Migrants to China’s West Bask in Prosperity

By ANDREW JACOBS

SHIHEZI, China — They marched through the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and countless small towns propelled by patriotic cheers and thumping drums. It was 1956, and Mao Zedong was calling on China’s youth to “open up the west,” the vast borderland known as Xinjiang that for centuries had defied subjugation.

After a monthlong journey by train and open-air truck, thousands arrived at this Gobi Desert army outpost to find that the factory jobs, hot baths and telephones in every house were nothing but empty promises to lure them to a faraway land.

“We lived in holes in the ground, and all we did night and day was hard labor,” recalled Han Zuxue, a sun-creased 72-year-old who was a teenager when he left his home in eastern Henan Province. “At first we cried every day but over time we forgot our sadness.”

More than five decades of toil later, men and women like Mr. Han have helped transform Shihezi into a tree-shaded, bustling oasis whose canned tomatoes, fiery grain alcohol and enormous cotton yields are famous throughout China.

This city of 650,000 is a showcase of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a uniquely Chinese conglomerate of farms and factories that were created by decommissioned Red Army soldiers at the end of the civil war.

“Put your weapons aside and pick up the tools of construction,” one popular slogan went. “Develop Xinjiang, defend the nation’s borders and protect social stability.”

With a total population of 2.6 million, 95 percent of it ethnic Han Chinese, Shihezi and a string of other settlements created by the military are stable strongholds in a region whose majority non-Han populace has often been unhappy under Beijing’s rule. Last month, that discontent showed itself during vicious ethnic rioting that claimed 197 lives in Urumqi, the regional capital, which is a two-hour drive away.

The government says that most of the dead were Han Chinese bludgeoned by mobs of Uighurs, Muslims of Turkish ancestry whose presence in Xinjiang has been steadily diluted by migration from China’s densely populated east.

“Ever since we arrived they’ve resented us and had no appreciation for how we’ve improved this place,” said He Zhenjie, 76, who has spent his adult life leveling sand dunes, planting trees and digging irrigation ditches. “But we’re here to stay. The Uighurs will never wrest Xinjiang away.”

Even if many Uighurs view the settlers as nothing more than Chinese colonists, many Chinese consider the bingtuan, meaning soldier corps, a major success. In one fell swoop Mao deployed 200,000 idle soldiers to help develop and occupy a resource-rich, politically strategic region bordering India, Mongolia and the Soviet Union, a onetime ally turned menace.

Shihezi and other bingtuan settlements quickly became self-sufficient, a relief to a government lacking resources, and its “reclamation warriors” worked without pay those first few years, steadily turning thousands of acres of inhospitable scrubland into some of the country’s most fertile terrain.

With an annual output of goods and services of $7 billion, the settlements run by the bingtuan include five cities, 180 farming communities and 1,000 companies. They also report directly to Beijing and run their own courts, colleges and newspapers.

“During peaceful times, they are a force for development, but if anything urgent happens, they will step out and maintain social stability and combat the separatists,” said Li Sheng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a former bingtuan member who writes about the region’s history.

In those early years, the ranks of the bingtuan were fortified by petty criminals, former prisoners of war, prostitutes and intellectuals, all sent west for “re-education.” During the mid-1950s, 40,000 young women were lured to Xinjiang with promises of the good life: they arrived to discover their main purpose was to relieve the loneliness of the male pioneers and cement the region’s Han presence through their progeny.

Demographics have always been a tactical element of the campaign to pacify the region. In 1949, when the Communists declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, there were just 300,000 Han Chinese in Xinjiang. Today, the number of Han has grown to 7.5 million, just over 40 percent of the region’s population. The percentage of Uighurs has fallen to 45 percent, or about 8.3 million.

Their grievances have multiplied even as Xinjiang has grown more prosperous, thanks in part to its huge reserves of natural gas, oil and minerals. Many Uighurs complain about the repression of their Islamic faith, official policies that marginalize their language and a lack of job opportunities, especially at government bureaus and inside the bingtuan.

During a recent visit to Shihezi, armed paramilitary policemen stopped every car and bus entering the city. But only Uighurs were made to step out of vehicles for identification checks and searches.

Neatly laid out on a grid, its sidewalks graced by apple trees and elms, the city is populated by the sturdy and defiantly proud who think of Xinjiang as China’s version of Manifest Destiny, the doctrine undergirding the westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century. But just beneath the self-satisfaction runs a deep vein of bitterness, especially among those who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s.

“I thought I was going to be a nurse, but I ended up sweeping the streets and cleaning toilets,” said Yue Caiying, who moved here in 1963, and, like many of those with an education, was forced to set aside personal ambition.

Lu Yiping, an author who spent five years interviewing women trucked into Xinjiang from Hunan Province, tells of girls lured with promises of Russian-language classes and textile-mill jobs. In an interview published online, he told the story of arriving women greeted by Wang Zhen, the famously hard-line general who helped tame the region. “Comrades, you must prepare to bury your bones in Xinjiang,” he quoted Mr. Wang as telling the women.

Still, for many early settlers, Xinjiang offered an escape from the deprivation that stalked many rural areas between 1959 and 1962, when Mao’s disastrous attempt to start up China’s industrialization led to famine that killed millions.

Early settlers like Ma Xianwu, who arrived here in 1951 and helped dig the first thatch-covered pits that served as shelter, offer a typical mix of conflicted emotions. He expressed wonder at the city he had helped create, but also sorrow over the hardship he and others had endured.

“People would lose ears and toes to frostbite,” said Mr. Ma, who is 94 and nearly toothless.

But any sense of bitterness has faded. “We were serving the motherland,” he said, waving off the adulation of a visitor. “The glory belongs to the party. I’m just one drop of water in the ocean.”

White House Struggles to Gauge Afghan Success

By DAVID E. SANGER, ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

This article is by David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker.

WASHINGTON — As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won.

Those “metrics” of success, demanded by Congress and eagerly awaited by the military, are seen as crucial if the president is to convince Capitol Hill and the country that his revamped strategy is working. Without concrete signs of progress, Mr. Obama may lack the political stock — especially among Democrats and his liberal base — to make the case for continuing the military effort or enlarging the American presence.

That problem will become particularly acute if American commanders in Afghanistan seek even more troops for a mission that many of Mr. Obama’s most ardent supporters say remains ill defined and open-ended.

Senior administration officials said that the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, approved a classified policy document on July 17 setting out nine broad objectives for metrics to guide the administration’s policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Another month or two is still needed to flesh out the details, according to officials engaged in the work.

General Jones and other top National Security Council aides, including Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, gave an update to top Congressional leaders over recent days.

But as the Bush administration learned the hard way in Iraq, poorly devised measurements can become misleading indicators — and can create a false sense of progress.

That is especially difficult in a war like the one in Afghanistan, in which eliminating corruption, promoting a working democracy and providing effective aid are as critical as scoring military success against insurgents and terrorists.

For instance, some of the measures now being devised by the Obama administration track the size, strength and self-reliance of the Afghan National Army, which the United States has been struggling to train for seven years. They include the number of operations in which Afghan soldiers are in the lead, or the number of Afghan soldiers who have received basic instruction.

White House officials say they are taking the time to get the measurements right.

In some cases, old measurements are being thrown out. Commanders in Afghanistan say they no longer pay much attention to how many enemy fighters are killed in action. Instead, they are trying to count instances in which local citizens cooperate with Afghan and allied forces.

And in drafting a metric important to senior members of Congress, the administration is considering conducting an opinion poll to determine Afghan public perception of official corruption at national, provincial and district levels. This would give insight into how Afghan citizens view police performance at the neighborhood level all the way up to the quality of national political appointments.

But as the architects of similar metrics in Iraq learned, even the best-constructed measures can miss the larger truth.

In 2005 and 2006, for example, the White House was often citing the “rat rate” in Iraq, a measure of good tips from Iraqis about the location of insurgents or the planting of roadside bombs.

“We thought this was a good measure of how well the public was turning against” Al Qaeda and other insurgents, said Peter D. Feaver, a professor at Duke University who served in the National Security Council at the time. “What we discovered was that the rat rate numbers steadily improved over the course of 2006 — and the violence was rising.”

That experience helps to explain why the Obama administration has taken so much time. But some frustrated lawmakers said the delay might prove costly.

“We have been in Afghanistan now for more than seven and a half years,” said Representative Ike Skelton, a Democrat of Missouri and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “These metrics are required to help make the case for the American people that actual progress is being made, or if we need to change the course to another direction. I think that time is not on our side.”

When President Obama unveiled his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan in March, he emphasized the importance of these measures.

“We will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable,” Mr. Obama said. “We’ll consistently assess our efforts to train Afghan security forces and our progress in combating insurgents. We will measure the growth of Afghanistan’s economy and its illicit narcotics production. And we will review whether we are using the right tools and tactics to make progress towards accomplishing our goals.”

All that now seems unlikely to be completed before his field commanders finish their proposals for carrying out their marching orders. Their recommendations were originally due at the Pentagon within the next two weeks, but Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued expanded instructions for the assessment to the commanders last weekend and gave them until September to complete their report.

Skeptical lawmakers have implored Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to produce what Mr. Obama promised, and they have made specific recommendations of their own.

“The metrics are critically important to keep everyone’s feet to the fire on this and for the public to know how we’re doing and have some ways to measure it and not have just rhetoric,” said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“We all share the president’s goal of succeeding in Afghanistan,” said Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “The challenge here is how we are going to define success in the medium term, given the difficult security environment we face.”

Senior White House officials say their objectives are grouped in three main categories: counterterrorism, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The counterinsurgency objectives are highly classified and cover a “full range” of efforts to help Pakistan combat the militant threat in its tribal areas.

Others address Pakistan’s ability to maintain and strengthen democratically elected civilian government; the country’s ability to confront and defeat an internal insurgent threat; and international support for Pakistan, including international donors, the United Nations and the World Bank.

In Afghanistan, they would assess suppression of the insurgency; building and strengthening Afghan security forces; shoring up support for the government and reviving the economy; and garnering support from NATO, the European Union, the United Nations and international donors.

Baitullah Mehsud Dead, Aide Confirms

DERA ISMAIL KHAN: Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who led a violent campaign of suicide attacks and assassinations against the Pakistani government, has been killed in a US missile strike, a Taliban commander and aide to Mehsud said Friday.

‘I confirm that Baitullah Mehsud and his wife died in the American missile attack in South Waziristan,’ Kafayatullah told The Associated Press by telephone. He would not give any further details.

Earlier on Friday, three Pakistani intelligence officials said the militant commander had been killed in the missile strike and his body had been buried.

But one of the three said no intelligence agent had actually seen Baitullah Mehsud's body.

Intelligence sources have confirmed Baitullah’s death, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told reporters in Islamabad, adding that authorities would travel to the site of the strike to verify his death.

‘To be 100 per cent sure, we are going for ground verification,’ Qureshi said. ‘And once the ground verification re-confirms, which I think is almost confirmed, then we'll be 100 per cent sure.’

A senior US intelligence official had earlier said there were strong indications that Mehsud was among those killed in Wednesday's missile attack, but he did not elaborate.

If confirmed, Mehsud's demise would be a major boost to Pakistani and US efforts to eradicate the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Mehsud has al-Qaeda connections and has been suspected in the killing of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan viewed him as its top internal threat and has been preparing an offensive against him. For years, though, the US considered Mehsud a lesser threat to its interests than some of the other Pakistani Taliban, their Afghan counterparts and al-Qaeda, because most of his attacks were focused inside Pakistan, not against US and Nato troops in Afghanistan. That view appeared to change in recent months as Mehsud's power grew and concerns mounted that increasing violence in Pakistan could destabilise the country and threaten the entire region. But while Mehsud's death would be a big blow to the Taliban in Pakistan, he has deputies who could take his place. Whether a new leader could wreak as much havoc as Mehsud depends largely on how much pressure the Pakistani military continues to put on the network, especially in the tribal area of South Waziristan. The Pakistani intelligence officials said Mehsud was killed in Wednesday's missile strike on his father-in-law's home and that his body was buried in the village of Nardusai in South Waziristan, near the site of the strike. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly. One official said he had seen a classified intelligence report stating Mehsud was dead and buried, but that agents had not seen the body since the area is under Taliban control. Interior Minister Rehman Malik had earlier told reporters outside Parliament he could confirm the death of Mehsud's wife but not of the Taliban leader himself, although information pointed in that direction. ‘Yes, (a) lot of information is pouring in from that area that he's dead, but I'm unable to confirm unless I have solid evidence,’ Malik had said. A security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said ‘about 70 per cent’ of the information pointed to Mehsud's being dead. Another senior Pakistani intelligence official said phone and other communications intercepts — he would not be more specific — had led authorities to suspect Mehsud was dead, but he also stressed there was no definitive evidence yet. An American counterterrorism official said the US government was also looking into the reports. The official indicated the United States did not yet have physical evidence — remains — that would prove who died. But he said there are other ways of determining who was killed in the strike. He declined to describe them. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak on the matter publicly. A local tribesman, who also spoke on condition his name not be used, said Mehsud had been at his father-in-law's house being treated for kidney pain, and had been put on a drip by a doctor, when the missile struck. The tribesman claimed he attended the Taliban chief's funeral. Last year, a doctor for Mehsud announced the militant leader had died of kidney failure, but the reports turned out to be false. In Afghanistan, Defence Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said Mehsud's fighters would cross the border into eastern Afghanistan occasionally to help out one of most ruthless Afghan insurgent leaders Siraj Haqqani. ‘He was an international terrorist that affected India, Pakistan and Afghanistan,’ Azimi said without confirming Mehsud was dead. In March, the State Department authorised a reward of up to $5 million for the militant chief. Increasingly, American missiles fired by unmanned drones have focused on Mehsud-related targets. Pakistan publicly opposes the strikes, saying they anger local tribes and make it harder for the army to operate. Still, many analysts suspect the two countries have a secret deal allowing them. Malik, the interior minister, said Pakistan's military was determined to finish off Pakistan's Taliban. ‘It is a targeted law enforcement action against Baitullah Mehsud's group and it will continue till Baitullah Mehsud's group is eliminated forever,’ he said. Pakistan's record on putting pressure on the Taliban network is spotty. It has used both military action and truces to try to contain Mehsud over the years, but neither tactic seemed to work, despite billions in US aid aimed at helping the Pakistanis tame the tribal areas. Mehsud was not that prominent a militant when the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11 attacks, according to Mahmood Shah, a former security chief for the tribal regions. In fact, Mehsud has struggled against such rivals as Abdullah Mehsud, an Afghan war veteran who had spent time in Guantanamo Bay. But a February 2005 peace deal with Mehsud appeared to give him room to consolidate and boost his troop strength. Within months of that accord, dozens of pro-government tribal elders in the region were gunned down on his command. In December 2007, Mehsud became the head of a new coalition called the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or Pakistan's Taliban movement. Under his guidance, the group killed hundreds of Pakistanis in suicide and other attacks. Analysts say the reason for Mehsud's rise in the militant ranks is his alliances with al-Qaeda and other violent groups. US intelligence has said al-Qaeda has set up its operational headquarters in Mehsud's South Waziristan stronghold and neighbouring North Waziristan. Mehsud has no record of attacking targets in the west, although he has threatened to attack Washington. However, he is suspected of being behind a 10-man cell arrested in Barcelona in January 2008 for plotting suicide attacks in Spain. Pakistan's former government and the CIA have named him as the prime suspect behind the December 2007 killing of Benazir Bhutto. He has denied a role.

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/04-intelligence-sources-have-confirmed-baitullah-death-fm-qureshi-qs-06

It's Jjia jjia, But Written in Hangeul

	A tribe in Indonesia has begun using Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, as their writing system to express their spoken aboriginal language, which is on the verge of extinction. It is the first time the alphabet has been officially adopted outside the Korean Peninsula. The 60,000 person tribe in the city of Baubau, located in Buton of Souteast Sulawesi, has been working to transcribe its native language "Jjia jjia" into Hangeul. The Baubau city counsel decided to adopt Hangeul as the official alphabet in July 2008. Work soon began and the textbooks were completed on July 16 this year. By July 21, elementary and high school students began learning their spoken language through the Hangeul writing system. Textbooks were completed with the help of the Hunminjeongeum Society of Korea that is leading the Hangeul globalization project. The next step includes setting up a Korean center and using Hangeul on their signposts across the city, as well as training Korean language teachers. Hangeul has been lauded around the world by linguists for its logic-based structure. The language is a combination of 52 phonetic symbols. "This is quite significant to see another race of people start using it. This will also greatly help our project that we believe will be a long-term one," Seoul National University linguistics professor and member of the Hunminjeongeum Society Lee Ho-young told The Korea Herald. The textbook comprises writing, speaking and reading sections and also explains the tribe`s history, language and culture. It also has a Korean fairy tale. The entire book is written in Hangeul. Due to a lack of writing system, the tribe has seen its language almost disappear. "This will be all the more meaningful in an anthropological sense as well if Hangeul contributes to resurrect the dissipating language and culture," Kim Joo-won, head of the Hunminjeongeum Society said. Hangeul was created in the mid-15th century when King Sejong the Great commissioned scholars to create a new language to differentiate Korea from China. Organized into syllabic blocks, each consists of two or more 24 Hangeul letters that is comprised of 14 consonants and 10 vowels. These blocks take on the shape of how each is pronounced, and can be arranged both horizontally and vertically. The Hunminjeongeum Society began its project to promulgate Hangeul abroad last year. "In the long run, the spread of Hangeul will also help enhance Korea`s economy as it will activate exchanges with societies that use the language," Kim Joo-won said. While past efforts to introduce Hangeul have been difficult, this time it was possible because of avid support by the local government, Seoul National University, said. The association targets regions without their own alphabet where the local government would not oppose the efforts. It also takes into consideration whether the country has had close contact with Korea, such as those that send their nationals to work in Korea (like Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Mongolia and Vietnam). (angiely@heraldm.com)

Trafficking on Trial

Friday, 07 August 2009 15:03 Nathan Green

Photo by: Shaju John/UNDP

A victim of human trafficking breaks down during testimony on Thursday at the Court of Women in Bali, Indonesia.

Bali, Indonesia
WITH tears flowing down her face, a trafficking survivor told a court of international jurists how she was condemned to a life with HIV by handlers who repeatedly raped her for refusing to have sex with strangers in a Malaysian brothel.

"I haven't talked to anyone about having the disease at all, except for my doctor," she told the Southeast Asia Court of Women on HIV, Human Trafficking and Migration on Thursday. "Whenever we talk about it, all I can do is cry, but I want to share my story so that if others are facing similar situations, they will have an idea of what to do."

The Cambodian, who uses the pseudonym Wanta and spoke only on condition of anonymity, was barely a teenager when she was forced into prostitution, but officials say she is far from alone in her plight.

Though the exact number is not known, it is estimated that more than 250,000 women and children are trafficked in Asia each year - one-third of the global total.

Caitlin Wiesen, Regional HIV/Aids practice leader and programme coordinator for the United Nations Development Programme, said: "These numbers are staggering and involve forms of violence that are numbing."

Trafficking is not only a "hideous crime" and "gross violation of human rights", but also a major contributor to the spread of HIV, Wiesen warned. "Sexual exploitation is an integral part of human trafficking, and unprotected sex is the major vector for the transmission and spread of HIV."

Wanta appeared with 21 other survivors of trafficking and exploitation, including the woman pictured above, at an emotionally charged 37th sitting of the Court For Women in Bali, Indonesia, set up to explore the links between HIV and human trafficking.

The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers

Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States.

After years of neglecting signs of trouble, elite opinion-makers have begun in recent months to recognize that things have gone horribly awry. Journals ranging from Time, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New Republic to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times concur on the diagnosis: newspapers, as we have known them, are disintegrating and are possibly on the verge of extinction. Time's Walter Isaacson describes the situation as having "reached meltdown proportions" and concludes, "It is now possible to contemplate a time in the near future when major towns will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters." A newspaper industry that still employs roughly 50,000 journalists--the vast majority of the remaining practitioners of the craft--is teetering on the brink.

Blame has been laid first and foremost on the Internet, for luring away advertisers and readers, and on the economic meltdown, which has demolished revenues and hammered debt-laden media firms. But for all the ink spilled addressing the dire circumstance of the ink-stained wretch, the understanding of what we can do about the crisis has been woefully inadequate. Unless we rethink alternatives and reforms, the media will continue to flail until journalism is all but extinguished.

Let's begin with the crisis. In a nutshell, media corporations, after running journalism into the ground, have determined that news gathering and reporting are not profit-making propositions. So they're jumping ship. The country's great regional dailies--the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer--are in bankruptcy. Denver's Rocky Mountain News recently closed down, ending daily newspaper competition in that city. The owners of the San Francisco Chronicle, reportedly losing $1 million a week, are threatening to shutter the paper, leaving a major city without a major daily newspaper. Big dailies in Seattle (the Times), Chicago (the Sun-Times) and Newark (the Star-Ledger) are reportedly near the point of folding, and smaller dailies like the Baltimore Examiner have already closed. The 101-year-old Christian Science Monitor, in recent years an essential source of international news and analysis, is folding its daily print edition. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is scuttling its print edition and downsizing from a news staff of 165 to about twenty for its online-only incarnation. Whole newspaper chains--such as Lee Enterprises, the owner of large and medium-size publications that for decades have defined debates in Montana, Iowa and Wisconsin--are struggling as the value of stock shares falls below the price of a single daily paper. And the New York Times needed an emergency injection of hundreds of millions of dollars by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim in order to stay afloat.

Those are the headlines. Arguably uglier is the death-by-small-cuts of newspapers that are still functioning. Layoffs of reporters and closings of bureaus mean that even if newspapers survive, they have precious few resources for actually doing journalism. Job cuts during the first months of this year--300 at the Los Angeles Times, 205 at the Miami Herald, 156 at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 150 at the Kansas City Star, 128 at the Sacramento Bee, 100 at the Providence Journal, 100 at the Hartford Courant, ninety at the San Diego Union-Tribune, thirty at the Wall Street Journal and on and on--suggest that this year will see far more positions eliminated than in 2008, when almost 16,000 were lost. Even Doonesbury's Rick Redfern has been laid off from his job at the Washington Post.

The toll is daunting. As former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and Post associate editor Robert Kaiser have observed, "A great news organization is difficult to build and tragically easy to disassemble." That disassembling is now in full swing. As journalists are laid off and newspapers cut back or shut down, whole sectors of our civic life go dark. Newspapers that long ago closed their foreign bureaus and eliminated their crack investigative operations are shuttering at warp speed what remains of city hall, statehouse and Washington bureaus. The Cox chain, publisher of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Austin American-Statesman and fifteen other papers, will padlock its DC bureau on April 1--a move that follows the closures of the respected Washington bureaus of Advance Publications (the Newark Star-Ledger, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and others); Copley Newspapers and its flagship San Diego Union-Tribune; as well as those of the once great regional dailies of Des Moines, Hartford, Houston, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Toledo.

Mired in debt and facing massive losses, the managers of corporate newspaper firms seek to right the sinking ship by cutting costs, leading remaining newspaper readers to ask why they are bothering to pay for publications that are pale shadows of themselves. It is the daily newspaper death dance-cum- funeral march.

But it is not just newspapers that are in crisis; it is the institution of journalism itself. By any measure, journalism is missing from most commercial radio. TV news operations have become celebrity- and weather-obsessed "profit centers" rather than the journalistic icons of the Murrow and Cronkite eras. Cable channels "fill the gap" with numberless pundits and "business reporters," who got everything about the last decade wrong but now complain that the government doesn't know how to set things right. Cable news is defensible only because of the occasional newspaper reporter moonlighting as a talking head. But what happens when the last reporter stops collecting a newspaper paycheck and goes into PR or lobbying? She'll leave cable an empty vessel and take the public's right to know anything more than a rhetorical flourish with her.

The Internet and blogosphere, too, depend in large part on "old media" to do original journalism. Web links still refer readers mostly to stories that first appeared in print. Even in more optimistic scenarios, no one has a business model to sustain digital journalism beyond a small number of self-supporting services. The attempts of newspapers to shift their operations online have been commercial failures, as they trade old media dollars for new media pennies. We are enthusiastic about Wikipedia and the potential for collaborative efforts on the web; they can help democratize our media and politics. But they do not replace skilled journalists on the ground covering the events of the day and doing investigative reporting. Indeed, the Internet cannot achieve its revolutionary potential as a citizens' forum without such journalism.

So this is where we stand: much of local and state government, whole federal departments and agencies, American activities around the world, the world itself--vast areas of great public concern--are either neglected or on the verge of neglect. Politicians and administrators will work increasingly without independent scrutiny and without public accountability. We are entering historically uncharted territory in America, a country that from its founding has valued the press not merely as a watchdog but as the essential nurturer of an informed citizenry. The collapse of journalism and the democratic infrastructure it sustains is not a development that anyone, except perhaps corrupt politicians and the interests they serve, looks forward to. Such a crisis demands solutions equal to the task. So what are they?

Regrettably the loud discussion of the collapse of journalism has been far stronger in describing the symptoms than in providing remedies. With the frank acknowledgment that the old commercial system has failed and will not return, there has been a flurry of modest proposals to address the immodest crisis. These range from schemes to further consolidate news gathering at the local level to pleas for donations from news consumers and hopes that hard-pressed philanthropists and foundations will decide to go into the news business. And they range from ineffectual to improbable to undesirable. Walter Isaacson has proposed that newspapers come up with a plan to charge readers "micropayments" for online content. Even if such a system were practically possible, the last thing we should do is erect electronic walls that block the openness and democratic genius of the Internet.

Don't get us wrong. We are enthusiastic about many of the efforts to promote original journalism online, such as ProPublica, Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post. We cheer on exciting local endeavors, such as MinnPost in the Twin Cities--a nonprofit, five-day-a-week online journal that covers Minnesota politics with support from major foundations, wealthy families and roughly 900 member-donors contributing $10 to $10,000. But even our friends at MinnPost acknowledge that their project is not filling the void in a metro area that still has two large, if struggling, daily newspapers. Just about every serious journalist involved in an online project will readily concede that even if these ventures pan out, we will still have a dreadfully undernourished journalism system with considerably less news gathering and reporting, especially at the local level.

For all their merits and flaws, these fixes are mere triage strategies. They are not cures; in fact, if there is a risk in them, it is that they might briefly discourage the needed reshaping of ownership models that are destined to fail.

The place to begin crafting solutions is with the understanding that the economic downturn did not cause the crisis in journalism; nor did the Internet. The economic collapse and Internet have greatly accentuated and accelerated a process that can be traced back to the 1970s, when corporate ownership and consolidation of newspapers took off. It was then that managers began to balance their books and to satisfy the demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by cutting journalists and shutting news bureaus. Go back and read a daily newspaper published in a medium-size American city in the 1960s, and you will be awed by the rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the frequency with which "outsiders"--civil rights campaigners, antiwar activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader--ended up on the front page.

As long ago as the late 1980s and early 1990s, prominent journalists and editors like Jim Squires were quitting the field in disgust at the contempt corporate management displayed toward journalism. Print advertising, which still accounts for the lion's share of newspaper revenue, declined gently as a percentage of all ad spending from 1950 to '90, as television grew in importance. Starting in 1990, well before the rise of the web as a competitor for ad dollars, newspaper ad revenues went into a sharp decline, from 26 percent of all media advertising that year to what will likely be around 10 percent this year.

Even before that decline, newspaper owners were choosing short-term profits over long-term viability. As far back as 1983, legendary reporter Ben Bagdikian warned publishers that if they continued to water down their journalism and replace it with (less expensive) fluff, they would undermine their raison d'être and fail to cultivate younger readers. But corporate newspaper owners abandoned any responsibility to maintain the franchise. When the Internet came along, newspapers were already heading due south.

We do not mean to suggest that '60s journalism was perfect or that we should aim to return there. Even then journalism suffered from a generally agreed-upon professional code that relied far too heavily on official sources to set the news agenda and decide the range of debate in our political culture. That weakness of journalism has been magnified in the era of corporate control, leaving us with a situation most commentators are loath to acknowledge: the quality of journalism in the United States today is dreadful.

Of course, there are still tremendous journalists doing outstanding work, but they battle a system increasingly pushing in the opposite direction. (That is why some of the most powerful statements about our current circumstances come in the form of books, like Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine; or documentaries, like Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine; or beat reporting in magazines, like that of Jane Mayer and Seymour Hersh at The New Yorker.) The news media blew the coverage of the Iraq invasion, spoon-feeding us lies masquerading as fact-checked verities. They missed the past decade of corporate scandals. They cheered on the housing bubble and genuflected before the financial sector (and Gilded Age levels of wealth and inequality) as it blasted debt and speculation far beyond what the real economy could sustain. Today they do almost no investigation into where the trillions of public dollars being spent by the Federal Reserve and Treasury are going but spare not a moment to update us on the "Octomom." They trade in trivia and reduce everything to spin, even matters of life and death.

No wonder young people find mainstream journalism uninviting; it would almost be more frightening if they embraced what passes for news today. Older Americans have been giving up on old media too, if not as rapidly and thoroughly as the young. If we are going to address the crisis in journalism, we have to come up with solutions that provide us with hard-hitting reporting that monitors people in power, that engages all our people, not just the classes attractive to advertisers, and that seeks to draw all Americans into public life. Going backward is not an option; nor is it desirable. The old corporate media system choked on its own excess. We should not seek to restore or re-create it. We have to move forward to a system that creates a journalism far superior to that of the recent past.

We can do exactly that--but only if we recognize and embrace the necessity of government intervention. Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism. We understand that this is a controversial position. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently engineered a $765 million bailout of French newspapers, free marketeers rushed to the barricades to declare, "No, no, not in the land of the free press." Conventional wisdom says that the founders intended the press to be entirely independent of the state, to preserve the integrity of the press. Bree Nordenson notes that when she informed famed journalist Tom Rosenstiel that her visionary 2007 Columbia Journalism Review article concerned the ways government could support the press, Rosenstiel "responded brusquely, 'Well, I'm not a big fan of government support.' I explained that I just wanted to put the possibility on the table. 'Well, I'd take it off the table,' he said."

We are sympathetic to that position. As writers, we have been routinely critical of government--Democratic and Republican--over the past three decades and antagonistic to those in power. Policies that would allow politicians to exercise even the slightest control over the news are, in our view, not only frightening but unacceptable. Fortunately, the rude calculus that says government intervention equals government control is inaccurate and does not reflect our past or present, or what enlightened policies and subsidies could entail.

Our founders never thought that freedom of the press would belong only to those who could afford a press. They would have been horrified at the notion that journalism should be regarded as the private preserve of the Rupert Murdochs and John Malones. The founders would not have entertained, let alone accepted, the current equation that seems to say that if rich people determine there is no good money to be made in the news, then society cannot have news. Let's find a king and call it a day.

The founders regarded the establishment of a press system, the Fourth Estate, as the first duty of the state. Jefferson and Madison devoted considerable energy to explaining the necessity of the press to a vibrant democracy. The government implemented extraordinary postal subsidies for the distribution of newspapers. It also instituted massive newspaper subsidies through printing contracts and the paid publication of government notices, all with the intent of expanding the number and variety of newspapers. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s he was struck by the quantity and quality of newspapers and periodicals compared with France, Canada and Britain. It was not an accident. It had little to do with "free markets." It was the result of public policy.

Moreover, when the Supreme Court has taken up matters of freedom of the press, its majority opinions have argued strongly for the necessity of the press as the essential underpinning of our constitutional republic. First Amendment absolutist Hugo Black wrote that the "Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society." Black argued for the right and necessity of the government to counteract private monopolistic control over the media. More recently Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, argued that "assuring the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order."

But government support for the press is not merely a matter of history or legal interpretation. Complaints about a government role in fostering journalism invariably overlook the fact that our contemporary media system is anything but an independent "free market" institution. The government subsidies established by the founders did not end in the eighteenth--or even the nineteenth--century. Today the government doles out tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, including free and essentially permanent monopoly broadcast licenses, monopoly cable and satellite privileges, copyright protection and postal subsidies. (Indeed, this magazine has been working for the past few years with journals of the left and right to assure that those subsidies are available to all publications.) Because the subsidies mostly benefit the wealthy and powerful, they are rarely mentioned in the fictional account of an independent and feisty Fourth Estate. Both the rise and decline of commercial journalism can be attributed in part to government policies, which scrapped the regulations and ownership rules that had encouraged local broadcast journalism and allowed for lax regulation as well as tax deductions for advertising--policies that greatly increased news media revenues.

The truth is that government policies and subsidies already define our press system. The only question is whether they will be enlightened and democratic, as in the early Republic, or corrupt and corrosive to democracy, as has been the case in recent decades. The answer will be determined in coming years as part of what is certain to be a bruising battle: media companies and their lobbying groups will argue against the "heavy hand of government" while defending existing subsidies. They will propose more deregulation, hoping to capitalize on the crisis to remove the last barriers to print, broadcast and digital consolidation in local markets--creating media "company towns," where competition is eliminated, along with journalism jobs, in pursuit of better returns for investors. Enlightened elected officials, media unions and public interest and community groups that recognize the role of robust journalism are going to have to step up to argue for a real fix.

Fortunately, an increasing number of veteran journalists, scholars and activists are beginning to grasp the historical significance of the present moment and the central role of public policy. It was the late James Carey, decorated University of Illinois and Columbia journalism professor and no fan of government power, who saw this before almost anyone else, writing in 2002: "Alas, the press may have to rely upon a democratic state to create the conditions necessary for a democratic press to flourish and for journalists to be restored to their proper role as orchestrators of the conversation of a democratic culture."

We have to ask where we want to end up, after the reforms have been implemented. In our view we need to have competing independent newsrooms of well-paid journalists in every state and in every major community. This is not about newspapers or even broadcast media; it entails all media and accepts that we may be headed into an era when nearly all of our communication will be digital. Ideally this will be a pluralistic system, where there will be different institutional structures. Varieties of nonprofit media will have to play a much larger role, though not a monopolistic one.

We recognize and embrace the need for a system in which there will be a range of perspectives from left to right, alongside some media more intent on maintaining a less explicitly ideological stance. We must have a system that prohibits state censorship and that minimizes commercial control over journalistic values and pursuits. The right of any person to start his or her own medium, commercial or nonprofit, at any time is inviolable. From this foundation we can envision a thriving, digital citizen's journalism complementing and probably merging with professional journalism. What will the mix be? It would vary, with more not-for-profit and subsidized media in rural and low-income areas, more for-profit media in wealthier ones. The first order of any government intervention would be to assure that no state or region would be without quality local, state, national or international journalism.

We begin with the notion that journalism is a public good, that it has broad social benefits far beyond that between buyer and seller. Like all public goods, we need the resources to get it produced. This is the role of the state and public policy. It will require a subsidy and should be regarded as similar to the education system or the military in that regard. Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack. With the collapse of the commercial news system, the same logic applies. Just as there came a moment when policy-makers recognized the necessity of investing tax dollars to create a public education system to teach our children, so a moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens.

So, if we can accept the need for government intervention to save American journalism, what form should it take? In the near term, we need to think about an immediate journalism economic stimulus, to be revisited after three years, and we need to think big. Let's eliminate postal rates for periodicals that garner less than 20 percent of their revenues from advertising. This keeps alive all sorts of magazines and journals of opinion that are being devastated by distribution costs. It is these publications that often do investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism.

What to do about newspapers? Let's give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers. The newspapers would have to publish at least five times per week and maintain a substantial "news hole," say at least twenty-four broad pages each day, with less than 50 percent advertising. In effect, this means the government will pay for every citizen who so desires to get a free daily newspaper subscription, but the taxpayer gets to pick the newspaper--this is an indirect subsidy, because the government does not control who gets the money. This will buy time for our old media newsrooms--and for us citizens--to develop a plan to establish journalism in the digital era. We could see this evolving into a system to provide tax credits for online subscriptions as well.

None of these proposed subsidies favor or censor any particular viewpoint. The primary condition on media recipients of this stimulus subsidy would be a mild one: that they make at least 90 percent of their content immediately available free online. In this way, the subsidies would benefit citizens and taxpayers, expanding the public domain and providing the Internet with a rich vein of material available to all.

What should be done about the disconnect between young people and journalism? Have the government allocate funds so every middle school, high school and college has a well-funded student newspaper and a low-power FM radio station, all of them with substantial websites. We need to get young people accustomed to producing journalism and to appreciating what differentiates good journalism from the other stuff.

The essential component for the immediate stimulus should be an exponential expansion of funding for public and community broadcasting, with the requirement that most of the funds be used for journalism, especially at the local level, and that all programming be available for free online. Other democracies outspend the United States by whopping margins per capita on public media: Canada sixteen times more; Germany twenty times more; Japan forty-three times more; Britain sixty times more; Finland and Denmark seventy-five times more. These investments have produced dramatically more detailed and incisive international reporting, as well as programming to serve young people, women, linguistic and ethnic minorities and regions that might otherwise be neglected by for-profit media.

Perhaps in the past the paucity of public media in the United States could be justified by the enormous corporate media presence. But as the corporate sector shrivels we need something to replace it, and fast. Public and community broadcasters are in a position to be just that, and to keep alive the practice of news gathering in countless communities across the nation. Indeed, if a regional daily like the San Francisco Chronicle fails this year, why not try a federally funded experiment: maintain the newsroom as a digital extension of the local public broadcasting system?

Currently the government spends less than $450 million annually on public media. (To put matters in perspective, it spends several times that much on Pentagon public relations designed, among other things, to encourage favorable press coverage of the wars that the vast majority of Americans oppose.) Based on what other highly democratic and free countries do, the allocation from the government should be closer to $10 billion. All totaled, the suggestions we make here for subscription subsidies, postal reforms, youth media and investment in public broadcasting have a price tag in the range of $60 billion over the next three years.

This is a substantial amount of money. In normal times it might be too much to ask. But in a time of national crisis, when an informed and engaged citizenry is America's best hope, $20 billion a year is chicken feed for building what would essentially be a bridge across which journalism might pass from dying old media to the promise of something new. Think of it as a free press "infrastructure project" that is necessary to maintain an informed citizenry, and democracy itself. It would keep the press system alive. And it has the added benefit of providing an economic stimulus. If these journalists (and the tens of thousands of production and distribution workers associated with newspapers) are not put to work through the programs we propose, their knowledge and expertise will be lost. They will be unemployed, and their unemployment will contribute to further stagnation and economic decline--especially in big cities where newspapers are major employers.

These proposals are a good start, but then the really hard work begins. We have to come up with a plan to convert failing newspapers into journalistic entities with the express purpose of assuring that fully staffed, functioning and, ideally, competing newsrooms continue to operate in communities across the country. The only way to do this is by using tax policies, credit policies and explicit subsidies to convert the remains of old media into independent, stable institutions that are ready to compete and communicate in the decades to come. To get from here to there, and especially to make possible multiple competing newsrooms in larger communities, policy-makers should be open to commercial ownership, municipal ownership, staff ownership or independent nonprofit ownership. Ideally the next media system will have a combination of the above; and the government should be prepared to rewrite rules and regulations and to use its largesse to aid a variety of sound initiatives.

We confess that we do not have all the answers. Neither, we have discovered, does anyone else. The fatal flaw in so many sincere but doomed responses to the current crisis is that they try to do the impossible, to create a system using varying doses of foundation grants, do-gooder capitalism, citizen donations, volunteer labor, the anticipation of a miraculous increase in advertising manna and/or a sudden--and in our view unimaginable--reversal on the part of Americans who have thus far shown no inclination to pay for online content. At best, these are piecemeal proposals when we are in dire need of building an entire edifice. The money from these sources is insufficient to address the crisis in journalism.

We have to open the door to enlightened public policies and subsidies. We need our members of Congress and our leading scholars to approach this matter with the same urgency with which they would approach the threat of terrorism, pandemic, financial collapse or climate change. We need an organized citizenry demanding the institutions that make self-government possible. Only then can we, like our founders, build a free press. The technologies and the economic challenges are, of course, more complex than in the 1790s, but the answer is the same: the democratic state, the government, must create the conditions for sustaining the journalism that can provide the people with the information they need to be their own governors.

About John Nichols

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.

Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.

About Robert W. McChesney

Robert McChesney is Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois. He hosts the program Media Matters on WILL-AM every Sunday afternoon from 1-2PM central time. He and John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, are the founders of Free Press, the media reform network, and the authors of Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (New Press). He has written 16 books and his work has been translated into 15 languages.

Post Office Reports $2.4 Billion Quarterly Loss

By Ed O'Keefe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 6, 2009

The U.S. Postal Service lost $2.4 billion in the quarter that ended June 30 and forecasts a $7 billion loss for the fiscal year, according to figures released Wednesday. Mail volume dropped 12.6 percent over a nine-month period, continuing a sharp decline fueled by the economic recession that began in 2007 and by wider use of the Internet.

Though attention in recent months has focused on the potential closure of hundreds of post offices or the elimination of Saturday mail delivery to narrow the budget gap, most of the Postal Service's financial woes are tied to labor costs, especially billions of dollars in required payments to prefund future retiree health benefits. The cost of funding current and future retirees is likely to top $7 billion this fiscal year.

The payments will contribute to an expected $700 million cash shortfall when the Postal Service's fiscal year ends Sept. 30, according to Postmaster General John Potter. The Postal Service will not make prepayments to the retiree fund if it faces a shortfall next month, he said, reiterating his displeasure with the requirement.

"If we were part of the federal government and treated as an agency, we would not be paying prefunding to a retirement benefit trust," Potter said at a news conference Wednesday announcing the financial situation. "On the other hand, if we were in the private sector, we would not be prefunding these retirement payments. So therein lies a bit of a dilemma."

Congress mandated the pre-payments in 2006 when it passed a postal reform bill. The Postal Service's balance sheets were in better condition at the time, and lawmakers sought to have it prepay retiree benefits because they knew that its financial condition would probably worsen as mail volume dropped with the increase in Internet use.

The House and the Senate will consider competing measures to relax that requirement after the August congressional recess, but the bills would provide only temporary relief. Potter called on lawmakers and the Obama administration to begin serious, long-term discussions about the future of American mail delivery.

"The Postal Service does not want to do anything that would disrupt this economy," he said. "Over a trillion dollars moves through the mail in any given year, and we are a hub of an industry that employs some 8 million Americans. We have no intention of doing anything that would disrupt the flow of mail."

That flow has slowed in recent years, to an average of 4.1 pieces of mail a day delivered to each address, down from 5.9 pieces in 2000, according to Postal Service figures. The decline has contributed to losses in 11 of the past 12 fiscal quarters.

In response, the Postal Service has implemented hiring and salary freezes and has dramatically cut its workforce -- by 37,000 employees in the past year, to a total of 630,000, down from a peak of 802,000 in 1999. It recently renegotiated more than 300 service contracts, saving $200 million.

The financial numbers follow last week's classification of the Postal Service as a "high risk" government agency and come just days after it released a list of almost 700 post offices it will consider closing.

The list once included as many as 3,000 facilities, and some postal officials privately acknowledge that no more than 200 locations, most of them in downtown urban areas, are likely to close. The varying figures have raised the ire of lawmakers concerned that mail service will be trimmed in their districts with little notice.

At a House hearing last week on postal matters, Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) said the Postal Service made cuts in his Cleveland area district with little or no input from him or community leaders.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) told postal officials that unannounced reductions in operating hours at Northern Virginia post offices mean his constituents with long commutes cannot get to the post office before closing time.

"I'm afraid the Postal Service leadership has leapt to the conclusion that the only way to keep the Postal Service solvent is to cut back on hours of operation," he said.

Potter would not commit to an exact number of post office closures but said some urban facilities are likely to consolidate certain operations while others will vacate expensive locations so the Postal Service can sell the properties.

He embraced the attention and concern provoked by the closure list.

"If this happened and no one reacted to it, I think I'd be concerned as the postmaster general that people really didn't have a need for the Postal Service," Potter said.

Envoy's Advice on Darfur Draws Criticism

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 6, 2009

NEW YORK, Aug. 5 -- The Obama administration's Sudan envoy is facing growing resistance to a suggestion he made recently to civilians displaced from Darfur that they should start planning to go back to their villages. Darfurian civilians and U.N. relief agencies say it is still too dangerous to return to the region where a six-year-long conflict has led to the deaths of more than 300,000 people.

In the latest sign of tension, Sheik al-Tahir, a leader at Kalma, one of Darfur's largest camps for displaced people, said Tuesday that homeless civilians would protest retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration's strategy for resolving the conflict and his assertion in June that genocide in Darfur has ended. Tahir and other camp leaders have accused Gration of taking the side of the Sudanese government, which has been seeking to dismantle the camps.

Gration denied this week that he is seeking to send Darfur's displaced into harm's way, saying he was simply urging Darfurians and the United Nations to begin preparations for return.

"I am not pushing for anybody to go back right now, because I don't think the situation is secure enough," he said in an interview Tuesday. "I don't want to get into a position where people are trying to return because there is peace and some modicum of security, and then we haven't done the planning to ensure they can move back."

The latest round of violence in Darfur began in February 2003, when two rebel movements took up arms against the Islamic government in Khartoum. In response, the government, backed by local Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed, launched a bloody counterinsurgency operation that the Bush and Obama administrations have termed genocidal.

A recent State Department analysis showed that more than 3,300 villages have been severely damaged or destroyed in the violence. Most of the survivors have either fled to neighboring Chad or crammed into a network of camps in Darfur.

Gration's effort to prod the displaced communities into preparing for a return has been complicated by the loyalty many still profess to an exiled rebel leader, Abdul Wahid al-Nur, who lives in Paris and has refused for years to participate in talks with the Khartoum government.

Gration met recently with leaders of the Kalma camp, which houses more than 100,000 displaced Darfurians. He told them that the violence was easing in Darfur and that he was confident he could negotiate a political settlement by the end of the year, according to notes of the encounter by a U.N. relief coordination team in Darfur known as the Inter-Agency Management Group.

Gration also urged camp leaders to select envoys to represent their interests at ongoing U.S.-backed talks in Doha, Qatar, suggesting that Wahid's boycott would deny them a voice in the process. Your "future is in his hands, and his hands are in Paris," Gration said, according to the briefing notes. "You need someone who is working for you."

Some of the camp leaders, according to the account, said they were unhappy with Gration's assertion that genocide was no longer occurring in Darfur, insisting that government forces and allied militias continue to commit atrocities against residents of Kalma. They said that they would never return to their villages unless the Janjaweed were disarmed.

The U.N. interagency group also expressed concern about Gration's assurance that "peace will prevail in Darfur by the end of the year, and returns have to happen," and described the conditions in Darfur as too dangerous to ensure civilians' safe return. It voiced concern that Gration was linking the fate of Darfurian civilians to political goals.

The U.N. group concluded that there are not enough funds or resources to deliver assistance to the villages people had fled or even to oversee the administrative work of ensuring that those who return are doing so voluntarily.

"In addition," the briefing note states, "it is important to keep in mind that a large part of the IDPS [internally displaced people] might opt for staying in their new settlements over a return to their place of origin."

Clinton's Visit to Somalia Gives New Meaning to 'Handshake Diplomacy'

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 6, 2009

NAIROBI, Aug. 5 -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Somali President Sharif Ahmed are expected to discuss weighty security issues when they meet in this city Thursday. But many Somalis will be paying close attention to a more delicate, but highly symbolic, matter of diplomacy: whether the two will shake hands.

"The talk is everywhere," said Abdirhaman Mumin, a Somali sugar exporter who is hoping for the handshake. "Will he or won't he? For many people, whether he's loyal to Islam or not depends on the handshake."

Somalia is a traditionally moderate Muslim country. Music and poetry are treasured, and handshaking between men and women -- taboo according to some conservative readings of Islam -- has long been considered normal. But since the collapse of the last central government in 1991, a more conservative strain of Islam has taken hold, with Somalis depending more on Islamic law to establish order.

Ahmed, a former geography teacher and Islamic scholar, was the widely respected leader of a movement of Islamist courts that briefly took power in 2006 and imposed a more strict interpretation of Islamic law. The movement was soon ousted in a U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion fueled by accusations that the movement's military wing, known as al-Shabab, had ties to al-Qaeda.

These days, a more resolutely moderate Ahmed is back in power and battling the Shabab, which broke with him and now controls much of southern Somalia.

Increasingly, though, its members are rebels without a cause. They lost one of their main battle cries when the Ethiopian army withdrew from Somalia. They lost another recently, when Ahmed heeded a popular call and adopted Islamic law for the country. And so, at the moment, the Shabab is relying heavily on portraying Ahmed as an "impure" Muslim, a puppet of the West, a turncoat.

Last week, pro-Shabab Web sites were speculating about a possible shake between Ahmed and Clinton, arguing that, were it to come to fruition, it would prove that Ahmed had lost credibility with Islamists. Some Somalis have argued that Sharif should refrain from pressing palms, if only to keep the Shabab from scoring a public relations victory.

"If they shake hands, they'll definitely use it as propaganda," said one Somali analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Shabab is known to target critics.

But in recent interviews with Somali exiles -- a generally moderate bunch -- most said they are in favor of the handshake, a view that reflects their cautious optimism about U.S. support for Ahmed, usually referred to as Sheikh Sharif. The United States recently shipped 40 tons of ammunition to help the government fight the rebels.

The pro-shake crowd also reflects a deep-seated desire among many Somalis to shed their image as citizens of one of the most dysfunctional and anarchic countries in the world.

"I think it's good for him to shake hands," said Abdi Ibrahim, who was discussing the issue with friends at a cafe in Nairobi's bustling Eastleigh neighborhood. "Sheikh Sharif has to show Somalis that this is normal. Everyone shakes hands. Why should Somalis be different? Why the big deal? We need to join the world."

"But," he added somewhat gloomily, "the insurgents will use it to say he has changed a lot -- maybe he shouldn't. I cannot say 100 percent."

The former spokesman for the ousted Islamist courts movement, Abdirahim Issa Addou, said that in his view, Sharif is no longer interested in appeasing the Shabab and that "we need to show the Americans we're different."

Following that line of reasoning, he said, Sharif should not just offer Clinton a hearty handshake. "To me, I'd go as far as kissing her," Addou joked. "But really, Sheikh Sharif is in a difficult position. "You know," he said with a sigh, "that Sharif has a lot of problems."

Clinton Pushes Kenyan Leaders to Follow Through on Promised Reforms

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 6, 2009

NAIROBI, Aug. 5 -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton began a major trip to Africa on Wednesday by publicly urging Kenya, a strategic U.S. ally, to move faster to resolve tensions lingering from a disputed 2007 election that precipitated the country's worst crisis since it gained independence.

Clinton went further in a meeting with Kenyan leaders, urging them to fire the attorney general and the police chief, who have been accused of ignoring dozens of killings carried out by police death squads, according to a senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was private. Clinton also raised the possibility of banning some Kenyan officials from traveling to the United States if the government does not move more quickly to prosecute those responsible for post-election ethnic violence that left 1,300 people dead. The organizers are widely suspected to include senior officials and cabinet ministers, many of whom have family members in the United States.

"We are going to use whatever tools we need to use to ensure that there is justice," the official said. "We raised the possibility of visa bans and implied there could be more."

Clinton's public remarks were more gentle but still reflected the Obama administration's concern that Kenya, which has lent crucial support to U.S. humanitarian, diplomatic and military operations in this volatile region, could slip back into political and ethnic violence that brought it close to collapse last year.

President Mwai Kibaki and former opposition leader Raila Odinga, now the prime minister, ended the crisis with a power-sharing deal and a commitment to political reforms that would include prosecution of those suspected of participating in the post-election violence. But Clinton made clear that their coalition government has not followed through.

"The absence of strong and democratic institutions has permitted ongoing corruption, impunity, politically motivated violence, human rights abuses, lack of respect for the rule of law," Clinton said at a news conference after meeting with Kibaki, Odinga and security officials.

'They're Trying to Hide'

Kenyans remain deeply frustrated with the coalition government, which they say is bloated with well-paid officials concerned more with their own survival than with the welfare of the country, swaths of which are in the midst of a hunger crisis.

In the latest example of trouble with the peace deal, the Kenyan government stepped back in recent days from a commitment to establish a special tribunal to try people accused in connection with the post-election violence. The government said it would rely on a "reformed judicial system" instead.

But in a country with a history of sweeping corruption cases, political killings and other official misdeeds under the rug, human rights groups and ordinary Kenyans cast the move as a blatant bid by senior officials to avoid punishment.

"They're selfish, and they're trying to hide," said Caleb Onduso, 25, who was among a crowd at a convention center here Wednesday hoping to hear Clinton speak. "They've forgotten us."

The U.S. Embassy also condemned the government's move in a statement on the eve of Clinton's visit, saying it was "not a credible approach in the eyes of Kenyans and the international community."

If the government fails to establish the special tribunal, U.S. officials say, they will support prosecution of the suspects by the International Criminal Court.

Clinton's trip comes just three weeks after President Obama visited Ghana and laid out his emerging policy toward Africa. Like Obama, whose father was Kenyan, Clinton is emphasizing good governance and touting a $20 billion U.S.-led program to provide poor countries in Africa and elsewhere with agricultural aid aimed at small farmers.

Clinton aides said the trips marked the first time a president and a secretary of state had visited Africa so early in a new administration. Clinton is set to log 21,200 miles on her 11-day, seven-country tour.

Economic Growth

She began her visit Wednesday morning at the annual forum on the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, a program started by President Bill Clinton that allows enhanced U.S. market access for African products. Clinton said she wanted to emphasize Africa's success stories and move beyond the "stale and outdated" image of the continent as a place awash in poverty, disease and conflict.

Sub-Saharan Africa had economic growth averaging more than 5 percent for the five years leading up to 2009, the first such expansion in 45 years. But the continent is now feeling the pinch of shriveling trade and remittances due to the global economic crisis.

At the AGOA Forum, Clinton emphasized plans for U.S. development assistance to focus more on spurring business and trade. Meanwhile, she said, African countries must focus on good governance and adherence to the rule of law, conditions she called "essential to creating positive, predictable investment climates."

In her meeting with Kibaki and Odinga, Clinton delivered a "frank statement" from Obama pressing for greater progress on political reforms such as a new constitution and an overhaul of the police, she told reporters.

Kibaki appeared to bristle at some of the U.S. demands, saying at the conference that his government had introduced electoral reforms and was in the midst of a constitutional review.

"These and other reforms are genuinely Kenyan," he said. "And Kenyans are driving them forward in earnest, for the good of all."

But Odinga, who had accused Kibaki of stealing the 2007 presidential election, acknowledged that there were problems and praised Clinton.

She has "demonstrated she's a true democrat, in agreeing to work with her opponent," he said, referring to Obama. "That's a lesson Africa needs to take seriously."

Iraqi Government to Remove Blast Walls Along Baghdad's Main Roads in 40 Days

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 6, 2009

BAGHDAD, Aug. 5 -- Iraq's government announced Wednesday that it intends to take down within 40 days the concrete blast walls erected by the U.S. military along Baghdad's thoroughfares, a move that could backfire on the country's prime minister, who has tied his reelection hopes to keeping violence at a manageable level as American troops withdraw.

Removing miles of the blast walls that have turned this capital into a grim, bunkered city would ease traffic and help restore the sense of normalcy that Iraqis yearn for after six years of war.

But it also could help insurgents by making bombings deadlier and getaways easier. Many of the walls were erected to block access to areas used by militias to launch rocket attacks on the Green Zone and on U.S. military facilities.

Violence has increased slightly in Iraq in recent months, according to U.S. military officials. Two incidents Wednesday highlighted the security challenges that continue to bedevil Iraqi forces. A high-ranking American officer's convoy was struck by a grenade in western Baghdad. No one was hurt, the military said. Late Wednesday, powerful bombs in the capital's western neighborhood of Mansour destroyed one of the main cellphone towers of the Asiacell telecommunications network, Iraqi police officials said.

Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, a spokesman for the Baghdad security command, said the blast walls would vanish from highways and secondary roads within 40 days, marking the first time the government has provided a timeline for their removal.

Some Western media organizations and embassies based outside the Green Zone have quietly lobbied the Iraqi government to delay the move, which has been widely discussed for months, fearing that their compounds will become more vulnerable.

"No exceptions will be made," Moussawi said in a statement.

In 2006, the American military began a major campaign to erect the blast walls. In addition to protecting U.S. facilities, they were used to guard commercial and residential neighborhoods from attacks and to tightly regulate access to the capital. U.S. Army engineers erected most of the walls using flatbed trucks and small cranes. Concrete walls surround nearly every neighborhood in Baghdad.

Maj. David Shoupe, a U.S. military spokesman, would not say whether the Americans were notified about the Iraqi government's plan in advance or whether U.S. military officials think the Iraqis will be able to disassemble the blast walls without assistance from American troops.

"We haven't been tasked to remove barriers, nor have [Iraqi security forces] asked that we assist with their barrier removal assistance at this time," he said in an e-mail. "The Iraqi Security Forces have demonstrated that they are capable of determining the security needs of their city and we remain ready to enable their operations at their request."

Omar al-Mashhadani, a spokesman for Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni, dismissed the announcement as "election propaganda" by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite.

"I don't think they will remove all concrete walls in this period of time because they don't have the ability and the required equipment to do it in 40 days," Mashhadani said.

Some Baghdad residents said, however, that they were pleased by the news.

"This is a good step by Maliki because it will minimize the traffic jams in Baghdad," said Kadom Aboud, 37. "This will also help Maliki show that he is making progress on security in Baghdad after the withdrawal of U.S. forces."

Special correspondents Qais Mizher and Aziz Alwan contributed to this report.

Baghdad's Green Zone Reshapes Under Iraqi Control

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 6, 2009

BAGHDAD -- Baghdad's storied Green Zone, for six years a bunkered refuge for Westerners in this beleaguered capital, is America's turf no more.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki recently ordered that U.S. troops stop manning the area's entry points; they are now controlled solely by Iraqis.

Iraqi soldiers have set up roving checkpoints inside, and U.S. Embassy and military badges no longer exempt holders from inspection. Iraqi authorities have threatened to seize U.S. vehicles that do not have Iraqi license plates, sending hundreds of American government employees and contractors scrambling to Baghdad's equivalent of the DMV.

In two months, the Iraqis will start issuing badges granting varying levels of access to the Green Zone, a process that until now had been the purview of the U.S. military and for years subjected Iraqis to second-class status in their own capital.

Citing a higher threat of kidnappings and other dangers, the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. military and private defense contractors have imposed strict rules and, in some cases, curfews to restrict nonessential travel outside the mammoth new embassy compound and other fortified compounds within the Green Zone.

As rules have tightened and the line between the Green Zone and the Red Zone -- all the areas outside the fortified refuge -- has blurred, diplomats and contractors who have been here for years are mourning the demise of a surreal and often-wild haven that became among the most enduring symbols of this war.

"The Green Zone used to be fun," a veteran U.S. diplomat lamented. "Now we can't walk across the street."

A Lengthy Wait

The Iraqi government has long wanted to assert more control over the Green Zone, which until recently was informally governed by a U.S. military task force called the Joint Area Support Group. But the Iraqis assumed complete control over security of the perimeter after the June 30 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities -- one of several steps the government took to curb American power and visibility.

"The Americans now stay in their bases," Iraqi soldier Haider Abas said, as he stood guard outside the Green Zone palace that served as the U.S. Embassy until Jan. 1. The departure of American soldiers from the checkpoints in the zone is a welcome development for Iraqis, he added. "When you see someone from your own government, it's better than being governed by foreign forces."

The Green Zone, a four-square-mile area in central Baghdad along the Tigris River, became the hub for the interim government the Americans set up shortly after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

It got its name from the green, or unloaded, status of weapons inside. Outside, in the Red Zone, weapons were always in red, or loaded, status.

Shortly after the U.S. military bombed palaces and government buildings in central Baghdad during the "shock and awe" campaign in 2003, American officials moved into one of the few unscathed ones, Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, which became the U.S. Embassy.

American soldiers manned checkpoints and strictly regulated access into an area that would soon become home to thousands of U.S. diplomats, troops and contractors.

Iraqis who resided inside and those who needed to visit regularly -- including top government officials -- had to be screened by the U.S. military to obtain badges. They often waited in long lines as Westerners with higher-security badges breezed through checkpoints with nary a pat-down.

Parties in a Fortress

As the rest of Baghdad, bedeviled by Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents, descended into lawlessness and near-anarchy in the ensuing years, the Green Zone became increasingly impenetrable and divorced from the reality that unfolded outside its cement walls.

It was a freewheeling city within a crippled one, a bubble where the days were long, the parties wild and the booze plentiful.

The poolside of the Republican Palace became the backdrop for "Baghdad Idol," a spoof of the reality TV show. The pool was used by born-again Christians for baptisms. U.S. diplomats stacked files in Hussein's sunken tub and set up the political section in his bedroom.

A blue U.S. Embassy badge and a low-cut neckline, female diplomats joked, guaranteed unfettered access to the A-list parties. The Green Zone was among the few places in the world where women wore stilettos and holsters without seeming out of place.

There were rooftop parties at the Olive House, a compound run by South African security contractors where sweltering summer nights gave way to wet T-shirt contests. There was the Lock and Load bar near the palace, the FBI bar and the enigmatic CIA bar, which everyone professed to know about but few could point out on a map.

The who's who of the Green Zone convened Thursday nights at the venerable Baghdad Country Club, a bar and restaurant that billed itself as an "oasis of calm" in the "chaos which is Baghdad."

With decent steak, fine wine and occasionally shrimp, however, the sales pitch wasn't necessary. At one point, it drew crowds of more than 600. The establishment closed in 2007 under pressure from the U.S. military.

Same Place, but Not Quite

Rocket attacks, which became a near-daily occurrence in the springs of 2007 and 2008, put a damper on the nightlife, but the party circuit outlived the spates of violence. The demise of the Green Zone as an American-run haven began Jan. 1, when the Iraqi government assumed control of the area. The Iraqis forced the Americans to depart the old embassy before midnight and cut off access to a large area in front of it that had included a military store and fast-food restaurants.

As Americans and other Westerners have turned over or left other compounds and properties, the Green Zone's streets have become dirtier and more deserted. For-rent signs have gone up by the dozen.

What was once akin to college life in a war zone has become more like a strict boarding school with often-changing rules.

Last week, Robert Ford, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, held a town hall meeting to announce more-stringent rules. His message -- the Green Zone, folks, is no longer the Green Zone as we knew it -- was hard for some embassy veterans to stomach.

Now they are left to reminisce about onetime hot spots, like the Baghdad Country Club, that are only a memory. "It was designed as a place to let off a little bit of steam," said the club's founder, James Thornett. "It was a period of my life I enjoyed thoroughly."