In Anbar, U.S.-Allied Tribal Chiefs Feel Deep Sense of Abandonment - washingtonpost.com

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By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 3, 2009

RAMADI, Iraq -- There was once a swagger to the scotch-swilling, insurgent-fighting Raed Sabah. He was known as Sheik Raed to his sycophants. Tribesmen who relied on his largess called him the same. So did his fighters, who joined the Americans and helped crush the insurgency in Anbar province.

Sabah still likes his scotch -- Johnnie Walker Black, with Red Bull on the rocks -- but these days, as the Americans withdraw from western Iraq, he has lost his swagger. His neighbors now deride him as an American stooge; they have nicknamed his alley "The Street of the Lackeys."

"The Americans left without even saying goodbye. Not one of them," Sabah said in his villa in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, once the cradle of Iraq's insurgency. "Even when we called them, we got a message that the line had been disconnected."

Nowhere is the U.S. departure from Iraq more visible than in Anbar, where the 27 bases and outposts less than a year ago have dwindled to three today. Far less money is being spent. Since November, more than two-thirds of combat troops have departed. In their wake is a blend of cynicism and bitterness, frustration and fear among many of the tribal leaders who fought with the troops against the insurgents, a tableau of emotion that may color the American legacy in a region that has stood as the U.S. military's single greatest success in the war. Pragmatism, the Americans call their departure. Desertion, their erstwhile allies answer.

As the United States leaves the province, acknowledged Col. Matthew Lopez, the Marine commander here, "you're going to have individuals who are unhappy."

Sabah freely admits he is one of them.

"We stood by them, we carried out their requests, we let no one hurt them," he said in a rushed clump of words, near certificates of appreciation from the Marines and the U.S. Army that gather dust in a mother-of-pearl cabinet. "They weren't supposed to abandon us."

As he sat with other tribal leaders who joined the American-led fight in 2006 and 2007, his reticence seemed to rival his fatalism, the sense that foes outnumber friends. "I expect I'll die at any time," he worried. "Today, tomorrow, maybe the day after."

'The British Had Foresight'

Steeped in desert traditions of pride, dignity and honor, no one in Anbar, perhaps the most Arab of Iraq's Arab regions, would contend that any foreign occupation was good, and the Americans remain deeply unpopular in some quarters here. But true or not, there is a prevailing sense in this vast, arid region bisected by the Euphrates that, as far as occupations go, the British were better at it than the Americans.

There are bridges still nicknamed "British bridges," built after the British defeated the Ottoman Empire and occupied Iraq at the end of World War I. One spans the Euphrates in Ramadi. The descendants of some sheiks jealously guard pictures of their forefathers posing with British potentates. One of them bragged that Gertrude Bell, the British diplomat and adventurer, wrote about his ancestor, the powerful sheik Ali Sulaiman.

"One of the most remarkable men in Iraq," she declared in a letter to her father.

"The British had foresight and, we can't say credibility, but they had more patience than the Americans. They understood how to take time to win someone to their side," said his great-grandson, Ali Hatem Sulaiman. "The Americans, no. With them, it's either shoot you or give you money, it's either hire you or beat you up."

The Americans, he said, used a jackhammer to shape a diamond.

Deliberate Disengagement

To be fair, Lopez, the colonel in Ramadi, is no jackhammer.

His tenure in Iraq started in 2003 in Karbala, part of the Shiite Muslim heartland. He ends his latest tour, this one in Iraq's Sunni hub, next month. He dismissed the idea that allies were somehow abandoned or friends shown any disrespect.

The day after he took command, Lopez ordered the construction of a diwan, a kind of reception hall requisite in any sheik's house. Forty-eight hours later, it was done, complete with eight Persian carpets, overstuffed furniture, ample ashtrays and even pink plastic flowers in the corner. On the wall is a clock with the 99 names of Allah in Arabic.

"All the nuances," Lopez described it, "all the cultural sensitivities."

His Marines train their Army successors in the etiquette of brewing Turkish coffee, or as one soldier put it, "espresso times 10." Well-sugared tea should be served as soon as the sheiks sit down in Lopez's diwan. "You want to be Johnny on the spot every time," Cpl. Jared Jones insisted. In serving meals, put lamb in the middle, he said, chicken to the side. Take plastic silverware out of the wrapper; doing otherwise is considered tacky.

"We can't stress how much this matters," Jones lectured the impromptu class of a half-dozen soldiers. "We mess it up, we pay the price. Now, are there any questions about chow?"

But even Lopez's efforts can't rewrite the arithmetic of postwar Iraq. He acknowledged that "the sheer mathematics" of the withdrawal mean U.S. officers are simply less engaged with some of the sheiks who joined them in the fight against insurgents, a battle widely viewed as one of the crucial pivots in the American experience in Iraq. As he describes it, the military has also disciplined itself to better target which sheiks it wants to court -- the 20 or so whom they have deemed most prominent here.

"I think that's one of our institutional lessons learned," Lopez said.

The goal of what he called a responsible drawdown was "a return to normalcy."

"It's not normal for a coalition presence to be injected into the Iraqi cultural system and the sheiks' system," Lopez said, sitting in his office at Camp Ramadi. "Without extricating ourselves from the equation," he added, "it can't return to normal."

A Sheik Speaks His Mind

Postwar Anbar is anything but normal, whatever normal might mean here. By virtue of its money, arms and prestige, the U.S. military -- like its British predecessors -- has indelibly remade the province's landscape. One ally, Ahmed Abu Risha, whose clan was little known before the occupation, is on a trajectory to become Anbar's most powerful man. Other allies have gathered fabulous wealth. Yet others deem themselves dead men walking, having courted too few friends while they occupied the U.S. limelight.

The one constant is the degree to which the sheiks dislike one another. Any pledge not to speak ill about one's peers is almost always a preamble to a string of expletives. In one rant that ended only when the sheik ran out of breath, a rival was called a pimp, a prostitute, the son of a dog and, finally, "a circumciser."

Perhaps another constant is the suspicion that many of America's allies direct at their patron.

"They did the same thing in Vietnam," said the pragmatic Affan al-Issawi, a U.S.-allied militia leader near Fallujah whom Lopez called "a very dear friend of mine."

"I know their history. Just in one night, they left. They left all their agents and friends behind. I knew they would leave one day," Issawi said.

Issawi has decorated his villa with portraits of himself with then-President George W. Bush, former American military commanders and President Obama. He acknowledges the help the U.S. military gave him in the counterinsurgency, including rifles, heavy machine guns and ammunition it seized from "bad people," as well as $1.5 million in contracts to build schools and a water station. On one $450,000 school contract, he boasted, flashing a $25,000, diamond-encrusted Rolex watch, he managed to clear $300,000.

Indeed, Issawi may come out on top. He is an ally of Abu Risha, who some speculate might become the president of Iraq after next year's elections. Issawi has a seat on the provincial council, guaranteeing police protection. He carries his wealth naturally, like a rich Persian Gulf Arab, at ease with privilege to which he has grown accustomed.

"I didn't build my life with American bricks," said Issawi, who will turn 35 in November. "I knew one day they would leave, and that they would leave quickly."

A Bitter Aftertaste

In 1922, Ali Sulaiman, the sheik praised by Gertrude Bell in her letter, worried what would happen to his reputation if it looked like the British had abandoned him.

Nearly a century later, Raed Sabah and a coterie of other sheiks are the modern equivalent. At the peak of the fight against the insurgency, the United States supplied Sabah with 50 AK-47 rifles. Jassem Swaidawi, another ally, ran up a $30,000 bill one month on a U.S.-supplied phone he used to contact the military; he was reimbursed. Hamid al-Hais shows off a partial right finger and two wounds in his right leg, suffered in a fight with insurgents in 2007. They all met Obama when he was still a presidential candidate.

Some of them said they expected American citizenship. Fearful for their lives amid charges of treason, others hoped for help finding residency in neighboring Jordan or Syria. Some are clearly motivated by money, which was once abundant: They want funds to keep flowing in a region that, more than any other part of Iraq, appears wedded to kleptocracy. "The simplest thing they could have done was to keep in touch," said Sabah, who last saw representatives of the U.S. military before the provincial elections in January.

"The Americans never understood Iraqi society," added Hais, sitting in his diwan with a plaque from the U.S. military that reads, "Allies in battle, friends in peace."

"All they did was write down in their notebooks what they were supposed to have learned," he said.

The American project here was always infused with contradictions. Iraq was never as sovereign as U.S. officials insisted, never as secure as the military proclaimed. The United States called itself a partner, even as it presided over the destruction of the country's fabric. In Anbar, it proclaims a return to normalcy, amid a withdrawal it deems responsible, in a land that will long bear its mark.

Sabah and other U.S.-allied sheiks joke darkly about the accusations leveled against them: that they have served as spies and stooges for the Americans. Some call them "the sheiks of dolma," a reference to the stuffed grape leaves the allies would serve U.S. military officers for lunch. You served the Americans, some tell the sheiks, and they never served you.

"The Americans took what they wanted from them and left them behind. You can't do that in Iraq," said Col. Mahmoud al-Issawi, Fallujah's police chief. "It's shameful to the worst degree. It's not just shameful, it's actually a huge scandal."

"An easy target to be killed," he termed the sheiks.

In the interview, Lopez, the Marine commander, said he was sure that the United States would still boast of friends in Anbar in five years. Sabah, not called a sheik as often these days, was doubtful.

"They may have to come back one day, and their friends won't be here anymore," he said. "Who would stand with them again? After this? No one would accept it."

In China, the Forgotten Manchu Seek to Rekindle Their Glory - WSJ.com

By IAN JOHNSON

QAPQAL, China -- Hasutai gingerly turns on the tape recorder and places it on a table. Out of it emanates something he thought he'd never hear: his native tongue, Manchu, spoken by a living person.

Hasutai is a Manchu, descendant of a nomadic warrior tribe that conquered China in the 17th century and ruled it for more than 250 years. Generations of persecution have all but eliminated the Manchus' language.

So Hasutai, who in the Manchu tradition goes by the one name, has come to this remote corner of China on a quest. His goal is to connect with members of the Xibe tribe -- a reclusive group who speak a forgotten dialect similar to his people's. Along with a band of like-minded young people in half a dozen Chinese cities, Hasutai has started schools, Web sites, written textbooks and recorded the few remaining Manchu speakers for posterity. "At some point you realize that the first language you're speaking isn't your mother tongue," says Hasutai. "You feel like an orphan. You want to find your mother."

Hasutai is at the vanguard of an explosion of ethnic awareness and pride across China. The nation's 1.3 billion people are overwhelmingly Han Chinese, but roughly 9% of the population are ethnic minorities: Manchus and Mongolians, Uighurs and Tibetans as well as dozens of others. Although their numbers are small, minorities live on nearly half of China's territory, including most of its borderlands. Over the past two years they have been at the center of bloody riots that claimed hundreds of lives.

As China's Communist Party marks its 60th year this week with a series of festivities to symbolize national unity, Chinese society is struggling to overcome growing ethnic rifts.

For decades, China's authoritarian policies kept a lid on ethnic expression. Now, as the party loosens control over society, individuals are defining themselves by their culture -- embracing who they are, what language they speak and what their ancestors accomplished. "This is not a hobby or an interest," says Hukshen, a 22-year-old Manchu language student. "This is a burning emotion I feel, a need to find out who I am."

On some levels, this search can be a positive force, helping to give meaning to people's lives. "Having these outlets helps stability," says Sara Davis, director of Asia Catalyst, a non-governmental organization that promotes grassroots organizing. "If [people] feel proud of their culture, they're invested in their society."

But because many of China's 55 minority groups still feel marginalized, expressions of anger and violence are on the rise. Over the past two years, China has suffered serious ethnic rioting, something rare in China's recent history. Earlier this year, riots in China's vast region of Xinjiang left nearly 200 dead and 2,000 wounded.

A heightened sense of ethnic identity also poses challenges because China has few national symbols or myths to hold the groups together. Most Manchus, for example, are unimpressed with the Great Wall, a defensive fortification built by Chinese to keep them out. Ma Rong, a prominent writer and thinker at Peking University, says society is fragmenting.

"We should rethink a new framework of nation building," Mr. Ma wrote in a recent essay. He called upon people to "endeavor to make the country consider the 'nation' as the most essential and the most fundamental identification group."

Much of the identification can be traced to the Communists' policies. Soon after the party took power in 1949, it adopted minority programs imported from the Soviets. The population was divided into ethnic groups. Today there are 56. For those who didn't fit neat categories, social scientists created classifications. Even the Chinese majority got their own label, "Han." The basic idea was to keep an eye on minority groups -- especially those in strategically important regions of the country like Tibet and Xinjiang -- in order to prevent uprisings.

The policies have been a double-edged sword. By emblazoning people's ethnicity on their identity cards and passports, few can forget their past. Yet newer policies push assimilation. Officially, Beijing encourages minorities to learn languages and offers schooling, broadcasts and publications in minority languages. In practice, these offerings are minimal.

Minority education often takes place for a few grades in elementary school, while broadcasts are often just for an hour or two a day, or even a week. Coupled with economic forces that push them to learn Chinese, this neglect means that many young minorities have only a rudimentary understanding of their mother tongues.

For Manchus, the sense of loss was particularly acute. Manchus originated from China's northeast, which under the country's last dynasty, the Qing, was off-limits to Han Chinese immigration. As the dynasty collapsed toward the end of the 19th century, Chinese migrants flooded in. When Japan occupied Manchuria in the 1930s, Manchu language education was replaced by Japanese. Once China retook the region at the war's end, Japanese classes were replaced by Chinese. The Manchu language was never again taught on a wide scale.

As a result, virtually no Manchus today have heard Manchu spoken by their parents. For many, it was taboo. Gebu Algika, a 30-year-old sports promoter who helps run one of the Manchu classes in Beijing, said his grandfather, a prominent Manchu, was executed by the Communists shortly after the 1949 takeover for being a "reactionary." His family fearfully changed its ethnic registration from Manchu to Han. "People born after 1950 don't speak it," he says. "It was politically dangerous."

As rulers of China's last dynasty, Manchus suffered especially under communist rule. Members of the court underwent ideological indoctrination: Most famously the last emperor, Puyi, whose life story was filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci, became a gardener. His relatives were forbidden to speak Manchu, and Manchu schools in Beijing closed down.

Today, only one elementary school in the country teaches Manchu, and that only as an elective. In universities and a handful of private schools, written Manchu is still taught but purely as a means to reading the Qing dynasty's archives.

From two million registered Manchus in China's 1980 census, the country now has nine million -- a reflection of people's willingness to ignore stigmas and embrace their true heritage. For Hasutai, the desire to reconnect to his roots flared up when he was 11 and realized that his people's language was all but dead. He decided to teach himself written Manchu, using textbooks and old ethnographic recordings of Manchus.

Over time, he came into contact with other Manchus who shared the same goals. The group launched two Web sites, reprinted old textbooks, made up flashcards and collected recordings of Manchu speakers. Hasutai began holding classes in downtown Beijing. "We want it to be part of our life, a language we speak with our spouses and children," says Ridaikin, who also uses the Chinese name Hu Aibo. The 24-year-old graduate student in mathematics teaches one of the Manchu classes in Beijing.

The young men decided they needed more help and began by turning to academia to help promote their cause. That led to disappointment, with some scholars giving the impression that they weren't much interested in the language's revival.

Scholars familiar with the new language schools say the effort is inconsequential. "That may be regrettable but I'm afraid that's how it is," says Xu Danliang, a researcher of Manchu history at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences. "People don't know how it's really spoken in daily life."

Indeed, with virtually no native speakers left, it isn't always clear how to speak the words. In the Qing dynasty, a textbook had been developed for Chinese wanting to learn their rulers' languages, with Chinese characters to suggest how to pronounce Manchu letters. That helped, as did a system of transcribing Manchu script into Roman letters devised by European missionaries and academics. But even today, Manchus can't agree on how to pronounce one of the vowels, let alone how to make the language flow naturally.

Hasutai decided the answer lay in a remote corner of China: Qapqal, a county on the Kazakh border. In the 18th century, one of China's most famous emperors, Qianlong, sent members of the Xibe tribe to the newly conquered steppes of Central Asia. Close Manchu allies, the Xibe spoke what essentially was a dialect of Manchu. Isolated from the currents that wiped out Manchu speakers in their heartland, the Xibe kept the language in this remote region.

In July he decided to head west. The 28-year-old quit his job writing software for the Chinese computer maker Founder Group and traveled with a friend, a 22-year-old broadcasting student. They took a 40-hour train ride from Beijing to Urumqi, then a 10-hour bus ride.

The two live in a dormitory of a Xibe middle school and take six hours of Manchu lessons a day from an elderly teacher. Most of the time they wander the streets, reveling in the fact that people here are speaking a language from a bygone era.

One afternoon, they amble down a dusty, poplar-lined street to a market and watch old women haggle over seeds. Then they stop into a restaurant, where a group of Xibe men invite them over for beers and chicken. Dressed in polo shirts, shorts and sandals, the young men hardly blend in with the sun-hardened locals, mostly farmers. But the Xibe are impressed at their resolve and flattered that they have come to learn from them. Still, they find it curious that the young men are only now learning their native tongue as adults. "You Manchus, you lost your character. What happened to you?" one asks in Chinese. The young men look sheepish.

"Their language isn't bad but it's bookish," another adds. "Some of the words they say, I don't understand. We speak colloquial." Hasutai interjects enthusiastically: "That's a great advantage. It's what we want to learn."

The men immediately stand up and drink to that, downing plastic cups of warm beer, the first of many toasts. Hasutai sees the time he will spend here -- he might stay for months -- as part of an effort to make him a better teacher. "Not everyone can come out here," he says. "We're taking it back to them."

In Beijing a few days later, a group of teachers excitedly discuss the two young men's adventure. It is clear that most won't go -- obligations hold them back in Beijing -- but they are awaiting the two's return.

Soon the students crowd into the classroom, the conference room of a company sympathetic to the Manchu revival. Dekjin, a 28-year-old teacher, turns to the whiteboard and in a blue marker writes in Manchu script a word. Next to it she writes in Roman letters the way the word is spoken: m-a-n-j-u; Manchu.

Then she turns to the class and says, "This is who we are."

Write to Ian Johnson at ian.johnson@wsj.com

Much of the identification can be traced to the Communists' policies. Soon after the party took power in 1949, it adopted minority programs imported from the Soviets. The population was divided into ethnic groups. Today there are 56. For those who didn't fit neat categories, social scientists created classifications. Even the Chinese majority got their own label, "Han." The basic idea was to keep an eye on minority groups -- especially those in strategically important regions of the country like Tibet and Xinjiang -- in order to prevent uprisings.

The policies have been a double-edged sword. By emblazoning people's ethnicity on their identity cards and passports, few can forget their past. Yet newer policies push assimilation. Officially, Beijing encourages minorities to learn languages and offers schooling, broadcasts and publications in minority languages. In practice, these offerings are minimal.

Minority education often takes place for a few grades in elementary school, while broadcasts are often just for an hour or two a day, or even a week. Coupled with economic forces that push them to learn Chinese, this neglect means that many young minorities have only a rudimentary understanding of their mother tongues.

For Manchus, the sense of loss was particularly acute. Manchus originated from China's northeast, which under the country's last dynasty, the Qing, was off-limits to Han Chinese immigration. As the dynasty collapsed toward the end of the 19th century, Chinese migrants flooded in. When Japan occupied Manchuria in the 1930s, Manchu language education was replaced by Japanese. Once China retook the region at the war's end, Japanese classes were replaced by Chinese. The Manchu language was never again taught on a wide scale.

As a result, virtually no Manchus today have heard Manchu spoken by their parents. For many, it was taboo. Gebu Algika, a 30-year-old sports promoter who helps run one of the Manchu classes in Beijing, said his grandfather, a prominent Manchu, was executed by the Communists shortly after the 1949 takeover for being a "reactionary." His family fearfully changed its ethnic registration from Manchu to Han. "People born after 1950 don't speak it," he says. "It was politically dangerous."

As rulers of China's last dynasty, Manchus suffered especially under communist rule. Members of the court underwent ideological indoctrination: Most famously the last emperor, Puyi, whose life story was filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci, became a gardener. His relatives were forbidden to speak Manchu, and Manchu schools in Beijing closed down.

Today, only one elementary school in the country teaches Manchu, and that only as an elective. In universities and a handful of private schools, written Manchu is still taught but purely as a means to reading the Qing dynasty's archives.

From two million registered Manchus in China's 1980 census, the country now has nine million -- a reflection of people's willingness to ignore stigmas and embrace their true heritage. For Hasutai, the desire to reconnect to his roots flared up when he was 11 and realized that his people's language was all but dead. He decided to teach himself written Manchu, using textbooks and old ethnographic recordings of Manchus.

Over time, he came into contact with other Manchus who shared the same goals. The group launched two Web sites, reprinted old textbooks, made up flashcards and collected recordings of Manchu speakers. Hasutai began holding classes in downtown Beijing. "We want it to be part of our life, a language we speak with our spouses and children," says Ridaikin, who also uses the Chinese name Hu Aibo. The 24-year-old graduate student in mathematics teaches one of the Manchu classes in Beijing.

The young men decided they needed more help and began by turning to academia to help promote their cause. That led to disappointment, with some scholars giving the impression that they weren't much interested in the language's revival.

Scholars familiar with the new language schools say the effort is inconsequential. "That may be regrettable but I'm afraid that's how it is," says Xu Danliang, a researcher of Manchu history at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences. "People don't know how it's really spoken in daily life."

Indeed, with virtually no native speakers left, it isn't always clear how to speak the words. In the Qing dynasty, a textbook had been developed for Chinese wanting to learn their rulers' languages, with Chinese characters to suggest how to pronounce Manchu letters. That helped, as did a system of transcribing Manchu script into Roman letters devised by European missionaries and academics. But even today, Manchus can't agree on how to pronounce one of the vowels, let alone how to make the language flow naturally.

Hasutai decided the answer lay in a remote corner of China: Qapqal, a county on the Kazakh border. In the 18th century, one of China's most famous emperors, Qianlong, sent members of the Xibe tribe to the newly conquered steppes of Central Asia. Close Manchu allies, the Xibe spoke what essentially was a dialect of Manchu. Isolated from the currents that wiped out Manchu speakers in their heartland, the Xibe kept the language in this remote region.

In July he decided to head west. The 28-year-old quit his job writing software for the Chinese computer maker Founder Group and traveled with a friend, a 22-year-old broadcasting student. They took a 40-hour train ride from Beijing to Urumqi, then a 10-hour bus ride.

The two live in a dormitory of a Xibe middle school and take six hours of Manchu lessons a day from an elderly teacher. Most of the time they wander the streets, reveling in the fact that people here are speaking a language from a bygone era.

One afternoon, they amble down a dusty, poplar-lined street to a market and watch old women haggle over seeds. Then they stop into a restaurant, where a group of Xibe men invite them over for beers and chicken. Dressed in polo shirts, shorts and sandals, the young men hardly blend in with the sun-hardened locals, mostly farmers. But the Xibe are impressed at their resolve and flattered that they have come to learn from them. Still, they find it curious that the young men are only now learning their native tongue as adults. "You Manchus, you lost your character. What happened to you?" one asks in Chinese. The young men look sheepish.

"Their language isn't bad but it's bookish," another adds. "Some of the words they say, I don't understand. We speak colloquial." Hasutai interjects enthusiastically: "That's a great advantage. It's what we want to learn."

The men immediately stand up and drink to that, downing plastic cups of warm beer, the first of many toasts. Hasutai sees the time he will spend here -- he might stay for months -- as part of an effort to make him a better teacher. "Not everyone can come out here," he says. "We're taking it back to them."

In Beijing a few days later, a group of teachers excitedly discuss the two young men's adventure. It is clear that most won't go -- obligations hold them back in Beijing -- but they are awaiting the two's return.

Soon the students crowd into the classroom, the conference room of a company sympathetic to the Manchu revival. Dekjin, a 28-year-old teacher, turns to the whiteboard and in a blue marker writes in Manchu script a word. Next to it she writes in Roman letters the way the word is spoken: m-a-n-j-u; Manchu.

Then she turns to the class and says, "This is who we are."

Write to Ian Johnson at ian.johnson@wsj.com

Back From the Suburbs to Run a Patch of Somalia - NYTimes.com

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By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

ADADO, Somalia

ABOVE the shimmering horizon, in the middle of a deserted highway, stands an oversize figure wearing a golf cap, huge sunglasses, baggy jeans, and an iPhone on his hip, not your typical outfit in war-torn Somalia. But then again, Mohamed Aden, the man waiting in the road, is not your typical Somali. The instant his guests arrive, he spreads his arms wide, ready for a bear hug.

“Welcome to Adado,” he says, beaming. “Now, let’s bounce.”

Mr. Aden, 37, is part militia commander, part schoolteacher, part lawmaker, part engineer, part environmentalist, part king — a mind-boggling combination of roles for anyone to play, let alone for a guy who dresses (and talks) like a rapper and recently moved from Minnesota to Somalia in an effort to build a local government.

Think of him as the accidental warlord. And a shard of hope. In less than a year, Mr. Aden, who was born in Somalia and emigrated to the United States at age 22, has essentially built a state within a state.

With money channeled from fellow clansmen living in the United States and Europe, he has transformed Adado and its surroundings in central Somalia, which used to be haunted by bandits and warring Islamic factions, into an enclave of peace, with a functioning police force, scores of new businesses, new schools and new rules.

Somalia is one of the most violent countries on the planet, and at times Mr. Aden has had to speak with the business end of a machine gun. His patch — which encompasses around 5,000 square miles and a few hundred thousand people, most of them desperately poor nomads and members of his own Saleban clan — is now one of the safest parts of this broken nation.

Even outsiders are noticing.

“When I landed here, I was taken aback, in a good way,” said Denise Brown, a United Nations World Food Program official who visited Adado in March. “I didn’t see what I usually see in Somalia: destitution, chaos, needy people.”

Mr. Aden does not get much help from the United Nations or the internationally supported transitional government of Somalia, which is led by moderate Islamists and preoccupied with beating back an intense insurgency in the capital, Mogadishu.

Most of what Mr. Aden has accomplished he has accomplished on his own, in distinctly Somali fashion. His police officers carry rocket-propelled grenades. Parked in front of the police station are two enormous tanks.

“My Cadillacs,” Mr. Aden calls them.

But however playful or flamboyant he may come across, Mr. Aden seems to have hit upon a deeper truth. People want government, he says, even in Somalia. “They’re begging for it,” he said.

His experiment of building a small local government from the bottom up, relying on that one feature of Somali society that has bedeviled just about all national governance efforts to date — the clan — may have wider implications for the rest of the country, which seems to export trouble continuously, most recently in the form of pirates. Many pirates are actually from Mr. Aden’s area, and one pirate whose nom de guerre is Son of a Liar is building a huge house in Adado — right behind the police station.

“I’d take these guys on, but I can’t right now because I don’t have the resources,” Mr. Aden said. “Besides, you can’t just wipe out a whole line of work for thousands of young men. If you take something away, you must replace it with something else. Otherwise, more problems.”

WHAT drove him to give up a comfy life with his wife, Shamso, and their five boys in Burnsville, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb? How was he able to make the transition from running a small health care business to being “president,” which is what his constituents in Adado call him?

“When I first arrived, I was afraid,” he recalled. “I didn’t know how the people would react to me, if they would trust me. That first year I was focusing on muscle. Without muscle, you can’t do anything.”

Of course, there’s much about America he misses.

“SportsCenter, Subway, AC, even winter,” he says.

But in a way he didn’t have a choice. He came to Adado last year for what he thought would be a few weeks, to help out with a killer drought. He organized water trucking and emergency food deliveries and channeled tens of thousands of dollars from middle class Somalis in the United States to nomads dying of hunger and thirst.

Afterward, Adado’s elders, impressed by how fast he could work, turned to Mr. Aden and asked: want to be our leader?

“We needed a man of peace and he is from a peaceful place, Minnesota,” said one elder, Mohamed Ali Farah.

It did not hurt that Mr. Aden had a pipeline to overseas cash and a college degree from Minnesota State in management information systems. With the elders firmly behind him, he was able to form a well-armed police force of several hundred fellow clansmen who are fiercely protective of him — essentially his own private army, which has made it difficult for the extremist Islamists wreaking havoc in other parts of Somalia to establish a beachhead here.

People who have challenged his authority have paid the price. Last summer, his police officers shot to death four men who violently refused to vacate a piece of property that Mr. Aden’s administration ruled belonged to someone else.

“I knew there were outliers, people with their own rules,” he said. “I knew I had to challenge them, sooner or later.”

Nowadays, from Adado’s dusty town square, he hands down new laws, like a recent one saying that anyone who cuts down a live tree has to pay a fine of 100 camels.

The orderly refuge he has carved out has become a magnet for displaced families fleeing the relentless bloodletting in Mogadishu, and at noon each day, the metal roofs of thousands of new homes sparkle like mirrors scattered across the desert.

Mr. Aden grew up in Mogadishu, the son of a military mechanic, the firstborn of 10. He fled Somalia with an uncle in 1992, a year after the central government collapsed and his friends split into rival militias. “I didn’t see myself in this war,” he said.

But the war saw him. He was shot in the ankle by a stray bullet. Soon he packed up for Kenya and then on to Miami, where he lived in a homeless shelter. He eventually took a Greyhound bus to Minneapolis, the promised land for Somali immigrants and home to the largest Somali community in the United States. There he put himself through college parking cars and working in a factory, always keeping abreast of politics back home, hoping to jump in one day. Yet when finally presented with the opportunity, he turned down the Adado elders twice before relenting.

“It was hard for my wife and kids,” he said. “But I’m doing something big here, and they know that.”

HE spends his days in a large house in the center of town, where he has rigged up a small command center with a laptop, his iPhone and an Internet connection. As chairman of Himan and Heeb Administration, the province where Adado is located, he often meets with elders on his living room carpet, and he has had to straddle a delicate religious line, respecting the conservative Muslim culture here without coming across as phony. This spring, central Somalia was hit again by a devastating drought, and the elders asked him to lead a rain prayer. “I ain’t no imam,” he grumbled at first, though he eventually agreed to do it.

Mr. Aden seems to be a naturally upbeat person, but the one thing that drags him down is the drought. During a drive across the skinned landscape of his area a few months ago, he came upon a young man lying under a lean-to of sticks and blankets. The man was in bad shape, very thin, sweaty and empty-eyed. People said he had typhoid. And tuberculosis. And malaria.

Mr. Aden looked down at him and said he would pray. “There’s really nothing else I can do,” he said. “There’s no 911 out here.”

After Guinea Massacre, an Explanation From Captain Who Is President - NYTimes.com

By ADAM NOSSITER

CONAKRY, Guinea — At the military camp where he makes decisions — he does not care for government buildings — the captain who is president explained why he did not get to the political rally earlier this week that his soldiers turned into a bloodbath.

Moussa Dadis Camara, 45, this nation’s erratic new leader, said he could not find the keys to his pickup.

Three days after the massacre Monday in which as many as 157 people died protesting Captain Camara’s military rule, he rambled on to a gathering of reporters till nearly midnight as aides fidgeted under giant portraits of their leader. Then he offered to send the reporters to nightclubs.

“Whatever you want, at whatever time,” said Captain Camara, clad in the fatigues he never sheds. “On my tab, as chief of state.” For some reason he added, “I am incorruptible.”

This lush coastal nation of 10 million, rich in minerals and tropical fruits, and dark at night from lack of electricity, has known harsh dictators and army shooting sprees in its 51 years of independence. Neighbors to the north and to the south have experienced bloody civil wars; Guinea, the former French colony that angered Charles de Gaulle with its refusal of partnership, and locked up tight for decades under tyrant ideologues, was too brutalized to unravel.

But it has never known a week, or even a 10-month period, quite like the last one.

Captain Camara, an unknown junior officer, seized power last December, declared war on the drug lords who had held sway, interrogated corrupt flunkies of the previous regime on television and locked them up, and briefly transfixed fellow citizens with his 8 o’clock on-camera extemporizing. It felt, for a rare moment, like hope.

But as the government withered into Captain Camara’s small office at the sprawling Alpha Yaya Diallo military encampment, where aides wore fatigues and twirled AK-47s, and businessmen and officials could wait for days for an appointment, the citizens turned away.

On Monday, thousands demonstrated in the soccer stadium here in the capital against Captain Camara’s intimations of wanting to keep power — an ambition he denied when he first took over.

Witnesses say his men mowed many down at point-blank range. They beat and knifed many more, bashing elderly political figures and sending them to hospitals.

Captain Camara, offering only muted apologies for the deaths, sought to shift blame to the protesters.

“It wasn’t a peaceful march; it was premeditated, it was intentional,” he told reporters Thursday night in a rambling hourlong monologue that included disquisitions on Machiavelli, the character of a “Republican” army, the best way of mounting a coup d’état and a call he said he had received that day from the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

He said the demonstration “had the character of wanting to overthrow a chief of state.”

Most shocking to the wearied citizens in this predominantly Muslim nation, Captain Camara’s men raped scores of women in broad daylight, sexually assaulting many with rifles. For five days this week Conakry has seethed in sullen, silent anger, as many people remained missing following Monday’s demonstration, heavily armed soldiers patrolled, rumors flew about secret midnight burials by government security forces, and text-message and much cellphone traffic was blocked. Shops have remained shuttered and streets that are normally clogged have been empty.

On Friday, the anger began to boil over. The government, trying to still it, trucked in bodies of what it said were victims of the massacre. In the broiling heat a huge crowd milled about a giant field next to the main mosque here, Faycal, glancing at the stiff, shrouded corpses that were placed under tents on wooden planks, searching for missing brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers.

But there were at most a few dozen bodies, while up to 1,000 people had turned out. Hardly anyone in the surging crowd was finding loved ones.

“I lost my brother!” many called out, holding up photographs. “I lost my sister!” others cried, imploring foreign visitors to help them.

“The bodies that are here, they don’t represent all who died,” said Sekou Keita, who said his younger brother was missing. The bodies on display bore no obvious traces of bullet wounds; the shrouds had no blood. Some in the crowd said the government had simply brought in bodies from the local hospitals — victims of illness, not gunshots.

Cries against Captain Camara rang out, though it was impossible to say if it was anguish or the first shouts of revolt. “All those cockroaches in the Dadis government can get lost,” yelled a man, Alpha Oumar Diallo, to roars of approval.

The furious crowd ripped the clothes off a man who was said to be a government minister. Security forces later broke up the crowd with tear gas.

Coincidentally, this was Guinea’s day of national independence. But few were celebrating, except for Captain Camara.

In silence, wearing fatigues and mirrored sunglasses, and surrounded by eight pickup trucks full of armed soldiers, he laid a wreath at a downtown monument in the shadow of an abandoned eight-story hotel. Only a few dozen people looked on, wordlessly.

Djouma Bah, who owns a photography studio and was ignoring the ceremony, said, “They want to have their celebrations, the authorities, but there should be mourning, burying of the bodies.”

The keeper of a street stall, Mohammed Djoubate, said: “Nobody is happy now. We are all just tired.”

Military aides tried to quiet their boss and shoo reporters away, but Captain Camara launched into a monologue as he left the monument to the sound of a brass band.

“History will triumph,” he said. “It’s the awakening of Africa.”

Captain Camara, trying to overcome a tide of international opprobrium, earlier called for a government of “national unity.” But a leader of the opposition Union of Republican Forces, a former prime minister, Sidya Touré, said in an interview at his home here that this would not occur.

“A dialogue with these people would be useless,” said Mr. Touré, still wearing a bandage on his head from the beating he received at Monday’s demonstration. He said he saw top aides to Captain Camara at the stadium, directing the violence.

“The ministries have disappeared,” said Mr. Touré, who called for the interposition of an international force to counter the “barbarian horde” that has weapons.

The citizens were “profoundly traumatized” by what had happened to the women at the stadium, he said. “These people are not interested in democracy. They are interested in pillaging the country.”

Turkey's Shift to a More Open Economy - BusinessWeek

Image by Argenberg via Flickr

Applying for EU membership has sped up reforms, and that has helped the country weather the current crisis

By Stanley Reed

Turkey cannot escape the ravages of the global recession. But this time it may avoid the pains that often afflict this promising country in a downturn. For the Turks, a recession usually goes like this: A wild boom triggers high inflation, the currency collapses, and the poorly managed banking sector, hooked on speculative trading and foreign debt, has a near-death experience. Turkey has a well-educated workforce, proximity to Europe, and a shrewd management class. But financial fragility, including a meltdown that sparked riots in 2001, has kept it from entering the first rank of emerging market economies.

In the current turmoil, to everyone's amazement, things have been different. The economy has been dealt a body blow as exports have stalled. While structural problems still exist, in both the political and regulatory spheres, the financial system has held firm even as U.S. and European banks have hovered on the brink. "This is the first recession in which we didn't have a crisis," says Murat Ulgen, chief economist at HSBC (HBC) in Istanbul. Credit goes to reforms, backed by the International Monetary Fund, that curbed inflation and forced banks to bolster their balance sheets. The increased presence of foreign banks also spurred locals to improve their game. Most important, Turkey has welcomed investment and stepped up efforts to become a real player in the global economy.

This change in attitude has raised Turkey in the eyes of multinationals. Foreign direct investment surged from $1.1 billion in 2001 to $22 billion in 2007, before dropping back to $18 billion in 2008. Even though the figure is expected to fall to $9.1 billion this year, executives seem confident Turkey will bounce back. With a population of 76 million, Turkey is an attractive consumer market, and all those youthful workers at Europe's doorstep have turned the country into a workshop for export industries such as cars, aerospace, appliances, and textiles. "We put Turkey in the same category as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa," says Ali Faramawy, a vice-president of Microsoft International (MSFT) in Istanbul. Microsoft's software sales in Turkey are growing at 20% to 30% a year. "It's not difficult to see Microsoft Turkey doubling in size in a relatively short time," Faramawy adds.

Two things have made Turkey more of a player. The enforced discipline of applying for European Union membership has worked wonders. And Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has headed a moderately Islamist government since 2003, has pushed largely pro-business policies. Building on the ideas of Kemal Dervis, the former World Bank official who took charge of the Turkish economy during the 2001 crisis, Erdogan has slashed corporate taxes, tightened intellectual property protections, and set up an investment promotion agency. He also launched Turkey's EU negotiations. While the talks have been tortuous, they have pressured Turkey to make changes in a wide range of areas—from improving women's rights to easing protectionist policies. "The whole EU process affects business positively," says Umran Beba, Istanbul-based president of PepsiCo (PEP) for Southeast Europe.

As Turkey shifts from an inward-looking economy to a more open one, local business leaders realize they will need to remake their companies to meet increasing competition. That will require investment in technology and communications, creating a big opening for companies from IBM (IBM) to Cisco Systems (CSCO) to Google. (GOOG) Eray Yuksek, general manager for IBM in Turkey, figures that, excluding telecom, Turkish companies are spending only about $2 billion on information technology. "That's nothing, nothing" in a country with an economy of Turkey's size. "It's a huge opportunity for us," he says.

"STAGING GROUND"

Other areas of the Turkish market beckon. In 2005, General Electric (GE) spent $1.75 billion for 25% of GarantiBank. It now leads the Turkish loan market in most categories and is reporting 3.5% nonperforming loans, below Turkey's industry average of 4.5%. GE's now 21% share is worth $3.4 billion. The company has a venture that makes aircraft engine components, and it's opening a facility to supply locomotives for Europe.

Turkey's trump card is its location. You can sense that Turkey, and especially Istanbul, is at a crossroads by spending an evening at one of the ancient city's exquisite restaurants along the Bosporus, the glowing ribbon of water that separates Asia and Europe. The country is not just close to Europe but also to the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. The area from the Balkans to Kazakhstan has the potential to be fast-growing for years to come. Ferdinando Beccalli-Falco, Brussels-based CEO of GE International, sees Turkey as a "staging ground" for penetrating the region. Yesim Toduk, founder of Istanbul executive search firm Amrop International, says she spends much of her time finding Turks to work for companies in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

Investment flows from the East as well. The United Arab Emirates-based Oger Telecom, controlled by Lebanon's Hariri family, owns 55% of Turk Telekom, the fixed-line operator. Kuwaiti Finance House, an Islamic bank, has set up Kuveyt Turk to pursue Islamic banking. Investment firms that mainly channel Gulf money, including Dubai-based Abraaj Capital, which owns a Turkish hospital chain, are active in the country. Middle Eastern investment has soared to a cumulative $6.3 billion since 2004.

This year, though, both multinational and Turkish companies had a rough time. Aynur Bektas, the owner of Hey Tekstil, a textile concern with 4,000 employees, coped by ramping up production 25%, trimming prices, and doubling her customer base. Turkey's textile industry has been slammed, but her sales are up 10%. "Others were not so well prepared," she says.

When export demand slumped, Turkish consumers took up some of the slack. The government introduced a Buy Turkish program, including tax incentives, to encourage Turks to open their wallets. That benefited Arcelik, a unit of Koc Group, Turkey's largest conglomerate. The company churns out 12,000 washing machines a day in a factory in the sunbaked industrial town of Cayirova, an hour's drive from Istanbul. In January and February, output fell to 60% of capacity as demand for washers plummeted in Europe. "Those were the worst months. Now it's coming back," says production manager Alp Karahasanoglu. Production is up 20% since February, and he is planning for expansion. The plant will make about 2.3 million machines this year, but that will grow to 4 million units as export markets recover, he predicts.

Recovery will take time. The Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development predicts growth of 2.6% in 2010, after a 5.9% plunge in gross domestic product this year. Still, the Istanbul Stock Exchange is up 77% this year, and the lira has climbed 23% against the dollar since March.

One factor affecting investor confidence in the economy is the Prime Minister himself. Some Turks worry about the Islamist roots of his Justice & Development Party. The fear among secularists is that Erdogan wants to turn Turkey into a version of Saudi Arabia, forcing women to stay at home and banning alcohol. If that is his goal, Erdogan has a long way to go in Istanbul. While some women wear head scarves, plenty don't. And at night the alleyways of central Istanbul are crowded with tables of young people quaffing mugs of Efes beer.

Critics also complain that Erdogan has slowed the pace of reform. And investors were shocked when the government recently fined Dogan Yayin, Turkey's largest media group, $2.5 billion for back taxes and penalties. The company's publications have criticized Erdogan in the past. Another cause for anxiety: taxes. The tax regime hits some industries, such as telecom, harder than others, while half of wage earners aren't legally registered and don't pay taxes. That puts multinationals that play by the rules at a disadvantage to local rivals. "The tax system is a disaster," says A. Rahsan Cebe, managing partner of Cushman & Wakefield in Turkey and chairman of the lobby group American Business Forum in the country. Some businesspeople also think Erdogan should negotiate a new loan with the IMF, which would stabilize long-term finances.

Still, most observers are betting that moderation will prevail and Turkey will stay on a reform path. Adem Dogan, a 27-year-old Istanbul plumber, sees a bright future. He has expanded his business by spending $400 a month to advertise on Google. Says Dogan: "Before we had 100 customers, now we have 2,500."

With Merve Kara in Istanbul

Can Google Stay on Top of the Web? - BusinessWeek

Image via Wikipedia

As Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and less well-known upstarts nip at its heels, Google has hundreds of wizards racing to come up with smarter answers

By Robert D. Hof

High on a wall of the lobby at Google's (GOOG) sprawling headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., a projector displays a live sampling of the 2.5 billion searches made on Google every day. One after another, every second, they appear and just as quickly scroll out of sight: "Route 81 closed," "cushing's disease and canine diabetes," "weather." It's a graphic reminder of how many people, some 720 million a month worldwide, rely on the search giant for links to information, entertainment, products, and just about everything else on their minds.

Yet upstairs from the lobby on this bright September morning, two dozen Google search engineers and executives are gathered around a long conference table, not to celebrate their success but to wrestle with their failures. Headed by Udi Manber, one of nine Google vice-presidents for engineering, these are the leaders of a cadre of engineers and scientists known as the search quality group. They are the masters of the mysterious mathematical wizardry that has made Google one of the most powerful companies in the world. And every week, in a quixotic quest to provide the perfect answers, they meet to grill each other on how to improve Google's search results.

Better than anyone, these folks know that while Google may outperform other search engines, it still spits out plenty of clunkers—irrelevant sites or even occasionally no sites at all for a particular query. They also know that every disappointing result means someone is less likely to click on ads—the source of nearly all of Google's $22 billion in revenues last year—and more likely to try another search engine. "If it turns out that somebody offers a better service than we do," Manber, a former academic and executive at Yahoo! (YHOO) and Amazon.com (AMZN), says with characteristic understatement, "that's a concern."

Today more than ever, Manber and the brainiacs in the search quality group can't afford to falter. Google's competition has recently gone from pitiful to plentiful: Microsoft's (MSFT) new Bing search engine picked up 1.5 percentage points of market share in August to hit 9.5%, according to market researcher Hitwise, while Google's share fell from 71.4% to 70.2%. Bing's gain is partly thanks to a $100 million marketing blitz complete with television ads knocking Google every which way but in name. Microsoft's pending deal for Bing to become Yahoo's underlying search engine, creating a combined entity with 27% market share, could produce Google's first sizable competitor in years.

In addition, there are new upstarts, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Wolfram Alpha, a "knowledge engine" that attempts to answer factual queries in a more organized, comprehensive way. These and other companies are offering search services in such specialized areas as breaking news, updates from friends, and scientific research. Twitter, for instance, has become some news junkies' go-to site for finding out about plane crashes and other news that Google's computers haven't yet provided links to. "Google's very good at searching content as if it's out of a library," says Kimbal Musk, chief executive of OneRiot, a search startup for real-time posts and news from Twitter, Digg, and other social sites. "Twitter let people know another kind of search is possible."

ALTERNATIVES TO SEARCH?

Of course, countless would-be Google killers have fallen on their faces over the years. But longer term, Twitter, Facebook, and related services may pose a more fundamental threat to Google: a new center of the Internet universe outside of search. Twitter, now with 55 million monthly visitors, and Facebook, with 300 million, hint at an emerging Web in which people don't merely read or watch material but communicate, collaborate with colleagues, and otherwise get things done using online services. "Today the Web is not just a collection of pages, it's a collection of applications," says Anand Rajaraman, CEO of Kosmix, a guide to specific Web topics such as health.

As the Web evolves, there's no guarantee that search, or Google, will remain at its center. Not so long ago, portals such as AOL and Yahoo dominated the Internet as most people's first stop online. They lost ground as search improved and helped guide people quickly to sites they were looking for. Now Twitter and others are becoming significant drivers of people's attention to Web sites—Google's raison d'être. The New York Times (NYT) recently said that some 10% of NYTimes.com's traffic was sent by Twitter. Some marketers sense in the rapid rise of Twitter and Facebook a new way other than search for people to find information, connect with friends, and get recommendations and ads for products to buy. Twitter's ability to raise a round of venture money that gives the startup, which has no meaningful revenue yet, a valuation of $1 billion reflects the potential some people see.

Google clearly understands this emerging new Web, given its investments in such services as the video sharing site YouTube, online applications, and even an operating system. But the company hasn't been able to generate significant revenue from anything besides search-related ads, raising doubts about how long it can remain the key leader of the Internet economy.

Meanwhile, Google's very success and size are starting to work against it. In the past year the company has been the target of three U.S. antitrust inquiries and one in Italy. Most recently the Justice Dept. on Sept. 18 said Google's controversial settlement with authors and publishers, which would have allowed it to scan and sell certain books, must be changed to avoid breaking antitrust laws. Even Google's own paying customers—advertisers and ad agencies—say they're eager for alternatives to blunt Google's power. Says Roger Barnette, president of search marketing firm SearchIgnite: "People want a No. 2 that has heft and scale."

The challenges come at a pivotal time for Google. The company, whose founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have thumbed their noses at conventional corporate thinking since Google's founding in 1998, is going through a trying transition to maturity. Its year-over-year revenue growth skidded to 3% in the second quarter from 31% in 2008, prompting several small rounds of layoffs. Analysts chiefly blame the economy and expect search-ad growth to return quickly as the recession eases—one reason Google's stock has more than doubled from its 52-week low last November to nearly 500 today. Yet some current and former Googlers say the company's size has made it slower to act and thus less attractive to the entrepreneurial folk who flocked there in its early days. Google has seen a number of high-profile departures in the past two years.

Relatively few have left the search operation, however. And Google continues to hire engineers for it. "We're still investing a lot in search," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an interview. "We are first and foremost a search company." To explore Google's prospects for staying ahead, BusinessWeek recently got a close look at the highly secretive search quality group. Its mathematical formulas and methods are closely guarded to stymie competitors and prevent spammers from gaming the system. But Google provided candid insights into how it's trying to make search so good that people won't bother with extended detours to Twitter, Facebook, and beyond.

The group's home is in Building 43 in the center of the sprawling Googleplex in Mountain View. Deliberately casual, the first floor features such Googley touches as a refrigerator case with free Odwalla juices and huge panels of whiteboards scrawled with product ideas and jokes ("Why are they called apartments if they're stuck together?"). The company's trademark primary colors are splashed everywhere, down to the bulletin-board pushpins. A huge pile of Legos is scattered at the top of the stairs for engineers who need a break from coding software. In a hallway, someone snoozes in a MetroNaps EnergyPod, a semiprivate chair module for catnaps. Much of the second floor, which houses many members of the search quality team, resembles a well-used playroom for a large family of overgrown kids, which is more or less what it is.

The team is composed of several hundred engineers, many from outside the U.S. and some with 20 years of experience in search and information retrieval technologies that predate the Web. In Google's version of Silicon Valley egalitarianism, most people, including executives, share cramped glass offices. They're crowded with multiple large computer monitors, along with whiteboards and yellow sticky notes covered with formulas and notes on arcane aspects of search technology. The office of Matt Cutts, head of the anti-spam unit, and four others bears an inscription above the door: "What could possibly go wrong?"

It's a question Manber and his team contemplate every day. Google can claim a number of search breakthroughs in its 11 years, starting with the co-founders' breakthrough PageRank formula, which gives higher ratings to pages many other sites link to, because they're likely more useful than pages with few links. But it's clear these guys—and a few women—view doing search well as something as difficult as curing cancer. "There's just an endless supply of very difficult, challenging, but incredibly interesting problems to work on," says Scott Huffman, who runs the search evaluation unit and mobile search.

Lately Google has released a flurry of features that suggest it's paying close attention to the competition. One, called Search Options, opens up a pane on the left side of the Google page that allows searchers to narrow queries by such categories as videos, books, or time. In what may be a nod to Twitter, users can select the past 24 hours or even more recent results. Another feature, Google Squared, organizes information on topics, such as dog breeds, into a table with descriptions, photos, and more—echoing Wolfram Alpha.

Most of the search quality group's contributions are less visible because its work is focused mostly on the underlying algorithms, the mathematical formulas that determine which results appear in response to a particular query. Google conducts some 5,000 experiments annually on those formulas and makes up to 500 changes a year. Some are as tiny as improving the results returned on queries such as "GM" by inferring whether someone is looking for the car company or sites on genetically modified food. Others—such as Universal Search, which two years ago added images, videos, and maps to search results that once were all just Web pages—are radical changes. "The core relevance of the results underneath is still the most important thing," says search expert Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Land Web site.

If Google's corporate mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Manber articulates a similarly expansive vision of search. He notes that while the 20th century was all about conquering nature, the 21st century will be about understanding people—not just what they say they're looking for, but inferring what they mean from the most minute behavioral clues. "Search is a big part of it, possibly leading the way," says Manber, an intense but soft-spoken man who plays 10 different musical instruments strictly for his own enjoyment. "Our job is to do rocket science that will be taken for granted."

The group's work often begins with a complaint. Google users can flag a bum result by clicking a link at the bottom of results. In some cases, data collected from a standard set of sample queries that Google's computers are constantly running may indicate people aren't clicking on some results as much or in the same way as they did historically. Most ideas, though, come from Google engineers with an inspiration. At the Tuesday morning meeting of search leaders, briefings from colleagues all around Google may spark a new idea to improve a set of searches. Not least, engineers just keep their eyes open. While he browses local art shows, Cutts scribbles obscure artists' Web sites in a small notebook so he can check later on how well they show up in a search—or don't.

Whatever the source, "broken" queries and other proposals for improvements land in the e-mail box of Amit Singhal. The genial, 41-year-old Google Fellow (the company title for its most accomplished engineers) heads the core ranking team. Its job is to provide the most relevant links to pages, videos, and other information for every query and adjust the algorithms when results don't seem to match the queries. Making improvements follows a regular regime. Engineers on the team can essentially try out proposed changes on one of Google's copies of the entire Web, stashed on the company's massive network of computers. Once they think they have a fix, they send the proposal to the evaluation unit, "eval" for short. Those changes can affect many other queries in unexpected ways, so it's up to eval to run more rigorous tests to make sure a change is positive overall and doesn't hurt other results too much.

About three years ago, for instance, engineers proposed a ranking update that would include more results related to synonyms of the words or phrases a searcher typed in—theoretically providing more relevant results in some cases. A broad sample of queries seemed to indicate people on average liked the results. But when eval statisticians dug into results in particular countries, they ran into a big problem. In Chinese, terms such as "big school" and "little school" were coming back as synonyms, producing results that were "really bad, like this would be hugely embarrassing if we launch this," recalls Huffman, head of the evaluation unit. So despite the positive results in other languages, engineers had to try again. Ultimately, they found a bug in the software code that they fixed.

FASTER THAN AN EYEBLINK

That experiment points up another surprising aspect of Google's testing. Google is famous for its algorithms and data-driven approach, but the company depends nearly as much on a global network of human evaluators, or "raters." These part-time contract workers are asked to provide opinions on proposed changes and whether results are more relevant, among other things. Often their opinions carry the day. A couple of years ago, an engineer proposed that Google extract addresses from pages and display them, and perhaps a related map, in appropriate situations, such as when someone does a search for "MOMA New York." The raters liked it, and after a live test on Google confirmed its popularity, the feature was rolled out. About 10 changes are approved to go live at each Thursday morning launch meeting.

To an outsider, many of the changes may look impossibly trivial. Several years ago, for instance, engineers noticed that while Google was returning useful pages when someone typed an acronym such as "CIA"—providing links to the government agency and to the Culinary Institute of America—people were taking a slightly longer time than expected to click on one of them. So on the results pages, Google began highlighting in bold the full names. Immediately, Google saw more clicks through to pages—and faster, too. How much faster? Perhaps 30 or 40 thousandths of a second, on average, Singhal says. That's one tenth the speed of an eyeblink. "This was a small idea," concedes Singhal. "But we have a real responsibility as a company to respect people's time."

More recently, Google has been focusing on providing results more relevant to specific regions around the world. Engineers realized that people in India searching for "bank" didn't much care about Bank of America (BAC), even if it was in the news. So Google has been tweaking algorithms to emphasize the searcher's apparent location. Now, a search on "bank" on the U.S. site, google.com, will bring up links to Bank of America and Wells Fargo (WFC), while the same search on google.co.in, Google's Indian site, will bring up homegrown HDFC Bank (HDB) and ICICI Bank (IBN). It's one small reason Google has even higher market share in many other countries than in the U.S.—such as 88% in India, according to comScore (SCOR).

Making all these search improvement efforts even more difficult is the need to cull Web spam. Marketers of male enhancement drugs or purveyors of damaging software, for instance, are continually trying to fool Google's algorithms into ranking their pages up high. Cutts and his team are constantly on the lookout for ways to recognize them and squelch their appearance in results. In other cases, Webmasters who oversee sites run afoul of such efforts by accident. So Cutts, a voluble 37-year-old who currently sports a shaved head—the result of a lost bet that his team couldn't finish a project on a tight deadline—also educates Webmasters through conference appearances and informational videos on YouTube.

Cutts' unusually public role was on display at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. In this crowd, Cutts is a rock star, his blog posts studied as carefully as Wall Street traders deconstruct comments by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Cutts served on a panel called "Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic," where three dozen Webmasters rushed up to provide business cards. The first site was a sex toys emporium called mypleasure.com. An unruffled Cutts suggested changing its URLs, or Web addresses, to contain more product-related words. Examining a Midwestern department store site, Cutts chided, "Your URL structure is pretty much a search engine obstacle course," advising the Webmaster to excise question marks and other symbols.

The reason Google has become such a powerhouse isn't just because its search technology is exceptional, of course. It's because the company perfected a way to match advertisements to its search results. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers in its AdWords program bid in an online auction to buy "keywords," or terms likely to be in search queries, that they hope will trigger their ads to run on the right side or the top of the search results page. It's a good bet that people searching on, say, "sony cybershot" are in the market to buy a digital camera, and retailers that buy that term are more likely to attract clicks and sales. Spending on search advertising has soared in recent years because advertisers tend to get strong returns for their money.

How well are all the search improvements underlying those lucrative ads working? While no one knows for sure whose search results are best, a number of independent experts continue to give Google the nod over its rivals. And they think the current crop of would-be disrupters isn't going to beat Google at its own game anytime soon. "None of these are big challenges for Google," says search expert Sullivan. "I think Google is still better in quality."

For now, at least. But Google engineers know they need to think outside the search box to stay ahead. A recent contest called CSI, for "Crazy Search Ideas," asked engineers to submit improvements they thought would never be approved because they were weird or seemed too minor. Some 118 entries were culled to four, which are still being explored. Describing such left-field efforts after the recent Tuesday morning meeting, Manber mused about how easy it is to climb a hill and think you're on top of the world. "My worry is we could be stuck on top of a hill," he says, "and it's not the right hill."

VOA News - Rescue Workers Search for Survivors from Asian Disasters, Death Toll Likely to Rise

By Daniel Schearf Bangkok 02 October 2009

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Indonesian youth clean up rubbles in their home destroyed by earthquake in Pariaman, coastal town about 40 miles northwest of Padang, West Sumatra

Authorities say the death toll from an earthquake in Indonesia is likely to pass 1,000 as underequipped rescue workers dig through rubble for survivors. And the Philippines is on alert as a new typhoon heads toward the islands days after Typhoon Ketsana killed more than 400 people there and in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.

Indonesian rescue workers are digging by hand Friday, trying to find survivors among the hundreds of people believed trapped under piles of concrete.

Wednesday's earthquake struck off the coast of western Sumatra, with most of the damage in the city of Padang.

VOA's Jakarta correspondent, Brian Padden, has just arrived in Padang. He says the streets are busy with people and aid workers are pouring into the city.

"Just from the airport itself, it's like every third or fourth building we passed, there's serious damage, many have collapsed completely," he said. "Electricity is out everywhere. … There are long lines at gas stations, people are lined up with containers waiting to get the limited supply of gasoline that's here in the area."

Padden says the damage from Wednesday's quake is much worse than that from an earthquake in early September.

"In the last earthquake that hit Java, damage there was scattered, there'd be little pinpoints of damage. Here it seems everywhere, it's everywhere you look," he said.

Indonesia has asked for foreign aid to help with rescue efforts and support those affected by the 7.6 magnitude quake.

Numerous countries have offered assistance, including the United States, which pledged $3 million to help the quake victims.

Washington has also pledged aid for victims of a tropical storm that struck the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos this week. The storm killed more than 400 people in the region.

Typhoon Ketsana made landfall in the Philippines on Saturday, flooding parts of the capital, Manila and leaving tens of thousands homeless.

The Philippines is warning people to leave low-lying areas as another powerful typhoon nears.

In other natural disasters, the death toll from tsunami waves that hit the pacific islands of Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga is nearing 200.

BBC - Philippines braces for new storm

Image via Wikipedia

The Philippines has ordered the evacuation of thousands of people from areas in the path of a second powerful typhoon to hit the country in a week.

Typhoon Parma is expected to hit the main island of Luzon north of the capital Manila early on Saturday.

Officials fear a second disaster after Typhoon Ketsana caused the worst floods in the Philippines in decades.

Ketsana caused nearly 300 deaths in the Philippines, as well as more than 100 in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Parts of the Philippines near Manila remain flooded after Ketsana dropped a month's worth of rain in 12 hours last Saturday.

'Strongest typhoon'

President Gloria Arroyo appeared on national television to order the evacuation of low-lying coastal areas threatened by the new typhoon.

"We need that preventative evacuation," she said.

The military and police have been put on alert and civilian agencies have been ordered to stockpile food, water and medicine.

The Philippine weather bureau said Parma, with winds of up to 230km/h (140mph), would be the strongest typhoon to hit the country since 2006.

Nathaniel Cruz, the head weather forecaster in the Philippines, said Parma could yet change direction and miss the country, adding that it was carrying less rain than Ketsana.

But he said its strong winds could be highly destructive.

"We are dealing with a very strong typhoon [and] there is a big possibility that this typhoon will gather more strength," Mr Cruz said.

There are also fears that more heavy rain could worsen flooding left from the earlier typhoon.

"We're concerned about the effects of more rain on the relief work in flooded areas because the water level could rise again," said Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro.

Thousands homeless

Ketsana, with winds of up to 100km/h (60mph), hit the Philippines early last Saturday, crossing the main northern island of Luzon before heading out toward the South China Sea.

Almost two million people were affected by the flooding in Manila, the worst to hit the city in 40 years. At one point, 80% of the city was submerged.

Tens of thousands of people were left homeless.

Ketsana went on to hit the mainland of South-East Asia where it is now confirmed to have killed 99 people in Vietnam, 16 in Laos and 14 in Cambodia.

Most of the people have died in flooding or landslides caused by the sudden, heavy rain.

Authorities in Vietnam have been delivering food and water by speed boat and helicopter to isolated communities affected by Ketsana.

Some villages in Vietnam and Cambodia remained cut off by mudslides and flooding.

BBC - Indonesia awaits world quake aid

International rescue teams are heading to Indonesia in a last-ditch effort to free trapped earthquake survivors.

Experts from the UK, Australia and South Korea were en route to Sumatra, hit by a 7.6-magnitude quake two days ago. Others pledged emergency cash.

More than 1,000 people are already known to have died, the UN says, with thousands thought to remain trapped.

But one survivor was found on Friday: a young woman pulled, barely conscious, from within a collapsed school.

AT THE SCENE
Rachel Harvey, BBC News, Padang

Heavy diggers move across piles of rubble, slowly shifting the debris. Piledrivers are being used to break up slabs of concrete, and alongside the machinery men pick their way carefully, looking and listening for any sign of life.

They've not yet given up hope here, but the chances of finding anyone else alive must now be fading. Many hundreds of bodies are known to be trapped beneath collapsed buildings, including up to 60 children who were taking part in after school lessons when the earthquake struck.

In the grounds of the main hospital some of the injured are being treated in tents because the wards are full. One surgeon told me there was a desperate need for clean water to maintain levels of hygiene.

The rescue of Ratna Kurnia Sari was a boost to emergency workers in Padang, who were enduring tough conditions as they scrambled to reach survivors.

At least one other young woman was reported to remain trapped close to where the first rescue took place.

But as rescue efforts focused on Padang, aid workers and reporters said that in rural areas thousands more buildings had been destroyed and whole villages flattened.

"From the aerial assessments carried out yesterday, the feedback is, yes Padang city and environs are bad, but once you go outside into the surrounding rural areas, the situation is very seriously grave," said International Red Cross coordinator Christine South, quoted by AFP news agency.

There was still no information for some areas including Mentawai Island, 57km from the coast, she added.

An AP reporter said parts of Pariaman district, to the north of Padang, had virtually no buildings left standing and had received no outside help.

Collapsed school

As many as 3,000 people were still thought to be trapped under rubble in Padang and several other areas, Indonesia's disaster management agency told the Associated Press.

Overnight, workers rigged up floodlights and brought in a giant excavator as they tried to find students trapped beneath the collapsed three-storey school.

The Jakarta Post reported that 60 children were in the school when it collapsed.

One rescue team leader, known as Suria, said hope was fading for many of those still buried.

"We have pulled out 38 children since the quake. Some of them, on the first day, were still alive, but the last few have all been dead," she told the Reuters news agency.

Part of Padang's main hospital collapsed in the quake and a makeshift open air morgue has been set up to take the growing number of yellow body bags.

Operations were being performed in nearby white tents, doctors said.

"We have done hundreds of operations since the earthquake," said Dr Nofli Ichlas.

"Some broken bones, some with limbs completely cut off. Fractured skulls, abdominal trauma too."

International 'lifeline'

As the rescue efforts continued, Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari appealed for foreign aid to help the rescue effort.

There were calls in particular for skilled rescuers with specialised equipment to penetrate the unstable rubble.

"We need urgently electric cutters and medium-sized excavators to remove the debris," Red Cross official Febi Dwirahmadi, at the school, told AFP.

Elsewhere, teams worked at the site of the Ambacang Hotel, where as many as 100 people were thought to be trapped.

MAJOR INDONESIAN QUAKES

26 Dec 2004: Asian tsunami kills 170,000 in Indonesia alone

28 March 2005: About 1,300 killed after a magnitude 8.7 quake hits the coast of Sumatra

27 May 2006: Quake hits ancient city of Yogyakarta, killing 5,000

17 July 2006: A tsunami after a 7.7 magnitude quake in West Java province kills 550 people

30 Sept 2009: 7.6 magnitude quake near Sumatran city of Padang, thousands feared dead

1 Oct 2009: Second of two quakes near Padang, magnitude 6.8 - no damage or casualties reported

"We heard some voices of people under the rubble, but as you can see the damage is making it very difficult to extricate them," rescue spokesman Gagah Prakosa told AP.

British firefighters heading to Padang were delayed by technical problems overnight but were poised to fly from London on Friday morning.

UK International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander said the 60-strong team would provide a "lifeline" once they arrived in Padang.

In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said a plane carrying engineering and health teams was on its way to Indonesia, with a 44-strong rescue team due to head to Sumatra later on Friday.

Other nations have also pledged aid to Indonesia, among them China ($500,000; £315,000), South Korea (43-strong rescue team and $500,000), and Germany ($1.5m).

The quake struck on Wednesday close to Padang, the capital of West Sumatra province, bringing scores of buildings crashing to the ground.

The main earthquake struck at 1716 local time (1016 GMT), some 85km (55 miles) under the sea, north-west of Padang, the US Geological Survey said.

A second quake of 6.8 struck close to Padang at 0852 local time (0152 GMT) on Thursday causing panic but no reports of casualties or damage.

Sumatra lies close to the geological fault line that triggered the 2004 Asian tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries.

Geologists have long warned that Padang - a city of 900,000 people - could one day be completely destroyed by an earthquake because of its location.

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