Despite her disastrous performance in the 2008 election, Sarah Palin is still the sexiest brand in Republican politics, with a lucrative book contract for her story. But what Alaska’s charismatic governor wants the public to know about herself doesn’t always jibe with reality. As John McCain’s top campaign officials talk more candidly than ever before about the meltdown of his vice-presidential pick, the author tracks the signs—political and personal—that Palin was big trouble, and checks the forecast for her future.
By Todd S. Purdum August 2009
The pattern is inescapable: she takes disagreements personally, and swiftly deals vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. Illustration by Risko.
The crowds begin streaming into the Evansville Auditorium and Convention Centre a couple of hours before the arrival of the “special guest speaker” at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner on a soft Indiana spring evening—nearly 2,200 people in the banquet hall, 800 more in an adjacent auditorium watching the proceedings on a live video feed. The menu is thick slices of roast pork and red velvet cake, washed down with pitchers of iced tea, and when Sarah Palin finally enters, escorted by a phalanx of sheriff’s deputies and local police, she is mobbed. The organizers of the dinner, billed as “the largest pro-life banquet in the world,” have courted Palin for weeks with care packages of locally made chocolates, doughnuts, barbecue, and pastries, and she has requited by choosing Evansville, a conservative stronghold in southern Indiana, as the site of her first public speech outside Alaska in 2009. Like Richard M. Nixon, who chose the coalfield town of Hyden, Kentucky, for his first post-resignation public appearance, Palin has come to a place where she is guaranteed a hero’s reception. She is not only a staunch foe of abortion but also the mother of a boy, Trig, who was born with Down syndrome just a few months before John McCain chose Palin as his running mate. The souvenir program for this evening’s dinner is full of displays for local politicians and businesses, attesting to their pro-life bona fides. An ad for Hahn Realty Corporation reads, “If you need commercial real estate, call Joe Kiefer! Joe is pro-life and a proud supporter of the Vanderburgh County Right to Life.”
As Palin makes her way slowly across the crowded ballroom—dressed all in black; no red Naughty Monkey Double Dare pumps tonight—she is stopped every few inches by adoring fans. She passes the press pen, where at least eight television cameras and a passel of reporters and photographers are corralled, and spots a reporter for a local community newspaper getting ready to take a happy snap with his pocket camera. For a split second she stops, pauses, turns her head and shoulders just so, and smiles. She holds the pose until she’s sure the man has his shot and then moves on. A few minutes later, the evening’s nominal keynote speaker, the Republican Party’s national chairman, Michael Steele, who has been reduced to a footnote in the proceedings, introduces the special guest speaker as “the storm that is the honorable governor of the great state of Alaska, Sarah Palin!”
Just where that storm may be heading is one of the most intriguing issues in American politics today. Palin is at once the sexiest and the riskiest brand in the Republican Party. Her appeal to people in the party (and in the country) who share her convictions and resentments is profound. The fascination is viral, and global. Bill McAllister, until recently Palin’s statehouse spokesman, says that he has fielded (and declined) interview requests from France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Germany, Bulgaria, “and probably other countries I’ve forgotten about.” (Palin, keeping her distance from most domestic media as well, also declined to talk to V.F.). Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?
In the aftermath of the November election, the conventional wisdom among Palin’s supporters in the Republican establishment was that she should go home, keep her head down, show that she could govern effectively, and quietly educate herself about foreign and domestic policy with the help of a cadre of experienced advisers. She has done none of this. Rather, she has pursued an erratic course that, for her, may actually represent the closest thing there is to True North. Her first trip to Washington since the election was to attend the dinner of the Alfalfa Club, an elite group of politicians and businesspeople whose sole function is an annual evening in honor of a plant that would “do anything for a drink.” Some of her handlers first said she had accepted—though she then went on to decline—an invitation to speak at the annual June fund-raiser for the congressional Republicans. She created a political-action committee—Sarahpac—with the help of John Coale, a prominent Democratic trial lawyer. But just months into its existence the pac’s chief fund-raiser, Becki Donatelli, a veteran of Republican campaigns, suddenly quit. One person familiar with the situation told me that Donatelli could not stand dealing with Palin’s political spokeswoman in Alaska, Meghan Stapleton, who has drawn withering fire from Palin friends and critics alike for being an ineffective adviser. Also with Coale’s help, Palin formed the grandiosely named Alaska Fund Trust, to defray a reported half million dollars in legal expenses arising from a slew of formal ethics complaints against her in her home state—prompting yet another formal complaint, that the fund itself constitutes an ethical breach. Onetime supporters have become harsh critics. Walter Hickel, 89, a former two-term governor and interior secretary, and the grand old man of Alaska politics, who was co-chair of Palin’s winning gubernatorial campaign, in 2006, now washes his hands of her. He told me simply, “I don’t give a damn what she does.”
Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life—neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin’s life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.
Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs. This pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. It has captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin’s record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle. And it has made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks like a beauty queen.
Soon Palin will take a crack at her own story: she has signed a book contract for an undisclosed but presumably substantial sum, and has chosen Lynn Vincent, a senior writer at the Christian-conservative World magazine, as co-author of the memoir, which is to be published next year not only by HarperCollins but also in a special edition by Zondervan, the Bible-publishing house, that may include supplemental material on faith. During the presidential campaign, Palin’s deep ignorance about most aspects of foreign and domestic policy provided her with a powerful political reason not to submit to interviews. The forthcoming book adds a powerful commercial reason.
Palin is a cipher by choice. When she chooses to reveal herself, what she reveals is not always the same thing as the truth. Her singular refusal to have in-depth conversations with the national media—even Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney, among the most saturnine political figures in modern American history, each submitted to countless detailed interviews over the years—has compounded the challenge of understanding who she really is. There has been Hollywood talk that Palin could star in a reality-TV show about running Alaska, but nothing has come of it yet. Recently, Palin did star in a week-long seriocomic feud with David Letterman over some of his borderline jokes. Meanwhile, she has begun sharing insights several times a day on Twitter, with chipper reports on her own doings and those of her husband, Todd, and the rest of what she calls the “first family.” “Look forward to today’s staff discussion re: my 3rd justice appt to highest court in 3 yrs. Supreme Court truly effects AK’s future,” reads one. And another: “Picking up my handsome little man to rtrn to Juneau, Trig got 1st haircut so my little hippie baby’s ready for AK sunshine on his shoulders.”
Little Shop of Horrors
The caricature of Sarah Palin that emerged in the presidential campaign, for good and ill, is now ineradicable. The swift journey from her knockout convention speech to Tina Fey’s dead-eyed incarnation of her as Dan Quayle with an updo played out in real time, no less for the bewildered McCain campaign than for the public at large. It is an ironclad axiom of politics that if a campaign looks troubled from the outside the inside reality is far worse, and the McCain-Palin fiasco was no exception. As in any sudden marriage of convenience in which neither partner really knows the other, there were bound to be bumps. Palin had been on the national Republican radar for barely a year, after a cruise ship of conservative columnists, including The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, had stopped in Juneau in 2007 and had succumbed to her charms when she invited them to the governor’s house for a luncheon of halibut cheeks. McCain had spent only a couple of hours in Palin’s presence before choosing her, and she had pointedly failed to endorse him after he clinched the nomination in March. The difficulties began immediately, with the McCain team’s delivery of the bad news that the pregnancy of Palin’s daughter Bristol, which was already common knowledge in Alaska and had been revealed to the McCain team at the last minute, could not be kept secret until after the Republican convention.
By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction, and the post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores. The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin—Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor—were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.” Many of the details that led to such assessments have remained obscure. But in a recent series of conversations, a range of people from the McCain-Palin campaign, including members of the high command, agreed to elaborate on how a match they thought so right ended up going so wrong.
The consensus is that Palin’s rollout, and even her first television interview, with ABC’s Charles Gibson, conducted after an awkward two-week press blackout to allow for intensive cramming at her home in Wasilla, went more or less fine, though it had its embarrassing moments (“You can’t blink,” Palin said, when Gibson asked if she’d hesitated to accept McCain’s offer) and was much parodied. At least one savvy politician—Barack Obama—believed Palin would never have time to get up to speed. He told his aides that it had taken him four months to learn how to be a national candidate, and added, “I don’t care how talented she is, this is really a leap.” The paramount strategic goal in picking Palin was that the choice of a running mate had to ensure a successful convention and a competitive race right after; in that limited sense, the choice worked. But no serious vetting had been done before the selection (by either the McCain or the Obama team), and there was trouble in nailing down basic facts about Palin’s life. After she was picked, the campaign belatedly sent a dozen lawyers and researchers, led by a veteran Bush aide, Taylor Griffin, to Alaska, in a desperate race against the national reporters descending on the state. At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small. By late September, when the time came to coach Palin for her second major interview, this time with Katie Couric, there were severe tensions between Palin and the campaign.
By all accounts, Palin was either unwilling, or simply unable, to prepare. In the run-up to the Couric interview, Palin had become preoccupied with a far more parochial concern: answering a humdrum written questionnaire from her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman. McCain aides saw it as easy stuff, the usual boilerplate, the work of 20 minutes or so, but Palin worried intently. At the same time, she grew concerned that her approval ratings back home in Alaska were sagging as she embraced the role of McCain’s bad cop. To keep her happy, the chief McCain strategist, Steve Schmidt, agreed to conduct a onetime poll of 300 Alaska voters. It would prove to Palin, Schmidt thought, that everything was all right.
Then came the near-total meltdown of the financial system and McCain’s much-derided decision to briefly “suspend” his campaign. Under the circumstances, and with severely limited resources, Schmidt and the McCain-campaign chairman, Rick Davis, scrapped the Alaska poll and urgently set out to survey voters’ views of the economy (and of McCain’s response to it) in competitive states. Palin was furious. She was convinced that Schmidt had lied to her, a belief she conveyed to anyone who would listen.
The next big milestone for Palin was the debate with Joe Biden, on October 2. An early rehearsal effort in Philadelphia found 20 people sitting in a stifling room with hundreds of sample questions on note cards. Palin just stared down, disengaged, non-participatory. A disaster loomed, so Schmidt made the difficult decision to leave campaign headquarters, in Virginia, and fly to McCain’s vacation retreat in Sedona, Arizona, where it was thought that Palin might be able to relax and recharge, and accept the assistance of a voice coach and a television coach. For three full days—at the height of the campaign—Schmidt dropped virtually all other business to help Palin prepare.
He also enlisted some extra help. By this point, Palin’s relations with Nicolle Wallace—a veteran of the Bush White House and a former CBS News analyst who had tried to help Palin get ready for the Couric interview, and whom Palin blamed for the result—were so strained that campaign aides cast about for someone who could serve as a calming presence: Palin’s horse whisperer. They settled on Mark McKinnon, a smart, funny, soft-spoken former Democrat from Texas. McKinnon had long admired McCain, and had begun the Republican primary season helping him out—though warning that he would never work against Obama in the general election. But now McKinnon, whose role in helping prepare Palin has not been previously reported, and who declined to elaborate on it to V.F., changed his mind and quietly signed on. Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide, says that McKinnon was picked because “he’s got a lovely manner You sort of want a guy who’s very easygoing, gives good advice, and doesn’t add to the natural nervousness.”
Palin worked hard, and the results were adequate. Palin’s winking “Can I call you Joe?” performance against Biden was nothing like a disaster. In fact, it seems to have emboldened her enough that the next day she openly voiced disagreement with the McCain team’s decision to pull out of active competition in Michigan. When orders or advice from McCain headquarters began to conflict with her own impulses, aides told me, she simply did what she wanted to do. “The problem was she came down from Alaska with basically Todd as a sort of trusted bellwether adviser,” one McCain friend says. “She was given this staff of 20. It was probably too big a staff. To be real honest with you, I don’t think she could figure out who to trust.” All the while, Palin was coping not only with the crazed life of any national candidate on the road but also with the young children traveling with her. Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.) Palin maintained only the barest level of civil discourse with Tucker Eskew, the veteran G.O.P. operative who had been made her chief minder. A third party had to shuttle between them to convey even the most rudimentary messages. “She started to hedge her bets,” the same McCain friend says. “Frequently, she would be concerned about how something would play in Alaska. What? You’re worried about your backside in Alaska when there are hundreds of millions of dollars being spent?” One longtime McCain friend and frequent companion on the trail was heard to refer to Palin as “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Election Night brought what McCain aides saw as the final indignity. Palin decided she would make her own speech at the ticket’s farewell to the faithful, at the Arizona Biltmore, in Phoenix. When aides went to load McCain’s concession speech into the teleprompter, they found a concession speech for Palin—written by Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, who had also been the principal drafter of her convention speech—already on the system. Schmidt and Salter told Palin that there was no tradition of Election Night speeches by running mates, and that she wouldn’t be giving one. Palin was insistent. “Are those John’s wishes?” she asked. They were, she was told. But Palin took the issue to McCain himself, raising it on the walk from his suite to the outdoor rally. Again the answer was no.
Polar Disorder
There is virtually nothing about Palin’s performance in the fall campaign that should have come as a surprise to John McCain. Had he really attempted to learn something about her before the fateful day of August 29, 2008, when he announced that she was his choice for running mate, he would easily have discerned all the traits that he belatedly came to know.
The narrative that the McCain campaign employed to explain Palin’s selection and to promote her qualifications—that she was a fresh-faced reformer who had taken on Alaska’s big oil companies and the corrupt Republican establishment, governing with bipartisan support—was never more than superficially true. In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular.”
The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. More than 30 years ago, John McPhee wrote, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’” That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.
So, of all the puzzling things that Sarah Palin told the American public last fall, perhaps the most puzzling was this: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”
Believe me, it is not.
But Sarah Palin herself is a microcosm of Alaska, or at least of the fastest-growing and politically crucial part of it, which stretches up the broad Matanuska-Susitna Valley, north of Anchorage, where she came of age and cut her political teeth in her now famous hometown, Wasilla. In the same way that Lyndon Johnson could only have come from Texas, or Bill Clinton from Arkansas, Palin and all that she is could only have come from Wasilla. It is a place of breathtaking scenery and virtually no zoning. The view along Wasilla’s main drag is of Chili’s, ihop, Home Depot, Target, and Arby’s, and yet the view from the Palins’ front yard, on Lake Lucille, recalls the Alpine splendor visible from Captain Von Trapp’s terrace in The Sound of Music. It is culturally conservative: the local newspaper recently published an article that asked, “Will the Antichrist be a Homosexual?” It is in this Alaska—where it is possible to be both a conservative Republican and a pothead, or a foursquare Democrat and a gun nut—that Sarah Palin learned everything she knows about politics, and about life. It was in this environment that her ambition first found an outlet in public office, and where she first tasted the 151-proof Everclear that is power.
The second thing McCain could have discovered about Palin is that no political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition. To be sure, Palin is “conservative,” whatever that means, but she can be all over the lot in the articulation of her platform. In a June interview with Sean Hannity, she sounded like a New Dealer when she proudly proclaimed that “a share of our oil-resource revenue goes back to the people who own the resources—imagine that.” In the next breath, sounding like a “starve the beast” conservative, she said she hoped the price of oil, the principal variable of state revenue, would not rise too much. “The fewer dollars that the state of Alaska government has, the fewer dollars we spend, and that’s good for our families and the private sector.” Palin has always been a party of one. She gained the mayoralty of Wasilla in 1996 by turning against the incumbent, John Stein, who had been one of her mentors when she was on the city council, and injecting sharply partisan issues such as gun rights and abortion into what had previously been a low-key local contest. She fired the police chief, eased out the museum director and the city planner, and fired and then rehired the librarian (who had opposed book censorship). Palin was entitled to make the dismissals, and she variously justified them on the grounds of budget difficulties or the need for a team that she could be sure would support her efforts. But the Frontiersman accused Palin of confusing her election with a “coronation.”
Even in broad outline the story of how a small-town mayor became the youngest governor in Alaska history seems improbable. There was her long-shot campaign for lieutenant governor, in 2002, in which she came in second against a veteran state senator in a five-way race; her appointment as chair (and ethics supervisor) of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversees drilling and production; and her resignation from that post, charging that a fellow commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, the chair of the Alaska Republican Party, was conducting political business on state time. In a climate where the sitting Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, had become the most unpopular figure in the state, and where the F.B.I. was swarming over Alaska, pursuing the corruption probe that later ensnared the state’s senior U.S. senator, Ted Stevens, Palin seemed like a breath of fresh air.
Yet Palin herself cut corners. Ruedrich, Palin’s target on the Conservation Commission, was forced to resign, but in 2006, as Palin was beginning her campaign for governor, a conservative columnist dug up e-mail messages showing that she too had conducted campaign business from her mayoral office. Confronted by the columnist, Palin acknowledged that she had erred. Then she turned around and issued a press release, demanding to know why the columnist was publishing smears.
Palin won the crucial support of Walter Hickel in her campaign for governor in part by supporting one of his longtime hobbyhorses, an “all-Alaska” natural-gas pipeline that would pump gas to the port of Valdez for export worldwide. As the campaign wore on, Palin backed away from that idea. “I helped her out, she got elected,” Hickel says now. “She never called me once in her life after that.”
Palin’s 2006 campaign for governor relied at first almost wholly on a ragtag band of true believers. “She had this little grassroots group that was going around the state on a wing and a prayer, talking up her platitudes,” says John Bitney, an old friend of Palin’s from junior-high band in Wasilla, where he played the trombone and she played the flute. Bitney at the time was a lobbyist and veteran legislative aide in Juneau, and he began passing political intelligence and advice to Palin. When Palin routed Murkowski in the Republican primary, she still had no real professional campaign staff. Bitney signed on, forming a triumvirate with Curtis Smith, a veteran Anchorage media consultant, and Kris Perry, another old friend of Palin’s from Wasilla, who functioned as her personal assistant and also held the title of campaign manager. Palin began preparing for a general-election campaign against Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, a former Republican legislator who was running as an independent.
She apparently didn’t like preparing for debates back then either. “In the campaign for governor, they’re prepping her for debate,” Curtis Smith’s former business partner, Jim Lottsfeldt, told me recently in Anchorage, “and Curtis says, ‘The debate prep’s going horribly. Every time we try to help her with an answer, she just gets mad.’” (Smith himself says, “Unfortunately, I don’t recall having that exact conversation with Mr. Lottsfeldt, nor do I recall my experience, including debate prep, with Governor Palin in the light he portrayed.”) But Palin’s lack of knowledge turned out not to hurt her. Andrew Halcro later remembered that he and Palin once compared notes about their many encounters, and she said, “Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, Does any of this really matter?”
Palin’s victory that November was one of the flukiest successes in modern American politics. Rebecca Braun, the publisher of the Alaska Budget Report, a respected nonpartisan newsletter, describes the result as something “far beyond anything you could explain in terms of intellect or training.” But Palin had promised three big things, and with the help of Bitney, who became her liaison with the legislature, and Mike Tibbles, her chief of staff, she achieved them. She increased oil taxes; she won the legislative framework for a gas pipeline, though not the one Hickel wanted; and she signed significant ethics reforms. In all three efforts she won strong cooperation from Democrats. “She had an easy go of it,” says Larry Persily, a former editorial-page editor of the Anchorage Daily News, who went to work in Palin’s Washington office but is now a critic of the governor’s. “The Democrats were in love with her. She slew the oil-company Gorgon, and came in on the magic carpet of oil-tax reform and ethics. The Democrats were intoxicated because she wasn’t Frank Murkowski.” Rising oil prices provided an added lift. Palin was able to increase the annual distribution from the state’s Permanent Fund to about $3,000 per resident, almost double the amount received the previous year. She could be a fiscal conservative and a big spender all at the same time.
Sarah Palin and Cindy McCain
But there were ominous signs—indications of an erratic nature. This is the third thing McCain could have discovered about Palin—a woman, after all, who kept a pregnancy secret for seven months, flew all the way home from Texas to Alaska with a near-full-term baby while leaking amniotic fluid, and then finally drove the 45 minutes from Anchorage to a hospital in Wasilla, all so that the child could be born in the 49th state. Palin was for the infamous Gravina Island “bridge to nowhere” before she was against it, and reversed herself only when such pork-barrel projects prompted a nationwide backlash. As governor, she hired several old high-school, hometown, or political friends with minimal qualifications for important state jobs. One friend, a former mid-level manager for Alaska Airlines, headed the department that reviewed candidates for state boards and commissions; another became director of the state Division of Agriculture, citing a childhood love of cows as one qualification. Palin communicated with legislators and her staff mainly by BlackBerry, sometimes using a personal e-mail account to avoid having to disclose documents under the state public-records laws. (The one time Meg Stapleton, who handles Palin’s personal and political public relations, ever answered multiple e-mails was when I wrote her and Palin’s gubernatorial office at the same time, and she replied: “Thank you for emailing. I will email you separately so as to remove us from the state account.”) Palin’s anti-politician stance had worked so well in her campaign that she carried it over into her dealings with actual politicians in Juneau, who didn’t take kindly to the practice. After one meeting between the governor and legislators in 2007, Lyda Green, then the president of the state senate, returned to her office to catch up on some paperwork. She caught Palin on the news. “And she comes on TV and says, ‘I want to once again confirm that neither I nor my staff ever holds closed-door meetings.’ Well, we had just been in a closed-door meeting for an hour and a half!” Representative Les Gara, an Anchorage Democrat who often worked with Palin, told me that he had at first thought that some of Green’s sharp criticism of Palin amounted to Republican infighting, or maybe just sour grapes that Wasilla had produced a new political figure whose star far outshone Green’s. But he came to realize, he said, that Green had a better handle on Palin than he did. “She didn’t work very hard. You would speak to her on particular issues, and it was like she didn’t know anything about them and she never seemed very engaged.” That said, “if your priorities happened to be her priorities, you could build a coalition.”
On the other hand, if your priorities happened to differ from hers, you could pay a terrible price. Only weeks after Palin praised John Bitney for doing so much to make her first legislative session a success, she summarily fired him—because, he says, he had had the bad luck to fall in love with the wife of one of the Palins’ best friends (a woman he has since married). At the time, Palin’s office cited what it called “personal” reasons for an “amicable” departure. But when The Wall Street Journal called Palin’s office during last fall’s presidential campaign to ask about the case, a spokeswoman for Palin said that Bitney had been “dismissed because of his poor job performance,” and refused to elaborate.
Not quite a year after Bitney’s departure, Mike Tibbles abruptly resigned as chief of staff, for reasons that neither he nor Palin has ever explained. Jim Lottsfeldt, a friend of Tibbles’s, says that the chief of staff was worn down “by the steady drumbeat of her not consulting with him.” She replaced Tibbles with Mike Nizich, a part-time taxidermist, who over 30 years had served seven governors of both parties, most of that time as director of the state Division of Administration—a man who made the trains run on time in the governor’s office but had nothing to do with policy issues. Palin’s effectiveness was never again the same. The brutal reality is that many people who have worked closely with Palin have found themselves disillusioned.
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
Perhaps no episode of Palin’s governorship has drawn more attention than the one that came to be known as Troopergate. For more than a year of her tenure as governor, Palin and her husband and aides repeatedly and aggressively complained to Walt Monegan, the former Anchorage police chief whom Palin had named to head the state’s Department of Public Safety, about Mike Wooten, a state trooper who had been involved in a messy divorce from Palin’s sister Molly. Wooten was no angel. Before Palin ever took office, he had been disciplined after drinking beer in his patrol car, Tasering his stepson, illegally shooting a moose, and making threatening remarks about Palin’s father. But Wooten had already been disciplined, and Monegan believed that further action was unjustified if not impossible. The final straw may have been Monegan’s June 30, 2008, e-mail warning to Palin that an unnamed state legislator had complained that she’d been seen driving with her newborn son, and that the infant had not been strapped into an approved car seat. “I have never driven Trig anywhere without a new, approved car seat,” Palin fired back. “I want to know who said otherwise—pls. provide me that info now.” Twelve days later, Nizich fired Monegan on Palin’s orders. Forty-nine days after that, John McCain announced that Palin would join him on the ticket.
Arrows in the Back
In Alaska, there has never been a gubernatorial tradition of pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving, but Palin decided to stage such a ceremony last November all the same, at the Triple D Farm & Hatchery, outside Wasilla. After granting the lucky bird its reprieve, she stopped to talk to a local television reporter about what she had learned in the campaign just concluded. “I don’t think it’s changed me at all,” she insisted, clutching a cup of coffee as her breath steamed into the frosty air. “You know, it’s pretty brutal, the time consumption there, and the energy that has to be spent in order to get out and about with the message on a national level, a great appreciation for other candidates who have gone through this, but also just a great appreciation for this great country. There are so many good Americans who are just desiring of their government to kind of get out of the way and allow them to grow and progress, and allow our businesses to grow and progress. So, great appreciation for those who share that value.”
As Palin spoke, a grisly scene unfolded behind her. A worker hefted one squirming white turkey after another into a metal funnel, slit its throat, and bled it out in full view of the camera. The clip was replayed tens of thousands of times on YouTube and seemed an all too apt metaphor for how Palin’s political fortunes had changed in the wake of her great national adventure, even if her personality had not. A career that thrived for years on extraordinarily good luck seems to have known nothing but trouble since November 4. In December, Bristol Palin gave birth to Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, her son with her boyfriend, Levi Johnston, and for a time there was talk of a wedding. But by early spring the couple had split up, and their families fell to trading charges on talk shows and in the tabloids. After Levi told Tyra Banks that he had often spent the night in the Palin home, in the same room as Bristol, and assumed that the governor knew they were having sex, Palin, through her spokeswoman, released a blistering statement expressing disappointment “that Levi and his family, in a quest for fame, attention, and fortune, are engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration, and even distortion of their relationship.” On the CBS Early Show, days later, Johnston seemed resigned. “They said I didn’t live there. I ‘stayed there,”’ he said. “I was like, O.K., well, whatever you want to call it. I had my stuff there.” Although Bristol initially told Greta Van Susteren that teen abstinence is “not realistic at all,” by springtime she had signed up as an ambassador for the Candie’s Foundation to promote abstinence as the way to avoid teen pregnancy.
Meantime, Levi’s mother, Sherry, agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of possessing OxyContin with intent to sell it, in exchange for the state’s agreement to drop five other drug-related charges against her. Her lawyer has conceded that she will draw an automatic jail sentence, but hopes to minimize the time she spends behind bars, because she suffers from chronic pain. In April, Todd Palin’s half-sister Diana was arrested on charges of twice breaking into a house in Wasilla to steal money from a bedroom cabinet, under circumstances that remain unexplained.
Because Palin had taken particular umbrage in the fall campaign at any effort to criticize her children or invade their privacy, her willingness to mix it up in public with an 18-year-old, who is after all the father of her only grandchild, struck many in Alaska as odd. So did Palin’s suggestion, at a time when declining oil prices have thrown the state budget into the red, that she did not want to accept about a third of the $930 million in federal stimulus money available to Alaska, because it would come with too many big-government strings attached. The move seemed calculated to burnish her national conservative credentials. In the face of bipartisan outcry, Palin’s aides insisted she had never meant to say she wouldn’t take the money, only that she wanted to review the matter carefully. That was news to former aide Larry Persily. After the first meeting on the stimulus money, Persily told me, “Everyone in the room left thinking she’d said no. Then her staff said, ‘She didn’t say no. She just didn’t say yes.”’ Palin wound up taking all but about 3 percent of the $900 million available to Alaska. The consensus even among the Republicans I spoke to was that she rejected the last $28 million—for energy assistance—mostly to save face.
The ever shifting sands of Palin’s sensibility were also on display after former senator Ted Stevens’s conviction on corruption charges was set aside, in April. Palin’s old nemesis, the Alaska Republican Party chair Randy Ruedrich, called on Stevens’s Democratic successor, Mark Begich, who had defeated Stevens just days after the original conviction last fall, to step down and allow a new election. Palin told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in an e-mail, “I absolutely agree.” Days later, at a news conference, Palin insisted she had never called on Begich to step down.
Perhaps nothing has caused a bigger stir than Palin’s nomination of Wayne Anthony Ross to be Alaska’s attorney general. Ross is a two-time gubernatorial candidate and a board member of the National Rifle Association. He had sown controversy over the years by referring to gays and lesbians as “degenerates” (he later sought to downplay the remark, saying his aversion to homosexuals was no different from his aversion to lima beans) and for staunchly opposing subsistence-hunting preferences for native Alaskans. A flamboyant divorce lawyer who drives a big red Hummer with the vanity license plate war, Ross is a good old boy of pithy expression and considerable charm. (“In Alaska,” Ross told me, “a liberal is someone who carries a .357 or smaller.”) The final vote against Ross—with the Republican leaders of both chambers joining to defeat him—came just as Palin was speaking in Evansville. It was the first time in Alaska history that a cabinet nominee was rejected. “If I wince a little, it’s from the arrows in my back,” Ross told me a few weeks later. “I think there were a number of people who were trying to show her who the boss was.”
A year ago, 80 percent of Alaskans viewed Palin very favorably or somewhat favorably; by this spring, just 55 percent had a positive opinion. All this has given rise to speculation in Alaska that Palin may not run for re-election next year. She does not have to declare her candidacy until June 2010. Most politicians of both parties in Alaska with whom I spoke assume she could win, though not as persuasively as she did in 2006, which would hardly help her standing in a 2012 presidential campaign. Though Palin’s spokeswoman has said she does not intend to challenge Senator Lisa Murkowski, the former governor’s daughter, who is also up for re-election next year, Palin has changed her mind without warning in the past, and becoming a senator would keep her in the national spotlight. Surveying the landscape of political and policy troubles in Alaska, Gregg Erickson, an independent economic consultant in Juneau, concludes, “Everything she’s doing seems to be saying that there’ll be a problem in the future owing to her inattention, but she won’t be here to deal with it.”
“Just Make It All Go Away”
As Palin has piled misstep on top of misstep, the senior members of McCain’s campaign team have undergone a painful odyssey of their own. In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through. Do they ever ask, What were we thinking? “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. “You nailed it.” Another key McCain aide summed up his attitude this way: “I guess it’s sort of shifted,” he said. “I always wanted to tell myself the best-case story about her.” Even now, he said, “I don’t want to get too negative.” Then he added, “I think, as I’ve evaluated it, I think some of my worst fears … the after-election events have confirmed that her more negative aspects may have been there … ” His voice trailed off. “I saw her as a raw talent. Raw, but a talent. I hoped she could become better.”
None of McCain’s still-loyal soldiers will say negative things about Palin on the record. Even thinking such thoughts privately is painful for them, because there is ultimately no way to read McCain’s selection of Palin as reflecting anything other than an appalling egotism, heedlessness, and lack of judgment in a man whose courage, tenacity, and character they have extravagantly admired—and as reflecting, too, an unsettling willingness on their own part to aid and abet him. They all know that if their candidate—a 72-year-old cancer survivor—had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job. To ask why none of them dared to just walk away is to ask why Colin Powell did not resign in protest over the Bush administration’s foreign policy, or why none of Bill Clinton’s disillusioned aides resigned after he lied to them about Monica Lewinsky. The question cannot comprehend the intense bonds that the blood sport of modern politics produces. To leave a campaign—especially a struggling, losing campaign—is akin to desertion in wartime, and even as they began to understand her limitations, plenty of McCain aides still saw Palin as the campaign’s best hope. Some still believe that, simply in terms of the electoral math, she helped at least as much as she hurt, and maybe helped more.
McCain has delivered his own postmortem on Palin with the patented brand of winking-and-nodding ironic detachment that he usually reserves for painful political questions, an approach that simultaneously seeks to confess his sin and presume absolution for it. In November, he told Jay Leno he was proud of Palin and did not blame her for his defeat, but by April, when Leno asked him about who was running the Republican Party, McCain declined to mention Palin: “We have, I’m happy to say, a lot of choices out there: Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, Huntsman, Romney, Charlie Crist—there’s a lot of governors out there who are young and dynamic.” McCain went on, “There’s a lot of good people out there, and I’ve left out somebody’s name and I’m going to hear about it.” When I ask Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime speechwriter and co-author, about that comment, he says simply, “McCain always talks unscripted,” and adds that he has heard “not one word of regret” about Palin ever pass McCain’s lips. McCain’s daughter Meghan, who has continued the blog she began on the campaign last year, has said that Palin is the one topic on which she will have no public comment.
Palin herself has alternately shied away from the spotlight and injected herself into public debate on questions dear to conservatives, as she did when she issued a statement defending the former Miss California, Carrie Prejean, for opposing gay marriage despite “the liberal onslaught of malicious attacks.” Palin’s speech in Evansville was her first major post-election foray into the national media, and she followed it up in June with a trip to New York State, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Alaska’s entry into the union, visiting Auburn, the hometown of William H. Seward, who bought the Alaska territory from Russia, and making appearances at events supporting families with autism and developmental disabilities. But the biggest headlines the trip produced were those about Palin’s feud with David Letterman, who joked that Palin had gone to Bloomingdale’s to update her “slutty flight-attendant look” and made a tasteless sexual jibe about one of the Palin daughters. Letterman eventually apologized, though Palin fanned the flames in ways that were not necessarily to her advantage.
In Evansville, though, Palin concentrated on the task at hand: an emphatic defense of the anti-abortion cause. But in doing so she made a startling confession about what she thought when she learned she was pregnant at 43 with her youngest child, Trig, who arrived in April 2008, as the world now knows, with Down syndrome. “I had found out that I was pregnant while out of state first,” Palin told the crowd. “While out of state, there just for a fleeting moment, I thought, Nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, Wow, it is easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances and no one would know—no one would ever know. Then when my amniocentesis results came back, showing what they called abnormalities—oh, dear God—I knew, I had instantly an understanding, for that fleeting moment, why someone would believe it could seem possible to change those circumstances, just make it all go away, get some normalcy back in life.” It is almost impossible not to be touched by the rawness of her confession, even if it is precisely this choice that Palin believes no other woman should ever have, not even in the case of rape or incest.
Sarah Palin is a star in Evansville and all the many Evansvilles of America, but there is a big part of the Republican Party—the Wall Street wing, the national-security wing—in which she cuts no ice. At the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, Palin essentially came in tied for second with Governor Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana, and Representative Ron Paul, of Texas, with 13 percent support in a straw poll of potential 2012 presidential candidates; former governor Mitt Romney, of Massachusetts, got 20 percent. A more recent survey has Palin in a three-way tie with Romney and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. She could do well in the Iowa caucuses or South Carolina primary, but it is much harder to imagine her making headway in New Hampshire, where independent voters were turned off by her last fall. It is also difficult to see just how she would expand her appeal beyond the base that already loves her.
In Alaska, almost everyone I met wondered who was advising her in Washington—and in Washington, everyone wonders the same thing. There are one or two clues. On the eve of the Alfalfa dinner, in January, Palin was a guest in the home of Fred Malek, a veteran Republican fund-raiser and government official dating back to the days of the Nixon administration. Malek raised money for McCain’s campaign last year, and also agreed to play host to a fund-raising dinner for Republican governors in early May. (Palin was to have been an honored guest, but canceled owing to spring flooding in Alaska.) As noted, Palin has established a political-action committee with the legal advice of John Coale, who met Palin when his wife, Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News host, went to interview her during the campaign. Coale, a former Hillary Clinton supporter, told me he felt Palin had gotten a bum rap from liberals and conservatives alike, and he advised her that a pac was a logical and legal way to pay for out-of-state political travel. “We raised a good bit of money without even asking,” Coale says. “Just set up a Web site and, I think in the first month, $400,000 came in.” Coale says he still exchanges e-mails with Palin from time to time, but doesn’t consider himself a political adviser; he also says that Van Susteren has “put up a Chinese wall about all of this,” and has obtained her interviews with the Palins independently. Since the campaign ended, Van Susteren has interviewed Palin twice more, but she says she has never had a conversation with Palin off-camera, except for when Palin called to rescind her acceptance of Van Susteren’s invitation to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in May, because of the Alaska flooding. Todd Palin came solo as Van Susteren’s guest, and when a reporter for Politico sought to interview him at a pre-dinner brunch attended by hundreds of journalists, Van Susteren interposed herself, as in the manner of a staffer, to say it was a social event. Van Susteren told me she was just trying to exercise good manners.
Palin’s closest adviser remains her husband—the “first gentleman” or “first dude,” as she calls him. Testimony in the Troopergate investigation suggested that Todd was physically in the governor’s office for about 50 percent of the time, often sitting in on meetings or phone calls in which he had no obvious official function. By the end of last fall’s campaign, McCain’s friends had picked up word that Todd was calling around to Republicans in South Carolina, urging them to keep his wife in mind for 2012—the implication being that the Palins believed McCain was about to lose. This spring, he stood in for Palin at an event in Manhattan—at Alaska House in SoHo, the cultural antipode of Wasilla—promoting the Alaska commercial-fishing industry’s contributions to world food aid. In a brief prepared speech, he extolled Alaska salmon as “some of the world’s healthiest protein, rich in vitamins and minerals, and a source of omega-3 fats.”
“She doesn’t at all have anyone who’s willing to give it to her straight,” one person who occasionally advises Palin told me. Todd may be the one exception. “I saw nobody else like that, nobody who would sit her down and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’” He added, of the poor communications operation run by Stapleton, “I don’t know what part Sarah Palin plays in the lack of communications, but I don’t think she’s aware of how big a problem it is.”
And her national ambitions? “What it looks like to me she’s trying to do is try the same formula that got her the governorship,” John Bitney says. “You sort of start off with a conservative base. The right-wing base is obviously out on the far end of the spectrum, but it’s a very motivated base. They show up, they’re committed. It gets you that political beachhead. She did not get started with the blessing of the Republican Party. She started with a dedicated corps of sort of right-wing true believers who killed themselves for her, and got her going. And then she began to build on that, and after she crossed the primary hurdle, she moderated her message on some points.”
When I ask Bitney what he makes of the whole Palin phenomenon, he sighs. “What do I take away from this?” he asks. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s just a lot of emotions and stuff. I find it’s frustrating dealing with Sarah, because it seems we’re always dealing with emotional crap and we never seem to be able to focus on the business at hand that needs to be done. I don’t know whether to blame her or pity her for all this emotional upheaval that we’re always going through with her. Now we all get to listen to Levi and Bristol. Check my feet for horseshoes if I have to sit there and listen to another talk show. I got involved in helping her become governor because we needed to change some policy directions. Teen abstinence is not why I waved signs for her.”
Palin herself often sounds tired and resentful these days, as if wondering whether she should have blinked and just said no to John McCain. In a rambling, 17-minute speech introducing Michael Reagan, the former president’s son and a conservative radio host at an event in Alaska in June—a speech that borrowed heavily, without clear attribution, from a four-year-old article by Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Craig Shirley—Palin seemed resigned to the fact that her reputation would never again be as fresh and glowing as it once was. She complained about “national figures and some in the press who, who want to put not just me, but anybody who dares speak up, it seems nowadays, right back down in their place.” She bemoaned her changing fortunes in Alaska. “I think things here that have so drastically changed these past months … Some want to forbid others from speaking up, and it’s been through lawsuits, been ethics-violation charges, media distortions And those are the folks who want to tell me, they want to tell you to sit down and shut up. We will not do so. I just can’t because I love my state, I love my country, and I need you, we need Michael Reagan to keep on fighting for our freedoms, for our country, and what we’re being fed today, it seems, is a steady diet of selected misrepresented news So I join you in speaking up and asking the questions and taking action, and here at home in my beloved Alaska, I just say, politically speaking, if I die, I die.”
Palin has disappointed many of those who once had the highest hopes for her. She has stumbled over innumerable details. But as she said to Andrew Halcro years ago, “Does any of this really matter?” Palin has shown herself to have remarkable gut instincts about raw politics, and she has seen openings where others did not. And she has the good fortune to have traction within a political party that is bereft of strong leadership, and whose rank and file often demands qualities other than knowledge, experience, and an understanding that facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things. It is, at the moment, a party in which the loudest and most singular voices, not burdened by responsibility, wield disproportionate power. She may decide that she does not need office in order to have great influence—any more than Rush Limbaugh does.
On a rare fine day in Juneau, not long ago, Palin was seen sitting in the sunshine in the broad plaza near the state capitol, alone with her thoughts and some reading material for more than an hour and a half. Down the hillside below her, the big cruise liners that ply Alaska’s Inside Passage in the summer months were beginning to call in the port. Only two years have elapsed since William Kristol and his colleagues disembarked from one of them and hearkened to her siren call. Sarah Palin might well have been wondering whether her own ship is going out, or just coming in.
Todd S. Purdum is Vanity Fair’s national editor.
Jul 4, 2009
Chechen Police Die in Ingushetia
Chechen police die in Ingushetia
Nine Chechen policemen have been killed when militants attacked their vehicle in Russia's neighbouring republic of Ingushetia, officials say.
Another nine police were injured near the village of Arshty, in one of the deadliest recent attacks.
The Chechen police were conducting joint operations against militants in the volatile region.
Last month, Ingushetia's leader was seriously wounded in an apparent assassination attempt.
Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has vowed a "cruel" revenge on those who tried to kill Inghushetia's President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov.
Convoy ambushed
The vehicle the Chechen police travelling in came under grenade and gun fire at about 0840 local time (0540 GMT) on Saturday, officials say.
The militants opened fire from a nearby forest.
The Chechen police were travelling in a convoy of five vehicles.
It was not immediately known if there were any casualties among the attackers.
Islamist militants have been battling pro-Kremlin authorities and Russian security forces in a low-level insurgency in Ingushetia, Chechnya and also Dagestan in the Caucasus region.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8134193.stm
Published: 2009/07/04
Nine Chechen policemen have been killed when militants attacked their vehicle in Russia's neighbouring republic of Ingushetia, officials say.
Another nine police were injured near the village of Arshty, in one of the deadliest recent attacks.
The Chechen police were conducting joint operations against militants in the volatile region.
Last month, Ingushetia's leader was seriously wounded in an apparent assassination attempt.
Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has vowed a "cruel" revenge on those who tried to kill Inghushetia's President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov.
Convoy ambushed
The vehicle the Chechen police travelling in came under grenade and gun fire at about 0840 local time (0540 GMT) on Saturday, officials say.
The militants opened fire from a nearby forest.
The Chechen police were travelling in a convoy of five vehicles.
It was not immediately known if there were any casualties among the attackers.
Islamist militants have been battling pro-Kremlin authorities and Russian security forces in a low-level insurgency in Ingushetia, Chechnya and also Dagestan in the Caucasus region.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8134193.stm
Published: 2009/07/04
Syria News Briefing No. 65
Institute for War & Peace Reporting
SYRIA LOOKS TO BETTER US TIES
Washington decision to name an ambassador seen as positive but some are cautious.
By an IWPR-trained reporter
Syrian analysts and officials have welcomed the United States’ decision to send an ambassador to Damascus after a four-year break but said that Syria was still waiting for Washington to play a stronger role in establishing peace in the region.
On June 24, media reports quoted officials in Washington as saying that the new US administration had decided to send an ambassador to Damascus.
The officials said that the move reflected recognition by the new US administration “of the important role Syria plays” in bringing peace and stability to the Middle East.
Washington withdrew ambassador Margaret Scobey from Damascus in February 2005 as an expression of “profound outrage” over the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, a crime that was widely blamed on the Syrians. Damascus has denied any involvement in the killing.
Since then, the US kept its embassy open but headed by a chargé d’affaires. The Syrian ambassador in Washington stayed in his post.
Washington has not yet given the name of the new ambassador nor the date of his or her appointment.
The US assistant secretary for diplomatic security, Eric Boswell, visited Damascus in April to examine the possibility of opening a new embassy, according to Syria’s official news agency, SANA.
Observers view the recent rapprochement between the US and Syria as a “reward” for Syria’s improved attitudes in the region, mainly the exchange of diplomatic representation with Lebanon and boosting security along its border with Iraq.
Syria’s presidential and media advisor, Butaina Shaaban, declared in TV interviews that the US decision was “positive” but said that Damascus would not make any official statement about it at present.
Meanwhile, the Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Mustafa, told US media that the step was a small improvement. However, he cautioned that it was early to talk about radical changes in contacts between the two countries.
The US move comes at a time when the Iranian regime – Syria’s strongest strategic ally – seems to be shaky and one Damascus-based political analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Washington was trying to weaken that alliance.
He said that the US has also tried to persuade its allies in the region, mainly Saudi Arabia, to be reconciled with the Syrians in order to pull Damascus away from Tehran’s sphere of influence.
There were already signs of divergence between Iran and Syria on some regional issues, he said, and the Iranians were not content that Syria had cooperated with Saudi Arabia on Lebanon and put pressure on its Lebanese allies to compromise with their foes.
But the analyst said that the Syrians realised that “the price of breaking their alliance with Iran would be very costly”.
“What the US has offered to the Syrians is not enough to take that risk,” he added.
Before considering giving up its ties with the Islamic republic, Damascus expects a full commitment by the US to the peace process with the Israelis and eventually the return of the Golan Heights – a strategic patch of land occupied by Israel since 1967, the analyst said.
George Hajouj, a Damascus-based political analyst, told IWPR that Damascus had a clear vision of what role the US should play after the appointment of the new ambassador.
Damascus wants the US to pave the way for a fair settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict based on the “land for peace” principle and Washington is aware of that, Hajouj said.
“What is unknown up to now is the US vision and role in the region during the next phase,” he added.
In the past few months, several US officials visited Damascus including George Mitchell, the special US envoy to the Middle East, who is expected to lead the American efforts to seek peace in the region.
Some Syrian media reports said that the new ambassador would be working on a new US plan for peace between Israel and Syria developed by Mitchell’s team. The plan reportedly would turn the Golan Heights into a demilitarised nature reserve controlled by both Syria and Israel. In return, Damascus would break away from Iran and cut its ties with anti-Israeli militant groups.
Some hope that the appointment of a new ambassador will also boost stagnant economic relations between the two countries.
Ossama al-Qadi, an economics expert based in Damascus, told IWPR that the US should follow the European strategy of establishing economic, scientific and financial agreements with Syria to have a more tangible presence on the ground.
Helping Syrians get jobs and assisting Syria in building an infrastructure suitable for a modern economy would create trust, said Qadi.
The Syrian ambassador in London, Sami al-Khaimi, told the Lebanese TV channel LBC recently that he hoped the new US diplomat would be able to bring US investors to Syria.
Khaimi said Damascus also hoped the US would help with the “billions of dollars” that it costs to deal with a large number of Iraqi refugees in the country.
Despite the recent overtures, Washington decided last month to extend economic sanctions against Syria for another year, which was seen as a setback for the Syrians.
The measures, imposed in 2004, prohibit US exports to Syria except for food and medicine.
Some Syrians are not optimistic that the improvement in relations between Syria and the US will bring real change to the region.
“It does not seem that the US is willing to build peace in the region,” said Nour al-Khatib, a 26 year-old saleswoman living in Damascus.
“Tensions will continue in the region … as long as the US employs double standards in the region.”
Eyad Jarrous, 27, a Damascus-based engineer, said that the Syrians were weary of the “no-peace but no-war situation” with the Americans.
“We don’t want our government to continue oppressing us economically under the pretext of needing to finance the army,” he added.
WOMEN ADVANCE IN MEDIA AGAINST ODDS
A few senior jobs have gone to women but they still face an uphill struggle to be accepted as equals.
By an IWPR-trained reporter
Women are making a name for themselves in the Syrian media as never before, however some say they have to work a lot harder than men to prove themselves.
Last December, for the first time in the country’s history, a woman was chosen as editor-in-chief of one of the main official newspapers, Tishreen.
The appointment of Samira Masalma to this important position in Syrian society raised many eyebrows in a country where men occupy most of the leading posts, but was welcomed by some as a sign that more and more women are gaining importance in media institutions in Syria.
One of the most prominent is Intisar Younes, who presents Chessboard, a new political programme on national television that brings her face to face with mostly male analysts and politicians to tackle questions about Syria and the Middle East.
“Women in the media today are like women working in any other institution here. They basically have to carve out their careers,” said Diana Jabbour, a leading female figure who has been director of Syrian state-run television for three years.
“For women to make achievements, they have to pass through strenuous tests on a daily basis,” Jabbour said.
When a female journalist makes a mistake she will frequently be stigmatised for being a woman, she said.
Rim Haddad, an editor at the private Syrian TV station Dunya, said that she was once removed from her position as a producer of a TV programme that discussed articles in the local press.
Haddad, who headed a team of six men, said her colleagues kept complaining to the director of the channel that they refused to be headed by a woman and that they were more competent as men.
Female journalists face the patronising judgements of a male-dominated society that often regards them as professionally less competent than men, some say.
Abdel-Hamid Tawfik, director of the Damascus bureau of the Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera, told IWPR, "I am not against women working in the media but these women are in the end wives and mothers so their lifestyles obliges [them] to be present a lot of time in their homes.
“Therefore, I am not for women journalists occupying leading positions in media institutions because they get distracted a lot from their work. When I am away, I prefer to be replaced by a male reporter.
"It is true that [some] women have reached high-ranking positions in Arab and Syrian media but they are still considered to be minors in the eyes of men no matter how knowledgeable and experienced they are."
Women’s physiology and their role at home as mothers and wives limit their capacity for work, said Hisham Ghabra, director of the news department at a Damascus radio station.
Shahinza Bissani, a news editor at a Damascus radio station, said that her neighbours insulted her behind her back her because she returned late from work.
“I had to change my shifts at work to save my parents’ reputation,” Bissani said.
Although men and women working in the media earn much the same, it is more difficult for a female journalist to get promoted, observers say.
Souad Jarrous, who works in Damascus as a correspondent for the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, said that for a long time she had to accept a low income for the stories she wrote before getting a fixed job.
Many female journalists also complain that there are certain areas of journalism that are considered out of reach for them.
Female journalists are mostly confined to writing about art or women-related issues like fashion, said Jabbour at Syrian TV. Women are told that they are not good enough to analyse politics and culture because they cannot grasp these topics, she added.
“I had to fight to enter the world of politics,” said Jarrous, adding that for ten years she was only allowed to write about local news and crime before becoming a political reporter.
Many female journalists also find it hard to cover events in the field, which pushes many of them into desk jobs editing or compiling news reports.
Arij Bouwadakji, a news editor at the eSyria website, said that as a journalist it was difficult for her to report on the ground about controversial social issues like so-called honour crimes because as a woman she was looked down on by the relatives of the victims and even the investigators.
Honour crimes, where men kill female relatives who engage in extramarital sexual activities to save the family’s reputation, are common in certain areas of Syria and the rest of the Arab world and largely go unpunished.
Bouwadakji also said that women reporters were treated with condescension by police officers and so avoided reporting from police stations as well as court rooms.
Some observers also say that good looks, not competence, are the driving force behind the employment of female journalists, especially in TV.
The journalist at a Damascus radio station, Bissani, said appearance is the most important criterion today when hiring a female journalist, even in radio.
She lamented that many media institutions rejected competent female reporters if they were not attractive, which, she said, is bluntly expressed by some male directors or implied from their behaviour.
Mays Orfali, a presenter on Syrian national TV, said that as a veiled woman she was unable at first to find a job in television. She finally removed her headscarf after feeling it was the only way to get the work she wanted.
Meanwhile, many observers say that women in the media are also challenged by general difficulties that are equally faced by their male counterparts, such as restrictions on freedom of expression and nepotism.
“I have lost any ambition to change the current situation,” said Jarrous.
SYRIA LOOKS TO BETTER US TIES
Washington decision to name an ambassador seen as positive but some are cautious.
By an IWPR-trained reporter
Syrian analysts and officials have welcomed the United States’ decision to send an ambassador to Damascus after a four-year break but said that Syria was still waiting for Washington to play a stronger role in establishing peace in the region.
On June 24, media reports quoted officials in Washington as saying that the new US administration had decided to send an ambassador to Damascus.
The officials said that the move reflected recognition by the new US administration “of the important role Syria plays” in bringing peace and stability to the Middle East.
Washington withdrew ambassador Margaret Scobey from Damascus in February 2005 as an expression of “profound outrage” over the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, a crime that was widely blamed on the Syrians. Damascus has denied any involvement in the killing.
Since then, the US kept its embassy open but headed by a chargé d’affaires. The Syrian ambassador in Washington stayed in his post.
Washington has not yet given the name of the new ambassador nor the date of his or her appointment.
The US assistant secretary for diplomatic security, Eric Boswell, visited Damascus in April to examine the possibility of opening a new embassy, according to Syria’s official news agency, SANA.
Observers view the recent rapprochement between the US and Syria as a “reward” for Syria’s improved attitudes in the region, mainly the exchange of diplomatic representation with Lebanon and boosting security along its border with Iraq.
Syria’s presidential and media advisor, Butaina Shaaban, declared in TV interviews that the US decision was “positive” but said that Damascus would not make any official statement about it at present.
Meanwhile, the Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Mustafa, told US media that the step was a small improvement. However, he cautioned that it was early to talk about radical changes in contacts between the two countries.
The US move comes at a time when the Iranian regime – Syria’s strongest strategic ally – seems to be shaky and one Damascus-based political analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Washington was trying to weaken that alliance.
He said that the US has also tried to persuade its allies in the region, mainly Saudi Arabia, to be reconciled with the Syrians in order to pull Damascus away from Tehran’s sphere of influence.
There were already signs of divergence between Iran and Syria on some regional issues, he said, and the Iranians were not content that Syria had cooperated with Saudi Arabia on Lebanon and put pressure on its Lebanese allies to compromise with their foes.
But the analyst said that the Syrians realised that “the price of breaking their alliance with Iran would be very costly”.
“What the US has offered to the Syrians is not enough to take that risk,” he added.
Before considering giving up its ties with the Islamic republic, Damascus expects a full commitment by the US to the peace process with the Israelis and eventually the return of the Golan Heights – a strategic patch of land occupied by Israel since 1967, the analyst said.
George Hajouj, a Damascus-based political analyst, told IWPR that Damascus had a clear vision of what role the US should play after the appointment of the new ambassador.
Damascus wants the US to pave the way for a fair settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict based on the “land for peace” principle and Washington is aware of that, Hajouj said.
“What is unknown up to now is the US vision and role in the region during the next phase,” he added.
In the past few months, several US officials visited Damascus including George Mitchell, the special US envoy to the Middle East, who is expected to lead the American efforts to seek peace in the region.
Some Syrian media reports said that the new ambassador would be working on a new US plan for peace between Israel and Syria developed by Mitchell’s team. The plan reportedly would turn the Golan Heights into a demilitarised nature reserve controlled by both Syria and Israel. In return, Damascus would break away from Iran and cut its ties with anti-Israeli militant groups.
Some hope that the appointment of a new ambassador will also boost stagnant economic relations between the two countries.
Ossama al-Qadi, an economics expert based in Damascus, told IWPR that the US should follow the European strategy of establishing economic, scientific and financial agreements with Syria to have a more tangible presence on the ground.
Helping Syrians get jobs and assisting Syria in building an infrastructure suitable for a modern economy would create trust, said Qadi.
The Syrian ambassador in London, Sami al-Khaimi, told the Lebanese TV channel LBC recently that he hoped the new US diplomat would be able to bring US investors to Syria.
Khaimi said Damascus also hoped the US would help with the “billions of dollars” that it costs to deal with a large number of Iraqi refugees in the country.
Despite the recent overtures, Washington decided last month to extend economic sanctions against Syria for another year, which was seen as a setback for the Syrians.
The measures, imposed in 2004, prohibit US exports to Syria except for food and medicine.
Some Syrians are not optimistic that the improvement in relations between Syria and the US will bring real change to the region.
“It does not seem that the US is willing to build peace in the region,” said Nour al-Khatib, a 26 year-old saleswoman living in Damascus.
“Tensions will continue in the region … as long as the US employs double standards in the region.”
Eyad Jarrous, 27, a Damascus-based engineer, said that the Syrians were weary of the “no-peace but no-war situation” with the Americans.
“We don’t want our government to continue oppressing us economically under the pretext of needing to finance the army,” he added.
WOMEN ADVANCE IN MEDIA AGAINST ODDS
A few senior jobs have gone to women but they still face an uphill struggle to be accepted as equals.
By an IWPR-trained reporter
Women are making a name for themselves in the Syrian media as never before, however some say they have to work a lot harder than men to prove themselves.
Last December, for the first time in the country’s history, a woman was chosen as editor-in-chief of one of the main official newspapers, Tishreen.
The appointment of Samira Masalma to this important position in Syrian society raised many eyebrows in a country where men occupy most of the leading posts, but was welcomed by some as a sign that more and more women are gaining importance in media institutions in Syria.
One of the most prominent is Intisar Younes, who presents Chessboard, a new political programme on national television that brings her face to face with mostly male analysts and politicians to tackle questions about Syria and the Middle East.
“Women in the media today are like women working in any other institution here. They basically have to carve out their careers,” said Diana Jabbour, a leading female figure who has been director of Syrian state-run television for three years.
“For women to make achievements, they have to pass through strenuous tests on a daily basis,” Jabbour said.
When a female journalist makes a mistake she will frequently be stigmatised for being a woman, she said.
Rim Haddad, an editor at the private Syrian TV station Dunya, said that she was once removed from her position as a producer of a TV programme that discussed articles in the local press.
Haddad, who headed a team of six men, said her colleagues kept complaining to the director of the channel that they refused to be headed by a woman and that they were more competent as men.
Female journalists face the patronising judgements of a male-dominated society that often regards them as professionally less competent than men, some say.
Abdel-Hamid Tawfik, director of the Damascus bureau of the Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera, told IWPR, "I am not against women working in the media but these women are in the end wives and mothers so their lifestyles obliges [them] to be present a lot of time in their homes.
“Therefore, I am not for women journalists occupying leading positions in media institutions because they get distracted a lot from their work. When I am away, I prefer to be replaced by a male reporter.
"It is true that [some] women have reached high-ranking positions in Arab and Syrian media but they are still considered to be minors in the eyes of men no matter how knowledgeable and experienced they are."
Women’s physiology and their role at home as mothers and wives limit their capacity for work, said Hisham Ghabra, director of the news department at a Damascus radio station.
Shahinza Bissani, a news editor at a Damascus radio station, said that her neighbours insulted her behind her back her because she returned late from work.
“I had to change my shifts at work to save my parents’ reputation,” Bissani said.
Although men and women working in the media earn much the same, it is more difficult for a female journalist to get promoted, observers say.
Souad Jarrous, who works in Damascus as a correspondent for the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, said that for a long time she had to accept a low income for the stories she wrote before getting a fixed job.
Many female journalists also complain that there are certain areas of journalism that are considered out of reach for them.
Female journalists are mostly confined to writing about art or women-related issues like fashion, said Jabbour at Syrian TV. Women are told that they are not good enough to analyse politics and culture because they cannot grasp these topics, she added.
“I had to fight to enter the world of politics,” said Jarrous, adding that for ten years she was only allowed to write about local news and crime before becoming a political reporter.
Many female journalists also find it hard to cover events in the field, which pushes many of them into desk jobs editing or compiling news reports.
Arij Bouwadakji, a news editor at the eSyria website, said that as a journalist it was difficult for her to report on the ground about controversial social issues like so-called honour crimes because as a woman she was looked down on by the relatives of the victims and even the investigators.
Honour crimes, where men kill female relatives who engage in extramarital sexual activities to save the family’s reputation, are common in certain areas of Syria and the rest of the Arab world and largely go unpunished.
Bouwadakji also said that women reporters were treated with condescension by police officers and so avoided reporting from police stations as well as court rooms.
Some observers also say that good looks, not competence, are the driving force behind the employment of female journalists, especially in TV.
The journalist at a Damascus radio station, Bissani, said appearance is the most important criterion today when hiring a female journalist, even in radio.
She lamented that many media institutions rejected competent female reporters if they were not attractive, which, she said, is bluntly expressed by some male directors or implied from their behaviour.
Mays Orfali, a presenter on Syrian national TV, said that as a veiled woman she was unable at first to find a job in television. She finally removed her headscarf after feeling it was the only way to get the work she wanted.
Meanwhile, many observers say that women in the media are also challenged by general difficulties that are equally faced by their male counterparts, such as restrictions on freedom of expression and nepotism.
“I have lost any ambition to change the current situation,” said Jarrous.
Iraqi Crisis Report No. 295
Institute for War & Peace Reporting
NEW WAVE OF VIOLENCE AGAINST IRAQI GAYS
Rights advocate speaks of an "extraordinarily brutal campaign", saying hundreds may have been killed in last few months.
By IWPR trainees in Baghdad
Iraqi gays are being targeted and killed in what rights campaigners say is some of the worst violence against the community in recent years.
At least 68 gay and transgendered men have been killed over the last four months, according to the London-based rights advocacy group Iraqi LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), bringing the total number of killings of Iraqis because of their sexuality to 678 since 2004.
New York-based Human Rights Watch, which recently conducted field investigations on the violence, estimates that hundreds of homosexual men may have been killed in recent months.
Scott Long, a senior Human Rights Watch representative, described the killings as an "extraordinarily brutal campaign" targeting gay, transgender and effeminate men in several provinces.
"I am so afraid that I will be killed," said Samir, a 20-year-old gay Baghdad resident, who preferred not to give his surname.
"People do not understand that I have been created like this. Those who claim to be religious are disgusted by me."
Effeminate men are being targeted whether or not they are gay, but transgender men, particularly those taking hormones, face the most danger, said Ali Hili, Iraqi LGBT chair.
Iraqi LGBT and HRW believe that Shia militias are the primary perpetrators of the violence and say the majority of killings have occurred in Shia areas in south/central Iraq (including the towns of Ammarah, Najaf, Karbala and Basra) and Baghdad’s Sadr City district, the stronghold of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army.
This is based in part on reports of harassment and torture by Shia militias from victims who survived attacks.
“Sadr City was one of the areas where a lot of the killings appeared to be taking place … We talked to people in hospitals and morgues where bodies were coming in. Live victims were coming in with things like their anuses being filled with glue,” Long said.
Hili said names of individuals "wanted" for homosexuality have been posted in Shia neighbourhoods.
“Shia militias are ... [conducting] a killing, harassment…campaign against [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people in Iraq. They quite clearly have a specific target and tend toward sexual cleansing in Iraq,” he said.
While no group has said it’s behind the killings, Iraqi LGBT and HRW believe that elements of the Mehdi Army may be among the militants implicated in the violence, particularly in Sadr City.
Hili and Long also point out that smaller extremist Shia militias have openly threatened gays.
But both activists caution that it is difficult to know which militia is responsible for what in Iraq as most don't admit to crimes they’ve committed. It’s "always difficult to pin down exact accountability of militias in Iraq”, Long said.
Nonetheless, Long suggested that some members of Mehdi Army were trying to act as "agents of moral regeneration" in an attempt to regain some control over Shia neighbourhoods, following massive military operations that weakened the militia.
"My sense is that they probably initiated the campaign [of violence] because the Mehdi Army was trying to come back," he said.
“It is pretty clear that sermons started being preached in Shia mosques, particularly ones in areas that are heavily influenced by the Sadrists earlier this year, on the dangers of homosexuality [in the weeks prior to the wave of killings].”
Hili suspects Mehdi Army involvement in the violence in Sadr City because they are “are ruling and acting as a government [there]. There is no other force in Sadr City but Mehdi Army”.
Jasim al-Jabiri, a Mehdi Army leader in Sadr City, denied that the militia has played any party in the killing homosexuals in the district.
"The tribes to which the gays belonged killed them,” he said. “They consider them a shame on [the tribe].
“The Iraqi community rejects [gays] as disgusting and despicable."
And Sheikh Sayid al-Battat, a Sadr loyalist, said the perpetrators of crimes against homosexuals should be brought to justice.
"No party, whoever it might be, is above the law," Battat said. "Anyone proven guilty will be punished by Iraqi legislation and laws."
Sadr recently scorned homosexuality but warned against attacking gays.
He has launched a youth-targeted religious morality campaign to discourage "depravity", including homosexuality. Battat said that clerics deem homosexuality "a deviation from religious laws and will stand against it through preaching and guidance".
Iraqi LGBT and HRW also suspect police officers may be involved in the violence. They say some victims who survived torture or beatings reported their assailants were wearing uniforms. One said he was taken to an interior ministry building in Baghdad earlier this year, Long said.
Hili said his organisation receives reports of policemen arresting gays and handing them over to militias. “I think we’ve become a main target for extremist militias and even the Iraqi police,” he said.
Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the ministry of interior's official spokesman, denied the allegations.
"The police have nothing to do with these killings,” he said. “The police are launching an investigation to find the killers."
Currently, the interior ministry is only probing the murders of six homosexuals who were killed in Sadr City in April, but has not made any arrests. Khalaf said the ministry had no information about additional cases in which gays have been targeted.
Meanwhile, many gays in Baghdad are changing their appearance to make them less of a target. Fitted jeans and t-shirts have been replaced with baggier clothing. Hairdressers who cater for a gay clientele say customers who typically wore their hair longer are now requesting more masculine closely-cropped styles.
Some gays are even carrying guns for self-defence.
The United States early last month condemned anti-homosexual attacks and said the US embassy is raising the issue with senior Iraqi officials.
A number of local politicians have also spoken out against the killings. Rasheed Ismail, a representative of the Iraqi Communist party in Baghdad, called for protective legislation.
"Gays are not a huge population in Iraq, so why are they being killed and having their rights trampled on?" he asked.
Rights advocates see a bleak future for Iraqi gays, arguing that those under threat need to be granted asylum in western countries. Neighbouring states are not good options because they also persecute homosexuals, Long said.
Two IWPR-trained journalists, whose identities cannot be revealed for security reasons, reported from Baghdad. IWPR Iraq editor Tiare Rath reported from New York.
BASRA PLAGUED BY MINE MENACE
UN critical of pace of landmine clearance, warning it’ll be decades before targets met.
By Ali Abu Iraq in Basra
Sadiya Khalaf Lafta limped over to her friend’s wedding, knowing she has little chance of getting married herself, despite her good looks. Her mother says she wept while the guests ululated in celebration.
“What good is a one-legged woman to any man?” Lafta asks, having stepped on a landmine while herding sheep near the Iranian border 15 years ago. She is still haunted by the memory of seeing her limb blown off before she blacked out.
Lafta’s village, Jurf al-Milh, meaning “salt bank” in Arabic, lies on the eastern shore of the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the province of Basra.
The area is littered with millions of unexploded ordnance – mainly landmines and cluster bombs from recent conflicts.
Iraq is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world and has made little progress towards removing them.
A report released this week by the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, and Iraq’s environment ministry warned that the country is unlikely to meet its commitment to eliminate all landmines by 2018.
Iraq is estimated to have 20 million landmines and 2.66 million cluster bombs spread out over more than 1,700 square kilometres. Only 20 square kilometres have been cleared by demining organisations since Iraq signed up to the UN’s Mine Ban Treaty in February 2008.
The UN estimated that more than 1.6 million people are affected by the landmines. UNICEF reported that one million children are at risk.
Paolo Lembo, UNDP’s country director for Iraq, said in a statement that the government “will take decades to clear all mines and unexploded ordnance”, given its current capacities.
According to Ala Majid, director of Al-Rafidain Demining Organisation, an Iraqi NGO, landmine removal work ground to a halt last December because of conflicts between the defence, interior and environment ministries over who was in charge.
But news agencies have reported that the ministry of defence halted demining operations over concerns that the explosives were being sold to insurgents.
The Basra region has about seven million landmines, Majid said. His organisation has an annual budget of 2.2 million US dollars.
He estimated that only ten per cent of landmines have been cleared, despite efforts by non-governmental organisations and support from the UN over the past five years. Majid predicted the region will not be rid of its landmines before 2030.
The area, once famous for the cultivation of palm trees, has been cursed by its proximity to the Iranian and Kuwaiti borders. Much of the farmland is now mined. Even new reconstruction projects – such as a water treatment plant in Basra - are on hold because of landmines and other unexploded ordnance, the UN agencies say.
Abd al-Mutalib Abd al-Dyim, head of the Iraqi Society for Mine Removal and Land Reclamation in Shatt al-Arab county, estimated that 400 of the 2,500 people living in the area are landmine victims. Most of them are women and children, he said.
The landmines were first laid during the Iran-Iraq war. “They have threatened people’s lives ever since,” Dyim said.
Shatt al-Arab residents are traditionally shepherds. In recent decades, they have adopted a profitable yet deadly trade, becoming expert at dismantling abandoned weapons to recycle as scrap metal.
“It was not uncommon for a man to take home and disassemble rockets in front of his own family,” Dyim said. “There are a lot of stories here about the catastrophic accidents that occurred as a result."
Abu Mohammed, a man with an artificial leg and the battered face of a smallpox victim, is not yet 50 but looks at least twenty years older. He lives in a small, mud house among narrow alleyways dotted with heaps of garbage and filthy pools of water.
Chain-smoking throughout the interview, Abu Mohammed said he had made a living ransacking abandoned military positions during the UN-imposed sanctions in the 1990s.
“That was the only job available to us,” he said. “One day, despite all my caution and experience, I got caught in one of those minefields and the blast damaged my eyesight and my leg.
“Two years later, my son Mohammed also lost a leg looking for scraps from the war. And then my younger son Nizar lost both his legs while shepherding the only three lambs we had left from the flocks of the good old days.”
The interview with Abu Mohammed was interrupted by the angry cries of a woman inside his house. “What good have these people done, showing up with their cameras to photograph us when we can barely afford our bread?” she said.
Another woman responded in a louder voice, “Shut up you fool! Some good may come of this. Let’s wait and see. We have nothing to lose.”
Abu Mohammed chuckled, and explained, “My wives never stop bickering.”
Iyad Jiri al-Canan, a local sheikh and member of a demining committee, said the minefields became a source of livelihood for scavengers after the first Gulf War in 1991, when the Iraqi government began buying scrap metal from its citizens.
Until then, he said, the minefields had been largely cordoned off – though victims were reported as early as the 1980s.
Canan, who lost a leg in a landmine explosion, said his artificial limb was not well made and he cannot walk properly. He expects to wait a year for a replacement.
The Centre for Artificial Limbs in Basra was established in 1995 to provide aid to landmine victims. It is the only centre of its kind in southern Iraq and has about 600 people on its waiting list.
Dr Kamal Yacoub, the centre’s director, says it is not equipped to cope with the demand.
“The centre produces 50 to 60 artificial limbs a month on average and can serve the same number of handicapped people, about 70 per cent of whom are landmine victims,” he said.
The centre has also helped landmine victims with micro-financing projects, enabling them to invest in small businesses and raising livestock. Sewing machines are available for maimed women.
Lafta tried to start a sewing business at home with seed money provided by the centre. “But the family was always in need and it did not take long before the money was all gone,” she said.
Ali Abu Iraq is an IWPR-trained journalist in Basra.
NEW WAVE OF VIOLENCE AGAINST IRAQI GAYS
Rights advocate speaks of an "extraordinarily brutal campaign", saying hundreds may have been killed in last few months.
By IWPR trainees in Baghdad
Iraqi gays are being targeted and killed in what rights campaigners say is some of the worst violence against the community in recent years.
At least 68 gay and transgendered men have been killed over the last four months, according to the London-based rights advocacy group Iraqi LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), bringing the total number of killings of Iraqis because of their sexuality to 678 since 2004.
New York-based Human Rights Watch, which recently conducted field investigations on the violence, estimates that hundreds of homosexual men may have been killed in recent months.
Scott Long, a senior Human Rights Watch representative, described the killings as an "extraordinarily brutal campaign" targeting gay, transgender and effeminate men in several provinces.
"I am so afraid that I will be killed," said Samir, a 20-year-old gay Baghdad resident, who preferred not to give his surname.
"People do not understand that I have been created like this. Those who claim to be religious are disgusted by me."
Effeminate men are being targeted whether or not they are gay, but transgender men, particularly those taking hormones, face the most danger, said Ali Hili, Iraqi LGBT chair.
Iraqi LGBT and HRW believe that Shia militias are the primary perpetrators of the violence and say the majority of killings have occurred in Shia areas in south/central Iraq (including the towns of Ammarah, Najaf, Karbala and Basra) and Baghdad’s Sadr City district, the stronghold of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army.
This is based in part on reports of harassment and torture by Shia militias from victims who survived attacks.
“Sadr City was one of the areas where a lot of the killings appeared to be taking place … We talked to people in hospitals and morgues where bodies were coming in. Live victims were coming in with things like their anuses being filled with glue,” Long said.
Hili said names of individuals "wanted" for homosexuality have been posted in Shia neighbourhoods.
“Shia militias are ... [conducting] a killing, harassment…campaign against [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people in Iraq. They quite clearly have a specific target and tend toward sexual cleansing in Iraq,” he said.
While no group has said it’s behind the killings, Iraqi LGBT and HRW believe that elements of the Mehdi Army may be among the militants implicated in the violence, particularly in Sadr City.
Hili and Long also point out that smaller extremist Shia militias have openly threatened gays.
But both activists caution that it is difficult to know which militia is responsible for what in Iraq as most don't admit to crimes they’ve committed. It’s "always difficult to pin down exact accountability of militias in Iraq”, Long said.
Nonetheless, Long suggested that some members of Mehdi Army were trying to act as "agents of moral regeneration" in an attempt to regain some control over Shia neighbourhoods, following massive military operations that weakened the militia.
"My sense is that they probably initiated the campaign [of violence] because the Mehdi Army was trying to come back," he said.
“It is pretty clear that sermons started being preached in Shia mosques, particularly ones in areas that are heavily influenced by the Sadrists earlier this year, on the dangers of homosexuality [in the weeks prior to the wave of killings].”
Hili suspects Mehdi Army involvement in the violence in Sadr City because they are “are ruling and acting as a government [there]. There is no other force in Sadr City but Mehdi Army”.
Jasim al-Jabiri, a Mehdi Army leader in Sadr City, denied that the militia has played any party in the killing homosexuals in the district.
"The tribes to which the gays belonged killed them,” he said. “They consider them a shame on [the tribe].
“The Iraqi community rejects [gays] as disgusting and despicable."
And Sheikh Sayid al-Battat, a Sadr loyalist, said the perpetrators of crimes against homosexuals should be brought to justice.
"No party, whoever it might be, is above the law," Battat said. "Anyone proven guilty will be punished by Iraqi legislation and laws."
Sadr recently scorned homosexuality but warned against attacking gays.
He has launched a youth-targeted religious morality campaign to discourage "depravity", including homosexuality. Battat said that clerics deem homosexuality "a deviation from religious laws and will stand against it through preaching and guidance".
Iraqi LGBT and HRW also suspect police officers may be involved in the violence. They say some victims who survived torture or beatings reported their assailants were wearing uniforms. One said he was taken to an interior ministry building in Baghdad earlier this year, Long said.
Hili said his organisation receives reports of policemen arresting gays and handing them over to militias. “I think we’ve become a main target for extremist militias and even the Iraqi police,” he said.
Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the ministry of interior's official spokesman, denied the allegations.
"The police have nothing to do with these killings,” he said. “The police are launching an investigation to find the killers."
Currently, the interior ministry is only probing the murders of six homosexuals who were killed in Sadr City in April, but has not made any arrests. Khalaf said the ministry had no information about additional cases in which gays have been targeted.
Meanwhile, many gays in Baghdad are changing their appearance to make them less of a target. Fitted jeans and t-shirts have been replaced with baggier clothing. Hairdressers who cater for a gay clientele say customers who typically wore their hair longer are now requesting more masculine closely-cropped styles.
Some gays are even carrying guns for self-defence.
The United States early last month condemned anti-homosexual attacks and said the US embassy is raising the issue with senior Iraqi officials.
A number of local politicians have also spoken out against the killings. Rasheed Ismail, a representative of the Iraqi Communist party in Baghdad, called for protective legislation.
"Gays are not a huge population in Iraq, so why are they being killed and having their rights trampled on?" he asked.
Rights advocates see a bleak future for Iraqi gays, arguing that those under threat need to be granted asylum in western countries. Neighbouring states are not good options because they also persecute homosexuals, Long said.
Two IWPR-trained journalists, whose identities cannot be revealed for security reasons, reported from Baghdad. IWPR Iraq editor Tiare Rath reported from New York.
BASRA PLAGUED BY MINE MENACE
UN critical of pace of landmine clearance, warning it’ll be decades before targets met.
By Ali Abu Iraq in Basra
Sadiya Khalaf Lafta limped over to her friend’s wedding, knowing she has little chance of getting married herself, despite her good looks. Her mother says she wept while the guests ululated in celebration.
“What good is a one-legged woman to any man?” Lafta asks, having stepped on a landmine while herding sheep near the Iranian border 15 years ago. She is still haunted by the memory of seeing her limb blown off before she blacked out.
Lafta’s village, Jurf al-Milh, meaning “salt bank” in Arabic, lies on the eastern shore of the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the province of Basra.
The area is littered with millions of unexploded ordnance – mainly landmines and cluster bombs from recent conflicts.
Iraq is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world and has made little progress towards removing them.
A report released this week by the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, and Iraq’s environment ministry warned that the country is unlikely to meet its commitment to eliminate all landmines by 2018.
Iraq is estimated to have 20 million landmines and 2.66 million cluster bombs spread out over more than 1,700 square kilometres. Only 20 square kilometres have been cleared by demining organisations since Iraq signed up to the UN’s Mine Ban Treaty in February 2008.
The UN estimated that more than 1.6 million people are affected by the landmines. UNICEF reported that one million children are at risk.
Paolo Lembo, UNDP’s country director for Iraq, said in a statement that the government “will take decades to clear all mines and unexploded ordnance”, given its current capacities.
According to Ala Majid, director of Al-Rafidain Demining Organisation, an Iraqi NGO, landmine removal work ground to a halt last December because of conflicts between the defence, interior and environment ministries over who was in charge.
But news agencies have reported that the ministry of defence halted demining operations over concerns that the explosives were being sold to insurgents.
The Basra region has about seven million landmines, Majid said. His organisation has an annual budget of 2.2 million US dollars.
He estimated that only ten per cent of landmines have been cleared, despite efforts by non-governmental organisations and support from the UN over the past five years. Majid predicted the region will not be rid of its landmines before 2030.
The area, once famous for the cultivation of palm trees, has been cursed by its proximity to the Iranian and Kuwaiti borders. Much of the farmland is now mined. Even new reconstruction projects – such as a water treatment plant in Basra - are on hold because of landmines and other unexploded ordnance, the UN agencies say.
Abd al-Mutalib Abd al-Dyim, head of the Iraqi Society for Mine Removal and Land Reclamation in Shatt al-Arab county, estimated that 400 of the 2,500 people living in the area are landmine victims. Most of them are women and children, he said.
The landmines were first laid during the Iran-Iraq war. “They have threatened people’s lives ever since,” Dyim said.
Shatt al-Arab residents are traditionally shepherds. In recent decades, they have adopted a profitable yet deadly trade, becoming expert at dismantling abandoned weapons to recycle as scrap metal.
“It was not uncommon for a man to take home and disassemble rockets in front of his own family,” Dyim said. “There are a lot of stories here about the catastrophic accidents that occurred as a result."
Abu Mohammed, a man with an artificial leg and the battered face of a smallpox victim, is not yet 50 but looks at least twenty years older. He lives in a small, mud house among narrow alleyways dotted with heaps of garbage and filthy pools of water.
Chain-smoking throughout the interview, Abu Mohammed said he had made a living ransacking abandoned military positions during the UN-imposed sanctions in the 1990s.
“That was the only job available to us,” he said. “One day, despite all my caution and experience, I got caught in one of those minefields and the blast damaged my eyesight and my leg.
“Two years later, my son Mohammed also lost a leg looking for scraps from the war. And then my younger son Nizar lost both his legs while shepherding the only three lambs we had left from the flocks of the good old days.”
The interview with Abu Mohammed was interrupted by the angry cries of a woman inside his house. “What good have these people done, showing up with their cameras to photograph us when we can barely afford our bread?” she said.
Another woman responded in a louder voice, “Shut up you fool! Some good may come of this. Let’s wait and see. We have nothing to lose.”
Abu Mohammed chuckled, and explained, “My wives never stop bickering.”
Iyad Jiri al-Canan, a local sheikh and member of a demining committee, said the minefields became a source of livelihood for scavengers after the first Gulf War in 1991, when the Iraqi government began buying scrap metal from its citizens.
Until then, he said, the minefields had been largely cordoned off – though victims were reported as early as the 1980s.
Canan, who lost a leg in a landmine explosion, said his artificial limb was not well made and he cannot walk properly. He expects to wait a year for a replacement.
The Centre for Artificial Limbs in Basra was established in 1995 to provide aid to landmine victims. It is the only centre of its kind in southern Iraq and has about 600 people on its waiting list.
Dr Kamal Yacoub, the centre’s director, says it is not equipped to cope with the demand.
“The centre produces 50 to 60 artificial limbs a month on average and can serve the same number of handicapped people, about 70 per cent of whom are landmine victims,” he said.
The centre has also helped landmine victims with micro-financing projects, enabling them to invest in small businesses and raising livestock. Sewing machines are available for maimed women.
Lafta tried to start a sewing business at home with seed money provided by the centre. “But the family was always in need and it did not take long before the money was all gone,” she said.
Ali Abu Iraq is an IWPR-trained journalist in Basra.
Afghan Recovery Report No. 324
Institute for War & Peace Reporting
HELMANDIS BRACED FOR TALEBAN BATTLE
Local residents greet massive marine offensive with equal measures of hope and fear.
By Mohammad Ilyas Dayee and Aziz Ahmad Tassak
The residents of Nawa, in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, are not accustomed to seeing foreign soldiers on their streets. In fact, for most of the past year they have not seen even their own military – Nawa has been under Taleban control.
That changed on July 2, when a combined force of 4,000 United States Marines and 650 Afghan troops, along with 50 aircraft and dozens of combat vehicles, rolled out their biggest offensive since Fallujah, in Iraq, in 2004.
Operation Khanjar (dagger thrust) is no ordinary military action. Its aim, according to the officers in charge, is to win the hearts and minds of Helmandis. Instead of the “clear and withdraw” tactics of previous years, which did little more than temporarily displace the insurgents, Operation Khanjar will leave foreign troops holding an area, making it possible to conduct reconstruction and development.
“What makes Operation Khanjar different from those that have occurred before is the massive size of the force introduced, the speed at which it will insert, and the fact that where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold, build and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces,” said Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, commanding general of the Marine Expeditionary Brigade-Afghanistan, in a statement issued on July 2.
But they will have an uphill battle convincing war-weary Afghans that this time things will be different.
“I cannot remember a single operation involving foreign soldiers that has not resulted in civilian casualties,” said Pacha, a resident of Lashkar Gah whose family is in Nawa. “I called my father a few minutes ago and told him to get the family out of the house, to come here.”
The issue of civilian casualties is a contentious one, and has caused considerable tension between the Afghan government and the foreign community over the past year. But the recently appointed US military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has made the protection of civilians his highest priority. In late June, he issued a new tactical directive, calling on troops in battle to take particular care to avoid endangering non-combatants, especially when calling in air strikes.
“We have been fully assured that there will not be any civilian casualties in this operation,” said Daoud Ahmadi, spokesman for the Helmand governor. “We are confident that this operation will be conducted with extreme care.”
Ahmadi said that the operation would target Nawa, Garmsir, Nad Ali, and Greshk districts.
Even without the air strikes that have killed hundreds of civilians in recent months, many Afghans are unhappy about the presence of foreign troops in their backyard.
“Our entire village is surrounded,” said Sefatullah, a resident of a village in Nad Ali called 31 West. “The foreigners are driving their tanks in our fields. They will not let anyone come out of their houses.”
A resident of Nawa had a similar tale.
“There are more than 60 tanks in our fields,” said Sher Agha. “Why can’t they drive on the roads? Do they think they are going to find Taleban in our fields? They are causing enormous damage.”
The Taleban have offered little resistance so far, although some residents reported the sound of heavy machine-gun fire, and one said that a few rockets had landed on his village in Nawa.
“There is no fighting yet, but…there have been a huge number of airplanes patrolling,” said Sharafuddin, in Nawa. “I can see the Taleban. They are sitting on the riverbank, just watching, and preparing themselves for the fight.”
In Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, life is going on normally, although the sound of explosions can be heard faintly, according to residents and foreign visitors. Shops are open, and people are out on the streets. There was even an election rally on July 2 by about 2,000 women in support of President Hamed Karzai.
Afghanistan is holding presidential elections on August 20, and one of the stated reasons for Operation Khanjar is to provide a more secure environment for the poll. If the turnout is too low, say observers, it could compromise the result, and throw doubt on the legitimacy of the victor.
“This operation is to bring peace and opportunity for employment of people,” said Helmand governor Gulab Mangal. “We want to create the opportunity for people to participate in the elections.”
While there are those who are angered by the heavy foreign troop presence, significant numbers of locals are tired of living under the Taleban, and are relieved that the insurgents may soon be gone.
“This operation will be good if done correctly,” said Abed, a resident of Nawa. “We would love to live in peace, and without the Taleban authoritarianism.”
According to Abed, the Taleban have left his area and are congregating in Khosrabad village.
“They are just waiting for the fight,” he said. “I am very happy that they are gone. We have a lot of houses here, and if anyone drops a bomb it will kill a lot of people.”
A resident of Khosrabad, who did not want to give his name for fear of the Taleban, confirmed that there was now a heavy insurgent presence in his village.
“The Taleban are telling people to leave, to get out of their houses,” he said. “This is the opposite of what they usually do. They used to make people stay, to use them as shields.”
The Taleban, for their part, say they are preparing for battle.
“We will fight until our last breath,” said Mullah Abdullah, a local Taleban commander in Helmand, who returned to Nawa just a few days ago. He was seriously injured in a skirmish with international forces in May, and had gone to Pakistan for treatment. He is now back, and ready for jihad.
“This operation will not have any result. The Taleban will never let the Americans and these other kofirs (infidels) control the villages. We will fight until our last breath.”
The Taleban have already claimed at least one victim: press reports indicate that one marine was killed and several others wounded or injured during the first day of fighting.
Helmandis, meanwhile, are a bit puzzled about all the hardware. The Taleban cannot be defeated with a frontal assault, they say. Guerrilla warfare, or so-called asymmetric combat is hard on the larger army, and on the civilians caught in the middle.
“The foreigners are bragging that they will get rid of the Taleban. Give me a break!” said one angry resident in Nad Ali. “They could bring 70,000 soldiers, [but] they still would not be able to do it. One Taleban fighter attacks them from inside a house, then he escapes. The Taleban are never going to get together all in one place, to have a major fight. The only thing they will be able to do is kill civilians.”
Political analyst Wahid Muzhda, who worked as a civil servant under the Taleban regime, is also sceptical about the success of Operation Khanjar.
“With all the soldiers and hardware, it is not going to be difficult to gain control of the areas,” he told IWPR. “But how long are they going to stay? This is the rule of guerrilla warfare: if the guerrillas are facing a decent army, they are not going to stay and fight. They will flee, and come back once the army has left.
“Let’s wait until the end of this operation. If the Americans set up bases after gaining control, then it is clear that [President Barack] Obama’s strategy for resolving Afghanistan’s problems is going to be implemented. If not, this invasion is just a tactical move. It’s nothing more than a propaganda campaign for the new general.”
Mohammad Ilyas Dayee and Aziz Ahmad Tassal are IWPR-trained reporters in Helmand. Aziz Ahmad Shafe also contributed to this report from Helmand.
HELMANDIS BRACED FOR TALEBAN BATTLE
Local residents greet massive marine offensive with equal measures of hope and fear.
By Mohammad Ilyas Dayee and Aziz Ahmad Tassak
The residents of Nawa, in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, are not accustomed to seeing foreign soldiers on their streets. In fact, for most of the past year they have not seen even their own military – Nawa has been under Taleban control.
That changed on July 2, when a combined force of 4,000 United States Marines and 650 Afghan troops, along with 50 aircraft and dozens of combat vehicles, rolled out their biggest offensive since Fallujah, in Iraq, in 2004.
Operation Khanjar (dagger thrust) is no ordinary military action. Its aim, according to the officers in charge, is to win the hearts and minds of Helmandis. Instead of the “clear and withdraw” tactics of previous years, which did little more than temporarily displace the insurgents, Operation Khanjar will leave foreign troops holding an area, making it possible to conduct reconstruction and development.
“What makes Operation Khanjar different from those that have occurred before is the massive size of the force introduced, the speed at which it will insert, and the fact that where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold, build and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces,” said Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, commanding general of the Marine Expeditionary Brigade-Afghanistan, in a statement issued on July 2.
But they will have an uphill battle convincing war-weary Afghans that this time things will be different.
“I cannot remember a single operation involving foreign soldiers that has not resulted in civilian casualties,” said Pacha, a resident of Lashkar Gah whose family is in Nawa. “I called my father a few minutes ago and told him to get the family out of the house, to come here.”
The issue of civilian casualties is a contentious one, and has caused considerable tension between the Afghan government and the foreign community over the past year. But the recently appointed US military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has made the protection of civilians his highest priority. In late June, he issued a new tactical directive, calling on troops in battle to take particular care to avoid endangering non-combatants, especially when calling in air strikes.
“We have been fully assured that there will not be any civilian casualties in this operation,” said Daoud Ahmadi, spokesman for the Helmand governor. “We are confident that this operation will be conducted with extreme care.”
Ahmadi said that the operation would target Nawa, Garmsir, Nad Ali, and Greshk districts.
Even without the air strikes that have killed hundreds of civilians in recent months, many Afghans are unhappy about the presence of foreign troops in their backyard.
“Our entire village is surrounded,” said Sefatullah, a resident of a village in Nad Ali called 31 West. “The foreigners are driving their tanks in our fields. They will not let anyone come out of their houses.”
A resident of Nawa had a similar tale.
“There are more than 60 tanks in our fields,” said Sher Agha. “Why can’t they drive on the roads? Do they think they are going to find Taleban in our fields? They are causing enormous damage.”
The Taleban have offered little resistance so far, although some residents reported the sound of heavy machine-gun fire, and one said that a few rockets had landed on his village in Nawa.
“There is no fighting yet, but…there have been a huge number of airplanes patrolling,” said Sharafuddin, in Nawa. “I can see the Taleban. They are sitting on the riverbank, just watching, and preparing themselves for the fight.”
In Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, life is going on normally, although the sound of explosions can be heard faintly, according to residents and foreign visitors. Shops are open, and people are out on the streets. There was even an election rally on July 2 by about 2,000 women in support of President Hamed Karzai.
Afghanistan is holding presidential elections on August 20, and one of the stated reasons for Operation Khanjar is to provide a more secure environment for the poll. If the turnout is too low, say observers, it could compromise the result, and throw doubt on the legitimacy of the victor.
“This operation is to bring peace and opportunity for employment of people,” said Helmand governor Gulab Mangal. “We want to create the opportunity for people to participate in the elections.”
While there are those who are angered by the heavy foreign troop presence, significant numbers of locals are tired of living under the Taleban, and are relieved that the insurgents may soon be gone.
“This operation will be good if done correctly,” said Abed, a resident of Nawa. “We would love to live in peace, and without the Taleban authoritarianism.”
According to Abed, the Taleban have left his area and are congregating in Khosrabad village.
“They are just waiting for the fight,” he said. “I am very happy that they are gone. We have a lot of houses here, and if anyone drops a bomb it will kill a lot of people.”
A resident of Khosrabad, who did not want to give his name for fear of the Taleban, confirmed that there was now a heavy insurgent presence in his village.
“The Taleban are telling people to leave, to get out of their houses,” he said. “This is the opposite of what they usually do. They used to make people stay, to use them as shields.”
The Taleban, for their part, say they are preparing for battle.
“We will fight until our last breath,” said Mullah Abdullah, a local Taleban commander in Helmand, who returned to Nawa just a few days ago. He was seriously injured in a skirmish with international forces in May, and had gone to Pakistan for treatment. He is now back, and ready for jihad.
“This operation will not have any result. The Taleban will never let the Americans and these other kofirs (infidels) control the villages. We will fight until our last breath.”
The Taleban have already claimed at least one victim: press reports indicate that one marine was killed and several others wounded or injured during the first day of fighting.
Helmandis, meanwhile, are a bit puzzled about all the hardware. The Taleban cannot be defeated with a frontal assault, they say. Guerrilla warfare, or so-called asymmetric combat is hard on the larger army, and on the civilians caught in the middle.
“The foreigners are bragging that they will get rid of the Taleban. Give me a break!” said one angry resident in Nad Ali. “They could bring 70,000 soldiers, [but] they still would not be able to do it. One Taleban fighter attacks them from inside a house, then he escapes. The Taleban are never going to get together all in one place, to have a major fight. The only thing they will be able to do is kill civilians.”
Political analyst Wahid Muzhda, who worked as a civil servant under the Taleban regime, is also sceptical about the success of Operation Khanjar.
“With all the soldiers and hardware, it is not going to be difficult to gain control of the areas,” he told IWPR. “But how long are they going to stay? This is the rule of guerrilla warfare: if the guerrillas are facing a decent army, they are not going to stay and fight. They will flee, and come back once the army has left.
“Let’s wait until the end of this operation. If the Americans set up bases after gaining control, then it is clear that [President Barack] Obama’s strategy for resolving Afghanistan’s problems is going to be implemented. If not, this invasion is just a tactical move. It’s nothing more than a propaganda campaign for the new general.”
Mohammad Ilyas Dayee and Aziz Ahmad Tassal are IWPR-trained reporters in Helmand. Aziz Ahmad Shafe also contributed to this report from Helmand.
Caucasus Reporting Service No. 500
Institute for War & Peace Reporting
BAKU’S WARMING TIES TO ISRAEL ANGER IRAN
Tehran’s attempt to scupper Israeli president’s visit gets nowhere, as Baku decides ties to Israel take priority over Islamic solidarity.
By Kenan Guluzade in Baku
The first visit by a president of Israel to independent Azerbaijan has caused a diplomatic rupture between Baku and Tehran, as well as highlighting warming ties between the Central Asian republic and the Jewish state.
President Shimon Peres made his official visit to Azerbaijan on June 28-29. The countries signed two agreements, on cooperation in the fields of science, education and culture and on information and communication technologies.
Israel has maintained an embassy in Baku since the early Nineties, shortly after Azerbaijan declared independence from the Soviet Union.
Baku has not yet reciprocated by opening an embassy in Israel. Nor have Israeli officials been invited to visit the overwhelmingly Muslim country until recently.
Boyukaga Agayev, head of South Caucasus Research Centre, said the Israeli visit had been symbolically significant as well as posing dilemmas for a state like Azerbaijan, which was Muslim but secular – and keen to have feet in several camps.
“Azerbaijan is a secular state but most of the population is Muslim and overfriendly relations with Israel might be misinterpreted by allies in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference as a breach of Muslim unity,” Agayev said.
“This organisation supports Baku in opposition to Yerevan,” he added, referring to Azerbaijan’s rancorous dispute with its neighbour Armenia over the territory of Nagorny Karabakh.
A separate problem was Iran – a regional partner of Azerbaijan in the OIC but a bitter foe of Israel. “Tehran actively objects to us opening an embassy in Israel as well as to the visit of officials from that country to Baku,” Agayev continued.
One day before Perez’s visit, Iran reminded Azerbaijan of its feelings on the issue, urging Baku to close the Israeli embassy and describing the visit of the Israeli head of state as an insult to the Islamic world.
Azerbaijan’s foreign minister, Elmar Mammadyarov, replied that Baku would do no such thing while Iran remained friendly to archenemy Armenia.
“Iran’s declaration about the need to close the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan is surprising,” he said, noting that Iran continued to “receive officials from Armenia at the highest level”.
After Iran’s protest failed to have any effect, Tehran recalled its ambassador to Baku, Muhammad Bagir Bahrami, “for consultations” while Perez was in the country.
Baku’s cool response to Tehran’s blustering reflects the fact that ties between Azerbaijan and Israel have become increasingly important for both countries.
The value of trade between the countries has risen to 3.6 billion US dollars annually, based on figures for 2008, substantially as a result of Azerbaijani oil exported to Israel through the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
Political scientist Rasim Musabayov says Tehran has little leverage over Baku, as a result of the growing mutual interests between Azerbaijan and Israel over trade and energy.
“Israel is interested in a relationship with a secular Muslim country, which is at the same time an energy supplier,” Musabayov noted.
“Israel is also the third buyer of Azerbaijan’s oil in terms of volume.
“Meanwhile Israel wishes to export agricultural products and technology to Azerbaijan and, as it emerged during Perez’s visit, military equipment as well.”
The Jewish community in – and from – Azerbaijan is another link between the two states.
More than 30,000 Jews still live in Azerbaijan. During the Soviet era, that number exceeded 100,000. Those who have migrated to Israel are seen as lobbyists for the interests of Azerbaijan in Israel – a fact to which Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliev, referred during Perez’s visit.
“The Jewish lobby gives great support to Azerbaijan in international organisations and US,” Boyukaga Agayev said.
“The economic and political relationship [between the two states] makes the partnership of Azerbaijan and Israel inevitable – in spite of the possibly negative reaction of the OIC and Iran above all.”
Not everyone in Azerbaijan appreciates the burgeoning alliance between their country and Israel, however.
Some politicians and public figures strongly objected to Perez’s visit, especially those with religious sensibilities.
“Perez’s visit is appreciated very negatively from the point of view of Muslim unity, and as a Muslim I don’t want to host a person responsible for the recent Holocaust in the Gaza Strip,” said Haji Ilgar Ibrahimoglu, head of the Centre for Protection of Freedom Conscience and Religion.
The theologian was referring to Israel’s controversial military action against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
“It is especially bad to do this at a time when Baku is claiming it is centre of Islamic culture,” Ibrahimoglu noted.
“That doesn’t mean I support Iran… I also oppose the fraternisation between Tehran and Yerevan and [Armenian president] Serj Sargsyan’s visits to Muslim countries. I am just against people and countries that act aggressively to, and terrorise, Muslims.”
The theologian insisted he was not motivated by any feelings of anti-semitism.
“Jews are my brothers and sisters; they are very wise and talented,” he said. “I don’t associate the whole of Israel with terror and Zionism just as I don’t associate all Muslims with Taleban and al-Qaeda.”
Opposition on the part of active Muslims to Perez’s visit to Baku did not develop into mass protests.
Even Nardaran, a religiously conservative Muslim suburb of Baku, where the population is very supportive of Iran – and where they frequently demonstrate this by burning US and Israeli flags – saw no disturbances.
Political scientist Rasim Musabayov said the lack of a response on the streets to the Israeli visit was not surprising.
“The support base within Azerbaijan for Iran’s position is very weak,” he said. “In any case, Azerbaijan is a secular country.”
As for the simultaneous arrival in Baku of Russian president Dmitriy Medvedev while Perez was also there, this was another warning signal to Iran to back away.
Concerning plans to open an Azerbaijan embassy in Israel, Rasim Musabayov is sure of one thing, “It will be opened even sooner if Iran continues with its negative campaign.”
Kenan Guluzade is a Baku-based journalist.
UN WITHDRAWAL LEAVES BORDER GEORGIANS FEARFUL
Georgian minority in Abkhazia feels especially exposed now international monitor are packing their bags.
By Irakli Lagvilava in Zugdidi and Anaid Gogorian in Sukhum
United Nations observers are pulling out of Georgia, leaving many people who live in the conflict zone that they have been monitoring afraid for their security and prompting predictions of an escalation of tension.
The withdrawal process started on June 30 and is to be completed by the end of July.
The UN Observer Mission in Georgia, UNOMIG, was established in 1993. The mandate of its roughly 130 observers was extended for what we now know was the last time in February 2009.
On June 15, however, Russia torpedoed the mission, vetoing a UN Security Council draft resolution that sought a technical extension of the mandate.
Russia voted against the resolution because the mission’s title continued to describe it as a “mission in Georgia”. Moscow insists that breakaway Abkazia and South Ossetia are now independent states.
Earlier, the Permanent Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe failed to reach an agreement on an extension to OSCE monitoring operations in breakaway South Ossetia. The OSCE mission had been operating there since 1992.
The authorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, controversially recognised by Russia as independent states after a brief war last August, said they were willing to accept international observers remaining on their soil.
But they set a high price. They said they would do so only after the international community endorsed their declarations of independence – declarations that Tbilisi maintains are illegal.
The statements prompted an angry response from Georgia, from which the two lands effectively broke away in the 1990s.
Fears have been voiced in Tbilisi that without the presence of international observers, jitters in Georgia’s conflict zones with Abkhazia and South Ossetia may increase. They say foreign observers helped avert worse trouble.
Shota Malashkhia, who chairs the Georgian parliament’s temporary commission for the restoration of territorial integrity of the country, said there was a danger that Russia and its allies were deliberately upping tensions in the region.
“With the observers withdrawing, provocations in the region should not be ruled out,” he said.
“After last year’s war and in the light of the global economic turbulence, Russia cannot afford to embark on fresh large-scale aggression against Georgia.
“But it does want to see the situation here becoming strained.”
Malashkhia said the only way to prevent this tension in the conflict zone from continuing to grow was to deploy new international observers – preferably from the European Union.
“EU observers should be allowed to take the place of UNOMIG,” he said, referring to the UN mission’s acronym. “Russia has no right to hamper them from carrying out monitoring activities in Abkhazia.”
The opposition political movement, the Alliance for Georgia, for once agreeing with the government’s analysis of the situation, described UNOMIG’s withdrawal as a “tragedy”.
“Shutting up the UN Observer Mission in Georgia poses a great threat to the security of the country,” one of the leaders of the alliance, Victor Dolidze, said.
A Georgian expert, Gia Nodia, described Russia’s move to veto any extension of the UNOMIG mandate as part of its strategy aimed at forcing Georgia to accept the loss of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Russia was following a “consistent policy aimed at changing all the existing formats of negotiations to adjust them to the much-talked-about ‘new realities’, which means ensuring that Abkhazia and South Ossetia participate in negotiations as independent states”, Nodia said.
Whether this strategy gets anywhere remains to be seen, the same analyst continued. “Russia wants the West to recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia but the West won’t do so, [so] I don’t think anything is going to change anywhere in the near future.”
Meanwhile, officials in the breakaway statelets have eyed the departure of the UN with mixed feelings. Some officials in Sukhum, capital of Abkhazia, said they did not wish to see the observers go, viewing them as a valuable conduit linking these isolated countries to the world stage.
“We were interested in the mission continuing its work,” the Abkhaz foreign minister, Sergei Shamba, said.
“[The mission] opened contacts for us, making it possible for us to participate in the international [diplomatic] process; our problem would be discussed at UN Security Council meetings.
“But we couldn’t have agreed to a new mandate if it contained even a slightest mention of Abkhazia as part of Georgia. We were ready to preserve the mission, but not at any price.”
Irakli Khintba, a lecturer at the Abkhaz State University, agreed.
“It was through the reports of the UN Secretary General that the world received quite balanced information about whatever processes were taking place in Abkhazia,” he said.
“That is why the mission’s withdrawal will probably spell for Abkhazia a loss of an important means of accessing public opinion in the West and the entire world.
“In the long run, it may make it still more difficult for Abkhazia to achieve international recognition.”
Meanwhile, the withdrawal of the observers has left the population in the conflict zone on both sides of the de facto border feeling nervous.
The Georgian minority living on the Abkhaz side is especially concerned for its future.
People in the mainly Georgian Gali district of Abkhazia say that the UN mission has up to now been the main source of their sense of safety.
There are still more than 200 EU observers in Georgia but they are not allowed to enter Abkhazia. The EU observers may only patrol the Georgian-controlled part of the conflict zone and have no access to the Gali district.
“The UN cars used to patrol our village, and we would feel more secure,” Natela, 72, who lives in the village of Nabakevi, in Gali, said. “The end of the mission to me means the end of the hope for peace.”
“Of course, the UN mission had no police functions, and they did not investigate incidents, but they did prevent violence against civilians,” agreed Natela’s fellow villager, Zurab, 45. “I’m afraid life will become less safe here now they’re leaving.”
People who often cross the administrative border hope some new form of observer force can be set up and vested with greater powers.
“The international organisations, together with the conflicting parties, should try to create a monitoring group endowed with police powers,” said a member of the exiled pro-Tbilisi administration in Gali.
“But neither the Russians, nor the Georgians and Abkhaz are ready to take the step yet. And, as a result, ordinary people, who have been living perpetually in fear for 16 years now, continue to suffer.”
There seems scant chance of such a breakthrough now, however. The Abkhaz leader, Sergei Bagapsh, has declared that after the UN mission withdraws from Abkhazia, “no other international [monitoring] organisation will have a presence in the republic”.
Irakli Lagvilava and Anaid Gogorian are IWPR contributors.
ARMENIA: DEPARTING PHONE GIANT CLAIMS UNFAIR COMPETITION
Russian firm’s pull-out reignites debate on extent of illegal imports.
By Armenak Chatinian in Yerevan
Unfair competition is being blamed by Russia’s largest mobile handset retailer for its decision to quit the Armenian market.
Euroset, which emerged in Armenia in 2006, cornered a stake of between 10 and 20 per cent of the mobile phone market in the country.
Alexander Malis, president of Euroset, told IWPR that he had closed all 12 Armenian branches after concluding the playing field was far from even.
As a major dealer, Euroset had been able to set low prices for its appliances, Malis said.
“In spite of that, we still couldn’t compete with the local players in price terms because only a few of them imported the goods legally,” he added.
“Our company policy is to obey the laws of the country in which we are working. Unfortunately, not all other market players take this seriously.”
Malis insisted the company would re-enter the Armenian market only if its rivals obeyed the law so that everyone operated in a fair, open environment, Malis said.
The company’s withdrawal from Armenia comes as the country is being especially hard hit by recession.
Between January and May 2009, gross domestic product, GDP, fell by 15.7 per cent compared to the same period last year.
Budgets have been revised downwards as tax revenues for the first quarter of 2009 tumbled by 16 per cent compared to this time last year.
Like many other companies, Euroset was finding its operations in Armenia increasingly unprofitable.
But the state revenue committee rejected the company’s claims of unfair competition. It said a total of 44 firms imported mobile phones into Armenia and “each..pays the taxes prescribed by law”.
However, Euroset is not alone in complaining about the alleged inequity of the Armenian mobile phone market.
One local representative of a small business said illegal imports of cell phones were common.
A popular way to import phones without paying import taxes on them, he said, was to have the new devices registered by airport customs as “accessories” to existing phones.
The dealer said he sometimes used this method himself in order not to pay duties and taxes on his imports. In this way, he felt able to compete with larger companies operating in the market.
Other companies have reportedly tried to escape duties by concealing imported phones. The only risk with this strategy was losing the phones to vigilant customs officials.
“There is a big risk in importing mobile phones illegally because customs officials can detect the goods at any time and confiscate them,” the dealer said.
Armenia’s customs service does periodically clamp down on such illegal imports.
In February 2009, for example, officials mounting an on-the-spot inspection of passengers on a flight from Dubai uncovered 54 phones on one passenger.
But another businessman working in the same field said the mobile phone market in Armenia was so competitive that small businessmen stood no chance of competing if they paid customs on imported handsets.
“If small-scale importers don’t use illegal methods, they just can’t compete in the local price field,” he said.
Few outside experts or international watchdogs doubt that corruption in general remains a major problem in the Armenian economy – as it does throughout the Caucasus.
The Global Corruption Barometer for 2009 published by the watchdog Transparency International also revealed growing public distrust of business throughout the region.
“Businessmen use bribes to influence social policy, laws and rules, in other words they are invading the state,” the survey said.
Transparency International said 38 per cent of respondents to a survey conducted throughout the region viewed their governments’ efforts to fight corruption as ineffective.
Armenak Chatinian is a reporter with Capital daily in Yerevan.
BAKU’S WARMING TIES TO ISRAEL ANGER IRAN
Tehran’s attempt to scupper Israeli president’s visit gets nowhere, as Baku decides ties to Israel take priority over Islamic solidarity.
By Kenan Guluzade in Baku
The first visit by a president of Israel to independent Azerbaijan has caused a diplomatic rupture between Baku and Tehran, as well as highlighting warming ties between the Central Asian republic and the Jewish state.
President Shimon Peres made his official visit to Azerbaijan on June 28-29. The countries signed two agreements, on cooperation in the fields of science, education and culture and on information and communication technologies.
Israel has maintained an embassy in Baku since the early Nineties, shortly after Azerbaijan declared independence from the Soviet Union.
Baku has not yet reciprocated by opening an embassy in Israel. Nor have Israeli officials been invited to visit the overwhelmingly Muslim country until recently.
Boyukaga Agayev, head of South Caucasus Research Centre, said the Israeli visit had been symbolically significant as well as posing dilemmas for a state like Azerbaijan, which was Muslim but secular – and keen to have feet in several camps.
“Azerbaijan is a secular state but most of the population is Muslim and overfriendly relations with Israel might be misinterpreted by allies in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference as a breach of Muslim unity,” Agayev said.
“This organisation supports Baku in opposition to Yerevan,” he added, referring to Azerbaijan’s rancorous dispute with its neighbour Armenia over the territory of Nagorny Karabakh.
A separate problem was Iran – a regional partner of Azerbaijan in the OIC but a bitter foe of Israel. “Tehran actively objects to us opening an embassy in Israel as well as to the visit of officials from that country to Baku,” Agayev continued.
One day before Perez’s visit, Iran reminded Azerbaijan of its feelings on the issue, urging Baku to close the Israeli embassy and describing the visit of the Israeli head of state as an insult to the Islamic world.
Azerbaijan’s foreign minister, Elmar Mammadyarov, replied that Baku would do no such thing while Iran remained friendly to archenemy Armenia.
“Iran’s declaration about the need to close the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan is surprising,” he said, noting that Iran continued to “receive officials from Armenia at the highest level”.
After Iran’s protest failed to have any effect, Tehran recalled its ambassador to Baku, Muhammad Bagir Bahrami, “for consultations” while Perez was in the country.
Baku’s cool response to Tehran’s blustering reflects the fact that ties between Azerbaijan and Israel have become increasingly important for both countries.
The value of trade between the countries has risen to 3.6 billion US dollars annually, based on figures for 2008, substantially as a result of Azerbaijani oil exported to Israel through the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
Political scientist Rasim Musabayov says Tehran has little leverage over Baku, as a result of the growing mutual interests between Azerbaijan and Israel over trade and energy.
“Israel is interested in a relationship with a secular Muslim country, which is at the same time an energy supplier,” Musabayov noted.
“Israel is also the third buyer of Azerbaijan’s oil in terms of volume.
“Meanwhile Israel wishes to export agricultural products and technology to Azerbaijan and, as it emerged during Perez’s visit, military equipment as well.”
The Jewish community in – and from – Azerbaijan is another link between the two states.
More than 30,000 Jews still live in Azerbaijan. During the Soviet era, that number exceeded 100,000. Those who have migrated to Israel are seen as lobbyists for the interests of Azerbaijan in Israel – a fact to which Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliev, referred during Perez’s visit.
“The Jewish lobby gives great support to Azerbaijan in international organisations and US,” Boyukaga Agayev said.
“The economic and political relationship [between the two states] makes the partnership of Azerbaijan and Israel inevitable – in spite of the possibly negative reaction of the OIC and Iran above all.”
Not everyone in Azerbaijan appreciates the burgeoning alliance between their country and Israel, however.
Some politicians and public figures strongly objected to Perez’s visit, especially those with religious sensibilities.
“Perez’s visit is appreciated very negatively from the point of view of Muslim unity, and as a Muslim I don’t want to host a person responsible for the recent Holocaust in the Gaza Strip,” said Haji Ilgar Ibrahimoglu, head of the Centre for Protection of Freedom Conscience and Religion.
The theologian was referring to Israel’s controversial military action against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
“It is especially bad to do this at a time when Baku is claiming it is centre of Islamic culture,” Ibrahimoglu noted.
“That doesn’t mean I support Iran… I also oppose the fraternisation between Tehran and Yerevan and [Armenian president] Serj Sargsyan’s visits to Muslim countries. I am just against people and countries that act aggressively to, and terrorise, Muslims.”
The theologian insisted he was not motivated by any feelings of anti-semitism.
“Jews are my brothers and sisters; they are very wise and talented,” he said. “I don’t associate the whole of Israel with terror and Zionism just as I don’t associate all Muslims with Taleban and al-Qaeda.”
Opposition on the part of active Muslims to Perez’s visit to Baku did not develop into mass protests.
Even Nardaran, a religiously conservative Muslim suburb of Baku, where the population is very supportive of Iran – and where they frequently demonstrate this by burning US and Israeli flags – saw no disturbances.
Political scientist Rasim Musabayov said the lack of a response on the streets to the Israeli visit was not surprising.
“The support base within Azerbaijan for Iran’s position is very weak,” he said. “In any case, Azerbaijan is a secular country.”
As for the simultaneous arrival in Baku of Russian president Dmitriy Medvedev while Perez was also there, this was another warning signal to Iran to back away.
Concerning plans to open an Azerbaijan embassy in Israel, Rasim Musabayov is sure of one thing, “It will be opened even sooner if Iran continues with its negative campaign.”
Kenan Guluzade is a Baku-based journalist.
UN WITHDRAWAL LEAVES BORDER GEORGIANS FEARFUL
Georgian minority in Abkhazia feels especially exposed now international monitor are packing their bags.
By Irakli Lagvilava in Zugdidi and Anaid Gogorian in Sukhum
United Nations observers are pulling out of Georgia, leaving many people who live in the conflict zone that they have been monitoring afraid for their security and prompting predictions of an escalation of tension.
The withdrawal process started on June 30 and is to be completed by the end of July.
The UN Observer Mission in Georgia, UNOMIG, was established in 1993. The mandate of its roughly 130 observers was extended for what we now know was the last time in February 2009.
On June 15, however, Russia torpedoed the mission, vetoing a UN Security Council draft resolution that sought a technical extension of the mandate.
Russia voted against the resolution because the mission’s title continued to describe it as a “mission in Georgia”. Moscow insists that breakaway Abkazia and South Ossetia are now independent states.
Earlier, the Permanent Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe failed to reach an agreement on an extension to OSCE monitoring operations in breakaway South Ossetia. The OSCE mission had been operating there since 1992.
The authorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, controversially recognised by Russia as independent states after a brief war last August, said they were willing to accept international observers remaining on their soil.
But they set a high price. They said they would do so only after the international community endorsed their declarations of independence – declarations that Tbilisi maintains are illegal.
The statements prompted an angry response from Georgia, from which the two lands effectively broke away in the 1990s.
Fears have been voiced in Tbilisi that without the presence of international observers, jitters in Georgia’s conflict zones with Abkhazia and South Ossetia may increase. They say foreign observers helped avert worse trouble.
Shota Malashkhia, who chairs the Georgian parliament’s temporary commission for the restoration of territorial integrity of the country, said there was a danger that Russia and its allies were deliberately upping tensions in the region.
“With the observers withdrawing, provocations in the region should not be ruled out,” he said.
“After last year’s war and in the light of the global economic turbulence, Russia cannot afford to embark on fresh large-scale aggression against Georgia.
“But it does want to see the situation here becoming strained.”
Malashkhia said the only way to prevent this tension in the conflict zone from continuing to grow was to deploy new international observers – preferably from the European Union.
“EU observers should be allowed to take the place of UNOMIG,” he said, referring to the UN mission’s acronym. “Russia has no right to hamper them from carrying out monitoring activities in Abkhazia.”
The opposition political movement, the Alliance for Georgia, for once agreeing with the government’s analysis of the situation, described UNOMIG’s withdrawal as a “tragedy”.
“Shutting up the UN Observer Mission in Georgia poses a great threat to the security of the country,” one of the leaders of the alliance, Victor Dolidze, said.
A Georgian expert, Gia Nodia, described Russia’s move to veto any extension of the UNOMIG mandate as part of its strategy aimed at forcing Georgia to accept the loss of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Russia was following a “consistent policy aimed at changing all the existing formats of negotiations to adjust them to the much-talked-about ‘new realities’, which means ensuring that Abkhazia and South Ossetia participate in negotiations as independent states”, Nodia said.
Whether this strategy gets anywhere remains to be seen, the same analyst continued. “Russia wants the West to recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia but the West won’t do so, [so] I don’t think anything is going to change anywhere in the near future.”
Meanwhile, officials in the breakaway statelets have eyed the departure of the UN with mixed feelings. Some officials in Sukhum, capital of Abkhazia, said they did not wish to see the observers go, viewing them as a valuable conduit linking these isolated countries to the world stage.
“We were interested in the mission continuing its work,” the Abkhaz foreign minister, Sergei Shamba, said.
“[The mission] opened contacts for us, making it possible for us to participate in the international [diplomatic] process; our problem would be discussed at UN Security Council meetings.
“But we couldn’t have agreed to a new mandate if it contained even a slightest mention of Abkhazia as part of Georgia. We were ready to preserve the mission, but not at any price.”
Irakli Khintba, a lecturer at the Abkhaz State University, agreed.
“It was through the reports of the UN Secretary General that the world received quite balanced information about whatever processes were taking place in Abkhazia,” he said.
“That is why the mission’s withdrawal will probably spell for Abkhazia a loss of an important means of accessing public opinion in the West and the entire world.
“In the long run, it may make it still more difficult for Abkhazia to achieve international recognition.”
Meanwhile, the withdrawal of the observers has left the population in the conflict zone on both sides of the de facto border feeling nervous.
The Georgian minority living on the Abkhaz side is especially concerned for its future.
People in the mainly Georgian Gali district of Abkhazia say that the UN mission has up to now been the main source of their sense of safety.
There are still more than 200 EU observers in Georgia but they are not allowed to enter Abkhazia. The EU observers may only patrol the Georgian-controlled part of the conflict zone and have no access to the Gali district.
“The UN cars used to patrol our village, and we would feel more secure,” Natela, 72, who lives in the village of Nabakevi, in Gali, said. “The end of the mission to me means the end of the hope for peace.”
“Of course, the UN mission had no police functions, and they did not investigate incidents, but they did prevent violence against civilians,” agreed Natela’s fellow villager, Zurab, 45. “I’m afraid life will become less safe here now they’re leaving.”
People who often cross the administrative border hope some new form of observer force can be set up and vested with greater powers.
“The international organisations, together with the conflicting parties, should try to create a monitoring group endowed with police powers,” said a member of the exiled pro-Tbilisi administration in Gali.
“But neither the Russians, nor the Georgians and Abkhaz are ready to take the step yet. And, as a result, ordinary people, who have been living perpetually in fear for 16 years now, continue to suffer.”
There seems scant chance of such a breakthrough now, however. The Abkhaz leader, Sergei Bagapsh, has declared that after the UN mission withdraws from Abkhazia, “no other international [monitoring] organisation will have a presence in the republic”.
Irakli Lagvilava and Anaid Gogorian are IWPR contributors.
ARMENIA: DEPARTING PHONE GIANT CLAIMS UNFAIR COMPETITION
Russian firm’s pull-out reignites debate on extent of illegal imports.
By Armenak Chatinian in Yerevan
Unfair competition is being blamed by Russia’s largest mobile handset retailer for its decision to quit the Armenian market.
Euroset, which emerged in Armenia in 2006, cornered a stake of between 10 and 20 per cent of the mobile phone market in the country.
Alexander Malis, president of Euroset, told IWPR that he had closed all 12 Armenian branches after concluding the playing field was far from even.
As a major dealer, Euroset had been able to set low prices for its appliances, Malis said.
“In spite of that, we still couldn’t compete with the local players in price terms because only a few of them imported the goods legally,” he added.
“Our company policy is to obey the laws of the country in which we are working. Unfortunately, not all other market players take this seriously.”
Malis insisted the company would re-enter the Armenian market only if its rivals obeyed the law so that everyone operated in a fair, open environment, Malis said.
The company’s withdrawal from Armenia comes as the country is being especially hard hit by recession.
Between January and May 2009, gross domestic product, GDP, fell by 15.7 per cent compared to the same period last year.
Budgets have been revised downwards as tax revenues for the first quarter of 2009 tumbled by 16 per cent compared to this time last year.
Like many other companies, Euroset was finding its operations in Armenia increasingly unprofitable.
But the state revenue committee rejected the company’s claims of unfair competition. It said a total of 44 firms imported mobile phones into Armenia and “each..pays the taxes prescribed by law”.
However, Euroset is not alone in complaining about the alleged inequity of the Armenian mobile phone market.
One local representative of a small business said illegal imports of cell phones were common.
A popular way to import phones without paying import taxes on them, he said, was to have the new devices registered by airport customs as “accessories” to existing phones.
The dealer said he sometimes used this method himself in order not to pay duties and taxes on his imports. In this way, he felt able to compete with larger companies operating in the market.
Other companies have reportedly tried to escape duties by concealing imported phones. The only risk with this strategy was losing the phones to vigilant customs officials.
“There is a big risk in importing mobile phones illegally because customs officials can detect the goods at any time and confiscate them,” the dealer said.
Armenia’s customs service does periodically clamp down on such illegal imports.
In February 2009, for example, officials mounting an on-the-spot inspection of passengers on a flight from Dubai uncovered 54 phones on one passenger.
But another businessman working in the same field said the mobile phone market in Armenia was so competitive that small businessmen stood no chance of competing if they paid customs on imported handsets.
“If small-scale importers don’t use illegal methods, they just can’t compete in the local price field,” he said.
Few outside experts or international watchdogs doubt that corruption in general remains a major problem in the Armenian economy – as it does throughout the Caucasus.
The Global Corruption Barometer for 2009 published by the watchdog Transparency International also revealed growing public distrust of business throughout the region.
“Businessmen use bribes to influence social policy, laws and rules, in other words they are invading the state,” the survey said.
Transparency International said 38 per cent of respondents to a survey conducted throughout the region viewed their governments’ efforts to fight corruption as ineffective.
Armenak Chatinian is a reporter with Capital daily in Yerevan.
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