"Is Timor-Leste a Failed State?" http://bit.ly/jRAk1
Portuguese Journal of International Affairs
Is Timor-Leste a Failed State?
Timor-Leste displays signs of political, military and social instability, and it is critical to understand if it is indeed a failed state or just, as the former European Parliament member José Ribeiro e Castro put it, "a state with failings". The answer to this question will influence the options of the various internal and external actors.
This article begins with a short overview of the nature of failed states -- terminology, defining characteristics and causes. It is followed by an analysis of existing and potential failed states. Since there is a clear link between the nature of the political regime and state malfunction, the subsequent paragraphs will focus, albeit in a non-exhaustive fashion, on a few political, military, judicial and economic aspects essential to addressing the final answer.
PJIA 1, Paulo Gorjão and André Monteiro, Is Timor-Leste a failed state?
http://www.ipris.org/php/download.php?fid=386
The Dragon and the Crocodile: Chinese Interests in East Timor
The article is structured in the following manner: in the first section the role of People's Republic of China will be considered through the prism of bipolarity: whether the Chinese method is perceived as an exercise of extending soft power, or as a source of what is described as a new "Cold War" with the United States via Australia. In the second section, a historical framework -- based on the tenet that support of the developing world is a constant of the Chinese foreign policy since the Cold War -- traces relations between China and Timor from 1975 to the present. The third section focuses on the foreign policy pillars: trade and aid; the role of the Lusofonia connection will also be analyzed. In the last section, a summary of the most recent facts concerning political and economic relations between the two countries will be provided.
PJIA 1, Nuno Canas Mendes, Chinese Interests in East Timor
http://www.ipris.org/php/download.php?fid=384
Jul 4, 2009
Young Baghdad Diarist Serves as Witness to War
Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 4, 2009
BAGHDAD The words are as simple as they are profound.
"I was born in war," Amal Salman says today, in reflection and epiphany.
She was 13 when the United States invaded her country, a war of its own choosing, buoyed by grand ambition and perhaps folly. Off a busy, four-lane street in the working-class district of Karrada, she huddled with her large family in the relative safety of their modest home, where rats sometimes scurried down a darkened stairwell.
When The Washington Post first profiled her in those days, she was a vivacious but awkward girl. In public, an adolescent giggle would give way to the brashness of youth, her convictions delivered impetuously. In quieter moments alone, keeping a diary imbued with her intelligence and curiosity, she would turn more contemplative about an imminent end and an uncertain beginning. The "suqut" -- collapse -- was her term for what followed: the fall of Saddam Hussein and 35 years of pitiless Baath Party rule.
"What's going to be the future of Iraq? Can it be good?" she asked in her diary then, the sloping script of her Arabic still lacking confidence. "No one knows."
Now 20, Amal has become calm and demure, tradition dictating reserve. Her words are considered, not impulsive. She exudes the quiet assuredness of intelligence, the realization that the fiercest argument can sometimes belie the deepest uncertainty.
Once wrapped in newspaper, her diary has become a sleek notebook, its pages protected by a plastic sheath and bundled by an elastic band. No longer tentative, her script forgoes a calligrapher's flourish for a stenographer's precision. She still writes at night when, as she puts it, "the noise subsides, and I hear only the frequent roar of the helicopters roaming back and forth, to which I have grown accustomed."
In those pages, penned in the third house her family has lived in since the invasion, the questions she asked as a child have given way to the declarations of an adult, in a nation that has journeyed away from the peaks of invasion, occupation and civil war. In the grimmest, most wrenching fashion, those events were spectacles. Like her country, Amal now grapples with the ambiguity of the ordinary, the equivocation that maturity brings.
"Life has made men forget the meaning of innocence and childhood," she wrote this year.
"Baghdad Has Fallen"
In nearly 1,250 years of history, invaders had vanquished Baghdad no less than 15 times, and Amal, reflexively defiant, witnessed its latest conquest.
"If a foreigner wants to enter Baghdad in peace, we will welcome him like a brother," she said then. "If a foreigner wants to enter as an enemy, every family will go out and confront them, even with stones. If they don't throw rocks, then they'll throw dirt."
Her father was killed in a car accident in the holy month of Ramadan in 1996. For years, her mother, Karima, sold gum from a canvas mat in the street and now bakes bread for neighbors. Of Karima's eight children, the oldest son, Ali, served as a soldier in Mosul; his younger brother, a ne'er-do-well and ex-convict, had joined a motley unit of militiamen patrolling Baghdad. Fatima, the oldest daughter, left school to help care for Amal and the rest of the children: Zeinab, the twins Hibba and Duaa, and the youngest son, Mahmoud.
The war was lost as soon as it began, and on a sunny morning, a neighbor's radio delivered the news to Amal and her family. Her entry on April 9, 2003, was shorter than most.
"And so," she wrote, "Baghdad has fallen to the Americans."
An image of the aftermath of invasion lingers in Baghdad, resonating in the prolonged interregnum between the suqut and the onset of a more routine life. The city felt like a dazed inmate stumbling out of a cell and squinting into harsh sunlight.
Amal grappled with words that seemed shorn of meaning. "They talk about democracy. Where is democracy? Is it that people die of hunger and deprivation and fear?" she wrote in the weeks after the invasion in the diary, which she kept tucked in a drawer.
She struggled with the nihilistic spasm of carnage into which Iraq soon descended, reflected in her family's lives. Her oldest brothers joined the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and blamed for some of the country's worst sectarian bloodletting. Dozens of bombings eventually tore through her neighborhood. Among the wounded was her sister Hibba, whose right arm was sliced by flying debris. "Shrapnel Hibba," schoolmates nicknamed her.
Her brother Mahmoud, just 11 then, recalled the grisliest of scenes: burning metal slicing through the living, a bone jutting through a pant leg, a car's engine resting on corpses. "The dead have become cheap," the boy said dryly.
In that crucible, Amal was no longer the girl who parroted slogans. Reflex had given way to questions, which in turn gave rise to an appreciation of an opposing view. Her words were more nuanced as she was forced to consider her country's experience.
"If I say the Americans are better, someone asks what have the Americans done," she noted then. ". . . If I said the time of Saddam was better, they say, what? If he didn't like you, he would cut off your head." She shook her head. "I don't know what to say."
Prayers and Toy Guns
Over the years, religion for Amal and her family was never piety. Like the Muslim call to prayer, it gave their lives cadence, speaking with clarity, offering simplicity and serving as a refuge in troubled times. It remains so today. "Oh God, if my livelihood and subsistence are in Heaven, do let it come down," reads a prayer hanging from a wall in Amal's house, whose blue paint has faded to reveal the water-stained cement beneath.
If it is in the ground, let it come out,
If it is far, let it come near,
If it is near, let it appear,
If it is little, increase it,
If it is much, bless it,
And make me, by it, avoid sins and wrongdoing.
But like the country, long subsumed in the grandest of narratives -- dictatorship, invasion, occupation and civil war -- the verse vies with the potpourri of influences that a semblance of normalcy has brought. Gone are the utopian promises of liberation. Hidden, somewhat, is the hatred. Quelled for now is the dystopia of violence.
Two of Amal's sisters, Fatima and Zeinab, have married, but the family still gathers almost every day. Zeinab's son Fahd, dressed in a shirt that reads "Tacky is Goofy," waves a play pistol and machine gun, then dances to a song written by a follower of Sadr, the Shiite cleric, whose militia once rampaged through Baghdad.
"A break and we'll return," the lyrics say. "We'll make the blood rise up to the knees."
Two pictures of Shiite saints adorn the wall, near a television stacked with DVDs of movies starring Jim Carrey and Antonio Banderas. Sitting on a soiled mattress covered with a brown blanket, Fatima declares her fondness for Dr. Phil and Oprah.
Smiling, Amal looks down at the floor's buckling tiles. "We already have enough disasters in Iraq," she jokes. "Why do we need to hear about other people's?"
In the worst days of the invasion in 2003, Karima once said something as her daughters sat around her: "It's like we're part of a play on a stage. Life's not good, it's not bad. It's just a play." The mother's words seemed to acknowledge a powerlessness she felt. The script was already written, and she was a spectator, watching the performance.
That sense still pervades Karima's life. Her oldest son, Ali, newly graduated from training in Jordan to work as a security guard, was detained when U.S. and Iraqi forces raided a cafe last year. He was one of 13 arrested, and his family believes it was arbitrary; eight months on, there is no sign of his release. After school, Amal and her younger sisters occasionally visit a church to light candles for him.
"Not even the cockroaches would eat the food in prison," his mother says. "He sees me and starts crying. His hair is turning gray. He's so worn out, so worn out."
Fatima, the oldest daughter and the most bitter, turns angry. "Have you seen anything tangible in this country?" she asks. "Has anything ever turned out for the better?"
No one answers, perhaps out of respect. In a few minutes, though, a levity that has become more common returns. Mahmoud, the boy who once recalled the ghastliest moments of a bombing, saunters in, wearing a jersey of his idol, the Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho. He celebrates the feats of his favorite team, Barcelona.
Fahd's giggles echo off sagging walls as his aunts chase him around the room. Karima smiles at the 2-year-old, whom she calls "the candle of my life."
"We're going to bring the police to take you," Fatima teases the boy.
"Call the police! Call the police now!" Amal cries. "They'll take you away."
'You Have to Be Optimistic'
Fatima and Amal gathered recently in Fatima's apartment, where the family lived during the invasion. On this day, an American patrol of four Humvees had just stopped by the building, a visit perhaps most remarkable for how commonplace it had become.
"Is it quiet?" they recalled the soldiers asking through a translator. "Peaceful here?"
They shrugged their shoulders, not too concerned.
Four years apart, the sisters are the most committed in their opinions, shaping a sibling rivalry. Fatima longs for childhood, before the suqut. Amal has hope, tempered as it is.
"We want to live like we used to," said Fatima, a newlywed. "There's still fear here. You still don't know who you can trust, whether you can trust anyone else."
Amal stayed quiet for a moment. "You have to be optimistic," she replied. "If you don't have a goal, if you don't have hope, then life has no meaning. It doesn't matter."
"What would be the reason for optimism?" Fatima shot back.
It was an argument Fatima and Amal had had dozens of times over the years. Fatima has never voted in Iraqi elections, nor will she. To her, officials here are hopelessly corrupt. Her brother's detention is symptomatic of a government unrestrained by notions of human rights or due process.
Amal agreed with much of what her sister said, but she was reluctant to settle for answers that felt too easy. After the suqut, the fear she expressed became questions; now, she had the confidence of conviction.
"I thought that in a democracy, you could say anything about anyone in the state, and nothing would happen to you. I thought that was democracy," she said. She smiled at what she judged her naivete. "A person is free," she said. "Free in everything, not just in expressing opinion, but in religion, in belief. Democracy is the basis of all freedom.
"That's my sense of it," she added. "Other than that I don't know."
"There are a lot of things that have to come before democracy," Fatima told her. "The people are hungry, sick. There are a lot of other things we have to worry about."
Fatima has no recollection of assassinations when Hussein ruled, nor does she remember neighbors dismembered by car bombs.
"If you sat in your house and didn't say anything, if you stayed quiet, would anything happen to you?" she asked. "Would anything have happened to our brother?"
Amal shook her head. "Of course, it would have," she said. "This was the basis of life back then: Don't see, don't talk, and don't hear. That was the old regime."
"But no one was killed without a reason or justification," Fatima told her.
"That's ignorant," Amal declared.
"Don't call me ignorant," Fatima said.
"Let Fatima be president," Amal quipped. "We'd be better off."
From Bombs to Exams
As a young girl, Amal began her diary with a simple invocation.
"In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate."
But as she often points out, her life has seen little of either mercy or compassion. She was born soon after Iraq's war with Iran, eight bitter and destructive years that forced a tenth of Iraq's population into the military. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait followed two years later, in 1990. Another war of sorts ensued -- devastating economic sanctions that wiped out Iraq's middle class and ended only after the United States overthrew Hussein. She witnessed occupation, insurgency and sectarian war, sometimes intersecting in anarchy.
"No one has had a chance to catch their breath," she says today.
No one would bestow on Baghdad the title its founder gave his capital: the City of Peace. But the war that once filled the pages of Amal's diary has ended, too.
She complains about school. "The material is tough, the teachers are tougher and the exams are even worse," she wrote in February. "Examinations are like hurricanes. They leave you no room even to breathe." She dreads Fridays and Mondays, days that fill her with pessimism; she enjoys March, the month of her birthday. She grows excited over the prospect of voting in elections this year. "I have a choice," she wrote.
"My choice may be right or may be wrong," she went on, "but the good thing is that in a democracy we can correct the mistake every few years. It is better than nothing."
In her room, she now has a poster of her favorite soccer team, Real Madrid (endlessly irritating her brother Mahmoud). Over her bed, she has smaller photos of actor Brad Pitt and soccer icon David Beckham. Her wall is an advertisement for stalwarts of Iraqi pop: Hussam al-Rassam, Hatem al-Iraqi, Kadhem al-Saher and Majid al-Mohandes.
Even the path she takes to school with her twin sisters, whom she still considers her best friends, has become habit.
"For three years, we have been going this way, but for me, every time I walk along it, it is as if it was the first time. As they say, the road is like a friend, the sweeter and more comfortable, the less you would be bored by it," she wrote in February. "Not a bad theory."
Her family's hardship has not ended. Amal complains about the cost of food and medicine, the lack of charity from her father's relatives, the ordeal of her brother and the corruption of a government that keeps him imprisoned.
"The harshness of life has become a part of my day," she wrote.
But age has brought a wisdom born of acceptance. Far from the heights of expectation and valleys of disappointment, a sober sense of life now colors her landscape.
"I have a rule," she wrote in an entry six years after the suqut. "Let's live 10 days in grief, 10 days in joy. If we laughed more than necessary, then we should cry. Joy and grief, the laugh and the tear are always together, inseparable from each other."
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 4, 2009
BAGHDAD The words are as simple as they are profound.
"I was born in war," Amal Salman says today, in reflection and epiphany.
She was 13 when the United States invaded her country, a war of its own choosing, buoyed by grand ambition and perhaps folly. Off a busy, four-lane street in the working-class district of Karrada, she huddled with her large family in the relative safety of their modest home, where rats sometimes scurried down a darkened stairwell.
When The Washington Post first profiled her in those days, she was a vivacious but awkward girl. In public, an adolescent giggle would give way to the brashness of youth, her convictions delivered impetuously. In quieter moments alone, keeping a diary imbued with her intelligence and curiosity, she would turn more contemplative about an imminent end and an uncertain beginning. The "suqut" -- collapse -- was her term for what followed: the fall of Saddam Hussein and 35 years of pitiless Baath Party rule.
"What's going to be the future of Iraq? Can it be good?" she asked in her diary then, the sloping script of her Arabic still lacking confidence. "No one knows."
Now 20, Amal has become calm and demure, tradition dictating reserve. Her words are considered, not impulsive. She exudes the quiet assuredness of intelligence, the realization that the fiercest argument can sometimes belie the deepest uncertainty.
Once wrapped in newspaper, her diary has become a sleek notebook, its pages protected by a plastic sheath and bundled by an elastic band. No longer tentative, her script forgoes a calligrapher's flourish for a stenographer's precision. She still writes at night when, as she puts it, "the noise subsides, and I hear only the frequent roar of the helicopters roaming back and forth, to which I have grown accustomed."
In those pages, penned in the third house her family has lived in since the invasion, the questions she asked as a child have given way to the declarations of an adult, in a nation that has journeyed away from the peaks of invasion, occupation and civil war. In the grimmest, most wrenching fashion, those events were spectacles. Like her country, Amal now grapples with the ambiguity of the ordinary, the equivocation that maturity brings.
"Life has made men forget the meaning of innocence and childhood," she wrote this year.
"Baghdad Has Fallen"
In nearly 1,250 years of history, invaders had vanquished Baghdad no less than 15 times, and Amal, reflexively defiant, witnessed its latest conquest.
"If a foreigner wants to enter Baghdad in peace, we will welcome him like a brother," she said then. "If a foreigner wants to enter as an enemy, every family will go out and confront them, even with stones. If they don't throw rocks, then they'll throw dirt."
Her father was killed in a car accident in the holy month of Ramadan in 1996. For years, her mother, Karima, sold gum from a canvas mat in the street and now bakes bread for neighbors. Of Karima's eight children, the oldest son, Ali, served as a soldier in Mosul; his younger brother, a ne'er-do-well and ex-convict, had joined a motley unit of militiamen patrolling Baghdad. Fatima, the oldest daughter, left school to help care for Amal and the rest of the children: Zeinab, the twins Hibba and Duaa, and the youngest son, Mahmoud.
The war was lost as soon as it began, and on a sunny morning, a neighbor's radio delivered the news to Amal and her family. Her entry on April 9, 2003, was shorter than most.
"And so," she wrote, "Baghdad has fallen to the Americans."
An image of the aftermath of invasion lingers in Baghdad, resonating in the prolonged interregnum between the suqut and the onset of a more routine life. The city felt like a dazed inmate stumbling out of a cell and squinting into harsh sunlight.
Amal grappled with words that seemed shorn of meaning. "They talk about democracy. Where is democracy? Is it that people die of hunger and deprivation and fear?" she wrote in the weeks after the invasion in the diary, which she kept tucked in a drawer.
She struggled with the nihilistic spasm of carnage into which Iraq soon descended, reflected in her family's lives. Her oldest brothers joined the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and blamed for some of the country's worst sectarian bloodletting. Dozens of bombings eventually tore through her neighborhood. Among the wounded was her sister Hibba, whose right arm was sliced by flying debris. "Shrapnel Hibba," schoolmates nicknamed her.
Her brother Mahmoud, just 11 then, recalled the grisliest of scenes: burning metal slicing through the living, a bone jutting through a pant leg, a car's engine resting on corpses. "The dead have become cheap," the boy said dryly.
In that crucible, Amal was no longer the girl who parroted slogans. Reflex had given way to questions, which in turn gave rise to an appreciation of an opposing view. Her words were more nuanced as she was forced to consider her country's experience.
"If I say the Americans are better, someone asks what have the Americans done," she noted then. ". . . If I said the time of Saddam was better, they say, what? If he didn't like you, he would cut off your head." She shook her head. "I don't know what to say."
Prayers and Toy Guns
Over the years, religion for Amal and her family was never piety. Like the Muslim call to prayer, it gave their lives cadence, speaking with clarity, offering simplicity and serving as a refuge in troubled times. It remains so today. "Oh God, if my livelihood and subsistence are in Heaven, do let it come down," reads a prayer hanging from a wall in Amal's house, whose blue paint has faded to reveal the water-stained cement beneath.
If it is in the ground, let it come out,
If it is far, let it come near,
If it is near, let it appear,
If it is little, increase it,
If it is much, bless it,
And make me, by it, avoid sins and wrongdoing.
But like the country, long subsumed in the grandest of narratives -- dictatorship, invasion, occupation and civil war -- the verse vies with the potpourri of influences that a semblance of normalcy has brought. Gone are the utopian promises of liberation. Hidden, somewhat, is the hatred. Quelled for now is the dystopia of violence.
Two of Amal's sisters, Fatima and Zeinab, have married, but the family still gathers almost every day. Zeinab's son Fahd, dressed in a shirt that reads "Tacky is Goofy," waves a play pistol and machine gun, then dances to a song written by a follower of Sadr, the Shiite cleric, whose militia once rampaged through Baghdad.
"A break and we'll return," the lyrics say. "We'll make the blood rise up to the knees."
Two pictures of Shiite saints adorn the wall, near a television stacked with DVDs of movies starring Jim Carrey and Antonio Banderas. Sitting on a soiled mattress covered with a brown blanket, Fatima declares her fondness for Dr. Phil and Oprah.
Smiling, Amal looks down at the floor's buckling tiles. "We already have enough disasters in Iraq," she jokes. "Why do we need to hear about other people's?"
In the worst days of the invasion in 2003, Karima once said something as her daughters sat around her: "It's like we're part of a play on a stage. Life's not good, it's not bad. It's just a play." The mother's words seemed to acknowledge a powerlessness she felt. The script was already written, and she was a spectator, watching the performance.
That sense still pervades Karima's life. Her oldest son, Ali, newly graduated from training in Jordan to work as a security guard, was detained when U.S. and Iraqi forces raided a cafe last year. He was one of 13 arrested, and his family believes it was arbitrary; eight months on, there is no sign of his release. After school, Amal and her younger sisters occasionally visit a church to light candles for him.
"Not even the cockroaches would eat the food in prison," his mother says. "He sees me and starts crying. His hair is turning gray. He's so worn out, so worn out."
Fatima, the oldest daughter and the most bitter, turns angry. "Have you seen anything tangible in this country?" she asks. "Has anything ever turned out for the better?"
No one answers, perhaps out of respect. In a few minutes, though, a levity that has become more common returns. Mahmoud, the boy who once recalled the ghastliest moments of a bombing, saunters in, wearing a jersey of his idol, the Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho. He celebrates the feats of his favorite team, Barcelona.
Fahd's giggles echo off sagging walls as his aunts chase him around the room. Karima smiles at the 2-year-old, whom she calls "the candle of my life."
"We're going to bring the police to take you," Fatima teases the boy.
"Call the police! Call the police now!" Amal cries. "They'll take you away."
'You Have to Be Optimistic'
Fatima and Amal gathered recently in Fatima's apartment, where the family lived during the invasion. On this day, an American patrol of four Humvees had just stopped by the building, a visit perhaps most remarkable for how commonplace it had become.
"Is it quiet?" they recalled the soldiers asking through a translator. "Peaceful here?"
They shrugged their shoulders, not too concerned.
Four years apart, the sisters are the most committed in their opinions, shaping a sibling rivalry. Fatima longs for childhood, before the suqut. Amal has hope, tempered as it is.
"We want to live like we used to," said Fatima, a newlywed. "There's still fear here. You still don't know who you can trust, whether you can trust anyone else."
Amal stayed quiet for a moment. "You have to be optimistic," she replied. "If you don't have a goal, if you don't have hope, then life has no meaning. It doesn't matter."
"What would be the reason for optimism?" Fatima shot back.
It was an argument Fatima and Amal had had dozens of times over the years. Fatima has never voted in Iraqi elections, nor will she. To her, officials here are hopelessly corrupt. Her brother's detention is symptomatic of a government unrestrained by notions of human rights or due process.
Amal agreed with much of what her sister said, but she was reluctant to settle for answers that felt too easy. After the suqut, the fear she expressed became questions; now, she had the confidence of conviction.
"I thought that in a democracy, you could say anything about anyone in the state, and nothing would happen to you. I thought that was democracy," she said. She smiled at what she judged her naivete. "A person is free," she said. "Free in everything, not just in expressing opinion, but in religion, in belief. Democracy is the basis of all freedom.
"That's my sense of it," she added. "Other than that I don't know."
"There are a lot of things that have to come before democracy," Fatima told her. "The people are hungry, sick. There are a lot of other things we have to worry about."
Fatima has no recollection of assassinations when Hussein ruled, nor does she remember neighbors dismembered by car bombs.
"If you sat in your house and didn't say anything, if you stayed quiet, would anything happen to you?" she asked. "Would anything have happened to our brother?"
Amal shook her head. "Of course, it would have," she said. "This was the basis of life back then: Don't see, don't talk, and don't hear. That was the old regime."
"But no one was killed without a reason or justification," Fatima told her.
"That's ignorant," Amal declared.
"Don't call me ignorant," Fatima said.
"Let Fatima be president," Amal quipped. "We'd be better off."
From Bombs to Exams
As a young girl, Amal began her diary with a simple invocation.
"In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate."
But as she often points out, her life has seen little of either mercy or compassion. She was born soon after Iraq's war with Iran, eight bitter and destructive years that forced a tenth of Iraq's population into the military. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait followed two years later, in 1990. Another war of sorts ensued -- devastating economic sanctions that wiped out Iraq's middle class and ended only after the United States overthrew Hussein. She witnessed occupation, insurgency and sectarian war, sometimes intersecting in anarchy.
"No one has had a chance to catch their breath," she says today.
No one would bestow on Baghdad the title its founder gave his capital: the City of Peace. But the war that once filled the pages of Amal's diary has ended, too.
She complains about school. "The material is tough, the teachers are tougher and the exams are even worse," she wrote in February. "Examinations are like hurricanes. They leave you no room even to breathe." She dreads Fridays and Mondays, days that fill her with pessimism; she enjoys March, the month of her birthday. She grows excited over the prospect of voting in elections this year. "I have a choice," she wrote.
"My choice may be right or may be wrong," she went on, "but the good thing is that in a democracy we can correct the mistake every few years. It is better than nothing."
In her room, she now has a poster of her favorite soccer team, Real Madrid (endlessly irritating her brother Mahmoud). Over her bed, she has smaller photos of actor Brad Pitt and soccer icon David Beckham. Her wall is an advertisement for stalwarts of Iraqi pop: Hussam al-Rassam, Hatem al-Iraqi, Kadhem al-Saher and Majid al-Mohandes.
Even the path she takes to school with her twin sisters, whom she still considers her best friends, has become habit.
"For three years, we have been going this way, but for me, every time I walk along it, it is as if it was the first time. As they say, the road is like a friend, the sweeter and more comfortable, the less you would be bored by it," she wrote in February. "Not a bad theory."
Her family's hardship has not ended. Amal complains about the cost of food and medicine, the lack of charity from her father's relatives, the ordeal of her brother and the corruption of a government that keeps him imprisoned.
"The harshness of life has become a part of my day," she wrote.
But age has brought a wisdom born of acceptance. Far from the heights of expectation and valleys of disappointment, a sober sense of life now colors her landscape.
"I have a rule," she wrote in an entry six years after the suqut. "Let's live 10 days in grief, 10 days in joy. If we laughed more than necessary, then we should cry. Joy and grief, the laugh and the tear are always together, inseparable from each other."
Autoworkers Pick Up New Skills But Downshift to Lower Pay
By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 4, 2009
WARREN, Mich. -- Big, burly and a "car guy" since high school, Tom Persinger worked for years at General Motors. Now he's a nurse's aide.
For about $12 an hour, he makes home visits to geriatric patients addled by dementia. He gets them fed or showered or moved from wheelchair to bed.
While he likes "taking care of people instead of fenders," Persinger says, it has been a jarring transition. He struggled at first to find another auto job, then took an introductory nursing class and now is adjusting to his circumstances: Persinger, 39, lives in his mother's basement.
"I've been humbled quite a bit," he said.
As the auto industry in America, which once employed more than 1 million people, continues to shrink rapidly, hordes of workers are struggling to acquire new skills, find new occupations and live on less than they made during the better times of U.S. manufacturing.
Many economists view the recession as a correction that, while difficult in the short run, will improve the economy by redirecting workers and investments into more profitable industries. But for workers cramming into community colleges around the country to retrain themselves, the path forward is far from clear.
Even with unemployment pay and tuition assistance, these midlife students often seek the shortest but perhaps not the best path to a new job. Many aim for quick certificates to become a nursing aide, a trucker or a computer networking technician.
"What we're seeing is the death of the conventional middle-class life and an increase in the population of working poor," said Jim Jacobs, president of Macomb Community College, where Persinger attends.
Enrollment at the college in this Detroit suburb has climbed 11 percent in three years, and similar recession-inspired jumps have been reported at community colleges across the country. But even after workers sacrifice time and tuition for new skills, many find that their earning prospects have been reduced, at least initially, because they must start over in a new field.
A machinist who is spending $4,500 for a course to learn automated manufacturing said that even if he gets a job, it will probably pay about $16 an hour, a third less than he made before.
An executive secretary on layoff from an auto supply firm said that when she finishes her nursing associate's degree, she'll be making 20 percent less than she once did.
And for many, there is an acute sense of regret. Like many of the workers here, Clyde Kubiak, 33, is rueful about the choice he made years ago.
"I was bamboozled," said Kubiak, laid off from a computer-aided-design job in the business. "I came out of high school, and they said, 'We have a job for you that pays $17 an hour to start.' At 18, I made $40,000. My friends who went to college were jealous. But . . . now what?"
With the ranks of the unemployed reaching 14.5 million, President Obama said last month that the administration was developing a comprehensive program to retrain displaced workers.
He pledged that in the weeks to come he would lay out new ideas for job training and vocational education.
"The idea here is to fundamentally change our approach to unemployment in this country so that it's no longer just a time to look for a new job, but is also a time to prepare yourself for a better job," Obama said.
Currently, the United States offers two primary programs focused on helping dislocated adult workers find their footing: the Trade Adjustment Act and the Workforce Investment Act. Both are administered by state and local groups. Funding for these programs has amounted to about $2.4 billion annually, and stimulus funding adds nearly $2 billion more.
"Politicians are calling for retraining of the workforce every day, but as a share of GDP, the federal government spends less today on all training and employment activities than any time over the last 40 years," said Howard Rosen, executive director of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Coalition, a group that helps displaced workers get aid.
Nationally, employment in auto manufacturing has been in a long-term decline. In two years 354,000 jobs have been lost, with the industry shrinking to 646,000 workers from 1 million, according to Labor Department statistics. Many more jobs have been lost in companies that rely on the auto industry.
At a state unemployment office here, workers are led through retraining orientation meetings 14 at a time. At one recent gathering, six of the 14 newly unemployed once worked at auto or auto parts manufacturers.
Clint Herendeen, 28, a machinist, was laid off a year ago and says he wants to become an insurance adjuster. He's tried to find auto jobs but, like others, discovered that the listings are scarce and wages are falling.
"They want to offer me $10 an hour when I'd worked my way up to $23," he said, shaking his head and frowning. "I'm done with the shop life."
At the orientation meeting, the workers are given a test in English and math skills, as well as a list of "top jobs," or fields in which hiring may still be happening. Within a few weeks, they may sign up for $5,000 in classes each year at the government's expense.
Some aim for associate's degrees, taking two years for classes that could propel them back into the job market. But at the Macomb County unemployment office and elsewhere, the most popular curricula are more quick and practical.
Enrollments are high in classes for truck driving, an occupation that promises $16 an hour for a tractor-trailer driver. That's enough to get someone back on his feet, but it's also a far cry from the kind of new "green" economy job that many politicians have envisioned. Clerical and technical positions in health care and computer classes are also popular.
Steve Mazure, 50, has been a skilled machinist for 25 years, but the machines he has long operated to shape metal pieces are changing.
No longer are they the kind of lathes and mills that have knobs and cranks that are adjusted by hand and by feel. The new jobs require skills in machines that are programmed, not turned by hand.
So, funded by a program that covers workers displaced by foreign trade, Mazure is learning the new manufacturing equipment.
"It's all formulas, and then you push a button," he said, impressed by the accuracy and speed of the machines.
Mazure, who sports a long, graying beard, came to class last week looking like an old-school biker: a stars-and-stripes scarf on his head and a sleeveless black Harley-Davidson shirt. He has a wife and two grown daughters. He said he's been a "factory rat" all his life.
"I'm not computer-literate, so what I gotta do on the computer is rough on me," he said. "I've never had to save a file. I don't even know how to type. In high school, typing was for girls."
He said he's getting the hang of it nevertheless. But Mazure, who once made $28 an hour for his craft, expects to make far less even once he gets out. He also suspects the new work -- "pushing buttons" -- could be stiflingly dull.
"I'll be lucky if I make $16 when I get out of here," he said.
Studies of federal retraining programs have been sparse. But a recent large study of 12 state programs showed that while retrained workers often initially suffer a drop in earnings compared with those who are not retrained, those with new training typically earn more over time and get back to their pre-layoff income levels in about 2 1/2 years.
"Dislocated workers definitely take a big hit," initially, said Carolyn Heinrich, an economist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who led the study.
Moreover, while retraining may have benefits, many workers cannot afford the time or tuition for classes, particularly if they have children. Persinger, who is single, is pursuing a degree to become a registered nurse -- a choice he says would have been impossible if he had a family.
He hopes his annual wages as a nurse will reach close to his pay as a GM contractor, about $60,000. Even better, he figures, is the new sense of job security the health-care industry seems to promise.
"Of course, 20 years ago, people thought the auto industry would always be solid," he said. "But, for now, I feel good about it."
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 4, 2009
WARREN, Mich. -- Big, burly and a "car guy" since high school, Tom Persinger worked for years at General Motors. Now he's a nurse's aide.
For about $12 an hour, he makes home visits to geriatric patients addled by dementia. He gets them fed or showered or moved from wheelchair to bed.
While he likes "taking care of people instead of fenders," Persinger says, it has been a jarring transition. He struggled at first to find another auto job, then took an introductory nursing class and now is adjusting to his circumstances: Persinger, 39, lives in his mother's basement.
"I've been humbled quite a bit," he said.
As the auto industry in America, which once employed more than 1 million people, continues to shrink rapidly, hordes of workers are struggling to acquire new skills, find new occupations and live on less than they made during the better times of U.S. manufacturing.
Many economists view the recession as a correction that, while difficult in the short run, will improve the economy by redirecting workers and investments into more profitable industries. But for workers cramming into community colleges around the country to retrain themselves, the path forward is far from clear.
Even with unemployment pay and tuition assistance, these midlife students often seek the shortest but perhaps not the best path to a new job. Many aim for quick certificates to become a nursing aide, a trucker or a computer networking technician.
"What we're seeing is the death of the conventional middle-class life and an increase in the population of working poor," said Jim Jacobs, president of Macomb Community College, where Persinger attends.
Enrollment at the college in this Detroit suburb has climbed 11 percent in three years, and similar recession-inspired jumps have been reported at community colleges across the country. But even after workers sacrifice time and tuition for new skills, many find that their earning prospects have been reduced, at least initially, because they must start over in a new field.
A machinist who is spending $4,500 for a course to learn automated manufacturing said that even if he gets a job, it will probably pay about $16 an hour, a third less than he made before.
An executive secretary on layoff from an auto supply firm said that when she finishes her nursing associate's degree, she'll be making 20 percent less than she once did.
And for many, there is an acute sense of regret. Like many of the workers here, Clyde Kubiak, 33, is rueful about the choice he made years ago.
"I was bamboozled," said Kubiak, laid off from a computer-aided-design job in the business. "I came out of high school, and they said, 'We have a job for you that pays $17 an hour to start.' At 18, I made $40,000. My friends who went to college were jealous. But . . . now what?"
With the ranks of the unemployed reaching 14.5 million, President Obama said last month that the administration was developing a comprehensive program to retrain displaced workers.
He pledged that in the weeks to come he would lay out new ideas for job training and vocational education.
"The idea here is to fundamentally change our approach to unemployment in this country so that it's no longer just a time to look for a new job, but is also a time to prepare yourself for a better job," Obama said.
Currently, the United States offers two primary programs focused on helping dislocated adult workers find their footing: the Trade Adjustment Act and the Workforce Investment Act. Both are administered by state and local groups. Funding for these programs has amounted to about $2.4 billion annually, and stimulus funding adds nearly $2 billion more.
"Politicians are calling for retraining of the workforce every day, but as a share of GDP, the federal government spends less today on all training and employment activities than any time over the last 40 years," said Howard Rosen, executive director of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Coalition, a group that helps displaced workers get aid.
Nationally, employment in auto manufacturing has been in a long-term decline. In two years 354,000 jobs have been lost, with the industry shrinking to 646,000 workers from 1 million, according to Labor Department statistics. Many more jobs have been lost in companies that rely on the auto industry.
At a state unemployment office here, workers are led through retraining orientation meetings 14 at a time. At one recent gathering, six of the 14 newly unemployed once worked at auto or auto parts manufacturers.
Clint Herendeen, 28, a machinist, was laid off a year ago and says he wants to become an insurance adjuster. He's tried to find auto jobs but, like others, discovered that the listings are scarce and wages are falling.
"They want to offer me $10 an hour when I'd worked my way up to $23," he said, shaking his head and frowning. "I'm done with the shop life."
At the orientation meeting, the workers are given a test in English and math skills, as well as a list of "top jobs," or fields in which hiring may still be happening. Within a few weeks, they may sign up for $5,000 in classes each year at the government's expense.
Some aim for associate's degrees, taking two years for classes that could propel them back into the job market. But at the Macomb County unemployment office and elsewhere, the most popular curricula are more quick and practical.
Enrollments are high in classes for truck driving, an occupation that promises $16 an hour for a tractor-trailer driver. That's enough to get someone back on his feet, but it's also a far cry from the kind of new "green" economy job that many politicians have envisioned. Clerical and technical positions in health care and computer classes are also popular.
Steve Mazure, 50, has been a skilled machinist for 25 years, but the machines he has long operated to shape metal pieces are changing.
No longer are they the kind of lathes and mills that have knobs and cranks that are adjusted by hand and by feel. The new jobs require skills in machines that are programmed, not turned by hand.
So, funded by a program that covers workers displaced by foreign trade, Mazure is learning the new manufacturing equipment.
"It's all formulas, and then you push a button," he said, impressed by the accuracy and speed of the machines.
Mazure, who sports a long, graying beard, came to class last week looking like an old-school biker: a stars-and-stripes scarf on his head and a sleeveless black Harley-Davidson shirt. He has a wife and two grown daughters. He said he's been a "factory rat" all his life.
"I'm not computer-literate, so what I gotta do on the computer is rough on me," he said. "I've never had to save a file. I don't even know how to type. In high school, typing was for girls."
He said he's getting the hang of it nevertheless. But Mazure, who once made $28 an hour for his craft, expects to make far less even once he gets out. He also suspects the new work -- "pushing buttons" -- could be stiflingly dull.
"I'll be lucky if I make $16 when I get out of here," he said.
Studies of federal retraining programs have been sparse. But a recent large study of 12 state programs showed that while retrained workers often initially suffer a drop in earnings compared with those who are not retrained, those with new training typically earn more over time and get back to their pre-layoff income levels in about 2 1/2 years.
"Dislocated workers definitely take a big hit," initially, said Carolyn Heinrich, an economist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who led the study.
Moreover, while retraining may have benefits, many workers cannot afford the time or tuition for classes, particularly if they have children. Persinger, who is single, is pursuing a degree to become a registered nurse -- a choice he says would have been impossible if he had a family.
He hopes his annual wages as a nurse will reach close to his pay as a GM contractor, about $60,000. Even better, he figures, is the new sense of job security the health-care industry seems to promise.
"Of course, 20 years ago, people thought the auto industry would always be solid," he said. "But, for now, I feel good about it."
U.S. Could End Engagement in Iraq if Violence Erupts, Biden Warns
By Nada Bakri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 4, 2009
BAGHDAD, July 3 -- Vice President Biden warned Iraqi officials Friday that the American commitment to Iraq could end if the country again descended into ethnic and sectarian violence.
Biden delivered the warning during a three-day visit to Iraq that began Thursday, just a few days after the United States formally withdrew most combat troops from Iraqi cities under a security agreement reached last year. It was the vice president's first visit since President Obama asked him to take the lead on Iraq policy.
In meetings with senior Iraqi officials, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Biden stressed that the United States would remain engaged in Iraq, even as its military role diminishes in a withdrawal that is expected to dramatically gather pace after parliamentary elections in January.
But a senior administration official briefing journalists said Biden made that support contingent on Iraqi progress in resolving long-standing conflicts, some that bedeviled Iraq even before the United States invaded in March 2003.
If "Iraq were to revert to sectarian violence or engage in ethnic violence, then that's not something that would make it likely that we would remain engaged because, one, the American people would have no interest in doing that, and, as he put it, neither would he nor the president," the official said.
He added that there "wasn't any appetite to put Humpty Dumpty back together again if, by the action of people in Iraq, it fell apart."
The warning was a dramatic indication of the changing U.S. posture in Iraq, the foremost foreign policy concern of the Bush administration. The statements suggested that the Obama administration would absolve itself of responsibility if Iraq again descended into chaos, dragged down by still-unresolved crises. They include border disputes between Kurds and Arabs and also legislation for Iraq's oil resources.
Across Iraq, signs are rife of a diminishing U.S. role. Simply by virtue of the presence of 130,000 U.S. troops, the United States is sure to exercise decisive influence. But the power it once wielded inside Baghdad has passed. Along with last month's pullout -- and a far larger one due to end by August 2010 -- staffing at the U.S. Embassy will be reduced over the year as well.
Even the interaction of officials seems to have changed. Early Friday, Biden's aides huddled with advisers to Ayad al-Samarraie, the speaker of Iraq's parliament, trying to figure out a time the two men could meet.
An aide to Samarraie told the vice president's staff that the speaker had no more than 30 minutes to spare for the meeting. "That is the best I can do," the aide said in a conversation overheard at a presidential palace, as workers vainly tried to clean the aftermath of a sandstorm that has buffeted Baghdad for almost a week.
Some lawmakers were irritated by the secretive nature of Biden's visit.
"They have to treat Iraq as a sovereign country," lawmaker Mahmoud Othman said. "They should have let us know, and they should be welcomed like any other leader."
During the day, with the capital cloaked in the sickly yellow glow of the sandstorm, which hampered Biden's travel, the vice president met with Ambassador Christopher R. Hill and U.S. military commander Gen. Ray Odierno. He then met with senior Iraqi leaders and, at least publicly, stressed that the United States remains fully engaged.
"President Obama asked me to return with a message -- that the United States is committed to Iraq's progress and success," Biden said in a statement aired by Iraqi state television after his meeting with Maliki.
"We are looking forward to strengthening our relationship," Maliki added.
In Biden's last visit to Iraq, in January before Obama's inauguration, Iraqi and U.S. officials said he had delivered another message: American patience had its limits, and Iraqi politicians would have to make a more concerted attempt to resolve their conflicts, particularly over the disputed border and the future of the contested northern city of Kirkuk. He seemed to reiterate a version of that message Friday.
"These are challenges for the Iraqis themselves to face and solve," the senior administration official said. "It's not for us to solve it for them."
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 4, 2009
BAGHDAD, July 3 -- Vice President Biden warned Iraqi officials Friday that the American commitment to Iraq could end if the country again descended into ethnic and sectarian violence.
Biden delivered the warning during a three-day visit to Iraq that began Thursday, just a few days after the United States formally withdrew most combat troops from Iraqi cities under a security agreement reached last year. It was the vice president's first visit since President Obama asked him to take the lead on Iraq policy.
In meetings with senior Iraqi officials, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Biden stressed that the United States would remain engaged in Iraq, even as its military role diminishes in a withdrawal that is expected to dramatically gather pace after parliamentary elections in January.
But a senior administration official briefing journalists said Biden made that support contingent on Iraqi progress in resolving long-standing conflicts, some that bedeviled Iraq even before the United States invaded in March 2003.
If "Iraq were to revert to sectarian violence or engage in ethnic violence, then that's not something that would make it likely that we would remain engaged because, one, the American people would have no interest in doing that, and, as he put it, neither would he nor the president," the official said.
He added that there "wasn't any appetite to put Humpty Dumpty back together again if, by the action of people in Iraq, it fell apart."
The warning was a dramatic indication of the changing U.S. posture in Iraq, the foremost foreign policy concern of the Bush administration. The statements suggested that the Obama administration would absolve itself of responsibility if Iraq again descended into chaos, dragged down by still-unresolved crises. They include border disputes between Kurds and Arabs and also legislation for Iraq's oil resources.
Across Iraq, signs are rife of a diminishing U.S. role. Simply by virtue of the presence of 130,000 U.S. troops, the United States is sure to exercise decisive influence. But the power it once wielded inside Baghdad has passed. Along with last month's pullout -- and a far larger one due to end by August 2010 -- staffing at the U.S. Embassy will be reduced over the year as well.
Even the interaction of officials seems to have changed. Early Friday, Biden's aides huddled with advisers to Ayad al-Samarraie, the speaker of Iraq's parliament, trying to figure out a time the two men could meet.
An aide to Samarraie told the vice president's staff that the speaker had no more than 30 minutes to spare for the meeting. "That is the best I can do," the aide said in a conversation overheard at a presidential palace, as workers vainly tried to clean the aftermath of a sandstorm that has buffeted Baghdad for almost a week.
Some lawmakers were irritated by the secretive nature of Biden's visit.
"They have to treat Iraq as a sovereign country," lawmaker Mahmoud Othman said. "They should have let us know, and they should be welcomed like any other leader."
During the day, with the capital cloaked in the sickly yellow glow of the sandstorm, which hampered Biden's travel, the vice president met with Ambassador Christopher R. Hill and U.S. military commander Gen. Ray Odierno. He then met with senior Iraqi leaders and, at least publicly, stressed that the United States remains fully engaged.
"President Obama asked me to return with a message -- that the United States is committed to Iraq's progress and success," Biden said in a statement aired by Iraqi state television after his meeting with Maliki.
"We are looking forward to strengthening our relationship," Maliki added.
In Biden's last visit to Iraq, in January before Obama's inauguration, Iraqi and U.S. officials said he had delivered another message: American patience had its limits, and Iraqi politicians would have to make a more concerted attempt to resolve their conflicts, particularly over the disputed border and the future of the contested northern city of Kirkuk. He seemed to reiterate a version of that message Friday.
"These are challenges for the Iraqis themselves to face and solve," the senior administration official said. "It's not for us to solve it for them."
Russia to Open Airspace to U.S. for Afghan War
By PETER BAKER
MOSCOW — The Russian government has agreed to let American troops and weapons bound for Afghanistan fly over Russian territory, officials on both sides said Friday. The arrangement will provide an important new corridor for the United States military as it escalates efforts to win the eight-year war.
The agreement, to be announced when President Obama visits here on Monday and Tuesday, represents one of the most concrete achievements in the administration’s effort to ease relations with Russia after years of tension. But the two sides failed to make a trade deal or resolve differences over missile defense, and are struggling to draft a preliminary nuclear arms deal.
The blend of success and stalemate leading to Mr. Obama’s visit suggests that it is easier to talk about a “reset” button than to press it. The promise of a new era of cooperation was always predicated on the tenuous notion that a change of tone and a shift in emphasis might be enough to bridge deep divisions. But even with both sides eager for warmer ties, the issues that have torn Washington and Moscow apart did not go away with the transition at the White House.
Mr. Obama is less enthusiastic than President George W. Bush was about an antimissile system in Eastern Europe or NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, but has not abandoned either goal, to the consternation of the Kremlin. Despite American pressure, Moscow has not yielded in its confrontation with Georgia a year after their brief war.
So Mr. Obama’s first visit here as president will be a test of his foreign policy. American officials said that the larger message was that if the Russians did not take his open hand, he would move on to other priorities.
But Mr. Obama faces a reservoir of resentment among Russians who believe that the United States has rarely followed through on such gestures. “There’s a lot of suspicion that this has been talk, talk, talk — let’s see some real action,” said Vladimir Pozner, a state television talk show host. “At this point, there is a little bit of hope and a lot of distrust.”
Richard R. Burt, a former American arms control negotiator and a member of a Russian-American group, Global Zero, that is pushing for nuclear disarmament, said Mr. Obama must overcome that suspicion. “I just get the sense that the Russians are kind of grumpy, so there’s still some sharpness on the Russian side, despite pushing the reset button,” he said.
At the same time, Mr. Obama faces pressure not to go soft on Russia. He sounded a tough note this week, saying Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin still “has one foot in the old ways.” He is also sending Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Georgia and Ukraine after the summit meeting to show he will not abandon them.
“We’re not going to reassure or give or trade anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defense,” said Michael McFaul, the president’s top adviser on Russia.
Georgian officials visiting Washington last week said that they had faith in the administration, but they expressed skepticism about a real change in relations. Russia maintains as many as 15,000 troops in two breakaway Georgian republics, despite a cease-fire agreement, and last month it used its veto to end the United Nations observer mission in one of them. Both Russia and NATO recently conducted war games in the region.
“Attempts by American officials to talk with them in a civilized manner are perceived as weakness,” Grigol Vashadze, Georgia’s foreign minister, said, comparing Mr. Putin to a bandit. “Of course you can talk with him. But in the end, you know the bandit will end up kicking you and taking your wallet.”
Looking for a breakthrough for his visit, Mr. Obama tried to cut a deal to finally admit Russia into the World Trade Organization. But days after Mr. Obama’s advisers visited Russia in June to discuss the idea, Mr. Putin unexpectedly suspended Moscow’s membership bid, dashing hopes for an announcement next week.
Russian officials said they were showing good faith, pointing to their suspension of the delivery of an S-300 air defense system to Iran. “In Moscow and in Washington, people have been known to lose opportunities,” said Mikhail V. Margelov, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of Russia’s upper house of Parliament. “We have to hope that this time we won’t lose the opportunity.”
The new airspace agreement represents an important step. Until now, Russia has restricted use of its territory for the Afghan war to railroad shipments of nonlethal supplies. Under the new arrangement, officials said, planes carrying lethal equipment and troops will be allowed to make as many as 10 flights a day, or thousands a year over Russia.
The agreement was a priority for Mr. Obama, who has ordered 21,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. Supply routes through Pakistan have been troubled by that nation’s increasing volatility. Uzbekistan evicted American troops from a base in 2005, and Kyrgyzstan threatened to do the same, until American negotiators persuaded it to reverse itself, in a deal that increases the rent.
But with Mr. Obama about to depart for Moscow, negotiators were still hashing out a preliminary agreement on nuclear arms cuts to announce along with President Dmitri A. Medvedev. The agreement would lay out parameters of a treaty to be drafted by the end of the year to replace the expiring cold war Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
Negotiators are talking about setting a range of perhaps 1,500 to 1,700 warheads (down from 2,200 now allowed under treaty) and 500 to 1,100 delivery vehicles (down from 1,600 currently allowed). But they have not settled on the numbers, and Russia wants to link the issue to missile defense.
The two sides have agreed to create a new standing commission with subgroups on issues like climate change to work between presidential meetings. The Obama team at first proposed a new version of a commission in the 1990s named for Vice President Al Gore and Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin. But the Russians refused to pair Mr. Putin with Mr. Biden. “Putin’s not a vice president,” an American official quoted the Russians as saying.
“This is like a midsemester report card,” said Sarah E. Mendelson, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who is organizing a conference on civil society here that Mr. Obama and perhaps Mr. Medvedev will attend. “It’s not looking like an A, but it’s not a D either.”
Ellen Barry contributed reporting.
MOSCOW — The Russian government has agreed to let American troops and weapons bound for Afghanistan fly over Russian territory, officials on both sides said Friday. The arrangement will provide an important new corridor for the United States military as it escalates efforts to win the eight-year war.
The agreement, to be announced when President Obama visits here on Monday and Tuesday, represents one of the most concrete achievements in the administration’s effort to ease relations with Russia after years of tension. But the two sides failed to make a trade deal or resolve differences over missile defense, and are struggling to draft a preliminary nuclear arms deal.
The blend of success and stalemate leading to Mr. Obama’s visit suggests that it is easier to talk about a “reset” button than to press it. The promise of a new era of cooperation was always predicated on the tenuous notion that a change of tone and a shift in emphasis might be enough to bridge deep divisions. But even with both sides eager for warmer ties, the issues that have torn Washington and Moscow apart did not go away with the transition at the White House.
Mr. Obama is less enthusiastic than President George W. Bush was about an antimissile system in Eastern Europe or NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, but has not abandoned either goal, to the consternation of the Kremlin. Despite American pressure, Moscow has not yielded in its confrontation with Georgia a year after their brief war.
So Mr. Obama’s first visit here as president will be a test of his foreign policy. American officials said that the larger message was that if the Russians did not take his open hand, he would move on to other priorities.
But Mr. Obama faces a reservoir of resentment among Russians who believe that the United States has rarely followed through on such gestures. “There’s a lot of suspicion that this has been talk, talk, talk — let’s see some real action,” said Vladimir Pozner, a state television talk show host. “At this point, there is a little bit of hope and a lot of distrust.”
Richard R. Burt, a former American arms control negotiator and a member of a Russian-American group, Global Zero, that is pushing for nuclear disarmament, said Mr. Obama must overcome that suspicion. “I just get the sense that the Russians are kind of grumpy, so there’s still some sharpness on the Russian side, despite pushing the reset button,” he said.
At the same time, Mr. Obama faces pressure not to go soft on Russia. He sounded a tough note this week, saying Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin still “has one foot in the old ways.” He is also sending Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Georgia and Ukraine after the summit meeting to show he will not abandon them.
“We’re not going to reassure or give or trade anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defense,” said Michael McFaul, the president’s top adviser on Russia.
Georgian officials visiting Washington last week said that they had faith in the administration, but they expressed skepticism about a real change in relations. Russia maintains as many as 15,000 troops in two breakaway Georgian republics, despite a cease-fire agreement, and last month it used its veto to end the United Nations observer mission in one of them. Both Russia and NATO recently conducted war games in the region.
“Attempts by American officials to talk with them in a civilized manner are perceived as weakness,” Grigol Vashadze, Georgia’s foreign minister, said, comparing Mr. Putin to a bandit. “Of course you can talk with him. But in the end, you know the bandit will end up kicking you and taking your wallet.”
Looking for a breakthrough for his visit, Mr. Obama tried to cut a deal to finally admit Russia into the World Trade Organization. But days after Mr. Obama’s advisers visited Russia in June to discuss the idea, Mr. Putin unexpectedly suspended Moscow’s membership bid, dashing hopes for an announcement next week.
Russian officials said they were showing good faith, pointing to their suspension of the delivery of an S-300 air defense system to Iran. “In Moscow and in Washington, people have been known to lose opportunities,” said Mikhail V. Margelov, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of Russia’s upper house of Parliament. “We have to hope that this time we won’t lose the opportunity.”
The new airspace agreement represents an important step. Until now, Russia has restricted use of its territory for the Afghan war to railroad shipments of nonlethal supplies. Under the new arrangement, officials said, planes carrying lethal equipment and troops will be allowed to make as many as 10 flights a day, or thousands a year over Russia.
The agreement was a priority for Mr. Obama, who has ordered 21,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. Supply routes through Pakistan have been troubled by that nation’s increasing volatility. Uzbekistan evicted American troops from a base in 2005, and Kyrgyzstan threatened to do the same, until American negotiators persuaded it to reverse itself, in a deal that increases the rent.
But with Mr. Obama about to depart for Moscow, negotiators were still hashing out a preliminary agreement on nuclear arms cuts to announce along with President Dmitri A. Medvedev. The agreement would lay out parameters of a treaty to be drafted by the end of the year to replace the expiring cold war Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
Negotiators are talking about setting a range of perhaps 1,500 to 1,700 warheads (down from 2,200 now allowed under treaty) and 500 to 1,100 delivery vehicles (down from 1,600 currently allowed). But they have not settled on the numbers, and Russia wants to link the issue to missile defense.
The two sides have agreed to create a new standing commission with subgroups on issues like climate change to work between presidential meetings. The Obama team at first proposed a new version of a commission in the 1990s named for Vice President Al Gore and Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin. But the Russians refused to pair Mr. Putin with Mr. Biden. “Putin’s not a vice president,” an American official quoted the Russians as saying.
“This is like a midsemester report card,” said Sarah E. Mendelson, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who is organizing a conference on civil society here that Mr. Obama and perhaps Mr. Medvedev will attend. “It’s not looking like an A, but it’s not a D either.”
Ellen Barry contributed reporting.
Top Reformers Admitted Plot, Iran Declares
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — Iranian leaders say they have obtained confessions from top reformist officials that they plotted to bring down the government with a “velvet” revolution. Such confessions, almost always extracted under duress, are part of an effort to recast the civil unrest set off by Iran’s disputed presidential election as a conspiracy orchestrated by foreign nations, human rights groups say.
Reports on Iranian Web sites associated with prominent conservatives said that leading reformers have confessed to taking velvet revolution “training courses” outside the country. Alef, a Web site of a conservative member of Parliament, referred to a video of Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who served as vice president in the reform government of former President Mohammed Khatami, as showing that he tearfully “welcomed being defrocked and has confessed to provoking people, causing tension and creating media chaos.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the Revolutionary Guards, Mojtaba Zolnour, said in a speech Thursday that almost everyone now detained had confessed — raising the prospect that more confessions will be made public. Ayatollah Khamenei is supreme religious leader.
The government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners held without charge or legal representation, often subjected to pressure tactics like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, according to human rights groups and former political prisoners. Human rights groups estimate that hundreds of people have been detained.
They fear the confessions are part of a concerted effort to lay the groundwork for banning existing reformist political parties and preventing any organized reform movement in the future. “They hope with this scenario they can expunge them completely from the political process,” said Hadi Ghaemi, coordinator of International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based group. “They don’t want them to come back as part of a political party.”
The confessions are used to persuade a domestic audience that even cultural and academic outreach by some of the nation’s top academics is really cover to usher in a velvet revolution, human rights workers and former prisoners say.
“If they talk about the velvet revolution 24 hours a day people don’t care,” said Omid Memarian, a former Iranian journalist who was arrested and forced to issue his own confession in 2004. “But if reformers and journalists say they are involved in it, it makes the point for them. Once my interrogators said, ‘Whatever you say is worth 100 times more than having a conservative newspaper say the same thing.’ ”
Fars, a semiofficial news agency, reported the confession of a Newsweek reporter, Mazaiar Bahari, that he had done the bidding of foreign governments, as well as a confession by the editor of a newspaper run by Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader. And at Friday Prayer, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said the government planned to put on trial several Iranian employees of the British Embassy — after confessions were extracted.
In addition to Mr. Abtahi, other prominent reformers being held include Abdullah Ramezanzadeh, Mr. Khatami’s spokesman, and Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former deputy interior minister.
In 2007, Iran produced a pseudo-documentary called “In the Name of Democracy,” which served as a vehicle to highlight what it called confessions of three academic researchers charged with trying to overthrow the state. “They don’t like new ideas to get to Iran,” said a researcher once investigated about his work, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They don’t like social and cultural figures in Iranian society to become very popular.”
In 2001, Ali Afshari was arrested for his work as a student leader. He said he was held in solitary confinement for 335 days and resisted confessing for the first two months. But after two mock executions and a five-day stretch where his interrogators would not let him sleep, he said he eventually caved in.
“They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping me in solitary confinement for one year,” Mr. Afshari said in an interview from his home in Washington. “They eventually broke my resistance.”
The problem, he said, was that he was not sure what he was supposed to confess to. So over the next several months, he said, he and his interrogators “negotiated” what he would say — and, more ominously, whom he would implicate. Once his confession was complete, he said, he practiced it for 7 to 10 days, and then it ran on state-run television.
Three years later, Mr. Memarian, the journalist and blogger, was arrested in another security sweep. He said that his interrogator at first sought to humiliate him by forcing him to discuss details of his sex life, and that when he hesitated, the interrogator would grab his hair and smash his head against the wall. He said the interrogator asked him about prominent politicians he had interviewed, asked if they ever had affairs, and asked if he had ever slept with their wives.
“I was crying, I begged him, please do not ask me this,” said Mr. Memarian, who is in exile now in the United States. “They said if you don’t talk now you will talk in a month, in two months, in a year. If you don’t talk now, you will talk. You will just stay here.”
The pressure was agonizing, he said, as he was forced to live in a small cell for 35 days with a light burning all the time and only three trips to the bathroom allowed every 24 hours. He was forced to shower in front of a camera, he said. At one point the interrogators threatened to break his fingers.
“They came up with names, and topics,” he said. “They gave me a three-page analysis and said read this and include it in your confession. My interrogator once said, ‘You have written seven years for the reformists; it’s O.K. to write for us for two months.’ ”
Mr. Memarian said that even in 2004, his interrogators were most interested in several leading reformers, including Mr. Abtahi, who at the time was an adviser to the president. When he was finally released, and after his confession was published by Fars, he was asked to testify before a committee led by the reform government investigating confessions, which included Mr. Abtahi. Mr. Abtahi, who has not been heard from since his arrest on June 16, understood even back then just how vulnerable he was, Mr. Memarian recalled.
“Abtahi said, ‘We cannot guarantee anyone’s security,’ ” Mr. Memarian said. “ ‘We know what happened to you guys. When you leave this building we do not know will happen to you, or what can happen to us in this committee.’ ”
(An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a conservative Web site that referred to a video of Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformer. The Web site is Alef, not Atef.)
CAIRO — Iranian leaders say they have obtained confessions from top reformist officials that they plotted to bring down the government with a “velvet” revolution. Such confessions, almost always extracted under duress, are part of an effort to recast the civil unrest set off by Iran’s disputed presidential election as a conspiracy orchestrated by foreign nations, human rights groups say.
Reports on Iranian Web sites associated with prominent conservatives said that leading reformers have confessed to taking velvet revolution “training courses” outside the country. Alef, a Web site of a conservative member of Parliament, referred to a video of Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who served as vice president in the reform government of former President Mohammed Khatami, as showing that he tearfully “welcomed being defrocked and has confessed to provoking people, causing tension and creating media chaos.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the Revolutionary Guards, Mojtaba Zolnour, said in a speech Thursday that almost everyone now detained had confessed — raising the prospect that more confessions will be made public. Ayatollah Khamenei is supreme religious leader.
The government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners held without charge or legal representation, often subjected to pressure tactics like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, according to human rights groups and former political prisoners. Human rights groups estimate that hundreds of people have been detained.
They fear the confessions are part of a concerted effort to lay the groundwork for banning existing reformist political parties and preventing any organized reform movement in the future. “They hope with this scenario they can expunge them completely from the political process,” said Hadi Ghaemi, coordinator of International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based group. “They don’t want them to come back as part of a political party.”
The confessions are used to persuade a domestic audience that even cultural and academic outreach by some of the nation’s top academics is really cover to usher in a velvet revolution, human rights workers and former prisoners say.
“If they talk about the velvet revolution 24 hours a day people don’t care,” said Omid Memarian, a former Iranian journalist who was arrested and forced to issue his own confession in 2004. “But if reformers and journalists say they are involved in it, it makes the point for them. Once my interrogators said, ‘Whatever you say is worth 100 times more than having a conservative newspaper say the same thing.’ ”
Fars, a semiofficial news agency, reported the confession of a Newsweek reporter, Mazaiar Bahari, that he had done the bidding of foreign governments, as well as a confession by the editor of a newspaper run by Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader. And at Friday Prayer, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said the government planned to put on trial several Iranian employees of the British Embassy — after confessions were extracted.
In addition to Mr. Abtahi, other prominent reformers being held include Abdullah Ramezanzadeh, Mr. Khatami’s spokesman, and Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former deputy interior minister.
In 2007, Iran produced a pseudo-documentary called “In the Name of Democracy,” which served as a vehicle to highlight what it called confessions of three academic researchers charged with trying to overthrow the state. “They don’t like new ideas to get to Iran,” said a researcher once investigated about his work, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They don’t like social and cultural figures in Iranian society to become very popular.”
In 2001, Ali Afshari was arrested for his work as a student leader. He said he was held in solitary confinement for 335 days and resisted confessing for the first two months. But after two mock executions and a five-day stretch where his interrogators would not let him sleep, he said he eventually caved in.
“They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping me in solitary confinement for one year,” Mr. Afshari said in an interview from his home in Washington. “They eventually broke my resistance.”
The problem, he said, was that he was not sure what he was supposed to confess to. So over the next several months, he said, he and his interrogators “negotiated” what he would say — and, more ominously, whom he would implicate. Once his confession was complete, he said, he practiced it for 7 to 10 days, and then it ran on state-run television.
Three years later, Mr. Memarian, the journalist and blogger, was arrested in another security sweep. He said that his interrogator at first sought to humiliate him by forcing him to discuss details of his sex life, and that when he hesitated, the interrogator would grab his hair and smash his head against the wall. He said the interrogator asked him about prominent politicians he had interviewed, asked if they ever had affairs, and asked if he had ever slept with their wives.
“I was crying, I begged him, please do not ask me this,” said Mr. Memarian, who is in exile now in the United States. “They said if you don’t talk now you will talk in a month, in two months, in a year. If you don’t talk now, you will talk. You will just stay here.”
The pressure was agonizing, he said, as he was forced to live in a small cell for 35 days with a light burning all the time and only three trips to the bathroom allowed every 24 hours. He was forced to shower in front of a camera, he said. At one point the interrogators threatened to break his fingers.
“They came up with names, and topics,” he said. “They gave me a three-page analysis and said read this and include it in your confession. My interrogator once said, ‘You have written seven years for the reformists; it’s O.K. to write for us for two months.’ ”
Mr. Memarian said that even in 2004, his interrogators were most interested in several leading reformers, including Mr. Abtahi, who at the time was an adviser to the president. When he was finally released, and after his confession was published by Fars, he was asked to testify before a committee led by the reform government investigating confessions, which included Mr. Abtahi. Mr. Abtahi, who has not been heard from since his arrest on June 16, understood even back then just how vulnerable he was, Mr. Memarian recalled.
“Abtahi said, ‘We cannot guarantee anyone’s security,’ ” Mr. Memarian said. “ ‘We know what happened to you guys. When you leave this building we do not know will happen to you, or what can happen to us in this committee.’ ”
(An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a conservative Web site that referred to a video of Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformer. The Web site is Alef, not Atef.)
Iran Cleric Says British Embassy Staff to Stand Trial
By JOHN F. BURNS and STEPHEN CASTLE
LONDON — A high-ranking Iranian cleric said Friday that Iran planned to put some of the detained British embassy staff members on trial, a move that could provoke a tightening of European sanctions against Iran, including the withdrawal of ambassadors.
The cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of the influential Guardian Council, told worshipers at Friday Prayer in Tehran that the embassy employees had “made confessions” and would be tried for their role in inciting protests after last month’s disputed presidential election.
In London, the Foreign Office said it was urgently seeking clarification from the Iranian government as to whether the cleric’s remarks represented official policy.
“We are confident that our staff have not engaged in any improper or illegal behavior,” Foreign Secretary David Miliband said in a statement. “We remain deeply concerned about the two members of our staff who remain in detention in Iran.”
He said he planned to speak to the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki.
Of the nine staff members seized Sunday, five were released Monday after the first British and European protests, and Iranian state media said Wednesday that three more had been freed, leaving one in custody. British officials, however, said that two remained under arrest.
As local employees of the embassy, those arrested did not have diplomatic immunity. None are British citizens.
Although the Foreign Office has denied that it had any role in stirring the ferment in Iran, officials in London have said that the embassy in Tehran had not forbidden its local employees to participate in the protests as individuals. The Iranian authorities say they have video evidence of some embassy employees at the protests.
Hours after the threat of trials, the European Union seemed to hold back from an out-and-out showdown, resolving to summon Iranian ambassadors in all 27 of the group’s countries to send “a strong message of protest against the detention of British Embassy local staff and to demand their immediate release,” said a European diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity, following the group’s rules.
Other graduated measures — like a slowdown in issuing visas to Iranian officials seeking to visit Europe and a potential withdrawal of all European ambassadors — would be considered, the diplomat said. He said Iranian diplomats would be told that the arrest of the embassy employees and the threat of trials were considered a threat to all European Union diplomatic staff members in Iran.
The Iranian authorities accused the employees of fomenting and orchestrating the protests that drew tens of thousands of Iranians into Tehran’s streets after the June 12 election. The demonstrations provoked a security crackdown that had largely ended the public protests but not the political ferment over the elections. The hard-line incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been officially declared the winner by a landslide, but his main opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi, has vowed to continue his campaign to have the official result declared fraudulent.
Ayatollah Jannati, who is an ally of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, did not say how many of the detainees would be tried or on what charges, news reports said. But, in unofficial translations provided by news agencies, he said that the British Embassy had a “presence” in the postelection unrest and that “some people” had been arrested. It was “inevitable” that they would face trial, he said.
The Guardian Council is an influential panel of 12 clerics whose responsibilities include vetting elections. On Monday it certified Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory, a step that emboldened hard-line officials to warn of a harsher crackdown if protests continued.
Britain has sought diplomatic help from the European Union, which is thought to hold more sway with Iran. But some European countries, led by Germany, have been reluctant to risk worsening ties with Iran, particularly at a time when European diplomats have been pressing it for concessions over its nuclear program. They have argued that a withdrawal of envoys, a step urged by Britain, would leave few diplomatic options if the crisis deteriorated further.
But there were signs that the threat of trials had stiffened resolve in other countries.
“Our solidarity with Britain is total,” said President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, adding that France favored tightening sanctions.
The Iranian authorities have frequently blamed foreigners for the turmoil, but they have singled out the British as instigators. They cited Britain’s covert role in past political upheavals, including the toppling in 1941 of Reza Shah Pahlavi, suspected of having pro-German sympathies during World War II, and the ouster in 1953 of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh after his government nationalized Iran’s British-dominated oil industry.
At the same time, Tehran has sent mixed signals about the fate of the embassy employees.
Hassan Qashqavi, the foreign ministry spokesman, said Monday that Iran was eager to maintain normal diplomatic relations with the European Union, its biggest trading partner. “Reduction of ties is not on our agenda with any European country, including Britain,” he said.
But on Wednesday, the semiofficial Fars news agency said that one of the embassy employees, who was not identified by name, “had a remarkable role during the recent unrest in managing it behind the scenes.”
While Ayatollah Jannati is not a member of the government or the judiciary, his words as the head of the Guardian Council and a close associate of the supreme leader carry some weight.
At Friday Prayer — a forum Iran has often used to convey significant political messages — he accused Britain of trying to provoke a “velvet revolution.” As long ago as March, he said, the British Foreign Office had said street riots were possible during the June elections. “These are signs, revealed by themselves,” he said.
John F. Burns reported from London, and Stephen Castle from Brussels. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.
LONDON — A high-ranking Iranian cleric said Friday that Iran planned to put some of the detained British embassy staff members on trial, a move that could provoke a tightening of European sanctions against Iran, including the withdrawal of ambassadors.
The cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of the influential Guardian Council, told worshipers at Friday Prayer in Tehran that the embassy employees had “made confessions” and would be tried for their role in inciting protests after last month’s disputed presidential election.
In London, the Foreign Office said it was urgently seeking clarification from the Iranian government as to whether the cleric’s remarks represented official policy.
“We are confident that our staff have not engaged in any improper or illegal behavior,” Foreign Secretary David Miliband said in a statement. “We remain deeply concerned about the two members of our staff who remain in detention in Iran.”
He said he planned to speak to the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki.
Of the nine staff members seized Sunday, five were released Monday after the first British and European protests, and Iranian state media said Wednesday that three more had been freed, leaving one in custody. British officials, however, said that two remained under arrest.
As local employees of the embassy, those arrested did not have diplomatic immunity. None are British citizens.
Although the Foreign Office has denied that it had any role in stirring the ferment in Iran, officials in London have said that the embassy in Tehran had not forbidden its local employees to participate in the protests as individuals. The Iranian authorities say they have video evidence of some embassy employees at the protests.
Hours after the threat of trials, the European Union seemed to hold back from an out-and-out showdown, resolving to summon Iranian ambassadors in all 27 of the group’s countries to send “a strong message of protest against the detention of British Embassy local staff and to demand their immediate release,” said a European diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity, following the group’s rules.
Other graduated measures — like a slowdown in issuing visas to Iranian officials seeking to visit Europe and a potential withdrawal of all European ambassadors — would be considered, the diplomat said. He said Iranian diplomats would be told that the arrest of the embassy employees and the threat of trials were considered a threat to all European Union diplomatic staff members in Iran.
The Iranian authorities accused the employees of fomenting and orchestrating the protests that drew tens of thousands of Iranians into Tehran’s streets after the June 12 election. The demonstrations provoked a security crackdown that had largely ended the public protests but not the political ferment over the elections. The hard-line incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been officially declared the winner by a landslide, but his main opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi, has vowed to continue his campaign to have the official result declared fraudulent.
Ayatollah Jannati, who is an ally of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, did not say how many of the detainees would be tried or on what charges, news reports said. But, in unofficial translations provided by news agencies, he said that the British Embassy had a “presence” in the postelection unrest and that “some people” had been arrested. It was “inevitable” that they would face trial, he said.
The Guardian Council is an influential panel of 12 clerics whose responsibilities include vetting elections. On Monday it certified Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory, a step that emboldened hard-line officials to warn of a harsher crackdown if protests continued.
Britain has sought diplomatic help from the European Union, which is thought to hold more sway with Iran. But some European countries, led by Germany, have been reluctant to risk worsening ties with Iran, particularly at a time when European diplomats have been pressing it for concessions over its nuclear program. They have argued that a withdrawal of envoys, a step urged by Britain, would leave few diplomatic options if the crisis deteriorated further.
But there were signs that the threat of trials had stiffened resolve in other countries.
“Our solidarity with Britain is total,” said President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, adding that France favored tightening sanctions.
The Iranian authorities have frequently blamed foreigners for the turmoil, but they have singled out the British as instigators. They cited Britain’s covert role in past political upheavals, including the toppling in 1941 of Reza Shah Pahlavi, suspected of having pro-German sympathies during World War II, and the ouster in 1953 of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh after his government nationalized Iran’s British-dominated oil industry.
At the same time, Tehran has sent mixed signals about the fate of the embassy employees.
Hassan Qashqavi, the foreign ministry spokesman, said Monday that Iran was eager to maintain normal diplomatic relations with the European Union, its biggest trading partner. “Reduction of ties is not on our agenda with any European country, including Britain,” he said.
But on Wednesday, the semiofficial Fars news agency said that one of the embassy employees, who was not identified by name, “had a remarkable role during the recent unrest in managing it behind the scenes.”
While Ayatollah Jannati is not a member of the government or the judiciary, his words as the head of the Guardian Council and a close associate of the supreme leader carry some weight.
At Friday Prayer — a forum Iran has often used to convey significant political messages — he accused Britain of trying to provoke a “velvet revolution.” As long ago as March, he said, the British Foreign Office had said street riots were possible during the June elections. “These are signs, revealed by themselves,” he said.
John F. Burns reported from London, and Stephen Castle from Brussels. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.
Syrian Leader Invites Obama to Visit, Raising Hope of Policy Shift
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — Syria’s president sent a Fourth of July message full of praise to President Obama on Friday and invited him to visit Syria. These were the latest signs that Syria is hedging its bets in the politics of the Middle East, warming up to the United States at a time when Syria’s longtime ally Iran is in turmoil.
The United States and its Arab allies have been hoping to pull Syria away from its alliances with Iran and Islamic militant groups in the region.
Syria seems unlikely to take such a dramatic step, but it does appear worried about Iran’s reliability and the long-term impact of postelection unrest in the country. Also, Hezbollah, a militant organization supported by Iran, suffered a setback when its coalition failed to win parliamentary elections in Lebanon last month; it was defeated by a pro-Western coalition.
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has been expressing hopes for better ties with the United States for months. But the latest developments may make dialogue look more likely.
Mr. Assad sent a telegram to Mr. Obama on the occasion of Independence Day, saying, “The values that were adopted by President Obama during his election campaign and after he was elected president are values that the world needs today.”
According to the state-run news agency, SANA, the telegram said: “It is very important to adopt the principle of dialogue in relations with countries based on respect and mutual interest.”
In an interview with Britain’s Sky News, Mr. Assad invited Obama to visit Damascus to discuss Middle East peace.
“We would like to welcome him in Syria, definitely; I am very clear about this,” Mr. Assad said in English.
Asked whether such a visit could take place soon, Mr. Assad said: “That depends on him.”
He added with a smile, “I will ask you to convey the invitation to him.” President Bill Clinton was the last American chief executive to visit Syria, in 1994.
The longstanding tensions between the United States and Syria have contributed to instability in Lebanon. The United States and Israel have also said that Syria’s backing of Hamas, the militant Palestinian organization, has undermined the Arab-Israeli peace process.
If the United States can draw Syria even somewhat away from Iran and the militant groups allied with it, that would represent a major shift and could help ease tensions in the Middle East.
The Obama administration has been wooing Syria. The administration is sending an American ambassador to Damascus after a four-year break caused by accusations of Syrian involvement in terrorism. Mr. Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, became the highest-level American official to visit Damascus since 2005, and he acknowledged Syria’s significance, saying that it had a central role to play in forging a Mideast peace.
In a separate interview with Sky News, Mr. Assad’s wife, Asma, said she believed that the Syrian and American leaders could work together.
“The fact that President Obama is young — well, President Assad is also very young as well — so maybe it is time for these young new leaders to make a difference in the world,” she said.
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — Syria’s president sent a Fourth of July message full of praise to President Obama on Friday and invited him to visit Syria. These were the latest signs that Syria is hedging its bets in the politics of the Middle East, warming up to the United States at a time when Syria’s longtime ally Iran is in turmoil.
The United States and its Arab allies have been hoping to pull Syria away from its alliances with Iran and Islamic militant groups in the region.
Syria seems unlikely to take such a dramatic step, but it does appear worried about Iran’s reliability and the long-term impact of postelection unrest in the country. Also, Hezbollah, a militant organization supported by Iran, suffered a setback when its coalition failed to win parliamentary elections in Lebanon last month; it was defeated by a pro-Western coalition.
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has been expressing hopes for better ties with the United States for months. But the latest developments may make dialogue look more likely.
Mr. Assad sent a telegram to Mr. Obama on the occasion of Independence Day, saying, “The values that were adopted by President Obama during his election campaign and after he was elected president are values that the world needs today.”
According to the state-run news agency, SANA, the telegram said: “It is very important to adopt the principle of dialogue in relations with countries based on respect and mutual interest.”
In an interview with Britain’s Sky News, Mr. Assad invited Obama to visit Damascus to discuss Middle East peace.
“We would like to welcome him in Syria, definitely; I am very clear about this,” Mr. Assad said in English.
Asked whether such a visit could take place soon, Mr. Assad said: “That depends on him.”
He added with a smile, “I will ask you to convey the invitation to him.” President Bill Clinton was the last American chief executive to visit Syria, in 1994.
The longstanding tensions between the United States and Syria have contributed to instability in Lebanon. The United States and Israel have also said that Syria’s backing of Hamas, the militant Palestinian organization, has undermined the Arab-Israeli peace process.
If the United States can draw Syria even somewhat away from Iran and the militant groups allied with it, that would represent a major shift and could help ease tensions in the Middle East.
The Obama administration has been wooing Syria. The administration is sending an American ambassador to Damascus after a four-year break caused by accusations of Syrian involvement in terrorism. Mr. Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, became the highest-level American official to visit Damascus since 2005, and he acknowledged Syria’s significance, saying that it had a central role to play in forging a Mideast peace.
In a separate interview with Sky News, Mr. Assad’s wife, Asma, said she believed that the Syrian and American leaders could work together.
“The fact that President Obama is young — well, President Assad is also very young as well — so maybe it is time for these young new leaders to make a difference in the world,” she said.
U.N. Chief Meets With Myanmar Junta
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar — Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, asked this country’s ruling generals on Friday to free its many political prisoners, including the democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, but there was no sign yet of movement on the issue from the junta.
Mr. Ban also asked to visit Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, but said the military leaders reminded him that she was on trial. Early Saturday, Mr. Ban said that his request to see her before he left the country Saturday night had been rejected.
Mr. Ban is hoping to win the release of political prisoners — estimated at 2,100 by international humanitarian organizations — ahead of elections scheduled for 2010.
Mr. Ban’s rare meeting with Senior Gen. Than Shwe and the other four generals who constitute the ruling State Peace and Development Council came as the government declared a one-week pause in Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial.
Mr. Ban called his exchange with the generals “frank,” and a senior United Nations official described the discussion as “forceful” on both sides.
Mr. Ban said he told the generals it would be important to release Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and the other political prisoners to ensure the broadest possible participation in the election.
“This election should be a credible, fair, inclusive and legitimate one where all the Myanmar people can express their will in a free way,” Mr. Ban said after meeting with the generals. “I was assured that Myanmar’s authorities will make sure that this election will be held in fair and free and transparent manner.”
At the same time, Mr. Ban asked for a series of steps toward that goal, though it was unclear whether the military government would endorse such a development, senior United Nations official said. The steps include revamping the election laws publicly and establishing an electoral commission. Not even the aborted election of 1990, which Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won, truly covered the whole nation, so another step would be allowing the party, the National League for Democracy, to open offices across the country and to permit her to campaign.
Mr. Ban said he also urged the generals to resume their dialogue with the opposition in a substantive and meaningful way, including with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi.
Mr. Ban is expected to have an additional, unscheduled meeting with General Than Shwe on Saturday, and is due to make a speech about the country’s future to a group of nongovernmental organizations involved in relief efforts for the past 14 months. He also plans to tour the Irrawaddy Delta, where Cyclone Nargis struck a devastating blow in May 2008, killing 138,000 people. His visit at that time opened the door for international aid organizations to play a greater role in relief efforts.
But Bishow Parajuli, the humanitarian coordinator for the country, said there was currently a backlog of about 219 international aid workers seeking visas to work in the country. The visa process has slowed since March, he said, another issue Mr. Ban took up with General Than Shwe.
International human rights groups have urged Mr. Ban to take a tough line on the junta. He tried, however, to play down expectations, saying that it would be a difficult trip, but that it was important to engage the ruling generals.
“I am very pleased to continue our discussion,” Mr. Ban said in his opening remarks to General Than Shwe. “I appreciate your commitment to move your country forward.”
The meeting was held in a soaring reception room painted with a mural of Buddhist temples set in the jungle, the landscape around Naypyidaw (pronounced nay-pee-DAW), the sprawling, isolated capital the generals constructed out of the rice fields and jungle about 200 miles north of Yangon. Yangon, formerly Rangoon, is the country’s main city.
The official reception building here is called Bayinnaung Hall, named after a 16th-century warrior king who united much of what is today Myanmar, as well as parts of India, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.
The monarch is the favorite historical figure of the authoritarian government.
Shortly after Mr. Ban arrived in the country, the authorities said that the current trial of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years, would be adjourned for one week until July 10. The trial was delayed because of what was described as an administrative error, according to Kyi Win, a lawyer representing her.
“When the judges came onto the bench they announced that the files from the higher court had not been returned,” Mr. Kyi Win said.
“There must be other reasons,” he said in an interview. “But we hate to speculate.”
Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has not been told whether she will be meeting Mr. Ban, the lawyer said. She is on trial on charges of violating the terms of her current house arrest after an American man swam uninvited across a lake to her home.
Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has denied the charge, but could be sentenced to five years imprisonment if found guilty. She is being held at the infamous Insein Prison. John Yettaw, the 53-year-old American intruder, was charged with trespassing and is also detained there.
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.
NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar — Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, asked this country’s ruling generals on Friday to free its many political prisoners, including the democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, but there was no sign yet of movement on the issue from the junta.
Mr. Ban also asked to visit Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, but said the military leaders reminded him that she was on trial. Early Saturday, Mr. Ban said that his request to see her before he left the country Saturday night had been rejected.
Mr. Ban is hoping to win the release of political prisoners — estimated at 2,100 by international humanitarian organizations — ahead of elections scheduled for 2010.
Mr. Ban’s rare meeting with Senior Gen. Than Shwe and the other four generals who constitute the ruling State Peace and Development Council came as the government declared a one-week pause in Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial.
Mr. Ban called his exchange with the generals “frank,” and a senior United Nations official described the discussion as “forceful” on both sides.
Mr. Ban said he told the generals it would be important to release Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and the other political prisoners to ensure the broadest possible participation in the election.
“This election should be a credible, fair, inclusive and legitimate one where all the Myanmar people can express their will in a free way,” Mr. Ban said after meeting with the generals. “I was assured that Myanmar’s authorities will make sure that this election will be held in fair and free and transparent manner.”
At the same time, Mr. Ban asked for a series of steps toward that goal, though it was unclear whether the military government would endorse such a development, senior United Nations official said. The steps include revamping the election laws publicly and establishing an electoral commission. Not even the aborted election of 1990, which Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won, truly covered the whole nation, so another step would be allowing the party, the National League for Democracy, to open offices across the country and to permit her to campaign.
Mr. Ban said he also urged the generals to resume their dialogue with the opposition in a substantive and meaningful way, including with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi.
Mr. Ban is expected to have an additional, unscheduled meeting with General Than Shwe on Saturday, and is due to make a speech about the country’s future to a group of nongovernmental organizations involved in relief efforts for the past 14 months. He also plans to tour the Irrawaddy Delta, where Cyclone Nargis struck a devastating blow in May 2008, killing 138,000 people. His visit at that time opened the door for international aid organizations to play a greater role in relief efforts.
But Bishow Parajuli, the humanitarian coordinator for the country, said there was currently a backlog of about 219 international aid workers seeking visas to work in the country. The visa process has slowed since March, he said, another issue Mr. Ban took up with General Than Shwe.
International human rights groups have urged Mr. Ban to take a tough line on the junta. He tried, however, to play down expectations, saying that it would be a difficult trip, but that it was important to engage the ruling generals.
“I am very pleased to continue our discussion,” Mr. Ban said in his opening remarks to General Than Shwe. “I appreciate your commitment to move your country forward.”
The meeting was held in a soaring reception room painted with a mural of Buddhist temples set in the jungle, the landscape around Naypyidaw (pronounced nay-pee-DAW), the sprawling, isolated capital the generals constructed out of the rice fields and jungle about 200 miles north of Yangon. Yangon, formerly Rangoon, is the country’s main city.
The official reception building here is called Bayinnaung Hall, named after a 16th-century warrior king who united much of what is today Myanmar, as well as parts of India, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.
The monarch is the favorite historical figure of the authoritarian government.
Shortly after Mr. Ban arrived in the country, the authorities said that the current trial of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years, would be adjourned for one week until July 10. The trial was delayed because of what was described as an administrative error, according to Kyi Win, a lawyer representing her.
“When the judges came onto the bench they announced that the files from the higher court had not been returned,” Mr. Kyi Win said.
“There must be other reasons,” he said in an interview. “But we hate to speculate.”
Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has not been told whether she will be meeting Mr. Ban, the lawyer said. She is on trial on charges of violating the terms of her current house arrest after an American man swam uninvited across a lake to her home.
Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has denied the charge, but could be sentenced to five years imprisonment if found guilty. She is being held at the infamous Insein Prison. John Yettaw, the 53-year-old American intruder, was charged with trespassing and is also detained there.
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.
Jul 3, 2009
Untold Truths About the American Revolution
By Howard Zinn, July 3, 2009
There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from, “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”
You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.
The American Revolution—independence from England—was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be occupied by and oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?
How many people died in the Revolutionary War?
Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let’s take the lower figure—25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs.
You might consider that worth it, or you might not.
Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?
In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials. It was a nonviolent revolution that took place. But then came Lexington and Concord, and the revolution became violent, and it was run not by the farmers but by the Founding Fathers. The farmers were rather poor; the Founding Fathers were rather rich.
Who actually gained from that victory over England? It’s very important to ask about any policy, and especially about war: Who gained what? And it’s very important to notice differences among the various parts of the population. That’s one thing were not accustomed to in this country because we don’t think in class terms. We think, “Oh, we all have the same interests.” For instance, we think that we all had the same interests in independence from England. We did not have all the same interests.
Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line—in the Proclamation of 1763—that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.
So when you look at the American Revolution, there’s a fact that you have to take into consideration. Indians—no, they didn’t benefit.
Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution?
Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it.
What about class divisions?
Did ordinary white farmers have the same interest in the revolution as a John Hancock or Morris or Madison or Jefferson or the slaveholders or the bondholders? Not really.
It was not all the common people getting together to fight against England. They had a very hard time assembling an army. They took poor guys and promised them land. They browbeat people and, oh yes, they inspired people with the Declaration of Independence. It’s always good, if you want people to go to war, to give them a good document and have good words: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, when they wrote the Constitution, they were more concerned with property than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You should take notice of these little things.
There were class divisions. When you assess and evaluate a war, when you assess and evaluate any policy, you have to ask: Who gets what?
We were a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to pretend in this country that we’re all one happy family. We’re not.
And so when you look at the American Revolution, you have to look at it in terms of class.
Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.
The American Revolution was not a simple affair of all of us against all of them. And not everyone thought they would benefit from the Revolution.
We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.
Once a historical event has taken place, it becomes very hard to imagine that you could have achieved a result some other way. When something is happening in history it takes on a certain air of inevitability: This is the only way it could have happened. No.
We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States.” The History Channel is running an adaptation called “The People Speak.” This article is an excerpt from Zinn’s cover story in the July issue of The Progressive.
There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from, “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”
You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.
The American Revolution—independence from England—was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be occupied by and oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?
How many people died in the Revolutionary War?
Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let’s take the lower figure—25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs.
You might consider that worth it, or you might not.
Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?
In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials. It was a nonviolent revolution that took place. But then came Lexington and Concord, and the revolution became violent, and it was run not by the farmers but by the Founding Fathers. The farmers were rather poor; the Founding Fathers were rather rich.
Who actually gained from that victory over England? It’s very important to ask about any policy, and especially about war: Who gained what? And it’s very important to notice differences among the various parts of the population. That’s one thing were not accustomed to in this country because we don’t think in class terms. We think, “Oh, we all have the same interests.” For instance, we think that we all had the same interests in independence from England. We did not have all the same interests.
Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line—in the Proclamation of 1763—that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.
So when you look at the American Revolution, there’s a fact that you have to take into consideration. Indians—no, they didn’t benefit.
Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution?
Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it.
What about class divisions?
Did ordinary white farmers have the same interest in the revolution as a John Hancock or Morris or Madison or Jefferson or the slaveholders or the bondholders? Not really.
It was not all the common people getting together to fight against England. They had a very hard time assembling an army. They took poor guys and promised them land. They browbeat people and, oh yes, they inspired people with the Declaration of Independence. It’s always good, if you want people to go to war, to give them a good document and have good words: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, when they wrote the Constitution, they were more concerned with property than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You should take notice of these little things.
There were class divisions. When you assess and evaluate a war, when you assess and evaluate any policy, you have to ask: Who gets what?
We were a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to pretend in this country that we’re all one happy family. We’re not.
And so when you look at the American Revolution, you have to look at it in terms of class.
Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.
The American Revolution was not a simple affair of all of us against all of them. And not everyone thought they would benefit from the Revolution.
We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.
Once a historical event has taken place, it becomes very hard to imagine that you could have achieved a result some other way. When something is happening in history it takes on a certain air of inevitability: This is the only way it could have happened. No.
We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States.” The History Channel is running an adaptation called “The People Speak.” This article is an excerpt from Zinn’s cover story in the July issue of The Progressive.
This July 4th, Let’s Be True to Our Principles
By Jeanne Theoharis, July 3, 2009
It’s the Fourth of July in America, and a U.S. citizen sits in solitary confinement in New York — and he hasn’t even been convicted of a crime.
His name is Syed Fahad Hashmi. His treatment stands in stark contrast to the freedoms we celebrate on this holiday.
For more than two years, Hashmi has awaited trial on four charges of providing material support to Al Qaeda. Hashmi has never previously been charged with a crime.
He grew up in Flushing, Queens, in New York and became an outspoken Muslim student activist. Now he sits in the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
He is allowed no contact with anyone outside his lawyer and, in very limited form, his parents.
He is allowed to write one letter to one family member a week and cannot use more than three sheets of paper.
His cell is electronically monitored inside and out, with shower and toilet in view of the camera.
He is allowed only one hour out of his cell a day — which is periodically withheld — and is not permitted fresh air but forced to exercise inside in a solitary cage.
He is forbidden any contact, directly or through his attorneys, with the news media and can only read portions of newspapers approved by his jailers, and not until 30 days after publication.
The government publicly claims the centerpiece of its case will be the testimony of Junaid Babar, who alleges he stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks in early 2004, stored luggage containing raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks in Hashmi’s apartment, used Hashmi’s cell phone to call other conspirators and then delivered these materials to the third-ranking member of Al Qaeda in South Waziristan, Pakistan.
Much of the evidence against Hashmi is classified. While his lawyers went through a CIA-level clearance to view it, they are not allowed to discuss it with Hashmi himself.
Hashmi’s case is unfortunately not an aberration. Other terrorism suspects in the United States have been stripped of many of their due process rights.
Yet we, as Americans, tend to think that the abuses in the War on Terror happened outside the United States and are a thing of the past. We’ve focused our attention on our Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s secret prisons but neglected the abuses right here at home.
Seeking to reassure the American public about closing Guantanamo, President Obama in May decried the techniques used there during the Bush years as “not America.” Two weeks later in Cairo, Egypt, he promised to “speak the truth as best I can.”
The truth — yet to be acknowledged by the Obama administration — is that such treatment is unfortunately still America.
Cases like Hashmi’s should be at the center of the public conversation about truth and civil liberties in the post-Bush era.
On this July Fourth, we must affirm the rule of law here in America, ending inhumane conditions of confinement and reaffirming the right to due process in court.
Jeanne Theoharis is the endowed chair in women’s studies and associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College of CUNY and the author of numerous books on civil rights. For more on Hashmi’s case, see www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org. Theoharis can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
It’s the Fourth of July in America, and a U.S. citizen sits in solitary confinement in New York — and he hasn’t even been convicted of a crime.
His name is Syed Fahad Hashmi. His treatment stands in stark contrast to the freedoms we celebrate on this holiday.
For more than two years, Hashmi has awaited trial on four charges of providing material support to Al Qaeda. Hashmi has never previously been charged with a crime.
He grew up in Flushing, Queens, in New York and became an outspoken Muslim student activist. Now he sits in the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
He is allowed no contact with anyone outside his lawyer and, in very limited form, his parents.
He is allowed to write one letter to one family member a week and cannot use more than three sheets of paper.
His cell is electronically monitored inside and out, with shower and toilet in view of the camera.
He is allowed only one hour out of his cell a day — which is periodically withheld — and is not permitted fresh air but forced to exercise inside in a solitary cage.
He is forbidden any contact, directly or through his attorneys, with the news media and can only read portions of newspapers approved by his jailers, and not until 30 days after publication.
The government publicly claims the centerpiece of its case will be the testimony of Junaid Babar, who alleges he stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks in early 2004, stored luggage containing raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks in Hashmi’s apartment, used Hashmi’s cell phone to call other conspirators and then delivered these materials to the third-ranking member of Al Qaeda in South Waziristan, Pakistan.
Much of the evidence against Hashmi is classified. While his lawyers went through a CIA-level clearance to view it, they are not allowed to discuss it with Hashmi himself.
Hashmi’s case is unfortunately not an aberration. Other terrorism suspects in the United States have been stripped of many of their due process rights.
Yet we, as Americans, tend to think that the abuses in the War on Terror happened outside the United States and are a thing of the past. We’ve focused our attention on our Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s secret prisons but neglected the abuses right here at home.
Seeking to reassure the American public about closing Guantanamo, President Obama in May decried the techniques used there during the Bush years as “not America.” Two weeks later in Cairo, Egypt, he promised to “speak the truth as best I can.”
The truth — yet to be acknowledged by the Obama administration — is that such treatment is unfortunately still America.
Cases like Hashmi’s should be at the center of the public conversation about truth and civil liberties in the post-Bush era.
On this July Fourth, we must affirm the rule of law here in America, ending inhumane conditions of confinement and reaffirming the right to due process in court.
Jeanne Theoharis is the endowed chair in women’s studies and associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College of CUNY and the author of numerous books on civil rights. For more on Hashmi’s case, see www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org. Theoharis can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
Drug-Cartel Links Haunt an Election South of Border
By JOEL MILLMAN and JOSE DE CORDOBA
COLIMA, Mexico -- The candidacy of Mario Anguiano, running for governor in a state election here Sunday, says a lot about Mexican politics amid the rise of the drug cartels.
A brother of the candidate is serving a 10-year prison sentence in Mexico for peddling methamphetamine. Another Anguiano is serving 27 years in a Texas prison for running a huge meth ring. A few weeks ago, a hand-painted banner hung on a highway overpass cited the Zetas, the bloodthirsty executioners for the Gulf Cartel drug gang, praising the candidate: "The Zetas support you, and we are with you to the death."
Mr. Anguiano says his meth-dealing brother was just an addict who sold small amounts to support his habit. He says the man jailed in Texas, reported by local media to be his cousin, may or may not be a relative. "If he is my cousin, I've never met him," he says. Denying any involvement with traffickers, he says the supposed Zetas endorsement was just a dirty trick by his election rivals.
If so, it backfired. In the weeks after the banner made local headlines, new polls showed Mr. Anguiano pulling ahead in the race. He is expected to be elected governor on Sunday.
The reaction suggests how blasé some voters have become about allegations of ties between their politicians and the drug underworld, as Mexico prepares to elect a new lower house of Congress, some state governors and many mayors. This, even as political experts and law-enforcement people worry that violent drug gangs are increasingly bankrolling a wide range of politicians' campaigns across Mexico, in return for turning a blind eye to their activities.
Cartel Turf Wars
The election comes amid President Felipe Calderón's all-out war on drug gangs, which wield armies of private gunmen and account for the bulk of illegal drugs sold in the U.S. The conservative president has deployed 45,000 troops to fight the gangs. In bloody confrontations between his forces and the cartels, and especially in turf battles among the cartels, an estimated 12,000 lives have been lost since Mr. Calderón took office in late 2006. June was the deadliest month yet: 769 drug-related killings, according to a count by Mexican newspapers.
Until recent years, Mexican drug traffickers focused the bulk of their bribery efforts on law enforcement rather than politicians. Their increasing involvement in local politics -- in town halls and state capitals -- is a response, experts say, to the national-level crackdown, to changes in the nature of the drug trade itself and to the evolution of Mexico's young democracy.
Mario Anguiano's campaign for governor in Mexico reveals the problems of power in a country with increasing narcotics trafficking and violence. WSJ's Joel Millman reports.
Starting in 2000, a system of fiercely contested multiparty elections began to replace 71 years of one-party rule, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. "In this newly competitive, moderately democratic system, it takes serious money to run a political campaign," says James McDonald, a Mexico expert at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. "This has given the narcos a real entree into politics, by either running for office themselves or bankrolling candidates."
In addition, the gangs have evolved from simple drug-smuggling bands into organized-crime conglomerates with broad business interests, from local drug markets to extortion, kidnapping, immigrant smuggling and control of Mexico's rich market in knockoff compact discs. "There is more at stake than before. They need to control municipal governments," says Edgardo Buscaglia, a professor of law and economics at both Columbia University and Mexico's ITAM University.
Because of the federal crackdown and the warfare between rival cartels the drug traffickers also need more political allies than ever before.
Politicians who won't cooperate sometimes are threatened. On Monday, in the drug-producing state of Guerrero, a grenade blew up a sport-utility vehicle belonging to Jorge Camacho, a congressional candidate from President Calderón's National Action Party, or PAN. A message next to the destroyed car said, "Look, you S.O.B. candidate, hopefully, you will understand it is better you get out, you won't get a second chance to live."
Mr. Buscaglia says criminal groups' one-two punch of bribes and threats has given them either influence or control in 72% of Mexico's municipalities. He bases his estimate on observation of criminal enterprises such as drug-dealing and child-prostitution rings that operate openly, ignored by police.
According to a September 2007 intelligence assessment by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the governors of the states of Veracruz and Michoacán had agreements with the Gulf Cartel allowing free rein to that large drug-trafficking gang. In return, said the report, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the cartel promised to reduce violence in Veracruz state and, in Michoacán, financed a gubernatorial race and many municipal campaigns across the state.
In Veracruz, the FBI report said, Gov. Fidel Herrera made a deal with the cartel letting it secure a drug route through the state. In an interview, Mr. Herrera said the allegation is "absolutely false, and has no basis in fact -- it never happened." The PRI politician said he has never had any dealings with a criminal organization and blamed a rival political operative, whom he declined to name, for trying to sabotage his career.
In Michoacán, the FBI report said, "in exchange for funding, the Gulf Cartel will be able to control the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, to continue to introduce cocaine and collect a 'tax'" from other Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.
Control of Ports
Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, the Michoacán governor from the leftist PRD party who was in the office when the FBI said the deal was made, says the allegation is "totally false." Mr. Cárdenas Batel, grandson of the former Mexican president for whom the port is named, said Mexican ports are controlled by federal agencies, so drug traffickers have nothing to gain from bribing state officials in connection with them.
His successor, the winner of the 2007 election, is Leonel Godoy, also of the PRD. He calls the FBI allegation "an infamy" with "not a shred of evidence or any proof," and said he had never met or cut deals with drug traffickers. Messrs. Cárdenas Batel and Godoy both say they had alerted authorities before the elections about the growing infiltration of drug traffickers in Michoacán.
None of the three men -- Messrs. Cárdenas Batel, Godoy and Herrera -- have been charged with any crime. U.S. intelligence documents have occasionally proved unreliable in the past.
Police agents in Mexico City stand guard in May after a group of top officials from Michoacán were detained due to their alleged ties to 'La Familia' drug cartel. Ten mayors and 17 other officials were detained.
The Gulf Cartel doesn't appear to be the only gang with alleged influence in Michoacán officialdom. In May, soldiers and federal police arrested 10 mayors, as well as 17 police chiefs and state security officials, including a man who was in charge of the state's police-training academy. They have been charged with collaborating with "La Familia," the state's violent homegrown drug gang. Those arrested, who have said they are innocent victims of political vendettas, represented all three of Mexico's main political parties. On Monday, three more people, including the mayor of Lázaro Cárdenas, were arrested and charged with the same offense, according to the attorney general's office.
Five hundred miles to the north in the wealthy Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza García, a mayoral candidate from President Calderón's party sparked a scandal in June when he was recorded telling a gathering of supporters that security in the town was "controlled by" members of one of Mexico's most fearsome drug cartels, the Beltran Leyva gang.
The candidate, Mauricio Fernandez, seemed to suggest he would be willing to negotiate with the Beltran Leyvas if elected. "Penetration by drug traffickers is for real, and they approach every candidate who they think may win," Mr. Fernandez was recorded saying. "In my case, I made it very clear to them that I didn't want blatant selling."
Mr. Fernandez has acknowledged the audiotape's authenticity, but says his statements were taken out of context and that he had never met with members of the Beltran Leyva cartel. He says the full tape captures him saying he would not negotiate with the drug traffickers. As the election nears, he leads polls by a wide margin.
Meanwhile, in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, Mayor David Monreal of the town of Fresnillo denied having anything to do with 14.5 tons of marijuana police found months ago in a chili-pepper-drying facility owned by his brother. Mr. Monreal, who plans to seek the governorship next year, said his political enemies planted the mammoth stash.
In the campaign, the state of Mexico's economy appears to trump the drug issue for many voters. The economy is shrinking amid slumps in oil production, in exports to the U.S., in tourism and in remittances from emigrants. Polls give the PRI, the party that ruled for seven decades, an advantage of about six percentage points.
The governing party has made President Calderon's campaign against drug traffickers its main theme, and polls show his policy of using the military in the effort is widely popular. But they also show a majority of Mexicans don't think he is winning the narco-war.
Drugs are certainly campaign fodder in the border state of Chihuahua, where former Ciudad Juárez Mayor Héctor Murguía is the PRI's candidate for a congressional seat. Two years ago, Mayor Murguía named as his chief of public security a businessman named Saulo Reyes Gamboa. Last year, Mr. Reyes was arrested by U.S. law-enforcement agents in El Paso, Texas, after allegedly paying someone he thought to be a corrupt U.S. federal officer to help smuggle drug loads. During the operation, federal agents found nearly half a ton of marijuana in a Texas house, which they say Mr. Reyes had arranged to smuggle from Mexico.
Mr. Reyes, who pleaded guilty and is now serving eight years in a federal prison in Kentucky, couldn't be reached for comment. Mayor Murguía says that he has had no involvement with the Juárez Cartel and that Mr. Reyes never contributed "even five pesos" to support his political career.
Despite the bad publicity, Mr. Murguía is leading in polls and is expected to win Sunday -- not unlike Mr. Anguiano, the candidate in Colima with the supposed endorsement from the Zetas.
Talking Frankly
In Colima, the candidate for governor from President Calderón's party, Martha Sosa Govea, hasn't faced any narco-tie allegations. But there has been plenty of comment about her protegé, national assembly candidate Virgilio Mendoza Amezcua, thanks to a tape of him talking frankly about politics and drug traffickers, recorded by members of a rival party he was trying to win over.
[Drug-Cartel Links Haunt Election]
"You don't imagine how many 'nice' people have relations with those drug-trafficking bastards, and through them, the bastards bring things to you," he said on the tape. "They try to seduce you....They got close to me like they get close to half the world, and they sent me money."
Mr. Mendoza declined to comment, but has previously denied he took any money from the cartels. Ms. Sosa said the tape might have been doctored, and in any case, "just because they have him on a tape getting an offer of dirty money, there's still nothing on tape proving he accepted it."
The tape was turned over to federal authorities to determine whether it had been altered. Citing the proximity to the election, the Attorney General's office declined to comment on any of the drug cases.
Colima, though largely exempt from the narco-violence raging in neighboring states, has a reputation as a haven for traffickers, a sleepy place where residents don't ask questions about rich new neighbors. In the 1980s, Colima was home to a gentleman rancher from Guadalajara whom everybody knew as Pedro Orozco. He spent lavishly on schools, gave to charity and hung around with politicians.
In 1991, Mr. Orozco was gunned down in a firefight in Guadalajara, then Mexico's drug capital. It turned out the generous man-about-town was actually Manuel Salcido Uzueta, a top drug capo better known as Cochiloco, meaning the Mad Pig.
Ever since, Colima residents have grown cynical about the influence of drug gangs in politics. "Corruption? Drug ties? They say that about everyone who runs for office. Who can you believe?" says Salvador Ochoa, a local lawyer.
Ms. Sosa has been hammering her opponent, Mr. Anguiano, with claims that he has links to drug trafficking. But, she concedes, the response of many voters is, "Poor guy, why don't they just leave him alone?"
Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com and Jose de Cordoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com
COLIMA, Mexico -- The candidacy of Mario Anguiano, running for governor in a state election here Sunday, says a lot about Mexican politics amid the rise of the drug cartels.
A brother of the candidate is serving a 10-year prison sentence in Mexico for peddling methamphetamine. Another Anguiano is serving 27 years in a Texas prison for running a huge meth ring. A few weeks ago, a hand-painted banner hung on a highway overpass cited the Zetas, the bloodthirsty executioners for the Gulf Cartel drug gang, praising the candidate: "The Zetas support you, and we are with you to the death."
Mr. Anguiano says his meth-dealing brother was just an addict who sold small amounts to support his habit. He says the man jailed in Texas, reported by local media to be his cousin, may or may not be a relative. "If he is my cousin, I've never met him," he says. Denying any involvement with traffickers, he says the supposed Zetas endorsement was just a dirty trick by his election rivals.
If so, it backfired. In the weeks after the banner made local headlines, new polls showed Mr. Anguiano pulling ahead in the race. He is expected to be elected governor on Sunday.
The reaction suggests how blasé some voters have become about allegations of ties between their politicians and the drug underworld, as Mexico prepares to elect a new lower house of Congress, some state governors and many mayors. This, even as political experts and law-enforcement people worry that violent drug gangs are increasingly bankrolling a wide range of politicians' campaigns across Mexico, in return for turning a blind eye to their activities.
Cartel Turf Wars
The election comes amid President Felipe Calderón's all-out war on drug gangs, which wield armies of private gunmen and account for the bulk of illegal drugs sold in the U.S. The conservative president has deployed 45,000 troops to fight the gangs. In bloody confrontations between his forces and the cartels, and especially in turf battles among the cartels, an estimated 12,000 lives have been lost since Mr. Calderón took office in late 2006. June was the deadliest month yet: 769 drug-related killings, according to a count by Mexican newspapers.
Until recent years, Mexican drug traffickers focused the bulk of their bribery efforts on law enforcement rather than politicians. Their increasing involvement in local politics -- in town halls and state capitals -- is a response, experts say, to the national-level crackdown, to changes in the nature of the drug trade itself and to the evolution of Mexico's young democracy.
Mario Anguiano's campaign for governor in Mexico reveals the problems of power in a country with increasing narcotics trafficking and violence. WSJ's Joel Millman reports.
Starting in 2000, a system of fiercely contested multiparty elections began to replace 71 years of one-party rule, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. "In this newly competitive, moderately democratic system, it takes serious money to run a political campaign," says James McDonald, a Mexico expert at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. "This has given the narcos a real entree into politics, by either running for office themselves or bankrolling candidates."
In addition, the gangs have evolved from simple drug-smuggling bands into organized-crime conglomerates with broad business interests, from local drug markets to extortion, kidnapping, immigrant smuggling and control of Mexico's rich market in knockoff compact discs. "There is more at stake than before. They need to control municipal governments," says Edgardo Buscaglia, a professor of law and economics at both Columbia University and Mexico's ITAM University.
Because of the federal crackdown and the warfare between rival cartels the drug traffickers also need more political allies than ever before.
Politicians who won't cooperate sometimes are threatened. On Monday, in the drug-producing state of Guerrero, a grenade blew up a sport-utility vehicle belonging to Jorge Camacho, a congressional candidate from President Calderón's National Action Party, or PAN. A message next to the destroyed car said, "Look, you S.O.B. candidate, hopefully, you will understand it is better you get out, you won't get a second chance to live."
Mr. Buscaglia says criminal groups' one-two punch of bribes and threats has given them either influence or control in 72% of Mexico's municipalities. He bases his estimate on observation of criminal enterprises such as drug-dealing and child-prostitution rings that operate openly, ignored by police.
According to a September 2007 intelligence assessment by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the governors of the states of Veracruz and Michoacán had agreements with the Gulf Cartel allowing free rein to that large drug-trafficking gang. In return, said the report, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the cartel promised to reduce violence in Veracruz state and, in Michoacán, financed a gubernatorial race and many municipal campaigns across the state.
In Veracruz, the FBI report said, Gov. Fidel Herrera made a deal with the cartel letting it secure a drug route through the state. In an interview, Mr. Herrera said the allegation is "absolutely false, and has no basis in fact -- it never happened." The PRI politician said he has never had any dealings with a criminal organization and blamed a rival political operative, whom he declined to name, for trying to sabotage his career.
In Michoacán, the FBI report said, "in exchange for funding, the Gulf Cartel will be able to control the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, to continue to introduce cocaine and collect a 'tax'" from other Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.
Control of Ports
Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, the Michoacán governor from the leftist PRD party who was in the office when the FBI said the deal was made, says the allegation is "totally false." Mr. Cárdenas Batel, grandson of the former Mexican president for whom the port is named, said Mexican ports are controlled by federal agencies, so drug traffickers have nothing to gain from bribing state officials in connection with them.
His successor, the winner of the 2007 election, is Leonel Godoy, also of the PRD. He calls the FBI allegation "an infamy" with "not a shred of evidence or any proof," and said he had never met or cut deals with drug traffickers. Messrs. Cárdenas Batel and Godoy both say they had alerted authorities before the elections about the growing infiltration of drug traffickers in Michoacán.
None of the three men -- Messrs. Cárdenas Batel, Godoy and Herrera -- have been charged with any crime. U.S. intelligence documents have occasionally proved unreliable in the past.
Police agents in Mexico City stand guard in May after a group of top officials from Michoacán were detained due to their alleged ties to 'La Familia' drug cartel. Ten mayors and 17 other officials were detained.
The Gulf Cartel doesn't appear to be the only gang with alleged influence in Michoacán officialdom. In May, soldiers and federal police arrested 10 mayors, as well as 17 police chiefs and state security officials, including a man who was in charge of the state's police-training academy. They have been charged with collaborating with "La Familia," the state's violent homegrown drug gang. Those arrested, who have said they are innocent victims of political vendettas, represented all three of Mexico's main political parties. On Monday, three more people, including the mayor of Lázaro Cárdenas, were arrested and charged with the same offense, according to the attorney general's office.
Five hundred miles to the north in the wealthy Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza García, a mayoral candidate from President Calderón's party sparked a scandal in June when he was recorded telling a gathering of supporters that security in the town was "controlled by" members of one of Mexico's most fearsome drug cartels, the Beltran Leyva gang.
The candidate, Mauricio Fernandez, seemed to suggest he would be willing to negotiate with the Beltran Leyvas if elected. "Penetration by drug traffickers is for real, and they approach every candidate who they think may win," Mr. Fernandez was recorded saying. "In my case, I made it very clear to them that I didn't want blatant selling."
Mr. Fernandez has acknowledged the audiotape's authenticity, but says his statements were taken out of context and that he had never met with members of the Beltran Leyva cartel. He says the full tape captures him saying he would not negotiate with the drug traffickers. As the election nears, he leads polls by a wide margin.
Meanwhile, in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, Mayor David Monreal of the town of Fresnillo denied having anything to do with 14.5 tons of marijuana police found months ago in a chili-pepper-drying facility owned by his brother. Mr. Monreal, who plans to seek the governorship next year, said his political enemies planted the mammoth stash.
In the campaign, the state of Mexico's economy appears to trump the drug issue for many voters. The economy is shrinking amid slumps in oil production, in exports to the U.S., in tourism and in remittances from emigrants. Polls give the PRI, the party that ruled for seven decades, an advantage of about six percentage points.
The governing party has made President Calderon's campaign against drug traffickers its main theme, and polls show his policy of using the military in the effort is widely popular. But they also show a majority of Mexicans don't think he is winning the narco-war.
Drugs are certainly campaign fodder in the border state of Chihuahua, where former Ciudad Juárez Mayor Héctor Murguía is the PRI's candidate for a congressional seat. Two years ago, Mayor Murguía named as his chief of public security a businessman named Saulo Reyes Gamboa. Last year, Mr. Reyes was arrested by U.S. law-enforcement agents in El Paso, Texas, after allegedly paying someone he thought to be a corrupt U.S. federal officer to help smuggle drug loads. During the operation, federal agents found nearly half a ton of marijuana in a Texas house, which they say Mr. Reyes had arranged to smuggle from Mexico.
Mr. Reyes, who pleaded guilty and is now serving eight years in a federal prison in Kentucky, couldn't be reached for comment. Mayor Murguía says that he has had no involvement with the Juárez Cartel and that Mr. Reyes never contributed "even five pesos" to support his political career.
Despite the bad publicity, Mr. Murguía is leading in polls and is expected to win Sunday -- not unlike Mr. Anguiano, the candidate in Colima with the supposed endorsement from the Zetas.
Talking Frankly
In Colima, the candidate for governor from President Calderón's party, Martha Sosa Govea, hasn't faced any narco-tie allegations. But there has been plenty of comment about her protegé, national assembly candidate Virgilio Mendoza Amezcua, thanks to a tape of him talking frankly about politics and drug traffickers, recorded by members of a rival party he was trying to win over.
[Drug-Cartel Links Haunt Election]
"You don't imagine how many 'nice' people have relations with those drug-trafficking bastards, and through them, the bastards bring things to you," he said on the tape. "They try to seduce you....They got close to me like they get close to half the world, and they sent me money."
Mr. Mendoza declined to comment, but has previously denied he took any money from the cartels. Ms. Sosa said the tape might have been doctored, and in any case, "just because they have him on a tape getting an offer of dirty money, there's still nothing on tape proving he accepted it."
The tape was turned over to federal authorities to determine whether it had been altered. Citing the proximity to the election, the Attorney General's office declined to comment on any of the drug cases.
Colima, though largely exempt from the narco-violence raging in neighboring states, has a reputation as a haven for traffickers, a sleepy place where residents don't ask questions about rich new neighbors. In the 1980s, Colima was home to a gentleman rancher from Guadalajara whom everybody knew as Pedro Orozco. He spent lavishly on schools, gave to charity and hung around with politicians.
In 1991, Mr. Orozco was gunned down in a firefight in Guadalajara, then Mexico's drug capital. It turned out the generous man-about-town was actually Manuel Salcido Uzueta, a top drug capo better known as Cochiloco, meaning the Mad Pig.
Ever since, Colima residents have grown cynical about the influence of drug gangs in politics. "Corruption? Drug ties? They say that about everyone who runs for office. Who can you believe?" says Salvador Ochoa, a local lawyer.
Ms. Sosa has been hammering her opponent, Mr. Anguiano, with claims that he has links to drug trafficking. But, she concedes, the response of many voters is, "Poor guy, why don't they just leave him alone?"
Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com and Jose de Cordoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com
Amnesty International Accuses Israel and Hamas of War Crimes in Gaza
By ALAN COWELL
PARIS — Amnesty International on Thursday accused both Israel and Hamas, the militant movement that controls Gaza, of committing war crimes during the three weeks of fighting there early this year.
The human rights group singled out what it called the “unprecedented” scale and intensity of the Israeli onslaught and the “unlawful” Palestinian use of rockets against Israeli civilians.
Both Hamas and Israel rejected the report as unbalanced.
The Israeli military suggested that the “slant” of the report “indicates that the organization succumbed to the manipulations” of Hamas. Moreover, it said in a statement, the report ignored Israeli efforts to minimize civilian casualties.
The statement also said Israel’s investigations into the behavior of its forces during the war in late December and January proved that the military “operated throughout the fighting in accordance with international law, maintaining high ethical and professional standards.” It acknowledged, however, that the inquiries “found a few, unfortunate incidents” resulting from Hamas’s decision “to fight from within civilian population centers.”
A Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, quoted by The Associated Press, declared: “The report equated the victim and the executioner and denied our people’s right to resist the occupation. The report ignores the scale of destruction and serious crimes committed by the occupation in Gaza and provides a misleading description in order to reduce the magnitude of the Israeli crimes.”
The Amnesty International report was the second this week by an international human rights organization calling into question Israeli military practices in the Gaza war.
A report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch said 29 civilians were killed in what appeared to be six missile strikes by Israeli drones. The group questioned whether Israeli forces had taken “all feasible precautions” to avoid civilian casualties. Israel’s military has never acknowledged using the remotely piloted planes to fire missiles.
Amnesty International, which is based in London, released its 117-page report on Thursday. It explicitly rejected Israeli claims that Hamas used civilians as human shields but said that in several cases, Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians, including children, as “human shields, endangering their lives by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions.”
“The scale and intensity of the attacks on Gaza were unprecedented,” the report said, citing the deaths of hundreds of unarmed civilians, including many children.
Referring to breaches of the “laws of war” in the conflict, Amnesty International said Palestinian rocket fire into southern Israel — cited by Israel as its reason for invading Gaza — killed three civilians, wounded scores and drove “thousands from their homes.”
“For its part, Hamas has continued to justify the rocket attacks launched daily by its fighters and by other Palestinian armed groups into towns and villages in southern Israel during the 22-day conflict,” Donatella Rovera, an Amnesty International official who led an investigation team in Gaza and southern Israel in January and February, said in a statement. “Though less lethal, these attacks, using unguided rockets which cannot be directed at specific targets, violated international humanitarian law and cannot be justified under any circumstance.”
PARIS — Amnesty International on Thursday accused both Israel and Hamas, the militant movement that controls Gaza, of committing war crimes during the three weeks of fighting there early this year.
The human rights group singled out what it called the “unprecedented” scale and intensity of the Israeli onslaught and the “unlawful” Palestinian use of rockets against Israeli civilians.
Both Hamas and Israel rejected the report as unbalanced.
The Israeli military suggested that the “slant” of the report “indicates that the organization succumbed to the manipulations” of Hamas. Moreover, it said in a statement, the report ignored Israeli efforts to minimize civilian casualties.
The statement also said Israel’s investigations into the behavior of its forces during the war in late December and January proved that the military “operated throughout the fighting in accordance with international law, maintaining high ethical and professional standards.” It acknowledged, however, that the inquiries “found a few, unfortunate incidents” resulting from Hamas’s decision “to fight from within civilian population centers.”
A Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, quoted by The Associated Press, declared: “The report equated the victim and the executioner and denied our people’s right to resist the occupation. The report ignores the scale of destruction and serious crimes committed by the occupation in Gaza and provides a misleading description in order to reduce the magnitude of the Israeli crimes.”
The Amnesty International report was the second this week by an international human rights organization calling into question Israeli military practices in the Gaza war.
A report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch said 29 civilians were killed in what appeared to be six missile strikes by Israeli drones. The group questioned whether Israeli forces had taken “all feasible precautions” to avoid civilian casualties. Israel’s military has never acknowledged using the remotely piloted planes to fire missiles.
Amnesty International, which is based in London, released its 117-page report on Thursday. It explicitly rejected Israeli claims that Hamas used civilians as human shields but said that in several cases, Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians, including children, as “human shields, endangering their lives by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions.”
“The scale and intensity of the attacks on Gaza were unprecedented,” the report said, citing the deaths of hundreds of unarmed civilians, including many children.
Referring to breaches of the “laws of war” in the conflict, Amnesty International said Palestinian rocket fire into southern Israel — cited by Israel as its reason for invading Gaza — killed three civilians, wounded scores and drove “thousands from their homes.”
“For its part, Hamas has continued to justify the rocket attacks launched daily by its fighters and by other Palestinian armed groups into towns and villages in southern Israel during the 22-day conflict,” Donatella Rovera, an Amnesty International official who led an investigation team in Gaza and southern Israel in January and February, said in a statement. “Though less lethal, these attacks, using unguided rockets which cannot be directed at specific targets, violated international humanitarian law and cannot be justified under any circumstance.”
Russia’s Neighbors Resist Wooing and Bullying
By ELLEN BARRY
MOSCOW — This was supposed to be Russia’s round in the battle over its backyard. All year, despite its own economic spasms, Moscow has earmarked great chunks of cash for its impoverished post-Soviet neighbors, seeking to lock in their loyalty over the long term and curtail Western influence in the region.
But the neighbors seem to have other ideas. Belarus — which was promised $2 billion in Russian aid — is in open rebellion against the Kremlin, flaunting its preference for Europe while also collecting money from the International Monetary Fund. Uzbekistan joined Belarus in refusing to sign an agreement on the Collective Rapid Reaction Forces, an idea Moscow sees as an eventual counterweight to NATO.
There are other examples, like Turkmenistan’s May signing of a gas exploration deal with a German company, and Armenia’s awarding of a major national honor to Moscow’s nemesis, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia. But the biggest came last week when Kyrgyzstan — set to receive $2.15 billion in Russian aid — reversed a decision that had been seen as a coup for Moscow, last winter’s order terminating the American military’s use of the Manas Air Base there.
“A game of chance has developed in the post-Soviet space: Who can swindle the Kremlin in the coolest way?” wrote the military analyst Aleksandr Golts, when news of the Manas decision broke. “Such a brilliant result of Russia’s four-year diplomatic efforts!”
There are few projects that matter more to Russia than restoring its influence in the former Soviet republics, whose loss to many in Moscow is still as painful as a phantom limb. Competition over Georgia and Ukraine has brought relations between Moscow and Washington to a post-cold-war low, and the matter is bound to be central to the talks that begin on Monday between Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and President Obama.
Russia’s ability to attract its neighbors to its side and keep them there is unimpressive. The Kremlin’s methods have been reactive and often bullying, combining incentives like cheap energy or cash disbursement with threats of trade sanctions and gas cutoffs.
The war in Georgia seems to have hurt Moscow in that regard. Rather than being cowed into obedience, as most Western observers feared, the former republics seem to have grown even more protective of their sovereignty. Moreover, the leaders themselves have thrived by playing Russia and the West and, in some cases, China off against one another, although that has not brought stability or prosperity to their countries.
In Moscow’s so-called zone of privileged interests, in other words, Russia is just another competitor.
“There is no loyalty,” said Oksana Antonenko, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in London. “Rivalry is the persistent dynamic. They have to play in that game, to compete.”
Kyrgyzstan’s reversal on Manas is a case study in canny horse trading. Russian officials, including Mr. Medvedev, have said they blessed the decision, and that may be true, but President Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev is the one who walked away with what he wanted.
Moscow wanted the base, a key transit hub for the United States’ war in Afghanistan, shut down; Kyrgyzstan wanted more money. In February, Moscow seemed to have achieved a master stroke — at a news conference announcing the pledge of $2.15 billion in Russian aid, Mr. Bakiyev said the United States would have to leave Manas in six months.
The first Russian payments — a $150 million emergency grant and a $300 million low-interest loan — arrived in April, allowing Mr. Bakiyev to pay wages and pensions as he began his re-election campaign. Then Kyrgyzstan shocked the region by announcing a new agreement with the United States. Washington will pay more than triple the rent for the base — now called a “transit center” — increasing its annual payment to $60 million from $17.4 million, while kicking in upwards of $50 million in grants to the government. No one knows if the Kremlin will make good on the rest of its pledge.
Mr. Bakiyev “played the Russians, then he played us,” said Alexander A. Cooley, an associate professor of political science at Barnard College who addressed the Manas dispute in a recent book, “Base Politics.” “It’s all about getting as much as they can.”
This should be easier for Russia, which dwarfs its Eurasian neighbors in both size and wealth. Russia retains a military presence in more than half the former Soviet countries, and huge swaths of their populations rely on Russian media for their news. Russia can offer muscular assistance in elections, as in Moldova, which has just received a Russian pledge of $500 million four weeks before voters go to the polls to elect a new Parliament.
But Russia’s strategy for consolidating support in neighboring capitals can hardly be called a strategy. Belarus’s president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who is avidly pursuing Western partners, has been barraged with carrots and sticks from Moscow — first promised $2 billion in Russian aid, then bitterly chastised for his economic policy, then punished with a crippling ban on the import of milk products, then rewarded by a reversal of the import ban. Russia regards Mr. Lukashenko’s truculence as a bluff.
“He is imitating a quarrel with Russia until the West demands serious changes from his regime, at which point, he will, of course, surrender,” said Parliament member Konstantin F. Zatulin, a standard-bearer for Russia’s ambitions in former Soviet space. “It’s just his greedy line of behavior.”
But the examples extend much farther. Every post-Soviet country that can manage it is pursuing a “multivector policy,” Mr. Zatulin acknowledged. Mr. Zatulin said he was not upset by these tacks away from Russia, but there was an edge to his answer.
“What is the point of being disappointed?” Mr. Zatulin said. “Pride comes before a fall. These are weak, dependent and poor countries which want to attract attention to themselves — not only attention, but aid. I cannot criticize them for that. But there are some red lines that shouldn’t be crossed.”
Herein lies the problem: Russia’s appeal to them just does not sound very seductive. Ideally, it would present an attractive model for its neighbors, politically and economically. Young generations would learn Russian because they wanted to, and the post-Soviet alliances would be clubs its neighbors are lining up to join.
In any case, Moscow will have to use tools other than wire transfers if it hopes to emerge from the financial crisis with a solid political bloc. As Alexei Mukhin, director of the nonprofit Center for Political Information, put it, “Love bought with money will not last long.
“That is purchased love,” he said. “It’s not very reliable.”
MOSCOW — This was supposed to be Russia’s round in the battle over its backyard. All year, despite its own economic spasms, Moscow has earmarked great chunks of cash for its impoverished post-Soviet neighbors, seeking to lock in their loyalty over the long term and curtail Western influence in the region.
But the neighbors seem to have other ideas. Belarus — which was promised $2 billion in Russian aid — is in open rebellion against the Kremlin, flaunting its preference for Europe while also collecting money from the International Monetary Fund. Uzbekistan joined Belarus in refusing to sign an agreement on the Collective Rapid Reaction Forces, an idea Moscow sees as an eventual counterweight to NATO.
There are other examples, like Turkmenistan’s May signing of a gas exploration deal with a German company, and Armenia’s awarding of a major national honor to Moscow’s nemesis, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia. But the biggest came last week when Kyrgyzstan — set to receive $2.15 billion in Russian aid — reversed a decision that had been seen as a coup for Moscow, last winter’s order terminating the American military’s use of the Manas Air Base there.
“A game of chance has developed in the post-Soviet space: Who can swindle the Kremlin in the coolest way?” wrote the military analyst Aleksandr Golts, when news of the Manas decision broke. “Such a brilliant result of Russia’s four-year diplomatic efforts!”
There are few projects that matter more to Russia than restoring its influence in the former Soviet republics, whose loss to many in Moscow is still as painful as a phantom limb. Competition over Georgia and Ukraine has brought relations between Moscow and Washington to a post-cold-war low, and the matter is bound to be central to the talks that begin on Monday between Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and President Obama.
Russia’s ability to attract its neighbors to its side and keep them there is unimpressive. The Kremlin’s methods have been reactive and often bullying, combining incentives like cheap energy or cash disbursement with threats of trade sanctions and gas cutoffs.
The war in Georgia seems to have hurt Moscow in that regard. Rather than being cowed into obedience, as most Western observers feared, the former republics seem to have grown even more protective of their sovereignty. Moreover, the leaders themselves have thrived by playing Russia and the West and, in some cases, China off against one another, although that has not brought stability or prosperity to their countries.
In Moscow’s so-called zone of privileged interests, in other words, Russia is just another competitor.
“There is no loyalty,” said Oksana Antonenko, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in London. “Rivalry is the persistent dynamic. They have to play in that game, to compete.”
Kyrgyzstan’s reversal on Manas is a case study in canny horse trading. Russian officials, including Mr. Medvedev, have said they blessed the decision, and that may be true, but President Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev is the one who walked away with what he wanted.
Moscow wanted the base, a key transit hub for the United States’ war in Afghanistan, shut down; Kyrgyzstan wanted more money. In February, Moscow seemed to have achieved a master stroke — at a news conference announcing the pledge of $2.15 billion in Russian aid, Mr. Bakiyev said the United States would have to leave Manas in six months.
The first Russian payments — a $150 million emergency grant and a $300 million low-interest loan — arrived in April, allowing Mr. Bakiyev to pay wages and pensions as he began his re-election campaign. Then Kyrgyzstan shocked the region by announcing a new agreement with the United States. Washington will pay more than triple the rent for the base — now called a “transit center” — increasing its annual payment to $60 million from $17.4 million, while kicking in upwards of $50 million in grants to the government. No one knows if the Kremlin will make good on the rest of its pledge.
Mr. Bakiyev “played the Russians, then he played us,” said Alexander A. Cooley, an associate professor of political science at Barnard College who addressed the Manas dispute in a recent book, “Base Politics.” “It’s all about getting as much as they can.”
This should be easier for Russia, which dwarfs its Eurasian neighbors in both size and wealth. Russia retains a military presence in more than half the former Soviet countries, and huge swaths of their populations rely on Russian media for their news. Russia can offer muscular assistance in elections, as in Moldova, which has just received a Russian pledge of $500 million four weeks before voters go to the polls to elect a new Parliament.
But Russia’s strategy for consolidating support in neighboring capitals can hardly be called a strategy. Belarus’s president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who is avidly pursuing Western partners, has been barraged with carrots and sticks from Moscow — first promised $2 billion in Russian aid, then bitterly chastised for his economic policy, then punished with a crippling ban on the import of milk products, then rewarded by a reversal of the import ban. Russia regards Mr. Lukashenko’s truculence as a bluff.
“He is imitating a quarrel with Russia until the West demands serious changes from his regime, at which point, he will, of course, surrender,” said Parliament member Konstantin F. Zatulin, a standard-bearer for Russia’s ambitions in former Soviet space. “It’s just his greedy line of behavior.”
But the examples extend much farther. Every post-Soviet country that can manage it is pursuing a “multivector policy,” Mr. Zatulin acknowledged. Mr. Zatulin said he was not upset by these tacks away from Russia, but there was an edge to his answer.
“What is the point of being disappointed?” Mr. Zatulin said. “Pride comes before a fall. These are weak, dependent and poor countries which want to attract attention to themselves — not only attention, but aid. I cannot criticize them for that. But there are some red lines that shouldn’t be crossed.”
Herein lies the problem: Russia’s appeal to them just does not sound very seductive. Ideally, it would present an attractive model for its neighbors, politically and economically. Young generations would learn Russian because they wanted to, and the post-Soviet alliances would be clubs its neighbors are lining up to join.
In any case, Moscow will have to use tools other than wire transfers if it hopes to emerge from the financial crisis with a solid political bloc. As Alexei Mukhin, director of the nonprofit Center for Political Information, put it, “Love bought with money will not last long.
“That is purchased love,” he said. “It’s not very reliable.”
Head Scarf, or Jilbab, Emerges as Indonesia Political Symbol
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The three parties competing in Indonesia’s presidential election next week have plastered this city with campaign billboards and posters depicting, predictably, their presidential and vice presidential choices looking self-confident.
But one party, Golkar, has also put up posters of the candidates’ wives next to their husbands, posing demurely and wearing Muslim head scarves known here as jilbabs. The wives recently went on a jilbab shopping spree in one of Jakarta’s largest markets, and published a book together titled “Devout Wives of Future Leaders.”
Most polls suggest that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of the Democratic Party will be re-elected in next Wednesday’s vote, after running a smooth campaign based on his economic policies and a popular anticorruption drive. Despite television debates, the personality-driven campaigns have focused little on differences over policies or ideas, except regarding the wearing of the jilbab.
It is perhaps not surprising that the jilbab, the Islamic style of dress in which a woman covers her head and neck, has become an issue in a presidential campaign this year. Jilbab sales have been booming for three years across a country where women have traditionally gone unveiled, and where the meaning of wearing the jilbab — or not wearing one — remains fluid. The issue also cuts to a central, unresolved debate in Indonesia’s decade-old democracy: the role of Islam in politics.
“It’s the first time that the jilbab has become an issue in a presidential campaign in Indonesia,” said Siti Musdah Mulia, a professor of Islamic studies at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University here and a leading proponent of women’s rights. “There are so many more important issues that should be addressed in the campaign,” said Ms. Mulia, who has worn a jilbab for eight years. “Why this one?”
But it would not be the first time that politicians tried to co-opt religious symbols to win votes. The ruckus over the jilbab began a few months ago when Mr. Yudhoyono, whose wife, Kristiani Herawati, does not wear a jilbab, and Vice President Jusuf Kalla, whose wife, Mufidah, does, decided not to run together again.
The president selected as his new vice presidential running mate a respected central banker, Boediono, whose wife, Herawati, goes unveiled. Mr. Kalla, in turn, decided to run for president as the Golkar Party’s standard-bearer and picked as his No. 2 a retired general, Wiranto, whose wife, Rugaya, is veiled. (Many Indonesians go by only one name.)
Perhaps sensing an opening as it trailed in the polls, the Golkar Party soon put up posters of the veiled wives. With the news media in tow, the wives went shopping together for jilbabs at Tanah Abang, the city’s largest textile market, where the general’s wife was known as a regular, but Mr. Kalla’s wife was not.
Golkar Party officials rejected accusations by the president’s party that they were trying to exploit Islam for politics; they also denied having anything to do with the recent distribution of leaflets that stated, falsely, that Boediono’s wife was not Muslim, but Roman Catholic.
President Yudhoyono was also getting pressure from a current coalition ally, the Prosperous Justice Party, the country’s largest Islamic party. A party leader said that members were gravitating toward the Golkar candidates because of their jilbab-wearing wives.
The country’s Islamic parties have core supporters that are coveted by the major parties, though the Islamic parties have failed to make inroads among mainstream voters. In fact, in April’s parliamentary elections, they suffered a steep drop in support compared with five years ago, a decline interpreted as mainstream voters’ rejection of Islam in politics.
Neng Dara Affiah, an official at Nahdlatul Ulama, the country’s largest Islamic organization, which espouses moderate Islam, said the fight over the meaning of wearing the jilbab was taking place between “fundamentalists” and “progressives.”
The fundamentalists are trying to force women to wear the jilbab as an act of submission, and had already done so in various municipalities across the Indonesian archipelago in recent years, Ms. Neng said. For the progressives, she said, wearing the jilbab was an expression of a woman’s right.
“For women in Indonesia, whether they want to wear the jilbab or not is their choice,” said Ms. Neng, who started wearing one five years ago. “It shouldn’t be political.”
Despite being the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia does not have a tradition of Islamic dress. Most Indonesian women started wearing the jilbab in the last decade, after the fall in 1998 of President Suharto, who had kept a close grip on Islamic groups.
Fashion and clothing industry experts said the number of women wearing jilbabs rose sharply in the past three years, for reasons of religion, fashion or something undefined.
“If you ask 10 different women why they’re wearing jilbab, you’ll get 10 different answers,” said Jetti R. Hadi, the editor in chief of Noor, a magazine specializing in Muslim fashion, which features jilbab-clad models on its cover. “You cannot assume that because a woman is wearing a jilbab, she’s a good Muslim.”
At Tanah Abang, the market where the political wives shopped for jilbabs, many small shop owners had recently switched from selling Western clothes to jilbabs to capitalize on the boom. One shop owner, Syafnir, 53, said 7 of his 15 relatives working in the market had begun to sell jilbabs in the past two years. He himself now has two stores; the second opened just two months ago.
Asked whether faith was fueling the boom, he shook his head emphatically. Fashion was, he said, an answer echoed by others in the market.
Deni Sartika, 36, who was shopping with her mother and young daughter, all three of them veiled, said she started wearing a jilbab in 1991, long before most Indonesian women did. She was a member of the Prosperous Justice Party, the Islamic party that supports President Yudhoyono.
Ms. Deni said she would vote for Mr. Yudhoyono and his vice president even though their wives did not wear jilbabs.
“I’m looking at the candidates themselves instead of their wives,” she said, before adding, “but we’d be happy if the wives wore jilbabs.”
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The three parties competing in Indonesia’s presidential election next week have plastered this city with campaign billboards and posters depicting, predictably, their presidential and vice presidential choices looking self-confident.
But one party, Golkar, has also put up posters of the candidates’ wives next to their husbands, posing demurely and wearing Muslim head scarves known here as jilbabs. The wives recently went on a jilbab shopping spree in one of Jakarta’s largest markets, and published a book together titled “Devout Wives of Future Leaders.”
Most polls suggest that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of the Democratic Party will be re-elected in next Wednesday’s vote, after running a smooth campaign based on his economic policies and a popular anticorruption drive. Despite television debates, the personality-driven campaigns have focused little on differences over policies or ideas, except regarding the wearing of the jilbab.
It is perhaps not surprising that the jilbab, the Islamic style of dress in which a woman covers her head and neck, has become an issue in a presidential campaign this year. Jilbab sales have been booming for three years across a country where women have traditionally gone unveiled, and where the meaning of wearing the jilbab — or not wearing one — remains fluid. The issue also cuts to a central, unresolved debate in Indonesia’s decade-old democracy: the role of Islam in politics.
“It’s the first time that the jilbab has become an issue in a presidential campaign in Indonesia,” said Siti Musdah Mulia, a professor of Islamic studies at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University here and a leading proponent of women’s rights. “There are so many more important issues that should be addressed in the campaign,” said Ms. Mulia, who has worn a jilbab for eight years. “Why this one?”
But it would not be the first time that politicians tried to co-opt religious symbols to win votes. The ruckus over the jilbab began a few months ago when Mr. Yudhoyono, whose wife, Kristiani Herawati, does not wear a jilbab, and Vice President Jusuf Kalla, whose wife, Mufidah, does, decided not to run together again.
The president selected as his new vice presidential running mate a respected central banker, Boediono, whose wife, Herawati, goes unveiled. Mr. Kalla, in turn, decided to run for president as the Golkar Party’s standard-bearer and picked as his No. 2 a retired general, Wiranto, whose wife, Rugaya, is veiled. (Many Indonesians go by only one name.)
Perhaps sensing an opening as it trailed in the polls, the Golkar Party soon put up posters of the veiled wives. With the news media in tow, the wives went shopping together for jilbabs at Tanah Abang, the city’s largest textile market, where the general’s wife was known as a regular, but Mr. Kalla’s wife was not.
Golkar Party officials rejected accusations by the president’s party that they were trying to exploit Islam for politics; they also denied having anything to do with the recent distribution of leaflets that stated, falsely, that Boediono’s wife was not Muslim, but Roman Catholic.
President Yudhoyono was also getting pressure from a current coalition ally, the Prosperous Justice Party, the country’s largest Islamic party. A party leader said that members were gravitating toward the Golkar candidates because of their jilbab-wearing wives.
The country’s Islamic parties have core supporters that are coveted by the major parties, though the Islamic parties have failed to make inroads among mainstream voters. In fact, in April’s parliamentary elections, they suffered a steep drop in support compared with five years ago, a decline interpreted as mainstream voters’ rejection of Islam in politics.
Neng Dara Affiah, an official at Nahdlatul Ulama, the country’s largest Islamic organization, which espouses moderate Islam, said the fight over the meaning of wearing the jilbab was taking place between “fundamentalists” and “progressives.”
The fundamentalists are trying to force women to wear the jilbab as an act of submission, and had already done so in various municipalities across the Indonesian archipelago in recent years, Ms. Neng said. For the progressives, she said, wearing the jilbab was an expression of a woman’s right.
“For women in Indonesia, whether they want to wear the jilbab or not is their choice,” said Ms. Neng, who started wearing one five years ago. “It shouldn’t be political.”
Despite being the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia does not have a tradition of Islamic dress. Most Indonesian women started wearing the jilbab in the last decade, after the fall in 1998 of President Suharto, who had kept a close grip on Islamic groups.
Fashion and clothing industry experts said the number of women wearing jilbabs rose sharply in the past three years, for reasons of religion, fashion or something undefined.
“If you ask 10 different women why they’re wearing jilbab, you’ll get 10 different answers,” said Jetti R. Hadi, the editor in chief of Noor, a magazine specializing in Muslim fashion, which features jilbab-clad models on its cover. “You cannot assume that because a woman is wearing a jilbab, she’s a good Muslim.”
At Tanah Abang, the market where the political wives shopped for jilbabs, many small shop owners had recently switched from selling Western clothes to jilbabs to capitalize on the boom. One shop owner, Syafnir, 53, said 7 of his 15 relatives working in the market had begun to sell jilbabs in the past two years. He himself now has two stores; the second opened just two months ago.
Asked whether faith was fueling the boom, he shook his head emphatically. Fashion was, he said, an answer echoed by others in the market.
Deni Sartika, 36, who was shopping with her mother and young daughter, all three of them veiled, said she started wearing a jilbab in 1991, long before most Indonesian women did. She was a member of the Prosperous Justice Party, the Islamic party that supports President Yudhoyono.
Ms. Deni said she would vote for Mr. Yudhoyono and his vice president even though their wives did not wear jilbabs.
“I’m looking at the candidates themselves instead of their wives,” she said, before adding, “but we’d be happy if the wives wore jilbabs.”
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