Yemen’s future after Saleh worries U.S. officials

Image via Wikipedia

Washington Post 

By Peter Finn and Greg Miller, Published: June 5

The flight of Yemeni leader Ali Abdullah Saleh to Saudi Arabia deprives the United States of a fitful ally in the fight against al-Qaeda’s most dangerous affiliate and injects new uncertainty into counterterrorism operations that were already hampered by the country’s bloody internal strife, according to Yemen and security experts.

While Saudi Arabia, with U.S. backing, will almost certainly prevent Saleh’s return to Yemen, it is unclear who will replace him and whether there will be a change in attitude toward American efforts to target Islamic militants in the country.

The Pentagon and the CIA, which have steadily deployed more men and equipment to Yemen, including armed drones, will have to forge fresh relationships with whatever new leadership emerges in Yemen. And some in the opposition to Saleh have expressed skepticism about even the existence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), describing the terrorist group that has come to preoccupy Washington in recent years as a myth.

Officials in the United States and elsewhere fear that the al-Qaeda group will exploit the turmoil in Yemen to solidify its base and launch fresh attacks.

In recent weeks, U.S. officials said, Yemen’s counterterrorism forces, including special forces units that the U.S. has helped fund and train, have been sent back to their barracks or diverted from the pursuit of AQAP militants.

Some observers said that if the violence continues, the chaos might put pressure on the United States to act unilaterally, including expanding the use of armed drones.

Saleh’s departure to seek medical treatment for wounds suffered in an attack triggered celebrations Sunday in Sanaa, the capital, where jubilant residents filled the streets. But there was continued violence in the southern city of Taiz, with Yemeni security forces fighting gunmen.

AQAP emerged in the span of several years as a major terrorism threat by exploiting lawless spaces in Yemen and establishing itself as an innovative and influential al-Qaeda node. More than any other regional affiliate, AQAP has demonstrated a commitment to launching attacks against the United States, using the Internet to reach Western recruits and embracing the idea that even failed attacks can have a profound impact, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials.

The terrorist group was behind the attempt to bring down a commercial flight over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, as well as the targeting last year of cargo jets heading to the United States.

“We would be shortsighted to think this doesn’t pose short-term national security concerns,” said Frank J. Cilluffo, a former White House official who leads the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University. “The likelihood is that [AQAP operatives] will be raising their heads.” But he said that could provide an opportunity for the United States to launch strikes against them.

April Alley, the senior Arabian Peninsula analyst at the International Crisis Group, said that with Saleh gone, there is a real opportunity to initiate a peaceful transition to elections but that Yemen remains “quite precarious.”

“If a transition plan is not agreed to immediately, the situation could rapidly deteriorate into more widespread violence,” she said, noting that Saleh’s forces and his tribal enemies are still mobilized. “With Saleh out of the country, his son and nephews are severely weakened, but they still have tremendous destructive capacity.”

Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert at Princeton University, said a number of groups that have a shared antipathy toward Saleh, ranging from tribes to young protesters, may struggle to agree on how best to transition to new leadership in the country. He said the United States, as a result, may have to scramble to plan for the loss of its ally.

“The U.S., until very recently, didn’t put much focus on what comes after Saleh,” Johnsen said. “I’m not sure they have a good plan for what comes next — assuming anyone can know what comes next.”

Marine Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said Friday there were no plans to evacuate U.S. military personnel in Yemen who have been stationed there to train Yemeni counterterrorism forces. Lapan declined to say how many U.S. trainers are in Yemen but said they were taking “necessary precautions.”

There were reports in Yemen last week that a drone strike killed several AQAP militants in the coastal town of Zinjibar, even as Saleh’s forces and tribesmen were engaged in street fighting in Sanaa.

The strike could not be confirmed, but about 300 Islamic militants were reported to have taken over Zinjibar in late May.

“Yemen is so much more fractured and complicated than the other countries affected by the Arab Spring,” said Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser to former president George W. Bush. “It is a reflection of all the fractures and fissures within Yemeni society: tribal, military, problems of North and South, extremism and militancy. In some way the Arab Spring is really not what’s at play. What’s at play is the top falling off what is a very fragile and fractured country.”

Christopher Boucek, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that if a new government emerges, it would be likely to find a way to accommodate U.S. interests. Although some in the Yemeni opposition described AQAP as a myth, such rhetoric might be less likely if those who have been operating as outsiders move closer to government.

Faced with the reality of running a bankrupt, fragmenting country, whoever comes to power is going to be desperate for international assistance, Boucek said. And the U.S. can impress upon any new government the need for uninterrupted, and indeed stronger, action against AQAP.

“There are mutual interests,” Boucek said. “My guess is that there is no money left in the bank, that the economic collapse is even worse than we think. The U.S. can help with economic development, resource depletion, all the things that cause instability. And it can say you also need to help us do something about AQAP.”

Starting Points Daily Reader,June 4, 2011

Image via CrunchBaseThese are my daily tweets of news stories which fall within the broad topics mentioned in the Starting Points blog logo. Click on any tweets of interest to you to go directly to the original posting.

Topics covered in a full daily 'edition'of the Daily Reader cover all rubrics in Starting Points -- Southeast Asia, the Muslim world, American studies, global problems, minority groups, and internet resources (not necessarily in that order).  In this second edition, unlike the first, I have actually covered in a modest way all topics on which the blog focuses.  Whew.

Though there is a way to go in adding to and refining my RSS feeds, there is a lot to read for Saturday, a 'slow' day on the net.

Today I managed to tweet a good number of  items on Southeast Asia. But for those interested in serious research, the better source will remain the blog's Southeast Asia link directory, the first such directory in the right sidebar.  Links are the main attraction of the blog, and refining the Daily Reader should enable me to improve those directories -- gradually.:-)


If you're not familiar with Twitter yet, here is one link to Twitter Help Center .

Yemeni President Saleh hurt by 'shrapnel' in attack

4 June 2011 Last updated at 12:12 ET

The BBC's Lina Sinjab: "He has shrapnel three inches below the heart"

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh suffered shrapnel wounds and burns in Friday's attack on his compound in Sanaa, sources have told the BBC.

They said Mr Saleh had a piece of shrapnel under his heart and second-degree chest and face burns. This has not been officially confirmed.

Yemeni officials earlier denied reports that Mr Saleh had left the country.

The president aired an audio message late on Friday saying he was well, without appearing in public.

But there remains speculation over his condition.

In the broadcast, Mr Saleh blamed the attack on an "outlaw gang" of his tribal foes - an accusation denied by Sheikh Sadeq al-Ahmar, the head of the Hashid tribal federation, whose fighters have been clashing with security forces.
 

Start Quote

President Saleh is in a stable condition - he is just tired after yesterday's attack - End Quote - Hisham SharafYemeni Minister of International Co-operation

Tribal officials later said that 10 people had been killed and 35 others injured overnight when government troops shelled the Hassaba area, where Sheikh Ahmar's brother Hamid is based. Some reports now say that Sheikh Hamid himself was injured.

The Ahmar family has been financing the opposition and helping sustain protesters, who have been demanding Mr Saleh's resignation since January despite a crackdown that has left at least 350 people dead.

Western and regional powers have been urging Mr Saleh to sign a Gulf Co-operation Council-brokered deal that would see him hand over power to his deputy in return for an amnesty from prosecution.

He has agreed to sign on several occasions, but then backed out.

More than 160 people have been killed in the fighting that began on 23 May and has brought Yemen to the brink of civil war.
A number of people - including civilians - were injured in the overnight fightingSurgery needed?

Mr Saleh and several senior officials were praying at the al-Nahdayn mosque inside the presidential compound in the south of Sanaa on Friday afternoon when it was hit by at least three rockets, officials said. Seven presidential guards were killed, some apparently as they jumped on Mr Saleh to protect him.

Yemen's Minister of International Co-operation, Hisham Sharaf, told the BBC that the president had received light injuries to his head.

But later reports suggested his injuries might have been more severe.

Sources close to the president have told the BBC that Mr Saleh has a piece of shrapnel almost 7.6cm (3in) long under his heart and that it has punctured one of his lungs.

A decision on whether to carry out surgery had still to be taken, the sources added.

Mr Saleh was taken to a military hospital and not discharged until late on Friday. By Saturday morning, state television was still airing only his audio message, accompanied by an old photograph.

Mr Sharaf also said the speaker of the lower house of parliament, Yahya al-Rai, was seriously wounded, while several other senior officials were also hurt, including Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Mujawar, the speaker of the upper house, Abdul Aziz Abdul Ghani, and Mr Saleh's security adviser.

The Saba news agency said Mr Mujawar, Mr Rai, Mr Abdul Ghani, Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi and the security adviser, who was in a serious condition, were later flown to Saudi Arabia for treatment.


Yemen's Ahmar family

Sheikh Sadeq al-Ahmar is the overall leader of the Hashid tribal confederation, one of the two main tribal groupings in Yemen.

His father Abdullah Bin Hussein al-Ahmar - who died in 2007 - founded the Islamist Islah opposition party
Sheikh Sadeq's brother Hamid al-Ahmar is a prominent businessman and leading member of Islah. He has repeatedly called for Mr Saleh's resignation. Another brother, Sheikh Hussein Bin Abdullah al-Ahmar, resigned from President Saleh's Governing People's Council on 28 February over the shootings of protesters

Unconfirmed reports on Saturday said President Saleh had also gone to Saudi Arabia for treatment, or possibly even for good. But Deputy Information Minister Abduh al-Janadi and sources in the president's office insisted that the reports were untrue.

A source close to the Saudi royal family also denied Mr Saleh was there. He told the Reuters news agency that the Yemeni leader had "no intention of leaving".

Tanks and security checkpoints remain in place across the capital, with a number of roads blocked. Some residents have been out in the streets getting urgent supplies, but the atmosphere remains very tense, our correspondent says.

"Bullets are everywhere, explosions terrified us. There's no chance to stay any more," one man told the Reuters news agency.

After Friday's rocket attack, government forces intensified their assault on the northern Hassaba district, the location of Sheikh Ahmar's compound and several government buildings occupied by the tribesmen.

The United States, the European Union and the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) have all called for an immediate ceasefire.

Starting Points Daily Reader,June 3, 2011

Image via WikipediaIntroducing the Starting Points Daily Reader -- these are my daily tweets of news stories which fall within the broad topics mentioned in the Starting Points blog logo. Click on any tweets of interest to you to go directly to the original posting.

Today's' edition is a limited one -- morecomplete coverage of all Starting Points topics will begin June 4.  There is also a link to these tweets on Starting Points itself, but I will try to post a dated daily reminder of these tweets in a formal posting. 


Twitter currently keeps the daily tweets visible for some time, but not forever.  So you can miss a day and still 'catch up.  The most current tweets are always displayed on top.  You'll know you reached the end of all stored tweets when you can no longer scroll down my tweet list.

Topics covered in a full daily 'edition'of the Reader will cover all rubrics in Starting Points --
Southeast Asia, the Muslim world, American studies, global problems, minority groups, and internet resources (not necessarily in that order).

If you haven't yet joined Twitter, now is the perfect time to do it. :-)  Go to http://twitter.com

Exceptionally Powerful Twitter Add-on for Firefox

Use # hashtag (earchword), @ and (userid) with the Firefox add-on.  Results are fuller than would otherwise appear in a place like Google web search.  Here's  a relevant link -- http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/06/01/official-twitter-add-on-brings-twitter-search-to-the-mozilla-firefox-awesome-bar-on-desktop-and-mobile/

For example, try #timor
For example, try@ShababLibya

Even the last congressional holdouts are ready to leave Afghanistan

American Prospect

Robert Dreyfuss | May 31, 2011 | web only

President Barack Obama's Democratic base and a majority of Democrats in Congress are poised to revolt if the White House fails to order a sharp drawdown in the number of troops in Afghanistan this month.

That message was clear in the House of Representatives last week, where Democrats and Republicans teamed up to demand an endgame for the war in Afghanistan in a pair of amendments to the 2012 defense authorization bill. The resulting vote, in which dozens of Republicans -- and nearly the entire Democratic caucus -- voted in favor of drawing down U.S. forces, shows just how widespread opposition to the war has become. As President Obama's self-imposed July deadline approaches, and with Osama bin Laden now out of the picture, pressure on the White House for an accelerated pullout is mounting.

In a speech at West Point 18 months ago, Obama dismayed the liberal wing of his party by acceding to military demands for an additional, 30,000-troop "surge" for the war in Afghanistan; he sought to pacify anti-war forces in his party by announcing that he would begin a drawdown in July 2011. But as the deadline approaches, members within the administration remain divided over how many troops to pull out, and how quickly. According to The Wall Street Journal, the military is preparing a plan to withdraw just 5,000 troops in July and another 5,000 by the end of the year. Last month, Gen. Douglas Lute, Obama's chief Afghanistan adviser at the National Security Council, told me that the White House hadn't yet settled on a plan for a withdrawal, but he suggested that it was reasonable to expect a gradual withdrawal of the 30,000 troops dispatched in 2009 over 18 months.

In an effort to affect Obama's impending decision on the withdrawal, lawmakers in Congress who were previously content to sit on the fence have begun to speak out against the war.

"Members know that Obama is engaged right now in the decision-making process," says Paul Kawika Martin of Peace Action, which helped to organize a coalition of peace groups to lobby Congress. "They're thinking, 'If I'm going to say something, now's the time to say it.'"

On May 26, in a vote so close that it surprised even its sponsors, the House narrowly rejected, by a 215-to-204 margin, an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act proposed by Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Justin Amash of Michigan that would have required the Pentagon to present a plan for the "accelerated transition of military operations to Afghan authorities." It was considered especially significant that Rep. Steny Hoyer, the minority whip and a noted hawk, spoke on the House floor in its favor. "That was a big deal," says Martin.

McGovern's measure did not specify a deadline or include specific numbers, which may have led Republicans and cautious Democrats to vote yes. But last year, a similar measure garnered only 162 votes. This time, all but eight Democrats voted for it, along with 26 Republicans. "I think this is a very, very strong vote, much stronger, quite frankly, than I thought we were going to get," McGovern said.

A stronger measure, also introduced last week by Reps. Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Peter Welch of Massachusetts, would have required the Defense Department to submit a plan for withdrawing U.S. forces in 60 days -- it collected 123 votes. But a similar amendment just two months ago won only 93 votes, and in 2010, just 65 votes. Anti-war feeling is growing even though Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Obama's choice to lead the CIA, has accused its supporters of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. "The Taliban and al-Qaeda obviously would trumpet this as a victory, as a success," he said in March.

Leading members of the House cited the death of bin Laden as a major reason to wind down the war. "We accomplished what we had to do in Afghanistan a long time ago," said Rep. Jerrold Nader of New York. "We ought to stop wasting our troops and our money and our lives and get out. And this just shows that should al-Qaeda establish a base there, we can go in and take it out, as we just did in Pakistan."

In the Senate, things are moving more slowly, but there, too, opponents are becoming more outspoken. Sen. Jeff Merkely of Oregon last week organized a group of nine senators who wrote a letter to President Obama:
We write to express our strong support for a shift in strategy and the beginning of a sizable and sustained reduction of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, beginning in July 2011. ... There are those who argue that rather than reduce our forces, we should maintain a significant number of troops in order to support a lengthy counter-insurgency and nation building effort. This is misguided. We will never be able to secure and police every town and village in Afghanistan.

Among the signers: Barbara Boxer of California, Richard Durbin of Illinois, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Kirstin Gillibrand of New York, Tom Udall of New Mexico, Mike Lee of Utah, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

In the Senate, anti-war sentiment is building even among members who have previously been strong supporters of the war, including Sen. Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan, and Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Back in May 2010, Reid opposed a proposal by former Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin (he lost his seat last November) setting a timetable for an end to the war. Now, Reid is having second thoughts. "I'm not confident that it's going to work," said Reid in April, referring to Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy. "We cannot continue to keep dumping this money."

But what makes this surge of opposition even more significant is that more and more Republicans have begun to express significant doubts about the war. Traditional conservative and libertarian figures and organizations like the Cato Institute; Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform; the American Conservative Union; and Dick Armey's Tea Party-linked FreedomWorks have abandoned their neutrality and signed on. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the second ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that he's been "very skeptical about the efforts there for some time" when visiting constituents in Tennessee in early May. The same committee's top Republican, Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana, has also begun to vocalize doubts that the United States can sustain the war. "With al-Qaeda largely displaced from the country, but franchised in other locations, Afghanistan does not carry a strategic value that justifies 100,000 American troops and a $100 billion per-year cost, especially given current fiscal restraints," he said.

Polls show that the American people have turned the corner on Afghanistan. A recent survey by The Washington Post and ABC News, conducted before the death of bin Laden, revealed that by a margin of 64 percent to 31 percent, Americans no longer believe that the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting. By a margin of 73 percent to 21 percent, Americans favor a substantial withdrawal of U.S. troops in July.

Data like that have forced a sea change among organizations of grassroots Democrats. Howard Dean, the founder of Democracy for America and a former presidential candidate, has switched sides. "I actually supported the president when he sent extra troops to Afghanistan," Dean said. "But I've come to believe that's not a winnable war."

Leader Transcends Complex Politics of Turkey

Cover of Recep Tayyip ErdoğanNYT

By ANTHONY SHADID

Published: May 31, 2011 BURSA, Turkey — The cries tumbled from a balcony as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan swaggered down the campaign trail in this picturesque industrial city and former Ottoman capital. “Papa Tayyip!” went the refrain, drawing a wry smile from the man himself.

The words may have lacked the weight of “Father of the Turks,” the title given Mustafa Kemal Ataturk after he established modern Turkey in 1923. But it said much about Mr. Erdogan — arrogant and populist to detractors, charismatic and visionary to supporters — who will soon enter his second decade as leader of a country he has helped transform.

As Turkey heads to an election on June 12 — the size of Mr. Erdogan’s majority the only question — the country faces an Arab Spring, which took it by surprise; ambitions that stretch beyond its means; and growing fears that Mr. Erdogan’s eight years in office have decisively shifted power from the old secular elite and toward his party and the merchant class, migrants and downtrodden that it courts.

But even his critics acknowledge that this country of 79 million is a far different place from the one he inherited, emerging as a decisive power in a region long dominated by the United States.

Though Turkey is still dogged by unemployment, its businesses are booming. In foreign policy, it is acting like the heir of the Ottoman Empire that preceded it, building relationships with Iran and Arab neighbors at the expense of Israel.

And in age-old questions of identities that have haunted the country — Kurdish and Turkish, secular and religious — the party has governed at a time when those divisions seem less pronounced and possibly less relevant to a modernizing country.

The electoral power in Turkey is Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym AK, as it has been since it won its first election in 2002. But the undisputed force in the country is Mr. Erdogan (pronounced ERR-doh-ahn), a 57-year-old former mayor of Istanbul, semiprofessional soccer player and favorite son of Kacimpasha, a neighborhood known for its tough and outspoken men (and women, too, some say).

While polls suggest that his party wins its votes through a campaign message that casts its leaders as modernizers, populists and devout custodians of the poor, Mr. Erdogan is far bigger than the party.

A recent survey found that half of its votes came by way of the prime minister himself, a popular mandate his party has used to push through economic reform and challenge the power of the old elite through constitutional amendments, court cases and, some say, intimidation.

“He’s a phenomenon, really,” said Yilmaz Esmer, a professor of political science at Bahcesehir University.

At a rally this month in Koaceli, another industrial town, Mr. Erdogan strode into a stadium packed with tens of thousands of supporters with the swagger of a brawler, legs slightly apart and stooped shoulders swaying. A crowd that had waited hours grew ecstatic. Mr. Erdogan took the stage in a suit with no tie, his hard stare hidden behind sunglasses.

“We didn’t come to rule!” he declared to adulation. “We came to serve you!”

Mr. Erdogan compares well with any orator in the region, and has an innate sense of his audience. He is part Friday preacher, part neighborhood rabble-rouser, styling himself as an underdog even as he holds unquestioned power.

He is deeply pious, but his speech was short on religious fare. The message was instead Mr. Erdogan’s trademark synthesis of populism, nationalism and moralism, wrapped in a litany of schools built, roads paved, sewers rehabilitated and hospitals refurbished. “We did all of this, and we’ll do better now,” he promised. As with the party’s appeal, his crowd was a cross section of Turkey, with a large group of the hard faces of the disenfranchised in the heartland of Anatolia that Mr. Erdogan courts.

“I’ve liked him ever since he was mayor of Istanbul,” said Mahmune Uyan, a 46-year-old homemaker who brought her three sons to the rally and draped herself in an orange party flag. “Since then, he was a brother in this world and the world to come.”

Mr. Erdogan’s style of populism dates from the 1950s in Turkey. He is said to have sold lemonade and sesame buns as a youth in Kacimpasha, and the residents there revere him as a favorite son. At the Saray Cafe, festooned with Mr. Erdogan’s portraits, Yasar Kirici, the owner, insisted that the prime minister knew every resident by name.

Mr. Kirici grew angry over a look of disbelief at the claim. “Without a doubt!” he shouted, jabbing his finger into his chest.

On the wall was a portrait of Mr. Erdogan side by side with Mr. Ataturk. Another showed him at a neighborhood circumcision ceremony. A large portrait captured him berating President Shimon Peres of Israel at a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in 2009.

There is a longstanding debate over whether Turkey has tilted east after decades of embracing the West as a NATO member and almost reflexive ally of the United States. It still nominally embraces the goal of joining the European Union, carrying out reforms mandated by the entry process that have made Turkey a far more liberal place.

But sensing a decline of American power in the region, Turkish officials have become sharply more assertive in the Middle East, priding themselves on keeping open channels to virtually every party.

The policy falls under the rubric of “zero problems” with its neighbors, though successes have been few. Problems remain with Armenia, and Turkey was unable to resolve the conflict in Cyprus, still divided by Greek and Turkish zones. Once serving as a mediator between Syria and Israel, its relationship with the latter collapsed after Israeli troops killed nine people onboard a Turkish flotilla trying to break the blockade of Gaza.

“The problem lies with Israel,” Mr. Erdogan said bluntly in an interview.

Its own officials admit that the Foreign Ministry remains too small for its ambitions as a regional power. At least $15 billion in investments were lost in the civil war in Libya. And Syria — viewed as Turkey’s fulcrum for integrating the region’s economy — faces a revolt that has tested Mr. Erdogan’s friendship with President Bashar al-Assad. While some see Egypt as a newfound ally of Turkey, others view it as an emerging rival in a region where Mr. Erdogan remains one of the most popular figures.

The optimism derives from Mr. Erdogan’s greatest legacy — an economy that has more than tripled since 2002 and whose exports have gone to $114 billion a year from $36 billion. Europe remains its pre-eminent market, but its businessmen have plied Ottoman trade routes with a sense of unabashed optimism at untapped markets. Many hail from Anatolia, sharing the party’s ideology of social conservatism and economic liberalism, with a hint of nostalgia for the old empire.

They like to recite Mr. Erdogan’s contention that Turkey will be Europe’s second biggest economy after Germany by 2050. The confidence Mr. Erdogan sometimes inspires is so pronounced it borders on jingoism.

“We don’t want to be a second- or third-rate people,” said Hakan Cinkilic, the foreign trade manager of Sun Pet, a plastics factory in Gaziantep, near the Syrian border, whose exports have more than doubled in three years. “We should be first.”

The sense of ebullience seems to have washed across the longstanding divides in the country. They, of course, still exist. Many intellectuals fear that a resounding victory next month will allow Mr. Erdogan’s party to rewrite the Constitution, with little input from the opposition, perhaps even creating a presidential system, which Mr. Erdogan has suggested.

Mr. Erdogan’s own authoritarian streak — his sensitivity to caricatures, disdain of criticism and methodical attempts to dismantle the old-guard secular elite in the military and courts — has lost the party some of the liberal support that it had early on.

One professor called Mr. Erdogan arrogant, then pleaded for the quote not to be published, fearing he might lose his job. But even he acknowledged that the longstanding fears that Mr. Erdogan would impose his piety on the country had not come to pass.

The main opposition party has tried to extract itself from debate over religious versus secular emphasis, judging it a losing stand in a conservative country. Where once Mr. Ataturk was the rallying cry for secular Turkey, the opposition’s leader hardly mentions him by name.

Recent polling has suggested that voters themselves are less wed to the old definitions of secular and religious in a country where Mr. Ataturk once considered putting pews in mosques and introducing classical Western music at services.

In a survey last year by Iksara, a local firm, voters between the ages of 18 and 25 were asked to identify their ideological stands. More than a third of Mr. Erdogan’s supporters offered Kemalist, the ideology of Mr. Ataturk, as one of their identities.

“People are tired of old identities, this nationalist divide, this religious divide,” said Selcuk Sirin, a professor at New York University who helped with the polling.

“There’s a generational issue here,” he added.

Mexican drug cartels muscle in on lucrative movie and music piracy business

Image via Wikipedia

By William Booth, Published: May 29

MEXICO CITY — When hundreds of Mexican police crashed through the doors into a warren of mysterious warehouses and humming laboratories, they uncovered one of the largest illegal manufacturing centers of pirated movies and music ever found in Latin America.

The pre-dawn raids last month netted 12 tons of movie disks and more than 1,000 DVD burners, enough machinery to produce a staggering 500,000 counterfeit copies of “Kung Fu Panda 2” a day, if the factories were running at capacity.

Defenders here in the rough barrio of Tepito, famous for its black-market bazaar, threw spikes down into the street to blow the tires of the crusading police. No arrests were made, and Mexican officials shrug that they do not know who ran the laboratories. But according to U.S. officials and American producers of the stolen films, music and software, Mexican drug cartels lurk in the shadows.

Led by the notorious La Familia and Los Zetas drug mafias, Mexican cartels now take a big cut of the hundreds of millions of dollars in bootleg disks sold in Mexico each year, according to U.S. officials and representatives of film studios and software manufacturers.

“This is no longer a victimless crime. There is blood on the product,” said Federico de la Garza, managing director of the Motion Picture Association in Mexico City, whose own investigators work closely with the Mexican attorney general.

Disk piracy and U.S. copyright violations are a challenge around the world, but in Mexico the sale of bootleg copies of “Toy Story 3” and Microsoft Windows XP are funding the powerful mafias whose relentless violence has left more than 35,000 Mexicans dead in the past four years.

Mexico has become the pirate capital of Latin America, exporting so many bootleg movies to Central America, for example, that the major studios no longer bother to sell their products on the shelves there, according to industry watchdogs.

And in Cancun or Monterrey or Tijuana, when you buy a bootleg Disney movie for the kids, it is as likely as not to bare a stamp that shows it was distributed by the Zetas (a stallion) or La Familia (a butterfly).

Video piracy is ubiquitous in Mexico, where more than nine of 10 movie DVDs sold are counterfeits. Mexican authorities rarely seize products from street dealers or market stalls. U.S. officials in Mexico suspect many vendors give kickbacks to local authorities to allow them to operate.

The bootleg units sell for about $1, versus the $12 charged for legal disks, and though the sound and picture are sometimes inferior, the copies are generally decent. Box-office blockbusters are available on the street a couple of days after they open in theaters in the United States.

About 26 million legitimate DVDs are sold in Mexico each year; another 235 million are bootlegs, according to the motion picture industry, which claims the bootlegs account for $300 million to $600 million in lost revenue. Some critics suggest that U.S. film studios are selling their product at a price point far above what the average Mexican is willing to pay and thus are stoking the piracy boom.

On Saturday in Mexico City, counterfeit copies of “The Hangover Part II” were already on sale at metro stops, two days after the picture premiered.

Asked if he thought it was a crime to buy a pirated DVD, Juan Figueroa, a college student, said, “nope.” He acknowledged that it was wrong, but compared it to littering. Plus, he said, the price was right. He paid 10 pesos for the film, about 85 cents.

“The resources the cartels gain from these enterprises is considerable,” Mexico’s deputy attorney general, Irving Barrios Mojica, said in an interview.

Barrios said the cartels probably don’t manufacture the disks themselves but have muscled into the business, forming partnerships with distributors and extorting vendors, demanding a monthly cut. “Organized crime, for example, will charge the vendors a thousand pesos a month — about $90 — to do business,” Barrios said.

There are hundreds of thousands of such small vendors to shake down in Mexico. A 2009 study by the attorney general here found that La Familia could generate as much as $2 million a day through video piracy.

The Mexican attorney general has discovered that pirate disk suppliers are offering their distributors a form of insurance: For an extra peso per disk, they will replace any film confiscated by authorities.

A U.S. official in Mexico with knowledge of piracy, but who could not be named because of security protocols, said the cartels are continuing a pattern of exploiting new business opportunities, moving from drug and arms smuggling to human trafficking to petroleum theft and now to piracy.

A bipartisan caucus in the U.S. Congress last week announced the creation of a “watch list” of countries where piracy has reached “alarming levels” and is controlled by organized crime. The caucus named Canada, China, Russia, Spain and Ukraine, and members said that Mexico would probably be named soon — although they applauded the country for passing legislation last year that makes piracy a crime and establishes protocols for enforcement.

But challenges remain. Mexico has yet to make a major arrest. According to industry reports, 83 low-level distributors have been arrested this year, though only six are in jail. But the authorities are busy: 83 laboratories, 476 warehouses, 400 cyber-cafes and 72 bars have been busted this year, and more than 5 million DVDs, CDs and Blu-rays seized.

“Organized crime, the saying goes, is very organized, and we saw that two to three years ago, these criminal groups noticed a huge industry, a golden opportunity, and they seized it,” said de la Garza. “They are killers, but they are also good businessmen.”

Researcher Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.

Haqqani insurgent group proves resilient foe in Afghan war

Joshua Partlow/ THE WASHINGTON POST - U.S. soldiers are on a mission to apprehend an alleged Haqqani network fighter they suspected of participating in a bombing that killed five Afghan police officers in January. (May 24)


By Joshua Partlow, Published: May 29


KHOST, Afghanistan — The United States knows where to find the most feared insurgent family in the Afghanistan war.

Troops can point to the downtown Khost mansion owned by its patriarch, Jalaluddin Haqqani; the million-dollar blue-tile mosque he built for the city’s residents; and his base of operations 20 miles away in Pakistan. They are aware of his trucking and warehouse businesses, his sons who command about 3,000 fighters, and their sophisticated training camps that conduct courses in withstanding interrogation and firing rockets across borders.

Defeating the Haqqanis is another matter.

“Haqqani is the most resilient enemy network out there,” said Col. Christopher Toner, commander of the U.S. military brigade in this eastern Afghan province.

Outnumbered by the Taliban and less famous than al-Qaeda, the Haqqani network nevertheless poses an intractable problem for U.S. troops, particularly as the focus of the war shifts toward the Pakistani border.

After an intensive focus on fighting Mohammad Omar’s Taliban in southern Afghanistan in 2010, the Obama administration is in talks, mediated by Germany and Qatar, with an Omar deputy. But a political deal with the Taliban — still a distant prospect — would not necessarily end the war in the east: the Haqqani network is seen as the least reconcilable of the Afghanistan war’s motley crew of insurgent factions.

The Haqqani family, protected from all threats save for the occasional U.S. drone strike in its Pakistani sanctuary of North Waziristan, has carved out a lucrative niche by exploiting the porous border with smuggling rings and bribery.

The Haqqanis rely on their Pash­tun tribal connections and their patrons in Pakistan’s intelligence service, according to U.S. military officials.

The Haqqanis hew to the relatively narrow goal of ruling a three-province swath of eastern Afghanistan that was once their exclusive domain but is now shared with thousands of American troops.

“They want power, wealth, money and a seat at the table when this thing is over,” Toner said.

The Haqqani fighters cooperate with the Taliban but are “not fully subordinate” to Omar and sometimes extract tolls from Taliban fighters who transit their territory, said a U.S. military intelligence official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter for the record.

Resourceful network

Haqqani’s fighters slip into Afghanistan along mountain passes and historic trade routes, including several illegal border crossings used by hundreds of cargo trucks each day. The men generally fight in Afghanistan for many weeks before returning to Pakistan for a break of several months, U.S. officials say.

When in Afghanistan, the fighters move from village to village, never spending more than one night in the same house. They rarely use cellphones or radios, because the communications can be picked up by U.S. surveillance technology, and know to exploit the “red zone” — the one-kilometer-wide buffer zone near the border that U.S. troops do not enter without clearance from their commanders.

Even as U.S. troops work to deplete the ranks of Haqqani fighters — about 150 of them are killed or captured every month in Khost — the group regenerates. The Haqqanis dip into a seemingly endless supply of Afghan refugees and young men and boys schooled at conservative Islamic madrassas in Pakistan’s tribal areas. U.S. soldiers recently arrested a 15-year-old who they suspect is an insurgent cell leader.

To avoid detection, Haqqani fighters sometimes take elaborate precautions. U.S. troops noted how several people will convene at an Afghan safe house, each with a different bomb component — batteries, wire, clothespins and homemade explosives.

The fighters report to leaders in Pakistan and often do not know their comrades. Even if one is arrested, “he can’t give you the other six dudes,” said Capt. Daniel Leard, the company commander in the border district of Terezayi. “Even if you take out one arm, you can’t take out the whole network.”

‘The shadow government’

The titular head of the organization, Jalaluddin Haqqani, has been a militia leader for three decades, and he received money and weapons from the United States during the war against the Soviets. Then-U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson (D-Tex.), who championed the rebel cause, famously described Haqqani as “goodness personified.” Haqqani exacted a heavy toll on Soviet troops by besieging his home town of Khost. His status as a war hero gave him a credibility among Afghans that lasts to this day.

Now in failing health, Haqqani plays more of a symbolic role in the organization, which has been run for the past few years by his son Sirajuddin and, to a lesser extent, a second son, Badruddin. Sirajuddin is known for his business savvy, earning money from trucking, extortion and racketeering. The fighters conduct kidnappings, collect illegal taxes and shake down Afghan shopkeepers for protection fees.

“They’re trying to position themselves as the shadow government that will take over as the official government if they can win the war,” said Lt. Col. Jesse Pearson, a battalion commander in Khost. “That’s what their motivation is. I do not see them as ideologically based.”

Haqqani fighters receive extensive training in Pakistan, U.S. troops said. They have “live fire training that is every bit as realistic and funded and supported as anything we do in the States,” Leard said.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed last month on Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost in separate rocket attacks; at least one is suspected to have been staged from Pakistan.

The level of expertise in the Haqqani network has helped the group strike targets far from its base, including in the Afghan capital, Kabul. A suicide bombing this month inside an Afghan military hospital, as well as several other assaults on hotels, embassies and shopping malls, have been attributed to Haqqani fighters.

Last month, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, openly accused Pakistan’s main intelligence agency of supporting the Haqqani network. To Afghan officials, there has long been little doubt of ties between the group and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. “They are an element of the ISI. The whole world knows that,” said Lt. Col. Atiqullah Torzan, an Afghan border police commander in Khost. “They get 100 percent support.”

Pakistan denies the allegation. Pakistani officials have long pledged a military operation in North Waziristan to target the insurgents hiding there but have not delivered.

Weak links along border

To combat the Haqqani network, the United States has sent more troops to eastern Afghanistan: A 5,000-man brigade operates in Khost and in part of neighboring Paktia province. The Haqqanis are also a leading target of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.

The military pressure has taken its toll not only in the number of killed and captured insurgents, but also in less tangible ways. U.S. military officials said the greater presence of troops at border checkpoints has slowed illegal truck traffic and diverted it to other parts of the border, increasing the costs of bringing weapons into battle. Insurgents have complained in intercepted communications of wanting to attack but not having the money, bombs or people to do it. Pearson, the battalion commander, says he thinks Haqqani’s men are in “full defense mode” and are “hiding and trying to stay alive.”

“Frankly, we’re bringing terror to the terrorists,” he said.

But the Afghan security forces along the border remain a weak link in the fight. In Terezayi district, along the Pakistan border, there are just seven policemen on any given shift to patrol an area with a population of more than 100,000.

The border police have more men on the payroll, about 300, but only a third are present for duty at any one time. Those who serve are notoriously susceptible to bribes, which helps the Haqqani fighters slip through. The price the policemen charge, about $4 per vehicle, rises to about $40 for more important insurgent cargo, U.S. military officials said.

“We’re talking illegal imports of up to 200 trucks a day, semitrailers,” Leard said. “That’s enough to feed the insurgency in all of Khost.”

 

Wikipedia goes to class

Norm Shafer/ FOR THE WASHINGTON POST - James Madison sophomore Anna Wilson works on a Wikipedia-related assignment for a class called "Professional and Technical Editing.”

By Jenna Johnson, Published: May 29

A Virginia Tech graduate student hit save on her overview of the state workers’ compensation commission one spring day, but before her professor could take a look at it, someone else began deleting entire sections, calling them trivial and promotional.

It wasn’t a teaching assistant on a power trip — it was a Wikipedia editor known only as “Mean as custard.”


“I had worked on it for almost an entire day,” said Amy Pearson, a public administration master’s student. “It was kind of shocking.”

This school year, dozens of professors from across the country gave students an unexpected assignment: Write Wikipedia entries about public policy issues.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Web site, organized the project in an effort to bulk up the decade-old online encyclopedia’s coverage of topics ranging from the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 to Sudanese refugees in Egypt. Such issues have been treated on the site in much less depth than TV shows, celebrity biographies and other elements of pop culture.

Many students involved in the project have received humbling lessons about open-source writing as their work was revised, attacked or deleted by anonymous critics with unknown credentials.

In the fall, Rochelle A. Davis, an assistant professor at Georgetown University, told undergraduates in her culture and politics course to create a Wikipedia page about a community they belonged to, then use that research to develop a thesis for an academic paper.

“Collectively, they were the best papers I’ve ever read at Georgetown,” Davis said. She said students benefited from vetting their ideas with a wider community — a practice that could help academics at all levels. “This is where we are going,” she said. “I think that’s a good thing.”

In the fall semester, nine professors were involved. There are about three dozen now. By next semester, the foundation hopes to expand to schools in India, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom. The goal is to train at least 10,000 professors and students by 2013.

The total number of participants in the volunteer project is about 600. But in April alone, that group contributed 2.9 million characters worth of information, which would fill nearly 2,000 traditional printed pages.

“The outcome is just amazing,” said Frank Schulenburg, the foundation’s head of public outreach. “We have a much larger number of professors who are interested than we ever expected.”

Still, Wikipedia and academia make an odd pair. The “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” has long had an uneasy relationship with professors who dedicate their lives to filling scholarly journals and libraries. In their eyes, Wikipedia is an unreliable cheat sheet.

“I start every semester with the typical speech: ‘If you are turning in a paper and cite Wikipedia, then we have a problem. We need to talk,’ ” said Matt Dull, who is Pearson’s professor at Virginia Tech. But this time, he gave that speech and followed it with the Wiki assignment.

As the Wikipedia catalogue has grown to 18 million entries in more than 270 languages, the site has become one of the leading ways much of the world learns about new topics, double-checks memories of past events and settles bar bets.


§


Professors such as Dull are starting to see Wikipedia as an opportunity to educate a massive audience on the specialized topics their students research. Most college papers are read by a handful of people, at most, while a Wiki entry can be read by thousands (or millions) around the world.

“It’s the ability for students to feel that their works matters, that it doesn’t get trapped in the classroom,” said Adel Iskander, a Georgetown instructor who assigned Wiki entries in his graduate-level Arab media course. “We’re kind of challenging the academic establishment, in a way.”


To the uninitiated, writing for Wikipedia can be intimidating. There are complicated rules for what can be an entry and what counts as a reliable source. The language must hew to a neutral point of view. Writers also must learn how to add technical code to display their work properly on the Web.

To help students and professors, the foundation recruited a network of experts to organize campus workshops and answer questions via e-mail or online chats.

As students create the content, instructors must find a way to grade it. By the end of the term, the typical student has already received help — or headaches — from a host of Wiki editors. Automated Web tools known as bots have scoured their work for grammatical and coding errors.

“We had so many people, from God knows where, scold them for things that they have done and praise them,” said Cindy Allen, a technical writing and editing instructor at James Madison University who assigned two classes to write Wiki entries. “It’s really a different thing.”

Some professors have sifted through the editing histories of their students’ pages to pinpoint what they wrote. Some have simply given participation grades. Others have asked students to convert their entries into traditional term papers.

Some students walked away with an understanding of how to evaluate the quality of a Wikipedia page. Others found themselves contributing more to Wikipedia — just for fun.

“I got really sort of addicted to it,” said Jeff Reger, a Georgetown graduate student. “At this point, when I hear of something new, I find myself wondering, ‘Oh, I wonder what that Wikipedia page says.’ ”

 

Can Turkey Unify the Arabs?

Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Corbis

WISPS OF THE PAST Beyond Istanbul's landmarks, a legacy of cosmopolitan interchange of goods and ideas.
By ANTHONY SHADID, GAZIANTEP, Turkey
Published: May 28, 2011


LESS than a mile from the Syrian frontier, in the land of Kemal Ataturk, Ahmed Sheikh Said defies the identities that borders inspire.

Mr. Said was born in the Syrian town of Azaz and raised across a line on the map in Kilis, Turkey. A grocer, he speaks Turkish like a native to his customers, while holding an ear open to the Arabic telecasts of Al Jazeera playing in his store. His wife and his mother are Turkish, but Arab blood runs through his veins, he says, “till the end of time.”

“The bread of Azaz comes from Kilis, and the bread of Kilis comes from Azaz,” said Mr. Said, whose shop sits just off a road that once carried the business of the far-flung Ottoman Empire and now marks Turkey’s limits. “We’re the same. We’re brothers. What really divides us?”

As the Arab world beyond the border struggles with the inspirations and traumas of its revolution — a new notion of citizenship colliding with the smaller claims of piety, sect and clan — something else is percolating along the old routes of that empire, which spanned three continents and lasted six centuries before Ataturk brought it to an end in 1923 with self-conscious revolutionary zeal.

It is probably too early to define identities emerging in those locales. But something bigger than its parts is at work along imperial connections that were bent but never broken by decades of colonialism and the cold war. The links are the stuff of land, culture, history, architecture, memory and imagination that remains the realm of scholarship and daily lives but often eludes the notice of a journalism marching to the cadence of conflict.

Even amid the din of the upheaval in the Arab world, that new sense of belonging represents a more pacific and perhaps more powerful undertow pulling in directions that call into question more parochial notions. The undertow intersects with the Arab revolution’s search for a new sense of self; it also builds on economic forces now reconnecting an older imperium, as well as on Turkey’s new dynamism and on efforts to bring reality to what has long been nostalgia.

Its echoes are heard in the borderlands like Gaziantep, near Mr. Said’s shop, where businessman can haggle in a patois of English, Turkish, Arabic and even Kurdish. It is seen in the blurring of arbitrary lines where the Semitic script of Arabic and Kurdish tangles with the Latin script of Turkish across the borders with Syria and Iraq. It is noticed along the frontiers where Arab and Turkish nationalism, pan-Islamism and a host of secular ideologies never seemed to quite capture the ambitions or demarcate the environments of the diverse peoples who live there.

“The normalization of history,” proclaims the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, whose government has tried to reintegrate the region by lifting visa requirements and promoting a Middle Eastern trade zone, as it deploys its businessmen along the old routes and exports Turkey’s pop culture to an eager audience.

“None of the borders of Turkey are natural,” he went on. “Almost all of them are artificial. Of course we have to respect them as nation-states, but at the same time we have to understand that there are natural continuities. That’s the way it’s been for centuries.”

There is admittedly a hint of romanticism in it all. The Arab world may in fact be bracing for years of sectarian and internecine strife in places like Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria. And in seeking to be a more prominent, and steadying, influence, Turkey’s ambitions may well be greater than its means. Still, economic realities are already restoring old trajectories that joined the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq, tied Batumi in Georgia to Trabzon in Turkey, and knit Aleppo into an axis of cities — Mosul, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep and Iskenderun — in which Damascus, the leading but distant Arab metropole, was an afterthought.

THE DRAWING OF 20TH-CENTURY BORDERS rendered traumas large and small. Sectarian and ethnic cleansing after World War I rid Turkey and Greece of much of their diversity. The horrors of nationalism and the Holocaust made Salonica, a celebrated melting pot, unrecognizable in its modern incarnation. Even history’s footnotes were rewritten.

One example is Marjayoun, my family’s ancestral hometown in Lebanon, nestled near the Israeli and Syrian borders in the heart of the old Ottoman realm, and little more than an afterthought on maps these days.

No one in Marjayoun would necessarily pine for the days of the Ottoman rulers. Massacres occurred, and Jews and Christians faced discrimination in taxes and commerce. There was no such thing as equality. To this day, the darkest moments of Marjayoun’s history remain those last breaths of the empire — the seferberlik. It was the Ottoman name for the draft, but it came to represent the famine, starvation and death that World War I brought to the town, when the famished searched the manure of animals to find an undigested morsel of grain.

Yet more than a few in Marjayoun today might express a nostalgia for the time and place the Ottoman Empire represented, when Marjayoun’s traders ventured to Arish on the coast of the Sinai Peninsula and down the Nile to Sudan, by way of Palestine. The town was a way station on the route from the breadbasket of the Houran in southern Syria to Acre, the Levant’s greatest port on the coast of Palestine. Beirut was an afterthought. Marjayoun’s traders plied the steppe of the Houran, its gentry owned land in the Hula Valley, and its educated ventured to Haifa and Jerusalem to make their reputations.

World War I and the borders that followed augured the demise of this style of life, and not just in Marjayoun. The ideologies that gained prevalence in the town then were about contesting those frontiers — Arab nationalism, pan-Syrian nationalism and Communism, which itself was imagining a broader community. These movements failed as more borders were drawn in wars with Israel in 1948 and 1967. And with those lines on the map came a smaller sense of self. By the time Lebanon’s 15-year civil war began in 1975, ideologies had given way to identities, and most people in Marjayoun identified themselves simply as Christian, or perhaps Greek Orthodox, too unique to survive as a community.

A town of thousands is today a town of hundreds, strewn with the abandoned villas of another age. Hajar bala bashar, a friend once told me. “Stones without people.”

“A RECREATION OF THE HISTORIC AND NATURAL ENVIRONMENT” is how Mr. Davutoglu describes his vision for the region. And indeed, that vision, which is effectively government policy, has touched in a nerve in Turkey, a country with its own unresolved questions of identity.

Just as Arab nationalism still runs run deep, with the fate of Palestine its axis, so does Turkish nationalism, which includes a sense that the country deserves a role in the region, and beyond that at least echoes of its Ottoman age. The more sophisticated Turks dismiss charges of a new rationale for Turkish imperialism and call the goal instead a peaceful partnership that might look like the free-trade zone that presaged the European Union after World War II.

“It’s been almost 100 years that we’ve been separated by superficial borders, superficial cultural and religious borders, and now with the lifting of visas to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, we’re lifting national boundaries,” said Yusuf Yerkel, a young academic on Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s staff. “Turkey is challenging the traditional understanding of policy in the Middle East in place since the 20th century.”

More than the talk of a salon, the vision comes at an obvious turning point in the Middle East. Though dealt setbacks by the Arab revolution — investments have been lost in Libya and the prospect of chaos stalks Syria — Turkey has stuck to its vision of an integrated region. A railway line linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq reopened last year; a fast train is to operate between Gaziantep and Aleppo. The resources of northern Iraq are strategic for Turkey’s plans to diversify its energy sources and to feed a pipeline from Turkey to central Europe. A common free-trade area has already been agreed upon by Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

Turkish television series are dubbed into Syrian Arabic, and its stars’ posters sell by the tens of thousands in Iraq. In Baghdad, portraits of one famous actor are digitally altered to show him in traditional Kurdish or Arab dress.

Across the region, the Arab revolution has inspired a rethinking of identity, even as older notions of self hang like a specter over the revolts’ success. In its most pristine, the revolution feels transnational, as demands of justice, freedom and dignity are expressed in a technology-driven globalism. It echoes even in Turkey, where religious and national divides are increasingly blurred. Selcuk Sirin, a professor at New York University who has done extensive polling in Turkey, especially among youth, calls this the emergence of “hybrid identities.”

“Young people don’t buy into this idea of a clash, and they don’t buy into this idea of fixed identity,” he said. “They know how to negotiate these so-called polar opposites, and they’re looking for something new.”

THERE WAS A MOVIE more than a decade ago in Turkey called “Propaganda,” a dark comedy about the border drawn between Syria and Turkey, dividing family from family. It was inspired by the reality of relatives heading to the fence there on Muslim holidays — Bayram in Turkish, Id in Arabic — and throwing gifts to the other side.

These days, with the border effectively open, Syrians fill the hotels on weekends in Gaziantep, which is famous for its pistachios. Some merchants here talk about their trade growing tenfold since visa requirements were lifted. Debates rage over whether the kebab of Gaziantep is better than the kibbe in Aleppo.

Turks may still call a mess “Arab hair.” But they also judge a gift by the standards of “apricots in Damascus.” And the old notions of Ottoman tyranny (from the Arab point of view) and Arab betrayal in World War I (as Turks see it) have given way somewhat to the promise of profit in a market still booming even amid the uprising across the border.

Hakan Cinkilic, foreign trade manager of a plastics company called Sun Pet, is reaping the benefits. Nearly 80 percent of its products go to Iraq, and the company set up a factory in Jordan last year. Its exports have more than doubled since 2008. This year he has already traveled to Libya, the United States, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

As he spoke, his cellphone rang. It was a customer in Kirkuk, Iraq, who spoke to him in Turkish. A few minutes later, a businessman called from the West Bank. The conversation unfolded in English, punctuated by Arabic expressions inflected by the vowels of his native tongue. You wouldn’t call him neo-Ottoman, given the term’s suggestion of a resurgent imperialism. He’s not really Levantine, an identity whose borders hug the Mediterranean coast. He seemed post-Ottoman, reinterpreting the past.

“It’s natural,” he said simply.

§


TORNADO experts had seen it all before: whole neighborhoods obliterated, big-box stores flattened, even a hospital badly damaged.

But what really shocked them about the powerful storm that struck Joplin, Mo., last week was the toll in lives: more than 125 and counting. “We thought we were done with the 100-dead tornadoes,” said Thomas P. Grazulis, a tornado historian in St. Johnsbury, Vt. “With warnings and Doppler radar, there was a lot of feeling that we were done with this stuff.”

Experts are not sure yet why the toll was so high. Forecasts were made and warnings were issued, and this was an area, in the heart of Tornado Alley, where people knew what to do to protect themselves. “But something didn’t work the way we’d like it to,” said Harold Brooks , a research meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla.

Experts say there will always be deaths when a strong tornado scores a direct hit on a heavily populated area. The question — for all disasters, not just twisters — has been how low casualty figures can go.

“The fundamental characteristic of a major disaster is that there is going to be loss,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. “The goal of preparedness is to make that loss as minimal as possible, to optimize survival.”

During the 20th century, strides were made in optimizing survival from tornadoes. In the early part of the century, yearly deaths from twisters in the United States averaged a little less than 2 per million population, or about 200 per year in the 1920s. Beginning that decade, as awareness of the dangers increased and forecasting technologies were developed and improved, the death rate declined by an order of magnitude, reaching about 0.2 per million in the mid-1990s, or about 60 people per year.

Since then, Mr. Brooks said, it has leveled off, and while no one is certain why, researchers think the rise in mobile-home living is one reason. Lightly built and poorly anchored, mobile homes can be death traps in the extreme winds of a tornado.

This year, with more than 500 deaths already — including about 320 in an outbreak of several hundred tornadoes across Alabama and other states in late April — is an aberration, experts said, much like 1974, when there was a similar outbreak, and 1953, when strong tornadoes hit three cities: Waco, Tex.; Flint, Mich.; and Worcester, Mass. All of last year, only 45 people died, and in 2009 the number was 21. The toll next year is expected to be more like those figures than this year’s.

Mr. Brooks said the timing of the storm last week — 5:30 p.m. on a Sunday — may have had something to do with the 100-plus deaths. He compared the Joplin event to a tornado that struck Oklahoma City in 1999 and killed about one-fourth as many people. That twister hit after 7 p.m. on a Monday, when most people had settled in for the evening. “That’s not a bad time to get information to people,” Mr. Brooks said. But in Joplin, he added, “late Sunday afternoon, maybe there’s some issues with communication going on.”

Complicating the situation in Joplin was the fact that a high school graduation had occurred that afternoon, and more people were out and about, at parties or other events. And many people ended up in large stores, which tornado warnings say should be avoided because of the strong risk of collapse.

“Did people not receive the message?” Mr. Brooks said. “Did they not internalize the message in some way? Or did they make bad choices?”

While the tornado forecasting system works well, Mr. Brooks said, “we have to work on finding ways of communicating the messages better.”

“Perhaps we don’t do that in ways that people understand the threat,” he added.

And there is the possibility of issuing so many alerts that people become inured to the danger. Jasper County, where Joplin is located, receives many tornado warnings every year. “We’ve had no evidence in the past that people were overwarned,” Mr. Brooks said, “but we don’t know what the threshold of that is.” Beyond any improvements in forecasting and communication, getting even closer to zero deaths would require additional steps, said Stephen Flynn, president of the Center for National Policy, a Washington research group that studies preparedness issues. The destruction and deaths at the Joplin hospital, he said, pointed to one: replacing conventional windows with safety glass.

“Are you going to do that for a raised-ranch house?” he said. “No. But for a hospital facility where people are vulnerable, yes. And is that a huge cost issue? No, it’s not.”

But other efforts, like building community shelters for people in mobile-home parks or in areas with slab housing that lacks basements, can be costly. And the issue of cost, always major, has grown larger as economic conditions have worsened and governments have had to tighten their belts, Dr. Redlener said. “Dollars are limited,” he added. “States have to make decisions — are we going to provide health insurance for more children, or are we going to do better preparation for a disaster that may never happen?”

Beyond cost, though, are other considerations. In the case of community shelters, Mr. Brooks said, “you need to make sure that the shelter is open when people need it, but make sure it’s not open all the time, where your neighborhood pervert can do something in it.” Potential liability issues have forced many communities to abandon the idea of group shelters, he said.

Individuals can always build shelters for themselves, and one of the truths about natural disasters is that afterward, many people rush to make safety precautions they had ignored before.

Mr. Grazulis, the historian, said that no doubt some people in Joplin would rebuild their homes and include storm shelters, which can cost about $5,000 or more. “But I bet Joplin will not be hit again for a hundred or a thousand years,” he said. “The people that build these shelters — generations are not going to have to use them.”

Instead, the next disaster will happen elsewhere. And right now, Mr. Grazulis said, “the next town that needs them has no idea it needs them.”

 

Pressure For Reform in Southeast Asia

RFA

By Parameswaran Ponnudurai

2011-05-28

Singapore's 'watershed' election sends new signals for change across the region.

AFP

Singapore opposition party supporters celebrate results of general elections, May 8, 2011.

Rights activists constantly bombard Burma and its communist one-party state neighbors Vietnam and Laos for their stubborn refusal to embrace meaningful political reforms.

But shouldn't the more prosperous Southeast Asian nations—especially the founders of the ASEAN grouping—also take the flak for dragging their feet on expanding political liberties for their peoples?

The recent election in Singapore, in which the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) suffered its worst performance, has thrown the spotlight on lagging reforms not only in the island state but also in other more developed economies in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), such as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.   

The PAP's share of the popular vote slipped to an all-time low of 60 percent despite the island state's strong economic growth in the last five years, including a record 14.5 percent expansion in 2010.

The opposition romped home with six parliamentary seats, the highest number it has ever taken.

Many disenchanted young voters used the social media during the elections to press for a more open political system as they spoke out against Singapore's high living costs, low wages and lax immigration laws.

Reacting swiftly, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong unveiled sweeping Cabinet changes, opting for younger ministers, and with a pledge to review the high salaries earned by ministers, a raging election issue.

His blunt-speaking father, Lee Kuan Yew, the country's first prime minister, who has little patience for dissent, also stepped down from active politics after more than half a century at the very top.

But the public is crying for more reforms in the tightly-controlled state, demanding changes to sedition, libel and electoral laws and those that control media and freedom of assembly.

"It’s time for Singaporeans to realize that they will never be entitled to the full economic rights they deserve as citizens of Singapore without first reclaiming their political rights from the PAP," said Temasek Review, a popular Internet newspaper.

It urged Singaporeans to "first fight for their basic human rights of freedom of speech and assembly as enshrined and guaranteed" under the city state's constitution.

"Sounding board"

The "political tsunami" in Singapore serves as a "sounding board for the future political landscape in Southeast Asia," wrote Kavi Chongkittavorn, editor of The Nation newspaper in Thailand.

"Changes, albeit small and at a snail pace, as it may be in the island republic, sends a strong signal to similar kinds of governments in ASEAN that they either take up reform or soon be challenged by their own people," he said.

Rapid economic growth "is no longer sufficient criteria to sustain power holding without democracy and acceptable governance."

Reforms and polls

Elections are also approaching in Thailand in July and in Malaysia possibly within a year with planned reforms weighing heavily in the polls.

In Thailand, a high level panel that has recommended decentralizing the government's powers in a bid to give more rights to citizens was disbanded this month ahead of the elections.

The National Reform Committee was set up last year following political violence in a bid to heal deep social divisions, strengthen civil society and promote fairness as part of a government reconciliation agenda.

“Political parties (campaigning in the election) should make national reform a major policy. But so far no party has a clear-cut policy,” lamented Thailand's ex-premier Anand Panyarachun, who headed the panel.

The election is set to boil down to a clash between prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and exiled businessman Thaksin Shinawatra, who was twice elected premier only to be forced out by the military in 2006.

Any reform will have to scrutinize the role of the army in Thailand, which has endured at least 18 coups in the last eight decades. The military is believed backed by a small establishment of royalists and business elite.

Race-based policy

In Malaysia, reforms to a four-decade-old race-based policy that has led to blatant abuses and corruption and spawned a patronage-ridden economy have failed to take off one year after they were announced.

Prime Minister Najib Razak appears reluctant to move forward with his "New Economic Model" to revamp the affirmative action policy favoring majority ethnic Malays, due to opposition from right-wing  groups.

While the new model envisions an open high-income economy and attempts to ease criticism of racial discrimination against the ethnic minority Chinese and Indians, it does not go far enough in grappling with the enormous challenges facing the economy.

The reform plan "doesn't reflect and address the structural challenges or even identify them adequately," said Kamal Malhotra, a senior United Nations Development Programme official, Malaysia's official Bernama news agency reported.

Democratic reforms are also slow to come by in Malaysia, which still maintains a draconian law that allows indefinite detention of without trial. Newspapers must renew their licenses every year, and cannot petition the courts if the government revokes them.

Political parties

In the Philippines, much delayed political party reforms are still languishing in the legislature despite support from many lawmakers and non-government organizations.

The reforms set limits to campaign contributions and state financing for political campaigns as well as prohibit political turncoatism in a country driven by personality politics and where political parties are almost inconsequential.

The current Philippine system requires a "radical re-engineering as it is studded with opportunism and turncoatism and there is no transparency or accounting of political contributions or donations," said veteran politician and senator Edgardo Angara.

Philippine President Benigno Aquino, who was elected by a landslide last year, has also come under fire for not being firm in efforts to weed out corruption and poverty in the archipelago where more than 40 per cent of the people live on less than U.S. $2 a day.

It took eight months for Aquino to get cracking on a committee to plan the government's agenda and prioritize legislative programs. Even then, the initial list did not include bills that he had championed, including those on reproductive health and freedom of information.

Islamic radicalism

In Indonesia, Southeast Asia's largest state, efforts to spread democracy have slowed and some hard-fought reforms implemented following dictator President Suharto ouster in 1998 risk being rolled back due to pressure from conservatives, according to reports.

Rising Islamic radicalism is also posing a threat in the world's most populous Muslim nation.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told American journalists who traveled to Indonesia recently that his country was serious in conducting reforms but admitted it will be a long and "painful" process" and that "democracy takes time."

Electoral management, the fight against corruption and the lack of protection of minority rights are major areas where conservatives have sought to unwind reforms, Australia-based scholar Marcus Mietzner said in a report.

He argued that a civil society push-back was the only reason there had not been a full-blown reversal.

Swift reforms in the leading ASEAN countries are key to prodding the others in the group to open up their economies, especially Burma, which is under increasing pressure to release the more than 2,000 political prisoners it holds at present.

"It’s not wrong to regard Burma as the epitome of an evil regime in Southeast Asia, but this view shouldn’t prevent us from exposing and resisting the varying shades of authoritarianism in the region that are anathema to the building of a genuine democracy," said Mong Palatino, Southeast Asia editor at the international bloggers' forum Global Voices.