women from motorbike taxis sparked protests, so veiled women still zip about Kano with their arms around male drivers. The federal government reined in the sharia police, known as the Hisbah, after they were accused of terrorizing people.

Still, the Hisbah remain active. This year, they thwarted a planned protest by divorced Muslim women. Alongside politicians, they regularly smash bottles of liquor seized from trucks smuggling them into Kano's Christian neighborhood, where bars operate openly despite a state ban on alcohol sales. The Hisbah's actions have rankled Christian leaders.

"To us, sharia is a religious injunction laced around the strings of love, tolerance and respect for human dignity," said Tobias Michael Idika, 48, a Christian community leader, who on a recent day sat in a Kano hotel lobby and read from a letter he had written to local officials to protest the actions.

He looked up and shook his head: "Now we are being used as sacrificial lambs."

No Turning Back

All this has added up to a mishmash that looks little like the progress sharia supporters had envisaged. In their version, the tenets of Islam would guide leaders to care for the downtrodden, use resources wisely and punish criminals both powerful and lowly.

But few officials in sharia-governed states have been convicted of corruption, although critics point to their grand houses as evidence that wealth is not being spread.

"If anybody comes to me and asks for my support on the promise of implementing sharia, I wouldn't even vote for him," said Abba Adam Koki, an imam who served on a government sharia board for two years but said he quit after deciding that officials were committed only to preserving their power. "I prefer someone to come and tell me what programs he has for the people."

Government officials say they are doing their best and insist there can be no turning back from Islamic law, though they concede that a full sharia state in multi-faith Nigeria is impossible.

Sule Ya'u Sule, Kano state's spokesman, said the governor has established several agencies to oversee the spread of Islamic principles, including an anti-corruption unit and a branch that collects alms to pay the hospital bills of thousands of poor people each year. The government created 40,000 jobs in the four years prior to 2007 and has curbed prostitution and drinking, he said.

The challenges, Sule said, are that the secular federal police who still patrol Kano are unwilling to cooperate with the Hisbah and that the government does not gives states enough money. Officials require decent clothing, cars and houses, he said, but that does not mean they are corrupt.

"The federal government only gives you a little amount every month. And it is that amount that it expects you to use to develop the state," Sule said. "This money is not enough to finish this work and distribute it to the needy."

On a recent day outside the Islamic court in the northern city of Kaduna, two businessmen lamented that even the heart of Nigeria's Islamic law revolution -- its courts -- had turned out as sluggish as any.

In the turquoise-walled courtroom, prosecutors scolded the judge for postponing several long-standing cases on the docket, including an inheritance dispute and the case of a woman seeking to divorce her husband on grounds that their seven-year-old marriage had not been consummated.

Muhammed Bello, 45, and Yushau Inuwa, 28, were there to see whether a friend accused of theft a year ago -- and badly beaten by the Hisbah, they said -- would finally face trial. The courts were inefficient, they said, and the government had not delivered on what they referred to as their constitutional rights to better roads, schools and health care.

"It's a double tragedy," Inuwa said, though he insisted that the answer to his frustration was not violence. "We need better leaders."

Poor Neighborhoods Key in Income Difference, Study Finds

By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 27, 2009

Researchers have found that being raised in poor neighborhoods plays a major role in explaining why African American children from middle-income families are far more likely than white children to slip down the income ladder as adults.

The Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project caused a stir two years ago by reporting that nearly half of African American children born to middle-class parents in the 1950s and '60s had fallen to a lower economic status as adults, a rate of downward mobility far higher than that for whites.

This week, Pew will release findings of a study that helps explain that economic fragility, pointing to the fact that middle-class blacks are far more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods, which has a negative effect on even the better-off children raised there. The impact of neighborhoods is greater than other factors in children's backgrounds, Pew concludes.

Even as African Americans have made gains in wealth and income, the report found, black children and white children are often raised in starkly different environments. Two out of three black children born from 1985 through 2000 were raised in neighborhoods with at least a 20 percent poverty rate, compared with just 6 percent of white children, a disparity virtually unchanged from three decades prior.

Even middle-class black children have been more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods: Half of black children born between 1955 and 1970 in families with incomes of $62,000 or higher in today's dollars grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods. But virtually no white middle-income children grew up in poor areas.

Using a study that has tracked more than 5,000 families since 1968, the Pew research found that no other factor, including parents' education, employment or marital status, was as important as neighborhood poverty in explaining why black children were so much more likely than whites to lose income as adults.

"We've known that neighborhood matters . . . but this does it in a new and powerful way," said John E. Morton, who directs Pew's economic policy unit. "Neighborhoods become a significant drag not just on the poor, but on those who would otherwise be stable."

Patrick Sharkey, the New York University sociologist who wrote the report, said researchers still need to pinpoint which factors in neighborhoods matter most, such as schools, crime or peer groups. But overall, he said, the impact of the contrasting surroundings for black and white children was indisputable.

"What surprises me is how dramatic the racial differences are in terms of the environments in which children are raised," he said. "There's this perception that after the civil rights period, families have been more able to seek out any neighborhood they choose, and that . . . the racial gap in neighborhoods would whittle away over time, and that hasn't happened."

The Pew researchers argue that the report buttresses President Obama's agenda, which includes proposals for "promise neighborhoods" that would replicate the Harlem Children's Zone, where an intensive array of investments -- beginning with prenatal care -- is meant to transform an entire area. Such an approach, Pew says, holds more promise than dispersing poor families into middle-class neighborhoods by giving them housing vouchers, a strategy that has had mixed results and could be difficult to implement on a large scale.

Sharkey and Morton said policymakers can take heart in one finding: Black children in neighborhoods in which poverty fell by 10 percent had higher incomes as adults than those who grew up in areas where the poverty rate stayed the same. This is a sign, they said, that simply improving the overall economy and quality of a given neighborhood can have beneficial effects on those growing up in it.

The report does not address whether middle-income blacks should move to low-poverty areas for the sake of their children's future prospects. It is a thorny question -- many middle-income blacks have remained in high-poverty areas partly because of segregated housing patterns. And if they were to move elsewhere, the poverty rates in the areas left behind would rise.

Ideally, said several scholars who read the report, investments in struggling neighborhoods would improve them to the extent that the middle-income families would not feel the need to leave.

"These findings do suggest that those with the means or resources should try to escape these neighborhoods," said Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson. "But . . . the exodus of middle-class families from poor black neighborhoods increases the adverse effects of concentrated poverty."

Uighurs Lose Economic Ground to Han

By IAN JOHNSON

URUMQI, China -- As Chinese leaders look to prevent another outbreak of ethnic violence, they face a key question: how to spread China's growing wealth to its ethnic minorities when they are losing control over even their traditional industries?

This month's rioting in the capital of China's northwestern Xinjiang region left 197 people dead and more than 1,700 injured, the government says. According to official statistics, most victims were ethnic Chinese, or Han, attacked by Uighurs, the once-dominant group in Xinjiang that is increasingly being eclipsed.

Although the immediate catalyst for the attacks appears to have been the murder of two Uighurs in a southern Chinese factory, longer-term problems have simmered. Like Tibetans, who rioted last year against Han partly in protest of growing Han control of their region's economic life, many Uighurs feel that Han are taking over Xinjiang's economy. Most galling to some Uighurs, Han seem to be taking over traditional Uighur industries -- from traditional markets to Muslim foodstuffs.

In downtown Urumqi, for example, the main marketplace is in Han hands, although it features sculptures of Uighur merchants outside and bills itself as a grand Central Asian bazaar to rival Istanbul or Samarkand. Even some large companies making halal foods -- those prepared according to Muslim purity laws -- are run by Han and not Uighurs. In tourism, which has boomed in recent years by featuring the exoticism of the Uighur culture, Han companies seem to dominate.

"For the Uighurs, it's their homeland, but they're not the ones who have benefited from economic growth and development," says Jing Huang, a professor of Chinese politics at National University of Singapore.

More than 90% of China's population is Han, with the rest divided among 55 smaller ethnic groups. China aims to help its minorities through an array of generous policies, from easier college admission to soft loans and hiring requirements. Some of these have helped to create a small class of prosperous Uighurs who sit on government advisory boards and have risen to top levels in the region's government. The current head of the exiled Uighur opposition, Rebiya Kadeer, for example, was a prominent Uighur businesswoman before she left.

An exact calculation of ethnic income or hiring isn't possible because while the government collects such figures, it doesn't make them public. But available statistics indicate a stubborn gap. Xinjiang's economy has doubled from 2002 to 2008, but it remains reliant on energy -- especially oil, coal and gas -- for 60% of its economic output. The companies involved in these industries are run by Han companies, and visits to oil fields suggest that most employees are Han Chinese.

Rural statistics also imply ethnic inequality. Most Uighurs live in the countryside, especially in the southern part of the province. Last year, government statistics showed rural annual income averaged 3,800 yuan ($560) in Xinjiang as a whole, but for rural residents in southern Xinjiang it is much lower. For example rural residents around the oasis town of Khotan earn 2,226 yuan a year, according to government figures. Agriculture in northern Xinjiang, which is less arid and supports cotton farming, is controlled by the Han-dominated Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a quasi-military organization established to pacify the region.

Read More

• Opinion: China v. Civil Society
• China Defends Policies on Minorities

Government programs have sought to level this imbalance. Soft loans to small-scale farmers, most of whom are Uighurs, have enabled them to expand production. The government has also encouraged large food companies to sign long-term contracts with small farmers to give them some economic stability.

"The government really has made a good-faith effort to improve minorities' livelihood," said Wang Ning, an economist at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences.

Anecdotal evidence suggests Han control has expanded beyond the obvious areas of energy and large-scale agriculture. Huo Lanlan is a prominent Han entrepreneur who runs Xinjiang Jiayu Industrial & Trading Co. Her company offers 46 halal food products, from lamb and horse meat to camel and chicken.It is now one of Xinjiang's largest halal food processors, supplying Air China with food for its flights to Xinjiang and Muslim countries.

Most of her 300 employees, however, are Han, she says. She says she has a few Uighur employees, such as a cleaning lady, but all top positions are Han. "It's a requirement of all halal food companies to have Uighur employees," she said.

Equally striking is the Grand Bazaar. Once a stronghold of Uighur entrepreneurs, most of the bazaar was torn down and rebuilt in 2003 by a Hong Kong developer and Xinjiang Grandscape Group, a Han-run company. Just like in the fabled Silk Road city of Kashgar, whose old town is being torn down by the city's Han mayor, many Uighurs seem uneasy by the developments.

The new bazaar now features anchor tenants, such as a Kentucky Fried Chicken and French department-store chain Carrefour, both run by Han Chinese. Located in the heart of the Uighur part of Urumqi, it hasn't yet been reopened because many of the tenants are Han and afraid to return there, according to Han and Uighur business people interviewed.

Across the street is what is left of the traditional bazaar, a ramshackle series of alleys lined with small-scale Uighur businesses. The area is one of the last parts of the city where riot police are omnipresent, and the road between the old and new bazaars is still blocked to traffic.

"We are not so well organized like the Han," said one Uighur who owns a stand selling jeans. "They have the bazaar now."

—Jason Dean in Beijing contributed to this article.

Write to Ian Johnson at ian.johnson@wsj.com

Venezuelan State That Chávez Family Rules Is Rife With Kidnapping

By SIMON ROMERO

BARINAS, Venezuela — Stretching over vast cattle estates at the foothills of the Andes, Barinas is known for two things: as the bastion of the family of President Hugo Chávez and as the setting for a terrifying surge in abductions, making it a contender for Latin America’s most likely place to get kidnapped.

An intensifying nationwide crime wave over the past decade has pushed the kidnapping rate in Venezuela past Colombia’s and Mexico’s, with about 2 abductions per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Interior Ministry.

But nowhere in Venezuela comes close in abductions to Barinas, with 7.2 kidnappings per 100,000 inhabitants, as armed gangs thrive off the disarray here while Mr. Chávez’s family tightens its grip on the state. Seizures of cattle ranches and crumbling infrastructure also contribute to the sense of low-intensity chaos.

Barinas offers a unique microcosm of Mr. Chávez’s rule. Many poor residents still revere the president, born here into poverty in 1954. But polarization in Barinas is growing more severe, with others chafing at his newly prosperous parents and siblings, who have governed the state since the 1990s. While Barinas is a laboratory for projects like land reform, urgent problems like violent crime go unmentioned in the many billboards here extolling the Chávez family’s ascendancy.

“This is what anarchy looks like, at least the type of anarchy where the family of Chávez accumulates wealth and power as the rest of us fear for our lives,” said Ángel Santamaría, 57, a cattleman in the town of Nueva Bolivia whose son, Kusto, 8, was kidnapped while walking to school in May. He was held for 29 days, until Mr. Santamaría gathered a small ransom to free him.

The governor of Barinas, Adán Chávez, the president’s eldest brother and a former ambassador to Cuba, said this month that many of the kidnappings might have been a result of destabilization efforts by the opposition or so-called self-kidnappings: orchestrated abductions to reveal weaknesses among security forces, or to extort money from one’s own family.

“With each day that passes,” the governor said recently, “Barinas is safer than before.”

Through a spokeswoman, he declined to be interviewed.

In an election last year marred by accusations of fraud, Adán Chávez succeeded his own father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, a former schoolteacher who had governed Barinas for a decade with the president’s brother, Argenis, the former secretary of state in Barinas.

Another brother, Aníbal, is mayor of nearby Sabaneta, and another brother, Adelis, is a top banker at Banco Sofitasa, which does business with Adán’s government. Yet another brother, Narciso, was put in charge of cooperation projects with Cuba. The president’s cousin Asdrúbal holds a top post at the national oil company.

Politicians once loyal to the president who have broken with him and his family here contend that Mr. Chávez’s family has amassed wealth and landholdings through a series of deals carried out by front men.

One opposition leader, Wilmer Azuaje, detailed to prosecutors and legislators what he said was more than $20 million in illegal gains by the family since the president’s father was elected governor in 1998. But in a brief review of those claims, National Assembly, under the control of Chávez loyalists, cleared the family of charges of illicit enrichment.

“In the meantime, while the family wraps itself in the rhetoric of socialism, we are descending into a neo-capitalist chaos where all that matters is money,” said Alberto Santelíz, the publisher of La Prensa, a small opposition newspaper.

One reason for the rise in kidnappings is the injection of oil money into the local economy, with some families reaping quick fortunes because of ties to large infrastructure projects.

A new soccer stadium, built under the supervision of Adelis Chávez’s at a cost of more than $50 million, is still unfinished two years after its first game in 2007, joining other white elephants dotting Barinas’s landscape. Nearby lies the unfinished Museum of the Plains, intended to celebrate the culture of the president’s birthplace. A sprawling shopping mall stands half-completed after its backers fled a shakedown by construction unions.

More than a decade into the Chávez family’s rule in Barinas, the state remains Venezuela’s poorest, with average monthly household income of about $800, according to the National Statistics Institute. Kidnapping, once feared only by the wealthy, has spread in Barinas to include the poor. In one case this year of a 3-year-old girl kidnapped in the slum of Mi Jardín, the abductor, when told that the only thing of value owned by the girl’s mother was a refrigerator, instructed her to sell it to pay the ransom.

Kidnapping specialists here said the abductors were drawn from two Colombian rebel groups, a small Venezuelan guerrilla faction called the Bolivarian Liberation Front, other criminal gangs and corrupt police officers. Just a fraction of the kidnappings result in prison sentences.

“With impunity rampant in Barinas, how can our governor say with a straight face that people are kidnapping themselves?” asked Lucy Montoya, 38, a hardware store owner whose sister, Doris, a 41-year-old mother of three, was kidnapped in March.

Doris Montoya’s abductors have not freed her or communicated with her family since receiving ransom money in May, Lucy Montoya said, adding, “The government’s handling of this crisis is an affront to our dignity as human beings.”

Meanwhile, new figures show kidnappings climbing to 454 known cases in the first six months of 2009, including about 66 in Barinas, compared with a nationwide 2008 estimate of between 537 and 612. But officials acknowledge that the true figures are probably higher because many cases are never reported.

Here in Barinas, victims seethe over the inaction of the president and his family. “Our ruling dynasty is effectively telling us we are expendable,” said Rodolfo Peña, 38, a businessman who was abducted here last year. “The only other plausible theory,” he said, “is that they are too inebriated by power to notice the emergency at their feet.”

In One Afghan Province, Votes for President Could Turn on Loss of Poppy Income

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 21, 2009

FAIZABAD, Afghanistan -- The economic fortunes of Badakhshan province, a remote and wildly beautiful corner of far northeastern Afghanistan, have risen and fallen over the past seven years with the production of opium poppies.

Not long ago, emerald fields with nodding pink poppy flowers were everywhere, and Badakhshan was one of the country's fastest-growing poppy producers. Today, its golden hills are dotted with freshly harvested wheat stacks, and its 95 percent drop in opium production last year has been hailed as a model by international anti-drug officials.

For many communities, however, the loss of poppy income has meant a return to desperate rural poverty. As national elections approach on Aug. 20, with President Hamid Karzai seeking reelection against a field of 40 challengers, the decision among Badakhshan's voters rests partly on whether they give his government and its international backers credit or blame for the end of the poppy boom.

"The authorities promised our people jobs and projects if they stopped growing poppy, but that never happened," said a teacher here in the provincial capital, who gave her name as Aria. "We know that opium is un-Islamic and makes people addicted, but what about the farmers and their families? When we grew poppy, the people were doing well. Now they are suffering."

Aria was one of several thousand people at a recent campaign rally for Karzai's most prominent challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah. He spent a weekend this month barnstorming Badakhshan in a battered, Soviet-built military helicopter that crossed the snowcapped Hindu Kush mountains, swooped into narrow valleys and landed in wheat fields across the vertiginous province.

In speeches in village mosques, soccer stadiums and shady groves beside rushing mountain streams, Abdullah made vague promises to bring jobs, economic development and better government. But his major selling point was his role in Afghanistan's "holy war" against the Soviet Union during the 1980s, when he was an aide to the now-deceased mujaheddin leader Ahmed Shah Massoud.

"The people here know me, because I used to come on horseback and bring medical supplies in the early days of jihad," said Abdullah, 50, an ophthalmologist who graduated from medical school in Kabul in 1983 and became an adviser to Massoud two years later. Karzai named him foreign minister in 2002, but he was abruptly removed from the cabinet in 2006. Though fond of finely tailored Western suits during his run as foreign minister, Abdullah dresses in the locally popular salwar-kameez -- a tunic with baggy trousers -- when he is out on the campaign trail.

In each community where the green helicopter touched down -- it was provided by the central government in accord with official election policy -- crowds hoisted posters of Abdullah with Massoud, who was killed in 2001. His remarks included tributes to local martyred comrades and sentimental stories from the long-ago war, and he was constantly interrupted by impassioned shouts of "Long live jihad!" from men and boys in the crowd.

"We believe in jihad, and we do not want our Islamic values to be destroyed by the foreigners," said an elder named Rahim in the town of Jurm, who introduced the candidate and referred to his wool cap, traditionally worn by northern Islamic fighters. "As long as the pakul is on his head, he will follow the way of jihad and stand up for all the mujaheddin."

Yet despite their emotional identification with Abdullah, many people interviewed after or outside the rallies said they planned to vote for Karzai, who has ruled the country with strong international backing since early 2002. They said that the president has not visited their province in a long time but that he is a proven national leader with access to large amounts of foreign assistance.

"I would say 80 percent of the people in this district support Karzai," said Mohammed Issah, 36, a mullah in Baharak, a town surrounded by wheat fields and fruit orchards. "His government has brought us roads and security. Our people are living in harmony, and there is no more poppy, which we know is the enemy of our religion. It is our tradition to be hospitable to all guests, but that does not say how we will vote."

In Faizabad, a sleepy town that is largely inaccessible in winter, opinions were mixed. Some inhabitants bitterly blamed Karzai's government for the lack of economic development, noting that the local airstrip is still a Soviet-made metal platform, the main road is only now being paved and donkeys remain the principal form of transportation.

Several women here said that the state of provincial health care is a disgrace and that many pregnant patients die in childbirth because it is so difficult to reach hospitals. For years, according to U.N. reports, the levels of infant and maternal mortality in Badakhshan have been the highest in Afghanistan and on a par with those in many sub-Saharan African countries.

Other residents disputed the criticisms, saying that conditions have improved noticeably during the Karzai era and that international charities have been able to operate safely because the region is more secure than many other parts of the country.

"In the past, we had no roads or cars, and now we have a lot of them. In the past, we had a lot of poppy, and now it's gone," said Abdul Haq, 43, a shopkeeper who had pasted a campaign poster of Karzai to his wooden shutters. "We hear there is fighting in other places, but here we have 100 percent security. That is enough for me."

In some ways, Badakhshan's unusual geography has created a political anomaly. Its remoteness has made it both virtually impervious to the predations of Taliban insurgents based in the distant south and exceptionally devoted to its local leaders.

The governor, a Badakhshan tribal elder named Abdul Majid, has been credited with spearheading the anti-poppy drive by personally appealing to farmers across the province. The campaign in Badakhshan has proved more successful than in many other parts of Afghanistan, a country that produces more than 90 percent of the world's illicit opium.

Although Majid was appointed by Karzai, he has said he received little help from the central government in fighting drugs. Roadside signs in several towns touted the U.S. government's "alternative livelihoods" program for poppy farmers, but community elders complained that they had received scant assistance to develop legal crops.

"We have no work here, and all our young men go to Iran to find jobs," said Abdul Samad, an elder in Kesham district who hosted a picnic for Abdullah in a thriving grove of poplar, pear and pine trees. But Samad said that the grove had been funded by a Norwegian charity and that local farmers had neither the seeds nor the irrigation to replicate it. "We need a strong Muslim leader, a real mujahed, to bring us jobs and justice," he said.

In Pakistan, Generations of Brickmakers See Few Changes

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 3, 2009

TARLAHI, Pakistan -- At the end of a village road, behind a grassy bluff, lies a hidden valley carpeted with thick red dust and canyoned with craggy mounds of earth. At the bottom, clay-colored figures squat barefoot all day, shaping balls of mud into bricks. In the distance, a dozen scattered chimneys spew clouds of black smoke, which trail off prettily across the horizon.

This is the world of Pakistan's brick kilns, a self-contained and primitive production system that has changed little in generations. It relies on the labor of migrant families, from girls of 6 to grizzled grandfathers, who live in brick huts beside the kilns, rarely leave the quarries and never fully wash off the red mineral stains that seep into their feet, hands and clothing.

"My father did this work before me, and my children will do this work after me," said Abdul Wakil, 25, who makes bricks in a kiln about 20 miles from Islamabad, the capital. Sitting on his haunches last week, he slapped mud balls into metal molds and moved like a crab along the lengthening row of damp bricks. The workday had started at 4:30 a.m. By sundown, Wakil said, he would finish 1,200 bricks and earn $3.50.

His two younger sons toddled along beside him, playing in the mud. The 7-year-old was already at work, deftly molding balls. A gaunt old man watched from a cart, coughing frequently. His fingers were stained mauve. He was not certain of his age but said he had been working in the kilns "since the time of Ayub Khan," a military ruler of the 1950s.

"This work shortens your life. No one would do it by choice," said the man, Abdul Sadiq. "The problem is that you can never earn enough to leave. If your wife needs an operation or the rainy seasons lasts too long, you have to borrow from the kiln owners. You try to repay it, but the debt stays with you, sometimes for your whole life. It's like a pair of invisible handcuffs."

Brickmakers toil near the bottom of Pakistan's economic and social ladder, forever at the mercy of heat, dirt, human greed and official indifference. By law, they cannot be compelled to work or be kept in bondage; in practice, the great majority are bound to the kilns by debt. The work is seasonal and families move often, but if they leave one kiln for another, their debt is transferred to the new owner. If they try to escape, they said, they are hunted down.

At least 200,000 Pakistanis, many of them children, work in more than 2,500 kilns across the country, according to studies by labor advocacy organizations. Their plight is well known and often described as a national disgrace. Human rights groups have exposed cases of kiln owners chaining or imprisoning workers; reformists have initiated programs to forgive their debts and educate their children.

But resistance to change has been stubborn. Kiln owners tend to be economically powerful and politically well-connected, while many brick workers are illiterate, nomadic, cut off from modern society and unaware of their rights. For all its discomforts and indignities, moreover, this is the only life they know, and some say they cannot imagine where else they would go.

"Brick workers fall outside the formal labor force and fall between the cracks of the law," said Tahira Abdullah, an activist with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in Islamabad. "They have no unions, no organization, no voice and no one to speak for them." With permanent debts tying most of them to the kilns, she added, "they are almost like serfs."

Although federal laws against child labor and debt peonage are rarely enforced, the Pakistani court system has recently become more aggressive in pursuing cases of worker imprisonment. Protests by brick workers against inhumane conditions, some organized by a national group called the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, are becoming more common.

Such encouraging news rarely penetrates the insular world of the kilns, however, while cautionary tales circulate swiftly. In conversations at several kilns in this Punjab province district last week, a few older workers said that they had heard about efforts to promote debt forgiveness or wage increases over the years, but that no one had ever actually come to help them.

Salim Mohammed, 28, said that five years ago he asked for a raise of 20 rupees (about 30 cents) a day. The owner refused and had him arrested on false charges. The police beat him severely, he said, and after one month the owner finally had him released. The case is still languishing in a provincial court. Mohammed still works in the kilns, and his two sons work alongside him.

"I just wanted a little more for my kids, but what I got was a lesson that people like me can never raise their voice without something bad happening to them," Mohammed said, sipping tea at dawn last week beside a waiting mound of mud.

Most workers said they could not afford to send their children to school, or managed to buy them books and shoes for only a couple of years before giving up. A bright-eyed, 8-year-old quarry boy named Zarfran Khan proudly counted from one to 13 in English, then trailed off. "I liked school," he said in Pashto, the language of many migrant kiln families from the northwest, "but I don't go there anymore."

The brick workers know little about the industry they serve, except that when building construction is up, they must race to fill orders, and when it is down, they abruptly get laid off. They never see the kiln owners, but every two weeks, a manager arrives with a ledger that records their pay and any deductions they want to make toward their debt.

The work itself needs no supervision; it is an ancient assembly line in which everyone knows his part. Even the little quarry donkeys seem to know that when the last of 32 new bricks is placed on their backs, it is time to start along the dusty path to the kiln. On the return trip, the teenage herders leap on the donkeys' empty backs with whoops of glee, goading the beasts to a canter. It is the herders' only source of fun during the long, sweltering days.

The kiln chimneys belch black smoke round the clock, while stacks of bricks bake in huge underground ovens that are filled, emptied and refilled by hand, one brick at a time. Grimy men feed coal chips to the roaring fire through small holes in the oven's roof. Burns are a routine hazard, usually from hot bricks that topple. The smoke is toxic, but activists said periodic efforts to regulate kiln pollution had failed.

Sometimes, desperation drives kiln workers to risk a horrifying health hazard: selling their kidneys. The clandestine organ trade is criminally prosecuted and socially condemned in Pakistan, but kiln workers said it is one of the few available means of acquiring enough cash to pay off their debts. They said organ agents transport willing workers to urban clinics for the surgery, pay them the equivalent of a few thousand dollars afterward, then vanish.

"I thought if I did this, I could pay off the money I owed," said Imam Baksh, 45, a veteran kiln worker. After a moment's hesitation, he lifted his dirty tunic to display a long, diagonal scar across his left side. "They only paid me 80,000 rupees [about $1,600 at the time], and I owed 100,000," he added. "I lost my kidney, but I am still here, and I am still in debt."

In this timeless but precarious existence, families may work together at a kiln for years, occupying the same cluster of gloomy brick huts, and then be gone in an instant. Last week, a family of six was evicted and had piled up all their belongings outside: three string beds, a bicycle, clothes, cooking pots, and their prized possession -- an electric fan.

The father looked haggard and worried. He said that they were moving on to another kiln, and that their debt of 50,000 rupees would follow them. But as the family piled bundles into a horse cart, a little girl watching them began to weep. Even if their next perch were in another dusty red valley only a few miles away, she understood that she would never see them again.

Hello from Havana

by Jorge I. Dominguez

Photograph by Stu Rosner

Scenes from Havana, taken in March 2007

President Raúl Castro’s principal contribution thus far to the lives of ordinary Cubans has been that television soap operas now start on time. He often reminds his fellow citizens of this seemingly impossible accomplishment, after decades during which his elder brother commanded the airwaves and disrupted all public and personal schedules. But he alluded to this achievement most cleverly last December, prompting laughter with the opening sentence of his remarks before a summit meeting of the presidents of the Latin American countries in Bahia, Brazil, hosted by Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. According to Cuba’s official press reports, Castro began, “I hope that our colleague and dear friend Lula will not complain because I give shorter speeches than Chávez’s.”

The presidential summit was one stop on Raúl Castro’s first international trip since becoming Cuba’s acting president in August 2006 (when Fidel Castro was rushed to the hospital), and in that one sentence, he made several points. To most of the Latin American presidents, who did not know him well, and indeed to his fellow Cubans, he demonstrated that even a 78-year-old General of the Army could have a sense of humor. To the same audiences, but also to the incoming Obama administration, he demonstrated some distance and independence from Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, notwithstanding the tight economic and political bonds between their two countries. This was only the most recent and most public instance of Raúl Castro’s reiterated mocking comparison between Chávez’s propensity to speak forever and his own much shorter and self-disciplined speeches. (Of course, all those in the audience also knew that he was poking fun not just at Chávez but at his brother, who never met a time limit he did not despise.) And, finally, he highlighted, especially for his own people, that he honors and respects the time of others.

Raúl Castro’s military style of life cherishes punctuality and efficiency. Schedules, all schedules, even those for TV telenovelas, should be observed. Even during the waning moments of Fidel Castro’s rule, the time of Cubans was frequently occupied by marches, mobilizations, and the need to listen to the logorrheic Maximum Leader. There was even a cabinet minister in charge of what Fidel Castro called the “Battle of Ideas.” Now, marches occur on designated public holidays. And the minister in charge of the Battle of Ideas lost his job in March--and his ministry was disbanded.

Economic Evolution

The nuances in Cuban public life since Raúl became president in his own right in February 2008 are evident as well in the enactment of economic-policy reforms that were rolled out immediately following his formal installation. Consider some examples. Previously, Cubans had not been able to stay at hotels or eat at restaurants designed for international tourists, even if they had the funds to pay, unless they were on official business; now they were given access to all these facilities, so long as they could pay. Cubans had also been prohibited from purchasing cell phones and subscribing to such services unless officially authorized to do so. They were not allowed to purchase computers or DVD players. Now they were able to purchase such products so long as they had the funds.

How the Cuban government adopted these changes is important. It could simply have announced a general deregulation of prohibitions regarding purchases of consumer durables, for example. Instead, the government made each of these announcements separately: one week you could stay at tourist hotels, the next week you could purchase a computer, the following week you could obtain cell-phone services, and so forth. The government even announced that some products would be deregulated for purchase in 2009 (air conditioners) or 2010 (toasters).

This method of deregulating implied a desire to win political support over time, not all at once. It communicated that the government retained the right to micromanage the economy, deregulating product by product and service by service. The government also signaled that it expected to remain in office for years to come, behaving in the same way. Finally, most Cubans knew that they could have been purchasing these same consumer durables all along, albeit only on the black market. Thus the policy of postponed deregulation implied an official tolerance of some current criminality (knowing that some Cubans would buy toasters illegally in 2008, instead of waiting for 2010), because the government valued its economic micromanagement more.

Whom the government sought to benefit was equally newsworthy. In its most revolutionary phase, during the 1960s, the Cuban government adopted strongly egalitarian policies. Many Cubans came to believe in egalitarian values and resented the widening of inequalities in the 1990s. Consider, then, Raúl’s reforms. Hotels and restaurants designed for international tourist markets are expensive; so, too, are computers and DVD players. When these economic changes were announced in 2008, the median monthly salary of Cubans amounted to about $17: that is, the average monthly salary was below the World Bank’s worldwide standard for poverty, which is one dollar per day. To be sure, Cubans had free access to education and healthcare and subsidized access to some other goods and services. Nevertheless, only a small fraction of Cubans could take advantage of these new economic policies, because the purchases of such consumer durables and the access to such tourist services had to be paid for in dollar-equivalent Cuban currency at dollar-equivalent international prices. (Cuba has two currencies; the peso convertible is a close equivalent to the dollar, whereas the peso is worth about $0.04.) Raúl’s government was appealing to the upper-middle-class professionals.

Making Difficult Decisions

I have emphasized Raúl’s penchant for humor and nuance because Washington and Miami have not taken much notice of these traits. At the same time, no one should underestimate his capacity for decisiveness. A salient feature in his biography is his long-standing role as Cuba’s equivalent of a chief operating officer. President Fidel Castro made the decision to dispatch some 300,000 Cuban troops to two wars in Angola and one in Ethiopia from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, but it was Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and General of the Army Raúl Castro whose officers recruited, trained, promoted, equipped, and steeled these armies for battle. The United States lost the war in Vietnam. The Soviet Union lost the war in Afghanistan. Cuban troops won the three African wars in which they fought. Cuba’s was the only communist government during the entire Cold War that successfully deployed its armed forces across the oceans. And the “worker bee” for those victories was Raúl.

Within the first calendar year of his presidency, Raúl gave another example of this decisiveness: the reform of Cuba’s pension laws. Cuban law authorized and funded the retirement of women at age 55 and of men at age 60. In December 2008, the retirement ages were raised to 60 and 65 respectively. The speed of the change signaled as well a key difference between the Castro brothers.

It had long been a matter of public record that Cuban life expectancy had lengthened to reach the levels of the North Atlantic countries. Cuban demographers had also faithfully recorded that Cuba has been below the population replacement rate since 1978. They had developed various forecasts that showed that its population would age rapidly, creating a vast problem of pension liabilities, and then decline. The demographers committed only one error: they expected the demographic decline to set in near the year 2020, but the population has already declined (net of emigration) in two of the last three years.

Notwithstanding this abundance of information, Fidel chose not to act. The fiscal crisis of the state was much less fun than leading street marches to denounce U.S. imperialism. But Raúl’s prompt and effective change of the pension laws, making use of information supplied by social scientists, is yet another illustration of the difference between the brothers as rulers. And, of course, the one obvious change that was not made to the pension laws demonstrates as well that even a powerful government senses some limits to its power: although the life expectancy of women is longer, the pension reform retained the lower retirement age for them. Raúl Castro doesn’t dare take a perk like early retirement away from Cuban women.

Political Authoritarianism

The Castro brothers’ styles of rule of course show important similarities on matters that do and should matter in assessing their political regime. Cuba remains a single-party state that bans opposition political parties and independent associations that may advance political causes. The government owns and operates all television and radio stations, daily newspapers, and publishing houses. The number of candidates equals the number of seats to be filled in elections for the National Assembly. The constraints on civil society remain severe, even if there has been since the early 1990s a somewhat greater margin of autonomy for communities of faith, some of which (including Roman Catholic archdioceses) are permitted to publish magazines.

The two brothers have also demonstrated a strong preference for ruling with a small number of associates whom they have known for many years. For example, when Raúl became president formally in February 2008, he had the right to make wholesale changes in the top leadership. Instead, the president and his seven vice presidents had a median birth year of 1936. Raúl went a step further. He created a small steering committee within the larger Political Bureau of the Communist Party--and the members of the new committee were the exact same seven. Raúl’s buddies are the gerontocrats with whom he chooses to govern.

Yet there are stirrings of change. Although National Assembly elections are uncompetitive, they provide a means to express some opposition to the government. The official candidates are presented in party lists; each voting district elects two to five deputies from those lists and the number of candidates equals the number of posts to be filled in that district. The government urges voters to vote for the entire list, but voters have been free to vote for some but not all candidates on the list, thereby expressing some displeasure. The number of nonconforming voters (voted blank, null, or selectively) exceeded 13.4 percent of the votes cast in the most recent (January 2008) National Assembly elections--1.1 million voters. Both the percentage and the number of nonconforming voters were slightly larger than in the 2003 election, with the largest expression of nonconformity recorded in the province named City of Havana.

Yet another sign of change arises from Raúl’s own family. His daughter, Mariela Castro, has been for some years the director of Cuba’s center for the study of sexuality. This center has been principally known, however, for its advocacy for, and defense of, the rights of homosexuals, including special training for Cuban police officers, formulating changes in regulations, and disseminating information designed to create safer spaces for homosexuals.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, the Cuban government pursued very harsh policies toward homosexuals. In the early stages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, those who tested HIV-positive were automatically compelled to enter a quarantined facility at the cost of their jobs and family lives. At the time of the Mariel emigration crisis in 1980, the government activated its affiliated mass organizations to make life impossible for homosexuals, fostering their emigration under duress. And in the mid 1960s, the government had established the “military units to aid production” (UMAP). These were concentration camps to which “social deviants,” mainly but not exclusively male homosexuals, were sent to be turned, somehow, into “real men.” The commander in chief of the UMAP was, of course, Armed Forces Minister Raúl Castro.

It is unlikely that Raúl is a closet liberal, though there is evidence that he has been a loving father. It is not impossible, however, that he regrets having served as an architect of repression over the lives of many Cubans--not just homosexuals--especially in the 1960s, but also at other times. His daughter’s work during the current decade may be an instrument for elements of social liberalism.

U.S.-Cuban Relations

Raúl Castro understood earlier than his brother that the collapse of the Soviet Union and European communist regimes implied that Cuba had to change more and faster than Fidel wanted. In 1994, in the most public difference yet between the brothers, Raúl favored liberalizing agricultural markets, allowing producers to sell at market prices, even though Fidel remained opposed. Raúl showed more sustained interest in the economic reforms of China and Vietnam than did Fidel. And by the late 1990s, Raúl began to give the speech that he has now repeated many times, most notably this April in response to the Obama administration’s beginning of changes in U.S.-Cuba policies (authorizing Cuban Americans to travel and send remittances to Cuba): his government is ready to discuss anything on the U.S. government agenda.

In January 2002, Raúl even praised the Bush administration for having given advance notice of the incarceration of Taliban prisoners at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay. He also praised the professional military-to-military cooperation between the two countries’ officers along the U.S. base’s boundary perimeter, as well as between the coast guards in the Straits of Florida. In August 2006, his first public remarks upon becoming acting president made just two points: he did not much like to speak in public, and he was ready to negotiate with the United States. And this April, he took the time to make it clear that negotiating with the United States about any topic did, indeed, include discussion about political prisoners in Cuban jails. He made a specific proposal to exchange such political prisoners (estimated by Cuban human-rights groups as between 200 and 300 people) for five Cuban spies in U.S. prisons.

The Context for Change

The pace of political and economic change in Cuba has been slow by world standards. But the pace of social change has been very fast. Cuba’s people live long lives, thanks in part to good, albeit frayed, healthcare services--free of charge. Cuban children go to school and many become professionals. Indeed, Cuba’s principal area of export growth is the provision of healthcare services to the people of other countries. Until this most recent development, however, Cuba had exemplified how a half-century of investment in human capital could generate very poor economic-growth returns. Yet Cubans since the early 1990s have demonstrated entrepreneurial capacities in creating small businesses, whenever the government has permitted them, suggesting that with better economic incentives there could be a productive combination that would lead to economic growth. Cubans can talk seemingly endlessly at officially sponsored meetings, yet they demonstrate in other settings a capacity for insight, criticism, and imagination that could readily contribute as well to much faster political transformation.

U.S. policy toward Cuba for the bulk of this past decade has assisted the Castro government’s state security in shutting out information from the outside world: the United States banned the shipment of information-technology products, instead of facilitating Cuban electronic access to the world, and allowed Cuban Americans to visit their relatives only once every three years, instead of enabling cousins from both sides of the Straits of Florida to speak face to face about how a different, better Cuba might be constructed. (The United States has even protected ordinary Cubans from the Harvard Alumni Association, which could not lead tour groups there.) Perhaps the United States will stop being an obstacle to change in Cuba during the century’s second decade.

Jorge I. Domínguez, who most recently visited Cuba in March, is Madero professor of Mexican and Latin American politics and economics, vice provost for international affairs, and special adviser to the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for international studies. He shared a previous overview of U.S.-Cuba policy with this magazine’s readers in “Your Friend, Fidel” (July-August 2000, page 35).