Sep 1, 2009

How Nuclear Weapons Can Keep You Safe - Newsweek

Published Aug 29, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Sep 7, 2009

On Sept. 24, President Barack Obama will bring together 14 world leaders for a special U.N. Security Council meeting in New York. On the agenda: how to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The summit is the latest step in the administration's campaign to eliminate nukes, a priority Obama stressed on the campaign trail and formally announced in April during his speech in Prague. U.S. attempts to stop Iran from acquiring the bomb and to pry the weapons out of North Korea's fingers are also key parts of this campaign.

These efforts are all grounded in the same proposition: that, as Obama has said several times, nuclear weapons represent the "gravest threat" to U.S. security. This argument has a lot going for it. It's strongly intuitive, as anyone who's ever seen pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki knows. It's also popular; U.S. presidents have been making similar noises since the Eisenhower administration, and halting the spread of nukes (if not eliminating them altogether) is one of the few things Obama, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, and Benjamin Netanyahu can all agree on. There's just one problem with the reasoning: it may well be wrong.

A growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous, as Obama and most people assume. The bomb may actually make us safer. In this era of rogue states and transnational terrorists, that idea sounds so obviously wrongheaded that few politicians or policymakers are willing to entertain it. But that's a mistake. Knowing the truth about nukes would have a profound impact on government policy. Obama's idealistic campaign, so out of character for a pragmatic administration, may be unlikely to get far (past presidents have tried and failed). But it's not even clear he should make the effort. There are more important measures the U.S. government can and should take to make the real world safer, and these mustn't be ignored in the name of a dreamy ideal (a nuke-free planet) that's both unrealistic and possibly undesirable.

The argument that nuclear weapons can be agents of peace as well as destruction rests on two deceptively simple observations. First, nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. Second, there's never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war between two states that possess them. Just stop for a second and think about that: it's hard to overstate how remarkable it is, especially given the singular viciousness of the 20th century. As Kenneth Waltz, the leading "nuclear optimist" and a professor emeritus of political science at UC Berkeley puts it, "We now have 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It's striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states."

To understand why—and why the next 64 years are likely to play out the same way—you need to start by recognizing that all states are rational on some basic level. Their leaders may be stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend to do things only when they're pretty sure they can get away with them. Take war: a country will start a fight only when it's almost certain it can get what it wants at an acceptable price. Not even Hitler or Saddam waged wars they didn't think they could win. The problem historically has been that leaders often make the wrong gamble and underestimate the other side—and millions of innocents pay the price.

Nuclear weapons change all that by making the costs of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Suddenly, when both sides have the ability to turn the other to ashes with the push of a button—and everybody knows it—the basic math shifts. Even the craziest tin-pot dictator is forced to accept that war with a nuclear state is unwinnable and thus not worth the effort. As Waltz puts it, "Why fight if you can't win and might lose everything?"

Why indeed? The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling, it's led to what's known as the nuclear peace: the virtually unprecedented stretch since the end of World War II in which all the world's major powers have avoided coming to blows. They did fight proxy wars, ranging from Korea to Vietnam to Angola to Latin America. But these never matched the furious destruction of full-on, great-power war (World War II alone was responsible for some 50 million to 70 million deaths). And since the end of the Cold War, such bloodshed has declined precipitously. Meanwhile, the nuclear powers have scrupulously avoided direct combat, and there's very good reason to think they always will. There have been some near misses, but a close look at these cases is fundamentally reassuring—because in each instance, very different leaders all came to the same safe conclusion.

Take the mother of all nuclear standoffs: the Cuban missile crisis. For 13 days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union each threatened the other with destruction. But both countries soon stepped back from the brink when they recognized that a war would have meant curtains for everyone. As important as the fact that they did is the reason why: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's aide Fyodor Burlatsky said later on, "It is impossible to win a nuclear war, and both sides realized that, maybe for the first time."

The record since then shows the same pattern repeating: nuclear-armed enemies slide toward war, then pull back, always for the same reasons. The best recent example is India and Pakistan, which fought three bloody wars after independence before acquiring their own nukes in 1998. Getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction didn't do anything to lessen their animosity. But it did dramatically mellow their behavior. Since acquiring atomic weapons, the two sides have never fought another war, despite severe provocations (like Pakistani-based terrorist attacks on India in 2001 and 2008). They have skirmished once. But during that flare-up, in Kashmir in 1999, both countries were careful to keep the fighting limited and to avoid threatening the other's vital interests. Sumit Ganguly, an Indiana University professor and coauthor of the forthcoming India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, has found that on both sides, officials' thinking was strikingly similar to that of the Russians and Americans in 1962. The prospect of war brought Delhi and Islamabad face to face with a nuclear holocaust, and leaders in each country did what they had to do to avoid it.

Nuclear pessimists—and there are many—insist that even if this pattern has held in the past, it's crazy to rely on it in the future, for several reasons. The first is that today's nuclear wannabes are so completely unhinged, you'd be mad to trust them with a bomb. Take the sybaritic Kim Jong Il, who's never missed a chance to demonstrate his battiness, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has denied the Holocaust and promised the destruction of Israel, and who, according to some respected Middle East scholars, runs a messianic martyrdom cult that would welcome nuclear obliteration. These regimes are the ultimate rogues, the thinking goes—and there's no deterring rogues.

But are Kim and Ahmadinejad really scarier and crazier than were Stalin and Mao? It might look that way from Seoul or Tel Aviv, but history says otherwise. Khrushchev, remember, threatened to "bury" the United States, and in 1957, Mao blithely declared that a nuclear war with America wouldn't be so bad because even "if half of mankind died … the whole world would become socialist." Pyongyang and Tehran support terrorism—but so did Moscow and Beijing. And as for seeming suicidal, Michael Desch of the University of Notre Dame points out that Stalin and Mao are the real record holders here: both were responsible for the deaths of some 20 million of their own citizens.

Yet when push came to shove, their regimes balked at nuclear suicide, and so would today's international bogeymen. For all of Ahmadinejad's antics, his power is limited, and the clerical regime has always proved rational and pragmatic when its life is on the line. Revolutionary Iran has never started a war, has done deals with both Washington and Jerusalem, and sued for peace in its war with Iraq (which Saddam started) once it realized it couldn't win. North Korea, meanwhile, is a tiny, impoverished, family-run country with a history of being invaded; its overwhelming preoccupation is survival, and every time it becomes more belligerent it reverses itself a few months later (witness last week, when Pyongyang told Seoul and Washington it was ready to return to the bargaining table). These countries may be brutally oppressive, but nothing in their behavior suggests they have a death wish.

Still, even if Iran or North Korea are deterrable, nuclear pessimists fear they'll give or sell their deadly toys to terrorists, who aren't—for it's hard to bomb a group with no return address. Yet look closely, and the risk of a WMD handoff starts to seem overblown. For one thing, assuming Iran is able to actually build a nuke, Desch explains that "it doesn't make sense that they'd then give something they regard as central to their survival to groups like Hizbullah, over which they have limited control. As for Al Qaeda, they don't even share common interests. Why would the mullahs give Osama bin Laden the crown jewels?" To do so would be fatal, for Washington has made it very clear that it would regard any terrorist use of a WMD as an attack by the country that supplied it—and would respond accordingly.

A much greater threat is that a nuclear North Korea or Pakistan could collapse and lose control of its weapons entirely. Yet here again history offers some comfort. China acquired its first nuke in 1964, just two years before it descended into the mad chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when virtually every Chinese institution was threatened—except for its nuclear infrastructure, which remained secure. "It was nearly a coup," says Desch, "yet with all the unrest, nobody ever thought that there might be an unauthorized nuclear use." The Soviets' weapons were also kept largely safe (with U.S. help) during the breakup of their union in the early '90s. And in recent years Moscow has greatly upped its defense spending (by 20 to 30 percent a year), using some of the cash to modernize and protect its arsenal.

As for Pakistan, it has taken numerous precautions to ensure that its own weapons are insulated from the country's chaos, installing complicated firing mechanisms to prevent a launch by lone radicals, for example, and instituting special training and screening for its nuclear personnel to ensure they're not infiltrated by extremists. Even if the Pakistani state did collapse entirely—the nightmare scenario—the chance of a Taliban bomb would still be remote. Desch argues that the idea that terrorists "could use these weapons radically underestimates the difficulty of actually operating a modern nuclear arsenal. These things need constant maintenance and they're very easy to disable. So the idea that these things could be stuffed into a gunnysack and smuggled across the Rio Grande is preposterous."

The risk of an arms race—with, say, other Persian Gulf states rushing to build a bomb after Iran got one—is a bit harder to dispel. Once again, however, history is instructive. "In 64 years, the most nuclear-weapons states we've ever had is 12," says Waltz. "Now with North Korea we're at nine. That's not proliferation; that's spread at glacial pace." Nuclear weapons are so controversial and expensive that only countries that deem them absolutely critical to their survival go through the extreme trouble of acquiring them. That's why South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan voluntarily gave theirs up in the early '90s, and why other countries like Brazil and Argentina dropped nascent programs. This doesn't guarantee that one or more of Iran's neighbors—Egypt or Saudi Arabia, say—might not still go for the bomb if Iran manages to build one. But the risks of a rapid spread are low, especially given Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent suggestion that the United States would extend a nuclear umbrella over the region, as Washington has over South Korea and Japan, if Iran does complete a bomb. If one or two Gulf states nonetheless decided to pursue their own weapon, that still might not be so disastrous, given the way that bombs tend to mellow behavior.

Put this all together and nuclear weapons start to seem a lot less frightening. So why have so few people in Washington recognized this? Most of us suffer from what Desch calls a nuclear phobia, an irrational fear that's grounded in good evidence—nuclear weapons are terrifying—but that keeps us from making clear, coldblooded calculations about just how dangerous possessing them actually is. The logic of nuclear peace rests on a scary bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in exchange for a much bigger chance that something very bad—conventional war—won't happen. This may well be a rational bet to take, especially if that first risk is very small indeed. But it's a tough case to make to the public.

Still, it's worth keeping in mind as Obama coaxes the world toward nuclear disarmament—especially because he's destined to fail. The Russians and Chinese have shown little inclination to give up their nukes, for several reasons—chief among them that the U.S. is vastly more powerful in conventional terms, and these weapons are thus their main way of leveling the playing field. Moscow and Beijing would likely be unmoved by anything short of a unilateral U.S. disarmament, which no one in Washington contemplates. And even if Russia and China (and France, Britain, Israel, India, and Pakistan) could be coaxed to abandon their weapons, we'd still live with the fear that any of them could quickly and secretly rearm. Meanwhile, the U.S. campaign to slow Iran's weapons program and reverse North Korea's is also unlikely to work. States want nukes if they feel their survival is in jeopardy. The Obama administration may have dropped talk of regime change, but it continues to threaten Pyongyang and Tehran. That ensures the standoff will continue, for so long as these states feel insecure, they'll never give up their nuclear dreams.

Given this reality, Washington would be wiser to focus on making the world we actually live in—the nuclear world—safer. This involves several steps, few of which the Obama administration has mentioned but which it should emphasize in its Nuclear Posture Review due at the end of the year. To start, the logic of deterrence works only if everybody knows who has a nuclear arsenal and thus can't be attacked—as Peter Sellers puts it in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, "The whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!" So the United States should make sure everyone knows roughly who has what, to keep anyone from getting dangerous ideas. On a similar note, the United States should put more effort into advancing what Harvard's Graham Allison calls "nuclear forensics," an emerging discipline that would allow scientists to trace any nuclear device exploded anywhere, by anybody—be it a state or a terrorist—back to its manufacturer and point of origin (since this would convince rogues they can't risk selling bombs to bad guys).

A politically tougher but equally important step would be to make sure that any nuclear weapons state has what's called a "survivable second strike option," a means of ensuring that even if attacked, it could still shoot back, since this is the best way to persuade its enemies not to bother trying to incapacitate it through a surprise attack (as Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund points out, this can be done with a small arsenal and need not necessitate a big buildup). Finally, Washington should continue doing what it's done with Russia and Pakistan to help those regimes keep their weapons safe. The administration has announced plans to help secure loose nukes, and that's all to the good. But it should be prepared to offer the same technology and training to other new nuclear states if they emerge—even if they're U.S. enemies. Critics will scream that doing so would reward bad behavior and encourage it in others. It might. But it would also help keep everyone safe from an accidental launch, which seems a lot more important. None of these steps will be easy to pitch to the public, even for a president as gifted and nimble as Obama. But as he heads into a rare nuclear summit in late September, the least he could do is hold a frank debate on what's really the best strategy for securing the world from—or with—these weapons. Given the stakes, he can hardly afford not to.

U.S. GAO - Fair Lending: Data Limitations and the Fragmented U.S. Financial Regulatory Structure Challenge Federal Oversight and Enforcement Efforts

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GAO-09-704 July 15, 2009
Highlights Page (PDF) Full Report (PDF, 102 pages) Accessible Text Recommendations (HTML)

Summary

The Fair Housing Act (FHA) and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA)--the "fair lending laws"--prohibit discrimination in lending. Responsibility for their oversight is shared among three enforcement agencies--the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Department of Justice (DOJ)--and five depository institution regulators--the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve), National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). This report examines (1) data used by agencies and the public to detect potential violations and options to enhance the data, (2) federal oversight of lenders that are identified as at heightened risk of violating the fair lending laws, and (3) recent cases involving fair lending laws and associated enforcement challenges. GAO analyzed fair lending laws, relevant research, and interviewed agency officials, lenders, and consumer groups. GAO also reviewed 152 depository institution fair lending examination files. Depending upon file availability by regulator, GAO reviewed all relevant files or a random sample as appropriate.

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires certain lenders to collect and publicly report data on the race, national origin, and sex of mortgage loan borrowers. Enforcement agencies and depository institution regulators use HMDA data to identify outliers--lenders that may have violated fair lending laws--and focus their investigations and examinations accordingly. But, HMDA data also have limitations; they do not include information on the credit risks of mortgage borrowers, which may limit regulators' and the public's capacity to identify lenders most likely to be engaged in discriminatory practices without first conducting labor-intensive reviews. Another data limitation is that lenders are not required to report data on the race, ethnicity, and sex of nonmortgage loan borrowers--such as small businesses, which limits oversight of such lending. While requiring lenders to report additional data would impose costs on them, particularly smaller institutions, options exist to mitigate such costs to some degree, such as limiting the reporting requirements to larger institutions. Without additional data, agencies' and regulators' capacity to identify potential lending discrimination is limited. GAO identified the following limitations in the consistency and effectiveness of fair lending oversight that are largely attributable to the fragmented U.S. financial regulatory system: (1) Federal oversight of lenders that may represent heightened risks of fair lending law violations is limited. For example, the enforcement agencies are responsible for monitoring independent mortgage lenders' compliance with the fair lending laws. Such lenders have been large originators of subprime mortgage loans in recent years and have more frequently been identified through analysis of HMDA data as outliers than depository institutions, such as banks. Depository institution regulators are more likely to assess the activities of outliers and, unlike enforcement agencies, they routinely assess the compliance of lenders that are not outliers. As a result, many fair lending violations at independent lenders may go undetected, and efforts to deter potential violations may be ineffective. (2) Although depository institution regulators' fair lending oversight efforts may be more comprehensive, the division of responsibility among multiple agencies raises questions about the consistency and effectiveness of their efforts. For example, each regulator uses a different approach to analyze HMDA data to identify outliers and examination documentation varies. Moreover, since 2005, OTS, the Federal Reserve, and FDIC have referred more than 100 lenders to DOJ for further investigations of potential fair lending violations, as required by ECOA, while OCC made one referral and NCUA none. Enforcement agencies have settled relatively few (eight) fair lending cases since 2005. Agencies identified several enforcement challenges, including the complexity of fair lending cases, difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff, and the constraints of ECOA's 2-year statute of limitations.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director:
Team:
Phone:

Orice Williams Brown
Government Accountability Office: Financial Markets and Community Investment
(202) 512-5837

Matters for Congressional Consideration

Recommendation: To facilitate the capacity of federal enforcement agencies and depository institution regulators as well as independent researchers to identify lenders that may be engaged in discriminatory practices in violation of the fair lending laws, Congress may wish to consider the merits of additional data collection and reporting options. These varying options pertain to obtaining key underwriting data for mortgage loans, such as credit scores as well as LTV and DTI ratios, and personal characteristic (such as race, ethnicity and sex) and relevant underwriting data for nonmortgage loans.

Status: In process

Comments: When we determine what steps the Congress has taken, we will provide updated information.

Recommendation: To help ensure that all potential risks for fair lending violations are thoroughly investigated and sufficient time is available to do so, Congress may wish to consider extending the statute of limitations on ECOA violations.

Status: In process

Comments: When we determine what steps the Congress has taken, we will provide updated information.

Recommendation: As Congress debates the reform of the financial regulatory system, it may wish to take steps to help ensure that consumers are adequately protected, that laws such as the fair lending laws are comprehensive and consistently applied, and that oversight is efficient and effective. Any new structure should address gaps and inconsistencies in the oversight of independent mortgage brokers and nonbank subsidiaries, as well as address the potentially inconsistent oversight provided by depository institution regulators.

Status: In process

Comments: When we determine what steps the Congress has taken, we will provide updated information.

Recommendations for Executive Action

Recommendation: To help strengthen fair lending oversight and enforcement, DOJ, FDIC, Federal Reserve, FTC, HUD, NCUA, OCC, and OTS should work collaboratively to identify approaches to better assess the potential risk for discrimination during the preapplication phase of mortgage lending. For example, the agencies and depository institution regulators could further consider the use of testers, perhaps on a pilot basis, as well as surveys of mortgage loan borrowers and applicants or alternative means to better assess the potential risk for discrimination during this critical phase of the mortgage lending process.

Agency Affected: Department of Housing and Urban Development

Status: In process

Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Agency Affected: Department of Justice

Status: In process

Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Agency Affected: Department of the Treasury: Office of Thrift Supervision

Status: In process

Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Agency Affected: Department of the Treasury: Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

Status: In process

Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Agency Affected: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

Status: In process

Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Agency Affected: Federal Reserve System

Status: In process

Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Agency Affected: Federal Trade Commission

Status: In process

Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Agency Affected: National Credit Union Administration

Status: In process

Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

French Parliament to Investigate a Possible Ban on the Burqa and Niqab - NYTimes.com

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By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS — It is a measure of France’s confusion about Islam and its own Muslim citizens that in the political furor here over “banning the burqa,” as the argument goes, the garment at issue is not really the burqa at all, but the niqab.

A burqa is the all-enveloping cloak, often blue, with a woven grill over the eyes, that many Afghan women wear, and it is almost never seen in France. The niqab, often black, leaves the eyes uncovered.

Still, a movement against it that started with a Communist mayor near Lyon has gotten traction within France’s ruling center-right party, which claims to be defending French values, and among many on the left, who say they are defending women’s rights. A parliamentary commission will soon meet to investigate whether to ban the burqa — in other words, any cloak that covers most of the face.

The debate is indicative of the deep ambivalence about social customs among even a small minority of France’s Muslim citizens, and of the signal fear that France’s principles of citizens’ rights, equality and secularism are being undermined.

French discomfort with organized religion, dating from the 1789 revolution and the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church, is aggravated by these foreign customs, which are associated in the Western mind with repression of women.

André Gerin, a Communist Party legislator and mayor of Vénissieux, a Lyon suburb with many Muslims from North Africa, began the affair in late June by initiating a motion, signed by 57 other legislators, calling for the parliamentary commission.

“The burqa is the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Gerin said. “Islamism really threatens us.” In a letter to the government, he wrote: “It is time to take a stand on this issue that concerns thousands of citizens who are worried to see imprisoned, totally veiled women.”

A few days later, President Nicolas Sarkozy said that “the burqa is not welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” He did not say how it would be made unwelcome, however, or whether he intended to extend existing laws that already ban head scarves or any other religious symbol from public schools.

For Mr. Sarkozy, who defends participation in the Afghan war as a matter of women’s rights, “the problem of the burqa is not a religious problem,” he said. “It is a problem of liberty and the dignity of women. It is a sign of servitude and degradation.”

There is a strong suspicion that Mr. Sarkozy, who has supported religious freedom, is playing politics in a time of economic unhappiness and social anxiety. But he also seems to want to restrict more radical and puritanical forms of Islam from gaining further hold here.

The French press has been full of heated opinion pieces, charts about different Islamic veils, stories about public swimming pools and the burqini, an Islamic swimsuit that covers the body and the hair (but not the face). Women wearing the niqab, many of them French converts to Islam, have said that they have freely chosen to cover themselves after marriage. Others say solemnly that to stigmatize or ban the veil would only cause more women to wear it, out of protest.

Last year, Faiza Silmi, now 33, was denied French citizenship in part for wearing the niqab, bringing a legal judgment about personal dress into the home. In an interview with Le Monde, Ms. Silmi said that she chose to wear the niqab after her marriage, even if her own mother thought it was “a little too much.”

“Don’t believe for a moment that I am submissive to my husband!” she said. “I’m the one who takes care of the documents and the money.”

Passions have been so high that when domestic intelligence issued a report saying that only 367 women in France wore a full veil, it seemed to make no difference.

For many French Muslims, the entire discussion is an embarrassment and an incitement to racial and religious hatred.

M’hammed Henniche is the secretary for the private Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis. He is French first of all, he said, and he is appalled.

“There’s nothing but confusion,” he said. “What they’re talking about is the niqab, but I think choosing to use burqa instead is not an accident. They chose a word that is associated with Afghanistan, and that spreads a negative, scary image.

“There are laws in France that force women to show their face, in certain situations, at the town hall, at the bank,” Mr. Henniche added. “Women who wear niqab take it off when they must. But in the streets, everyone is free. They’re spinning this story in order to stigmatize a community.”

Even existing laws are misunderstood, he said, with a woman refused entry to a bank because employees thought a head scarf was illegal. “It’s a dangerous slip, going from a ban in school to a ban in the streets,” he said.

John R. Bowen, who wrote “Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space,” has been asked to testify by the parliamentary commission.

“French political discourse is internally conflicted,” said Mr. Bowen, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. There is confusion about different kinds of public space, he said — the street, and places that belong to the state but are not freely open to the public, like schools.

France took from Rousseau the principle that no intermediate group or affiliation should stand between the citizen and the state, which represents the general interest, Mr. Bowen said. But Rousseau also championed the right to form private associations, or clubs. It was not until 1901, however, that the state allowed some unions or associations, Mr. Bowen said, and not until 1981 that foreigners could form them.

Muslim groups then started religious tutoring, seen as promoting Islam, and clubs based on ethnicity or religion are viewed with great suspicion, Mr. Bowen said. “There is a sense that people who are publicly displaying their religious or ethnic characteristics are a slap in the face of French applied political theory.”

Mr. Bowen does not think there will be a law banning the niqab. Nor does Yazid Sabeg, Mr. Sarkozy’s commissioner for diversity and equal opportunity, who said it would be unenforceable.

“Even if they ban the burqa, it will not stop there,” Mr. Henniche, of the Muslim group, said. “There is a permanent demand for legislating against Muslims. This could go really bad, and I’m scared of it. I feel like they’re turning the screws on us.”

Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Paris.

Sri Lankan Journalist Punished for Writing About Army - NYTimes.com

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By LYDIA POLGREEN

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — On World Press Freedom Day in May, President Obama held up J. S. Tissainayagam, the editor of a crusading magazine in Sri Lanka who has been jailed since March 2008, as a symbol of the oppression of the media.

On Monday, a judge in Sri Lanka sentenced Mr. Tissainayagam to 20 years of hard labor for violating the country’s tough antiterrorism laws by writing articles highly critical of a government military offensive against Tamil Tiger rebels who had controlled a large chunk of Sri Lanka’s north.

Mr. Tissainayagam, who is Tamil, was the editor of the now-defunct North Eastern Monthly magazine, and was accused of accepting money and other support from the Tigers. He was convicted under laws that give harsh sentences for offenses like using racially divisive language or promoting disharmony. These laws were enacted in response to the Tamil Tiger insurgency. The insurgents, members of the Hindu Tamil minority, sought a separate state from Sri Lanka’s Buddhist, Sinhalese majority. The government decisively defeated the Tigers in a bloody final battle on a strip of beach in northern Sri Lanka in May, ending one of Asia’s longest civil wars.

As is often the case with local journalists in conflict zones, Mr. Tissainayagam’s reporting reflected the prevailing point of view of the minority to which he belonged, but the government argued that his work went further.

“The Constitution itself gives freedom of press, but that doesn’t allow anybody to spread false information to spur ethnic violence,” Sudarshana DeSilva, the prosecutor, told the court, Reuters reported.

But rights advocates say that Mr. Tissainayagam’s sentence reflects the plight of Sri Lanka’s embattled press corps. At least seven journalists have been killed since 2007, including some singled out by the Tamil Tigers. Many more have fled the country.

“It is very serious blow,” said Sanjana Hattotuwa, editor of Groundviews, a citizen journalism Web site. “It sends a chilling message that the independent expression of opinion is no longer tolerated in Sri Lanka.”

Lucien Rajakarunanayake, spokesman for Sri Lanka’s president and a columnist, said that Mr. Tissainayagam had the right to appeal.

“The court has believed the evidence placed before it,” Mr. Rajakarunanayake said. “That he did accept money from a terrorist organization and did work that furthered the cause of terrorism in this country.”

The sentence is sure to increase pressure from the West on Sri Lanka’s government, which has been criticized for its handling of the last battle against the Tamil Tigers and the treatment of Tamils displaced by the war.

Mr. Tissainayagam’s lawyer told reporters that he planned to appeal. Though he confessed, he later said that the confession was given under duress. Legal experts said that the antiterrorism laws under which he was convicted violated the Constitution.

Asanga Welikala, a lawyer who has written on press freedom in Sri Lanka, said that the law was so vague that practically any speech could be prosecuted.

“Totally unacceptable that we should have such a law, and even more unacceptable that a court of law should feel that this journalist should get the maximum possible sentence under that law for simply doing his job,” he said.

Turkey and Armenia to Establish Diplomatic Ties - NYTimes.com

By SEBNEM ARSU

ISTANBUL — Turkey and Armenia, whose century of hostilities constitutes one of the world’s most enduring and acrimonious international rivalries, have agreed to establish diplomatic relations, the two countries announced Monday.

In a breakthrough that came after a year of tiny steps across a still-sealed border and furtive bilateral talks in Switzerland, the foreign ministries of the two countries said that they would begin talks aimed at producing a formal agreement.

The joint statement said they had agreed “to start political negotiations” but did not touch on when or how some of their more intractable disputes would be addressed, starting with the killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turk government from 1915 to 1918, which the Turkish government has denied was genocide.

The two countries have never had diplomatic relations, and their border has been closed since 1993, when Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, went to war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. At the border, soldiers of Turkey, a NATO country, face Russian ones, called in by Armenia, across a mini-Iron Curtain.

Turkey supported Azerbaijan in the dispute, but Russia’s military action in Georgia last year shifted the security calculus in the region. After the war in Georgia, Turkey sought to improve ties with its neighbors in the Caucasus, and Armenia elected a new government interested in reciprocating.

Both countries hope an eventual opening of the border will benefit their struggling economies. Currently, there are limited charter flights between the countries but no real trade.

For Turkey, better relations with Armenia could improve its chances for admission to the European Union, where the genocide issue remains one of the main obstacles, and remove a bone of contention over the same issue with the United States, which has a large Armenian community.

The Swiss-mediated talks began last year, keeping a low profile to avoid exciting nationalist antagonism in both countries. Armenia’s insistence that border and trade relations be normalized before any discussion of genocide began helped push the most contentious issue to the back burner.

Last September, President Abdullah Gul of Turkey attended a Turkey-Armenia soccer match in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, the first visit by a Turkish leader in the two nations’ history.

The symbolic gesture, dubbed soccer diplomacy, was widely opposed in both countries, where bitter ethnic enmity commands large majorities.

The central dispute is the genocide, about which there is little dispute among historians. Turkey has resisted the label, arguing that the Armenians were killed in warfare.

The next round of talks is scheduled to last six weeks, ending about the time of a World Cup match between Turkey and Armenia in Istanbul. President Serge Sargsyan of Armenia is invited to attend.

Attorney General Plans Reshaping of Civil Rights Division - NYTimes.com

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Seven months after taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is reshaping the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division by pushing it back into some of the most important areas of American political life, including voting rights, housing, employment, bank lending practices and redistricting after the 2010 census.

As part of this shift, the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly. President George W. Bush’s appointees had discouraged such tactics, preferring to focus on individual cases in which there is evidence of intentional discrimination.

To bolster a unit that has been battered by heavy turnover and a scandal over politically tinged hiring under the Bush administration, the Obama White House has also proposed a hiring spree that would swell the ranks of several hundred civil rights lawyers with more than 50 additional lawyers, a significant increase for a relatively small but powerful division of the government.

The division is “getting back to doing what it has traditionally done,” Mr. Holder said in an interview. “But it’s really only a start. I think the wounds that were inflicted on this division were deep, and it will take some time for them to fully heal.”

Few agencies are more engaged in the nation’s social and cultural debates than the Civil Rights Division, which was founded in 1957 to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

The division has been at the center of a number of controversies over the decades, serving as a proxy for disputes between liberals and conservatives in matters like school busing and affirmative action. When the Nixon administration took office, it sought to delay school desegregation plans reached under former President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Reagan administration dropped the division’s policy of opposing tax-exempt status for racially discriminatory private schools. And former President Bill Clinton withdrew his first nominee to lead the division, Lani Guinier, after her writings about racial quotas were criticized.

But such dust-ups were minor when compared with sweeping changes at the division under the Bush administration, longtime career civil rights lawyers say.

Now the changes that Mr. Holder is pushing through have led some conservatives, still stinging from accusations that the Bush appointees “politicized” the unit, to start throwing the same charge back at President Obama’s team.

The agency’s critics cite the downsizing of a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panther Party, an investigation into whether an Arizona sheriff’s enforcement of immigration laws has discriminated against Hispanics, and the recent blocking of a new rule requiring Georgia voters to prove their citizenship. (Under the Bush administration, the division had signed off on a similar law requiring Georgia voters to furnish photographic identification, rejecting criticism that legitimate minority voters are disproportionately more likely not to have driver’s licenses or passports.)

Among the critics, Hans von Spakovsky, a former key Bush-era official at the division, has accused the Obama team of “nakedly political” maneuvers.

Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, rejected such criticism, saying those cases were decided “based on the facts and the law.”

Under the Bush administration, the agency shifted away from its traditional core focus on accusations of racial discrimination, channeling resources into areas like religious discrimination and human trafficking.

Department officials are working to avoid unleashing potential controversies as they rebuild the division’s more traditional efforts on behalf of minorities.

They are not planning to dismantle the new initiatives, rather to hire enough additional lawyers to do everything. The administration’s fiscal year 2010 budget request includes an increase of about $22 million for the division, an 18 percent increase from the 2009 budget. Other changes are already apparent.

The division has filed about 10 “friend of the court” briefs in private discrimination-related lawsuits since Mr. Obama’s inauguration, a practice that had dwindled in the previous administration.

In July, moreover, the division’s acting head, Loretta King, sent a memorandum to every federal agency urging more aggressive enforcement of regulations that forbid recipients of taxpayer money from policies that have a disparate impact on minorities.

The division has also lifted Bush-era rules that some career staff members saw as micromanagement or impediments, like restrictions on internal communications and a ban on front-line career lawyers’ making recommendations on whether to approve proposed changes to election laws.

Other changes from the Bush years may be harder to roll back. The division’s downgrading of the New Black Panther Party charges, which were filed in the final days of the Bush administration, has had rippling consequences. It apparently prompted Senate Republicans to put a hold on President Obama’s nominee to lead the division as assistant attorney general for civil rights, Thomas Perez.

The delay in Mr. Perez’s arrival, in turn, is stalling plans to review section managers installed by the Bush team, including several regarded with suspicion by civil rights advocacy groups. Under federal law, top-level career officials may not be transferred to other positions for the first 120 days after a new agency head is confirmed.

Bush-era changes to the division’s permanent rank may also have lingering effects. From 2003 to 2007, Bush political appointees blocked liberals from career jobs and promotions, which they steered to fellow conservatives, whom one such official privately described as “real Americans,” a department inspector general report found. The practice, which no previous administration had done, violated civil service laws, it said.

As morale plunged among veterans, turnover accelerated. The Obama transition team’s confidential report on the division, obtained by The New York Times, says 236 civil rights lawyers left from 2003 to 2007. (The division has about 350 lawyers.)

Many of their replacements had scant civil rights experience and were graduates of lower-ranked law schools. The transition report says the era of hiring such “inexperienced or poorly qualified” lawyers — who are now themselves protected by civil service laws — has left lasting damage.

“While some of the political hires have performed competently and a number of others have left, the net effect of the politicized hiring process and the brain drain is an attorney work force largely ill-equipped to handle the complex, big-impact litigation that should comprise a significant part” of the division’s docket, the transition report said.

At the end of the Bush administration, the attorney general at the time, Michael B. Mukasey, began to make changes intended to reduce political influence over entry-level career lawyer hiring. The Civil Rights Division is now seeking to expand those changes.

It is developing a new hiring policy under which panels of career employees — not political appointees — would decide both whom to hire and to promote for positions from interns to veteran lawyers. The policy could be completed as early as this month.

“We wanted to create a very transparent policy that will stand the test of time and ensure that we hire the best and brightest,” said Mark Kappelhoff, a longtime civil rights lawyer who is the division’s acting principal deputy assistant attorney general.

Some conservatives are skeptical that such a policy will keep politics out of hiring, however. Robert Driscoll, a division political appointee from 2001 to 2003, said career civil rights lawyers are “overwhelmingly left-leaning” and will favor liberals.

“If you are the Obama administration and you allow the career staff to do all the hiring, you will get the same people you would probably get if you did it yourself,” he said. “In some ways, it’s a masterstroke by them.”

Mr. Holder has elsewhere called for social changes with civil rights overtones, like the passage of a federal hate-crimes law, the elimination of the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine and greater financing for indigent defense.

By contrast, he described his Civil Rights Division efforts as more restoration than change. The recent moves, he argued, are a return to its basic approach under presidents of both parties — despite some policy shifts between Republican and Democratic administrations — before the “sea change” and “aberration” of the Bush years.

“Of course there are going to be critics,” Mr. Holder said. But, he argued, “any objective observer” would see the recent approach as consistent with “the historical mission of the division, not straying into some kind of liberal orthodoxy. It really is just a function of enforcing the statutes.”

3 Americans Charged With Traveling to Cambodia for Sex With Children - washingtonpost.com

By Ashley Surdin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 1, 2009

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 31 -- Three Americans accused of traveling to Cambodia to have sex with children are expected to be charged in federal court here, officials said Monday, marking the first prosecutions under a new international initiative intended to combat child-sex tourism.

The initiative, Operation Twisted Traveler, targets Americans who exploit children for sex in Cambodia, which experts describe as a top destination for child predators. U.S. and Cambodian authorities, as well as nongovernmental organizations, were involved in the effort.

"This level of cooperation is unprecedented," said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which coordinated the initiative with the Justice Department.

Before arriving in Los Angeles on Monday, the suspects -- Ronald Boyajian, 49, Erik Peeters, 41, and Jack Sporich, 75 -- were arrested by Cambodian authorities on charges related to child sexual exploitation. They are expected to make their initial appearances in federal court Tuesday afternoon.

The three men are current or former California residents, and all are registered sex offenders, authorities said. An attorney for Boyajian did not respond to a call to comment. The other two men do not yet have attorneys.

Child-sex tourism -- whereby minors are sold for sex through brothels or solicited off the street -- has long been part of the landscape in Cambodia. Like most countries where the crime occurs, such as Thailand and Mexico, Cambodia is a poor nation, with a $600 annual per capita income, according to the World Bank. In desperation to pay for food or health care, some families sell their children to foreign pedophiles or sex houses.

It is difficult to know how pervasive child-sex tourism is in Cambodia, or in any other country, because of the illicit nature of the crime. Undercover investigators, working with human rights activists, continue to find many brothel owners and traffickers selling minors for sex in Cambodia.

There are increasing reports of men traveling there to have sex with underage girls for as much as $4,000, according to the State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report of 2009. The report designated the Southeast Asian country as among those that should receive special scrutiny because it has not made enough progress in eliminating the problem.

Cambodia has made some efforts. Over the past year, after enacting laws with anti-trafficking provisions, the government convicted a dozen offenders and prosecuted nearly 70. U.S. legislation, including the PROTECT Act of 2003, has also targeted trafficking. The legislation bolstered federal laws targeting predatory crimes against children outside the United States by expanding the range of crimes and increasing penalties.

Officials say Twisted Traveler, launched in October, will help enforce existing laws. Under the initiative, the FBI and ICE trained the Cambodian National Police and local police in Phnom Penh, the nation's capital.

"Some part of what we're trying to do here is change attitudes and change acceptance of child-sex tourism as something that's always been around or can't be changed," Carol A. Rodley, the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, said in a telephone interview. "And I think that's very much true of the Cambodian police -- that their attitudes about the issue have changed in part because of the collaboration."

Authorities in both countries relied on information provided by Action Pour Les Enfants, a nonprofit group, and the International Justice Mission, a human rights agency. Their involvement, Rodley said, marked a breakthrough for Cambodia, which historically has had an uneasy relationship with such organizations because of their criticism of the government.

In a statement announcing the latest allegations, officials said Boyajian, of Menlo Park, Calif., is accused of having sex with a 10-year-old Vietnamese girl. Peeters, of Norwalk, Calif., is accused of engaging in sexual activity with at least three underage Cambodian boys, paying them $5 to $10. Sporich, of Sedona, Ariz., is accused of sexually abusing at least one Cambodian boy, and of driving through city streets on his motorbike, dropping money as a way to attract children.

If convicted, the men face sentences of up to 30 years for each victim.

Officials said they hope the arrests will deter would-be sex tourists. Over the past six years, ICE has arrested more than 70 suspects nationwide on charges of child-sex tourism.

"The appeal of a place like this is that it's very far away, and pedophiles feel like they can come here and be anonymous and be outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement," Rodley said. "I hope the message that it sends is one of deterrence."

U.N. Chief's 'Quiet' Outreach To Autocrats Causing Discord - washingtonpost.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 1, 2009

UNITED NATIONS -- U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has a message for despots and dictators: We can talk.

The world's top diplomat has had more face time with autocratic leaders than any of his recent predecessors, jetting off for tete-a-tetes with Burma's senior general, Than Shwe, and pulling aside Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir at summits for discreet chats.

Ban has said he is confident that his trademark "quiet diplomacy" can help nudge the most recalcitrant leaders to mend their ways. He says he has pried open the door for aid workers in cyclone-ravaged Burma, gotten thousands of international peacekeepers into Darfur and helped raise the international profile of climate change.

"It is human relationships which can make a difference," Ban said in a recent interview, adding that he doesn't find it productive to scold foreign leaders in public but won't shrink from delivering tough messages in private. "Some might think I have been quite soft, but I have been quite straight, very strong in a sense."

The approach, however, has recently exposed the U.N. chief to criticism that he too often remains silent in the face of atrocities by the very leaders he seeks to cultivate, and that he has exaggerated his accomplishments. His frequent contacts with unsavory leaders have contributed to the United Nations' reputation as a forum for grubby compromises, detractors say.

"The main image people have of him is sitting down with the bad guys and getting nothing," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said of Ban.

As the Obama administration explores the merits of engagement with its adversaries, including Iran, North Korea and Syria, Ban's diplomatic strategy offers insights into some of the political risks of haggling with the world's most difficult political leaders. Halfway through his first term, Ban is facing a leadership crisis as U.N. civil servants and diplomats here increasingly portray him as an ineffective administrator whose reluctance to hold outlaw leaders to account for bad behavior has undercut the United Nations' moral authority.

For Ban, perhaps the greatest test of engagement as a policy came earlier this year.

In Sri Lanka, where the government was pushing to crush the ruthless Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the secretary general reached out to President Mahinda Rajapaksa to persuade him to show restraint to protect the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians forced to serve as the Tigers' human shields.

In an effort to maintain a cordial working relationship with Rajapaksa, Ban and his top advisers withheld criticism of the government, advising U.N. human rights officials not to publish U.N. estimates of the civilian death toll in the conflict, arguing that they were not convinced of their credibility, according to officials familiar with the discussions. In the end, Ban's diplomatic intervention achieved a brief weekend pause in the fighting but did little to stem to slaughter, which cost the lives of 7,800 to 20,000 civilians.

Ban says he won commitments from Sri Lankan leaders to improve conditions for displaced people and to pursue reconciliation, but his handling of such crises has raised questions among some U.N. diplomats about his viability for a second term.

Norway's U.N. ambassador, Mona Juul, wrote that Ban is a "spineless and charmless" leader who has failed to convey the U.N.'s "moral voice and authority," according to a confidential memo to Norway's foreign minister. Juul, whose husband, Terje Roed-Larsen, serves as one of Ban's Middle East envoys, sharply criticized Ban's handling of the crises in Sri Lanka and Burma in the memo, which was first published in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.

"The Secretary-General was a powerless observer to thousands of civilians losing their lives and becoming displaced from their homes," Juul wrote of Ban's role in Sri Lanka. "The moral voice and authority of the Secretary-General has been missing."

Ban has been stung by the criticism and said he is striving to improve his performance. But he suggested that the criticism stemmed from a misunderstanding in the West of his Asian diplomatic approach. "We need to be able to respect the culture, tradition and leadership style of each and every leader," Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, told reporters in a visit to Oslo on Monday. "I have my own charisma, I have my own leadership style."

Mission to Burma

Despite the criticism, Ban still enjoys the support of the United Nations' most powerful countries, including the United States, China and Britain, and of the U.S. Congress, which has recently voted to pay off American debt to the United Nations.

Ban's advisers say the criticism is patently unfair and does not take into account his willingness to speak out against abuses. Ban infuriated China by criticizing its treatment of ethnic Uighurs in western China, he has spoken out against Iranian President Mamhoud Ahmedinijad's nuclear ambitions and his frequent anti-Israeli remarks, and he has publicly scolded the powerful Group of Eight industrial powers for not committing to steeper emissions cuts.

Still, U.N. officials and diplomats are concerned that the criticism of Ban's political mediation is overshadowing what they believe is his most important accomplishment: rallying international support for a treaty that would reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

The Obama administration has publicly praised Ban's performance. But before joining the administration, Samantha Power, the White House's top U.N. specialist, was a sharp critic of Ban's diplomatic style, characterizing his handling of the Darfur crisis as "extremely disappointing."

"Can we afford to do without a global figure, a global leader?" she told the New Statesman, a British magazine, last year.

U.S. officials say that Power's comments do not reflect the views of the administration and that they were made before she had an opportunity to work closely with Ban.

"Secretary General Ban has one of the most difficult jobs in the world," Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in a statement. "I believe he is principled, hard-working, cares deeply and is willing to take risks to carry out his mission." Rice also credited Ban with increasing the number of women in senior posts and "bringing countries together to tackle challenges such as climate change and global health."

But Rice has differed with Ban over his engagement strategy, and she cautioned him against traveling to Burma in July. Rice argued that a high-profile meeting with the Burmese military ruler would make him look weak unless he extracted a clear commitment to democratic reform, according to U.N. officials.

During his visit, Than Shwe bluntly rejected Ban's appeal to release opposition leader Aung San Su Kyi; Ban's request to meet with her also was denied. Five weeks later, a Burmese court sentenced Suu Kyi to 18 additional months under house arrest, ensuring that she will not participate in the country's national elections next year.

But Burma's ruler subsequently allowed another visitor, Sen. James Webb (D-Va.), to meet with Suu Kyi and to take home a U.S. citizen, John Yettaw, who had been sentenced to seven years in prison for paying an unauthorized visit to her villa.

Ban bridles at the suggestion that his trip was a failure, saying he has established a vital personal channel to the Burmese leader. Ban said he also prevailed upon Than Shwe to allow him to address a gathering of Burmese officials, academics and relief groups, where he sharply criticized Burma's human rights record and publicly chided Than Shwe for rebuffing his request to see Suu Kyi. "That was unprecedented," Ban said.

Burmese opposition leaders say that while they appreciate Ban's efforts, they do not think he has moved the country toward democracy. "I don't want to say it was totally nothing," Burma's exiled prime minister, Sein Win, said during a recent visit to U.N. headquarters. "When you look at the immediate impact, of course, we could not see anything."

'Spotlight' on Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, Ban and his advisers sought to perform a delicate balancing act. They pressed the country's leader in private to halt the shelling of civilian zones, while avoiding an open confrontation with cautiously worded public statements about the violence.

Human rights advocates faulted Ban for not pressing hard enough to hold Sri Lanka accountable for its actions. Days after the war ended, the secretary general signed a joint agreement with Rajapaksa committing Sri Lanka to pursue political reconciliation with ethnic Tamils and to release hundreds of thousands of displaced ethnic Tamils in government-controlled camps.

In exchange, Ban dropped a U.N. push for an independent investigation into war crimes, leaving it to Sri Lanka to determine whether its military was responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians in the final offensive. Two days later, Sri Lankan diplomats, citing the agreement, quashed a proposal by the top U.N. human rights official to create an independent commission of inquiry to probe war crimes in the country.

Some diplomats have defended Ban's handling of the crisis, saying he pushed far more aggressively to protect Sri Lankan civilians than did any government, including the United States, India, China, Russia and key European powers.

"He put a spotlight on what was happening in Sri Lanka," said John Sawers, Britain's U.N. ambassador. "So it's not perfect in Sri Lanka; far too many civilians got killed and there is still an outstanding problem with the civilians in the [Internally Displaced Persons] camps. But I believe Ban's engagement made the situation less bad than it would otherwise have been."

E.Timor releases suspected Indonesian militia - UN - Reuters

Image via Wikipedia

By Sunanda Creagh

DILI (Reuters) - An Indonesian man who was allegedly involved in crimes against humanity in East Timor when the country voted for independence has been released from a Dili prison, a United Nations spokesman said on Monday.

East Timor's government under President Jose Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao has attracted strong criticism from rights groups over its policy of pardoning convicted ex-militia and pursuing a conciliatory approach with Indonesia, its sprawling neighbour and former ruler.

Louis Gentile, the East Timor representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the release of Martenus Bere, who was wanted for militia attacks on pro-independence civilians, sent the wrong signals.

"His release is contrary to the Security Council resolutions which set up the U.N. mission in Timor Leste (East Timor) and completely undermines the principle of accountability for crimes against humanity globally," Gentile told Reuters.

"This has global significance."

A former Portuguese colony, East Timor was invaded in 1975 by Indonesia. An estimated 180,000 died during the occupation, and the U.N. estimates about 1,000 East Timorese died in the mayhem that surrounded the 1999 vote for independence.

According to a document archived on the website of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Bere was a member of a militia that attacked and killed pro-independence civilians, including priests, in September 1999, in what became known as the Suai massacre.

"He was believed to have been involved in directing the attack. He was not one of the junior ones, so that's why this is so serious," Gentile told Reuters.

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Bere was recently arrested near the Indonesian border on an outstanding warrant for crimes against humanity, but was released from Dili's Becora prison on Sunday on instructions from Gusmao, Gentile told Reuters.

A spokesman for the East Timor government was unable to confirm immediately whether Bere had been released.

Indonesian news website Kapanlagi.com quoted West Nusa Tenggara governor Frans Lebu Raya saying that Bere had been released and was currently at the Indonesian embassy in Dili. The Indonesian embassy in Dili did not return calls from Reuters.

Damien Kingsbury, an expert on East Timor and Indonesian politics at Australia's Deakin University, said Indonesia had been pushing for Bere's release.

"This will ease tensions with Indonesia but increase domestic anger over impunity," Kingsbury told Reuters.

East Timor has pursued much closer diplomatic and economic ties with Indonesia, its more prosperous neighbour. "No one denies that warm relations between Indonesia and East Timor is a good thing. But nevertheless, the issue of justice for crimes against humanity needs to be separated from the need for good relations. It is a complete distortion of priorities," said Gentile.

Bere's release coincided with the 10th anniversary celebration of East Timor's vote for independence, as President Ramos-Horta awarded prizes to scores of activists for campaigning against human rights abuses.

On Friday, the president mounted a spirited defence of his decision to oppose a UN Crimes Tribunal in East Timor.

"I know what suffering is," said Ramos-Horta, who lost four siblings in the conflict.

"But I repudiate the notion that we do not care about justice. Indonesian democracy has progressed. Indonesians are the ones who will bring justice to Indonesia, in their own time."

A new political generation rises in East Timor - Reuters

Image via Wikipedia

By Sunanda Creagh

DILI, Aug 30 (Reuters) - As a student activist in Jakarta, Avelino Coelho da Silva sought refuge in the Austrian embassy to avoid capture by Indonesian troops. Now as East Timor's Secretary of State for Energy Policy, he installs solar power in villages.

Coelho, 46, is likely to be among the next generation of leaders in the tiny, oil and gas-rich nation which voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia exactly a decade ago.

Both Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, 63, who was imprisoned by Indonesia, and President Jose Ramos-Horta, 59, who campaigned abroad to keep East Timor's struggle in the public eye, are independence heroes.

But a new generation of political leaders, most of whom were children or students during Indonesia's rule, is getting ready to take over.

A former Portuguese colony, East Timor was invaded in 1975 by Indonesia. An estimated 180,000 died during the occupation, and the U.N. estimates about 1,000 East Timorese died in the mayhem that surrounded the 1999 vote for independence.

Since then, Dili has struggled to tackle security, social and economic woes including high unemployment, splits in the army, and poor infrastructure, healthcare and education.

"If you look at other members of cabinet, I tell you, 80 to 85 percent are new generation. People no more than 35-45 years old, who grew up in the era of occupation. This is the new generation running the country. They are the hope of this country," said Ramos-Horta.

Damien Kingsbury, an East Timor analyst from Australia's Deakin University, said there are already several people in East Timor ready to take over the reins from Gusmao and Ramos-Horta.

"It's essentially the student generation, members of the student resistance organisations and expat Timorese who went back from Australia and Indonesia," Kingsbury said.

The next elections are due in 2012.

The challenges the new leaders face remain daunting. Many roads are just dirt and gravel, making communication with remote villages tough.

Almost 30 percent of the adult population is illiterate: the young men who hang around on Dili street corners are evidence of the 40 percent jobless rate in a country where average household monthly income is just $27. In parts of Dili, roadside stalls sell cast-off clothes to people who can't afford to buy them new.

Coelho's Rural Electrification Master Plan has brought electricity to 17 isolated villages in just over a year by installing solar power systems, funded by the government but owned, installed and maintained by community cooperatives.

"Now they have electricity for five to six hours a day. Before, they spent $US1 a day to buy kerosene but now they can save $US30 a month and use it for other things," he said.

Max Lane, a political analyst who covers Indonesia and East Timor, said the electrification project had helped build Coelho's reputation.

"There will be other candidates around when the big guys leave politics but Coelho will definitely be in the race."

NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK

Ramos-Horta, who survived an assassination attempt in February 2008, said he sees Fernando Lasama de Araujo, the 46-year-old speaker of parliament, as a future leader.

Araujo, who got almost 20 percent of the vote in the 2007 presidential elections, was acting president for several months after Ramos-Horta was shot by disgruntled former soldiers. He was also involved in negotiations with the militants, who eventually laid down their arms.

Araujo, from the Democratic Party, says the government cannot just rely on its $5.1 billion Petroleum Fund, where money from oil and gas deals is collected, to fund development.

"We need to get the money from somewhere to accelerate development. I support foreign loans to achieve this," he said.

"After 10 years of independence, we should have achieved more than we have. Water is a very important one and roads, and schools. Until we build a port we cannot attract investors and tourism."

Finance Minister Emilia Pires, 48, who grew up and studied law in Australia, is another leader carving out a name for herself as she tries to increase spending on education, health and infrastructure. Pires is an independent, like some other cabinet members, and is close to Gusmao.

The economy grew 12.8 percent last year and she expects it to expand 8 percent both this year and next.

(For an interview, click on [ID:nJAK518967] )

Her predecessor, Fernanda Borges, an Australian-educated former credit risk analyst who helped set up the Central Payments Office, the forerunner of the Banking and Payments Authority, or central bank, is also considered a future leader.

Borges, 40, quit as finance minister in 2002 after accusing the government of corruption, and formed her own party, the National Unity Party.

East Timor ranked 145th out of 180 countries in Transparency International's 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index -- on a par with Kazakhstan and below Indonesia.

"I understand my limitations as a member of a small party. I know I don't have the resistance hero image behind me. But with three seats in parliament we can be a voice to say this is wrong and when the government is doing the right thing, we can say this is the right thing too," she told Reuters in an interview.

"We are the new kids on the block but people trust us. (Reporting by Sunanda Creagh in Dili; Editing by Sara Webb and Sanjeev Miglani)

Aug 31, 2009

Link by Link - Wikipedia Looks Hard at Its Culture - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By NOAM COHEN

BUENOS AIRES

EUGENE KIM left his conference here on Thursday afternoon to visit the Plaza de Mayo, where the mothers of victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s march silently, their hair swept under white scarves.

The weekly marches began in 1977 to remember “the disappeared,” those who were snatched and killed by the dictatorship in an attempt to destroy the political opposition. Today, the mothers represent a movement — they are joined by supporters as they march, and there are key chains and T-shirts for sale. People like Mr. Kim come to take photographs.

“They have been professionalized,” Mr. Kim observed. It’s inevitable, he says. He should know; he is in the professionalization business. Or consulting, as it is also known.

His latest client, as of July, is the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization in San Francisco responsible for Wikipedia projects around the world, which is spending $600,000 to create a five-year strategic plan. And the conference he briefly left was the annual Wikimania gathering, held last week in the General San Martín Cultural Center, just off Corrientes Avenue, one of the main arteries of Buenos Aires, and a short subway ride to the Plaza de Mayo.

He and the other newly hired wiki-consultants tended to stick out. They were a bit older. They were a bit better dressed (O.K., a lot better dressed). They tended to travel in packs of two or three. And they were taking notes. Few had been to this conference before, and they were clearly trying to figure out where to begin in remaking a miraculous project that had become among the top five Web sites in the world, with a total of more than 330 million visitors a month, without the benefit of consultants.

In addition to Mr. Kim, there was Jelly Helm, a former executive creative director at Wieden + Kennedy who worked for clients like Nike before leaving to focus on nonprofit work, and three members of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting firm that will help analyze trends within the Wikipedia community.

In a similar role is Matt Halprin, a partner of the Omidyar Network, a “philanthropic investing firm” created by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, which in August announced a $2 million grant to the foundation over two years. Mr. Halprin, a former vice president at eBay in charge of global trust and security, was just named to the Wikimedia board.

•

The presence of the wiki-consultants was the most tangible sign of soul-searching among Wikipedians, and certainly at the foundation. Wikipedia has never been more influential but this success has come with burdens — errors or vandalism can resonate around the world, while the largest projects, English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, were losing steam, adding fewer articles and scaring off potential new contributors. And to a certain temperament, great success naturally leads to the question, how long can it last?

“There is a spirit and culture that is starting to shift,” Mr. Kim said of the need for a strategic plan. “That is a necessary thing. But the question is how do you scale without losing sight of your essence.” A student of collaboration, Mr. Kim, whose consulting business is called Blue Oxen Associates, says any plan will have to “do it the wiki-way.”

“We will put those questions up on the wiki and have them go at it for an extended time and hope that we get something,” he said.

He will be soliciting proposals from the community, which will have its own wiki pages, and Wikipedians are being asked to commit 10 hours a week for four months to join task forces divided by issues of concern.

Jimmy Wales, the public face of the project, was unsparing in his criticism in addressing the conference. “We are mostly male computer geeks,” he stated, adding that there might be a measure of diversity, but only in that “we are from different parts of the world.”

As he spoke, a chart showed the self-reported demographics of Wikipedia contributors — more than 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30.

Some Wikipedias are dominated by articles about pop culture, Mr. Wales pointed out, especially Japanese Wikipedia; according to one of his slides, barely 20 percent of the articles on Japanese Wikipedia are about anything else.

More profoundly, he said that Wikipedia was losing sight of its commitment to give everyone in the world a free encyclopedia, particularly people in sub-Saharan Africa. “Is it more important to get to 10 million articles in English, or 10,000 in Wolof?” he asked.

In her speech, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, was effusive in her praise for all that Wikipedians have created, but she too thought there was reason for concern.

“I believe we are pretty suspicious outsiders,” she said, adding that there were good reasons for that. “We are vulnerable to exploitation — people want to monetize the traffic that comes to Wikipedia, or pursue a political agenda.”

“People want to help us,” she said. “We need to open ourselves up to external resources. It is important we open those doors and let those people in.”

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Walking through Buenos Aires, Mr. Helm said this was unlike any communications assignment he had taken on. “It is an awesome story to tell, but I have no idea what we’ll do in terms of tactics,” he said. “My hope is that no one will be able to say who did they hire to do this work.”

Mr. Kim said one issue Wikipedians would need to examine would be “the introduction of bureaucratization,” as represented by outsiders like himself. “It is important to me that my participation have a beginning and an end,” he said.