Keeping Focus on Fighting Genital Mutilation - Nation

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For a couple of decades, a small, underfunded nonprofit organization in New York called Equality Now has bolstered community groups in Africa that are making steady progress against the painful and destructive practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). But there is concern that an Equality Now-led campaign that has cost an unknown number of advocates their lives is meeting new resistance not only in traditional societies but also among Western anthropologists and other cultural apologists who put a higher value on a harmful practice than on the well-being of girls. Taina Bien-Aimé, Equality Now's executive director, calls it a "rites or rights" dilemma.

The United Nations has taken a surprising lead in publicly advocating for an end to the practice, in which a girl or woman's clitoris and sometimes surrounding vaginal areas are cut away to make her "more marriageable." The World Health Organization estimates that about 100 million to 140 million women worldwide have been subjected to FGM. The practice is most prevalent in Africa but also occurs among immigrants in Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Genital cutting is also reported in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. According to Unicef, about 3 million girls are at risk of being mutilated each year, some in infancy, in countries where the prevalence of the practice can be as high as 90 percent. In August the Population Fund, UNFPA, published a technical report on the scope of the practice.

There is often more action internationally than in the United States to curb the practice, although 17 American states have passed laws against the procedure since it began to appear in immigrant communities. In the United States, an analysis of census data by the African Women's Health Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston shows that (based on families' countries of origin) more than nearly 228,000 females have been or are at risk of being subjected to FGM, with more than 38,000 of them in California and nearly 26,000 in New York State. Only one person in the United States, an Ethiopian-born resident of Georgia, has gone to jail, charged with cruelty after he cut off his 2-year-old daughter's clitoris with scissors.

On November 3 Equality Now will kick off a campaign in the United States to refocus attention on FGM, with Meryl Streep appearing as a spokeswoman for the cause at the first screening of the documentary Africa Rising. That screening, at NYU, sold out weeks in advance, but it will be followed by programs on the West Coast and in Boston.

By early next year a distribution agreement with Women Make Movies, a multicultural feminist nonprofit, should make the documentary, featuring activists from Africa and international rights organizations, widely available to any group interested in presenting a program on the issue.

Bien-Aimé said that from the beginning in the early 1990s, Equality Now, which also campaigns against sex tourism and trafficking in the United States, followed the lead of grassroots activists against FGM in Africa at a time when the subject was taboo in the United States. "We met with and were actually fascinated by the work of individuals who were literally risking their lives to talk about female genital mutilation, to break the silence and raise awareness," Bien-Aimé observes.

Equality Now stepped in to help forge a network and give it an international platform, but the programs and pace were always left to the people on the scene, men as well as women. In 2000 a fund was created to funnel support to the local groups. A newsletter, Awaken, is published in English, French and Arabic.

Many of the women who have been helped in their advocacy were survivors of the practice. "They were indigenous to their communities," Bien-Aimeé said. "They know best how to address the issue."

"Just the fact that FGM is now a household word is an enormous success," she said. "Fifteen of twenty-eight African countries have laws; an African protocol on the rights of women is the first legal instrument mandating governments to legislate against FGM."

But the practice goes on, and resistance to the prohibition of FGM has led to increasingly younger girls being cut on the apparent theory that this will pass unnoticed. During the political upheaval in Kenya in 2008, while police forces were overstretched or in disarray, mass cuttings were reported. Equality Now heard of the forcible cutting of about 600 girls in the Kenyan city of Eldoret during the school Christmas break.

Bien-Aimé said that last year in Burkina Faso, where there is a hot line to report cases, about 200 infants were rushed to hospitals after being subjected to the practice. FGM, apart from causing girls to bleed to death and eliminating sexual pleasure from the lives of survivors, can lead to high levels of infection and disease, later difficult births and maternal deaths.

The resistance to ending FGM or creating less harmful rites of passage for girls is not confined to developing countries. "For reasons that I don't understand, there's this resurgence of debate around 'rites or rights' in this country," Bien-Aimé said. "It's extremely disturbing." Campaigns against the practice are being challenged on cultural sensitivity by anthropologist and other academics. Some leading American anthropologists, including Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago and Bettina Shell-Duncan, a specialist in biocultural and medical anthropology at the University of Washington, argue that activists who advocate against genital cutting tend to overemphasize the most harmful versions of the practice and fail to appreciate the importance of this rite in many families and communities, where damage to a girl or young woman may be slight.

FGM has fallen off the radar of many health officials. "What is the CDC doing, what is Health and Human Services doing?" Bien-Aimé asked. By comparison, Britain, Sweden and France have special programs in immigrant communities.

"It is critically important for voices from the ground to be heard now," she said.

About Barbara Crossette

Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN.

She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995 and in paperback by Random House/Vintage Destinations in 1996, and a collection of travel essays about colonial resort towns that are still attracting visitors more than a century after their creation, The Great Hill Stations of Asia, published by Westview Press in 1998 and in paperback by Basic Books in 1999. In 2000, she wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, India: Old Civilization in a New World, for the Foreign Policy Association in New York. She is also the author of India Facing the 21st Century, published by Indiana University Press in 1993.

Latvia's Tiger Economy Loses Its Bite - Nation

View a slideshow of images from Latvia, with photographs by Akim Aginsky and captions by Kristina Rizga.

AKIM AGINSKY FOR THE PULITZER CENTER
Valdis Novikovs sells remnants of bankrupt businesses from a rental space in Riga.

Riga, Latvia

Kristina Rizga reported from Latvia on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Gatis Visnevskis contributed research for this story.

Despite his 33 years, Valdis Novikovs still radiates teenage energy and a hunger for adventure. Latvia is a small country (population: 2.2 million), and like a lot of young people who felt suffocated and needed to get out, Novikovs left for England in 2005. He worked as a sous-chef at the Hard Rock Cafe in Birmingham and shared a studio apartment with a Polish roommate. When he went back to Latvia two years later, he barely recognized his own country. The moderately ticking postcommunist economy he'd left behind had turned into a booming engine, propelling rapid changes almost everywhere he looked.

"I come back and everyone around me is buying and selling properties," Novikovs says. "People have two luxury cars. They are traveling all over the world. I'm laboring overtime like a fool in England, but I can't do any of that." Sitting in his apartment in Riga, Novikovs speaks animatedly: "I felt like something gigantic was happening in Latvia, and the train was leaving without me!"

In fact, "something gigantic" was happening in Latvia: sweeping across the country was the biggest real estate (and luxury car) bubble in Europe. Less than a year after Latvia joined the European Union in 2004, its growth rate topped all of Europe. As global stock markets overheated and competition for investment opportunities intensified, Scandinavian banks showered Latvia with cheap credit. Eighteen years ago, when Latvia was under Soviet rule, the vast majority of the population had no experience with banking, investments or credit; no one owned property. But by 2005 Latvians could buy everything they ever dreamed of on credit--from teakettles to Bentleys to luxury apartments. As hundreds of office and apartment towers reached skyward, some construction workers started earning more than doctors. Novikovs, who had no experience in construction, got a job as a "plumber's assistant," in addition to managing a Jamaican-inspired restaurant, Coco Loco, at night. He was making more than $2,800 a month in construction alone, twice what he made in England.

Increased earnings and easy credit fueled a hunger for owning property. Oskars Kurdeko felt anxious that by 2007 he still didn't own a home. "All of my friends had already bought their apartments," Kurdeko explains. A percussionist for two local pop-rock bands, Putnu Balle and Tumsa, Kurdeko saw his income shoot up 70 percent that year, fueled by corporate gigs. He took out a $272,000 mortgage on a two-bedroom apartment in Riga with no down payment.

But as the global financial storm swept across Europe, the dreams of Latvians like Novikovs and Kurdeko were blown apart. By the end of 2008 Novikovs had lost both his jobs. Kurdeko's monthly mortgage payment now exceeds his pay, and his apartment is worth a fraction of what he owes on it. He's not alone: almost a third of all Latvian households have mortgages for homes or apartments that have dropped 50 percent in value since last year--the deepest plunge in the world, according to the Global Property Guide.

Novikovs now runs a business selling off remnants of other businesses that have closed or gone bankrupt, including his former restaurant. In May his headquarters--a small, dark rental space in a dilapidated Soviet-era building--was packed to the ceiling with more than 800 pairs of imported shoes, which used to sell for $40 but now go for $5. In one room, Italian sports bras piled up on top of a steel refrigerator. Recently, he and his partner started selling wood processing equipment and other machinery, as local manufacturing output continues to drop.

Latvia's economy has been among the worst hit by the global economic crisis, and it is now coping with Europe's second-deepest recession, after Lithuania. Its GDP dropped by an annual 19 percent in the second quarter of 2009. In February 2008 its government requested an emergency bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF, with the help of the EU, approved an emergency aid package of more than $10 billion. Per capita, it is estimated to be one of the IMF's largest bailout loans.

Outside Riga, among the hardest hit are the large farms, which increased by 25 percent between 2005 and 2007, fueled by easy credit. "It's very hard for large farmers right now, who focused on producing one thing, like milk or grain, and took out large loans to expand their facilities," explains Liga Martuzane, a small farmer in Adazi. Now that the prices of grain and milk have dropped, many farmers are drowning in debt. Martuzane mentions the tragic suicide last year of her friend Gatis Karlovs, who operated a large farm. In February more than 1,000 farmers blocked the streets of Riga with their tractors in anger over the government's failure to protect them from the onslaught of subsidized EU imports, which they believe contributed to their bankruptcy. The protesters forced the resignation of Martins Roze, Latvia's agriculture minister.

The IMF and EU emergency loans have their own downside--they are given on condition of drastic cutbacks in government spending. The Latvian government has agreed to cut about $1 billion from its budget each year until 2012, the year it hopes to adopt the euro. Government officials waited until the day after the June 6 municipal elections to announce 10 percent cuts in pensions and 50 percent cuts to teachers' salaries. They feared the same public reaction that shook the country on January 13.

On that day more than 10,000 people took to the streets to protest spending cuts. What started as peaceful protests turned into the worst riots Latvia has seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis dissolved his center-right government coalition and stepped down in February, but his successor, Valdis Dombrovskis, assembled another center-right cabinet, which has pursued the same fiscal austerity policies. Latvia has since seen four more massive protests, as many Latvians feel that the cuts are arbitrary, without any clear vision or planning, and are directed disproportionately at the masses.

"It just doesn't look to me like the top is making the same sacrifices while they squeeze the bottom," Dagnija Kamerovska, the director of a local homeless shelter, said in May. The Latvian state controller, Inguna Sudraba, came out with a preliminary report in September that found that most large state bureaucracies, which swelled in the boom years, hadn't made the required 20 percent cuts in their salaries.

In the meantime, budget cuts are affecting areas like education and healthcare. On September 6 more than 400 protesters blocked two bridges to oppose the closing of the only hospital in Bauska, a rural city about an hour away from Riga. "Bauska's hospital has been here since the nineteenth century. It lived through both wars, all regime changes.... I don't understand why we have to close it," Bauska's City Council chairman, Valdis Veips, told the Latvian newspaper Diena. Instead of explaining the closure, government officials sent in a special unit to break up the protest. A Bauska newspaper reported the next day that city residents had received a government fax stating that financial support for the hospital, though reduced, would continue.

As Latvia prepares to receive the third installment of the $10 billion package from the IMF and the EU, the British Telegraph reported on October 5 that Sweden's finance minister, Anders Borg, had told banks secretly to prepare for the collapse of international talks. According to the Telegraph, Latvia's government had failed to deliver a 20 percent cut to pensions and a 15 percent cut to public wages, as requested by the lenders.

Meanwhile, the pain and suffering in Latvia continues. Unemployment has already doubled this year, and the IMF reports that more than 10 percent of Latvia's borrowers are over ninety days late on their mortgage payments. Although banks have resisted evicting homeowners, they haven't been totally idle; in June, on an unused airstrip at the Riga airport, more than 500 cars, trucks and bulldozers sat idle, all repossessed by the banks.

Since my mother and I emigrated from Latvia to the United States in 1994, I have visited my homeland every year. As I traveled around Latvia in May, I wondered, How did it get so bad? How did Latvia go from being one of the most developed regions in the Soviet Union to an area experiencing one of the worst depressions in the world?

The trajectory began in 2004, when Latvia formally joined the EU after nine years of negotiations. Credit rating agencies blessed the deal, with Moody's upgrading Latvia from a "stable" to "positive" grade in 2005. According to the Bank Association of Latvia, loans and cheap credit quadrupled from 2004 to 2008, reaching 95 percent of Latvia's GDP by early 2008. Most investment went into the construction of new luxury condos and office buildings--rather than export capacity--under the assumption that real estate values would grow indefinitely. The rest went into buying imported goods, many of them subsidized, weakening Latvia's local manufacturing and export base. By 2007 Latvia had the second-highest trade deficit in the EU, after Bulgaria.

To make matters worse, the real estate bubbles in England and Ireland sucked away local labor. At the same time Valdis Novikovs left for England, an estimated 1.5 percent of Latvia's labor force went abroad. Unemployment dropped to an unprecedented 5 percent in Riga, and from 2006 to 2008 the cost of labor doubled. As inflation tripled, Novikovs noticed that local clothing and food cost almost twice as much as in England. "Latvians were traveling to Germany and Finland to buy cheaper clothes and furniture," he recalls with outrage. In 2007 Latvians had the lowest household savings rate in the EU.

The Latvian government didn't do much to stop this economic transformation. If anything, it stepped on the gas. Riga's new deputy mayor and millionaire Ainars Slesers, who served in the Latvian Parliament during the boom years, coined a phrase that is sure to become a symbol of the prevailing government attitude at the time: gazi grida (pedal to the metal). Enabled primarily by foreign banks, Latvia's government created a bubble economy financed by debt without developing sustainable means to pay off these loans. Now Latvia's economy looks like a race car that has smashed into a concrete wall.

While economic indicators are a crucial part of Latvia's story, they don't fully explain why its bubble was the biggest in Europe or why its citizens so fully embraced extreme, gazi grida neoliberalism. Latvia's Soviet legacy still drives much of its politics. For centuries, the territories where Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are located served at best as stable colonies and at worst as bloody battlegrounds where major Western and Eastern empires like Germany, Sweden and Russia fought for control. The Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940 is the most recent and painful scar. As many as 200,000 Latvians were imprisoned or deported to Soviet gulags, and for the next fifty years Russian was made the sole official language in all political and economic spheres. In this context independence often took the form of cultural resistance--language, traditions and cultural heritage. My family celebrated summer solstice and Christmas in secret.

I grew up in the small, rural city of Livani, about 100 miles south of Riga. My late father, Peteris Rizga, helped build a new factory, Livanu Majinas, in the early 1970s that helped move Soviets from bloc apartment buildings into modern, single-family houses. My Jewish mother, Fruma, worked in the glass factory Livanu Stikls, which produced some of the most coveted vases and glass in the Soviet Union. Thanks to these and other new factories, rural Livani was transformed into an industrial center. A similar trend of Moscow-driven strategic industrialization took place across Latvia, absorbing laborers and military personnel from other Soviet republics. These waves of migration changed the Latvian share of the population from 75 percent in 1935 to 52 percent by 1989. Today, Latvia has the highest proportion of Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic states, raising the fear of cultural extinction more acutely than in neighboring countries.

In the '80s my mother became very active in the Independence Movement of Latvia. On January 13, 1991, she packed sandwiches, made hot coffee in a thermos and said, "We are going to defend Riga from the Soviet tanks." Thousands of farmers drove their tractors from across the country to use them as shields. Small fires flickered throughout downtown Riga at night, as my mother and I passed out hot coffee. On March 3 of that year, 70 percent of the Latvian public voted in a referendum to support independence, and on August 21 Latvia officially regained its independence. I was 14 then, walking around with an inflated sense of pride and self-importance. My mother and I had helped defeat Russian tanks without any guns.

At the time, Latvians feared that in a full democracy, the Russian-speaking minorities might elect Russian communists back to power. In Riga only about 40 percent of residents were ethnic Latvians; the rest were Russian-speaking minorities--Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians and other ethnicities. In 1991 the party my mother supported initiated stringent citizenship laws, naturalizing only those who could prove their residence in Latvia before 1940, as well as their descendents. Under these laws, my mother, who had come from Ukraine in 1956, could not become a citizen. She felt betrayed. In 1994 she and I packed our entire life into two suitcases and came to the United States. In the late 1990s the Latvian government started gradually reforming its citizenship laws--and now they are similar to those of the United States--but for years citizenship laws that favored ethnic Latvians kept Russian-speaking minorities from joining the country's political elite.

In its drive to contain Russian influences, the Latvian government also prioritized entry into the EU and NATO, a policy goal that overshadowed other domestic priorities, like stimulating local manufacturing or supporting agriculture. As in most Eastern European bloc countries, Latvia's politicians looked to the West, and the United States especially, for economic models. The resulting reform strategy of the ruling Latvia's Way government during the '90s is often characterized by Western analysts as "soft shock therapy." Latvia has had a flat tax since 1997, and until this year progressive taxation has never been on the agenda of any ruling coalition. The Latvian government also refused to tax capital gains, which turned real estate trading into one of the most lucrative professions in the boom years. This unique confluence of nationalism and neoliberalism took Latvia from the extremes of communism to the extremes of capitalism in less than twenty years.

Nil Ushakov, the newly elected mayor of Riga, believes that Latvian nationalism has allowed politicians to pander to their base and ignore important economic issues. "What is easier, reading EU documents in French and English on how to protect our local sugar refinery, or talk about nationalism?" he asks. "What we have as a result is an economy that's based too heavily on transit, finance and imports, while our huge potentials, such as an educated workforce, manufacturing and agriculture, have been lost."

Unlike its neighbors Estonia and Lithuania, Latvian left-opposition parties have not been a part of the ruling coalition in Parliament since 1991. That has meant that neoliberalism has dominated Latvian politics virtually unchallenged since 1991. Two decades of this unchallenged center-right rule have also fueled high levels of corruption. From 2000 to 2002 several international studies found that Latvia had one of the worst corruption records among its high-ranking government officials in the post-Soviet states. In 2004, when Latvia joined the EU, it received more than $1 billion in "structural funds," aimed at developing Latvia's infrastructure--modernizing schools and building roads and bridges, among other things. But along with those funds came a resurgence of the old Soviet-era affliction of bribery.

Delna, an anti-corruption watchdog group, believes there are widespread but hard to trace kickbacks from contractors vying for lucrative government projects. In her stylish glasses and short, spiky hair, Delna's 26-year-old Aiga Grisane looks more like a musician than a legal analyst. Grisane sees direct connections between government corruption and the Latvian real estate bubble. When Grisane monitored land development for two years, for example, she discovered that there was essentially no government regulation of construction development. "In Estonia, if you are building a bunch of skyscrapers, you have to submit a plan for roads, kindergartens, stores. In Latvia, you could do whatever you wanted." Grisane believes such unregulated development inflated Latvia's real estate bubble more than in neighboring Lithuania or Estonia. She observed many cases in Jurmala, a small city near Riga, where city officials passed laws erasing regulation at the last minute without any public scrutiny.

Although the media cover government corruption scandals regularly, high-ranking officials are rarely caught or prosecuted. As a result, many Latvians don't feel like giving their taxes to arrogant and corrupt state officials. Grisane also believes that a widely accepted underground cash economy helped inflate Latvia's bubble. "Most of these construction workers were getting salaries under the table. That definitely contributes to inflation." A 2004 report by the European Commission estimated that about 20 percent of the Latvian workforce operates off the books, compared with only 9 percent in Estonia.

The economic crisis of recent months, along with the January protests and the resignations of two ministers, has been a boon for the left coalition party called the Harmony Center. It now holds the largest share of seats in Riga's City Council, the first time since Latvian independence that the most left-leaning major party has done so. And for the first time since 1991 an ethnic Russian, Nil Ushakov, is the mayor of Latvia's capital, home to 700,000 people, almost a third of the country's population.

The Harmony Center owes its success in large part to the charismatic 33-year-old Ushakov, who represents a new generation--young, progressive, cosmopolitan--with no record of scandals or corruption. A former journalist, Ushakov studied economics in Denmark and speaks five languages. "You can't run your country like a business; you have to treat your country like your family," Ushakov explained in campaign videos.

Ushakov's main opponent for mayor was Ainars Slesers, the millionaire entrepreneur who had coined the phrase gazi grida. Riga's residents--ethnic Latvians and Russian-speaking citizens--clearly rejected Slesers's philosophy of unregulated capitalism, and gave Ushakov's party twice as many votes (Slesers became deputy mayor). The People's Party, considered among Latvians the most corrupt, and For Fatherland and Freedom, the most extreme on issues of nationalism, suffered significant losses in the country's June 6 local elections. But the right-wing People's Party still holds the largest share of seats in Parliament, for which elections take place in October 2010.

These changes may signal a new era in Latvia, one in which ethnic divisions become less relevant, nationalism is not a campaign mantra, capitalism is tempered with regulation, and government helps stimulate local businesses while reducing red tape and corruption. In a sense, hope has arisen from crisis. "I like this crisis," says Dagnija Kamerovska, director of a homeless shelter. "People forgot that you need to produce something valuable to get paid. I hope it will change people's attitude toward labor." From entrepreneurs to teachers to farmers and the unemployed, a surprisingly high number of Latvians (about 80 percent) said in May that for the past five years, they've felt that their country was headed in the wrong direction. And despite the hardships of the past year, there is a sense that the current situation will "correct a lot of wrongs."

Kristine Drevina, a 34-year-old member of a new Latvian left-opposition party called Jaunlatvija (New Latvia), sits in a cafe and talks about why she got involved in politics. For the past six years, Drevina worked at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. But it dawned on her in early 2008 that "the country is going in the wrong direction, and I have no right to complain if I'm not doing something about it." Her party wants to reorient Latvia away from blindly following neoliberalism and focusing on ethnic tensions. "In the current situation, we have definitive proof that you can't let the markets run completely free. The state has to be involved to assure fair rules for everyone and provide safety nets for the most vulnerable."

Like Drevina, most members of the new party are in their 30s and have studied or worked abroad. "New Latvia will be a test for our democracy. Can we rise to power without a long [money] tail behind us?" Drevina says. The party was founded only two months before the municipal elections and has made minimal gains. But it is determined to boost its visibility and membership before the October 2010 parliamentary elections.

Another new entrant into politics is Laura Mikelsone, Delna's director, who stayed away from politics until last year. She worked in the Ministry of Economics and also as a human resources consultant helping colleagues start a business in China. Now, as part of a team of mostly young women who work at Delna, Mikelsone wants to see leadership that is capable of going beyond nationalism and embracing the full complexity of Latvia's history. "I want a Latvian Obama," she laughs.

As new leaders, activists and artists are charting a more sustainable political and economic agenda, a new generation of entrepreneurs is also emerging to seek ways of creating sustainable businesses. One such is the green cosmetics company Madara, founded by three women in their 30s, which makes its products using local resources, from plants to labor. The women launched the company in 2006, raising small amounts of capital through friends, and have opened a new store in the thick of an economic recession.

While these green shoots are springing up across Latvia, the austerity measures imposed by foreign lenders threaten to slowly burn them out, raising the specter of more social unrest this winter. A growing number of ordinary Latvians are criticizing the ways their government is handling the crisis. They point to the fact that while the United States and the European Union are growing their deficits to provide economic stimulus, Latvia is still pursuing the opposite strategy.

I called Valdis Novikovs in October, four months after I left Latvia, to see how his company that sells off the assets of bankrupt businesses was doing. "Our business is growing, and we recently started negotiating sales with Lithuanians and Belorussians," Novikovs says, catching his breath after a long day of work.

Will Latvia survive this crisis? "Latvians will be fine," Novikovs says with confidence. "The thing is, even when you ask a Latvian how he is doing in the best of times, they always say, just 'OK.' They don't shine with optimism like Americans, but that's deceiving," Novikovs explains. "We have seen worse things than this crisis, and we always survived."

About Kristina Rizga

Kristina Rizga is the executive editor of WireTap, a political youth magazine, project director of Future5000.com and a member of the editorial board of The Nation.

Gorbachev on 1989 - Nation

Image by cliff1066™ via Flickr

On September 23, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and her husband, Stephen F. Cohen, a contributing editor, interviewed former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at his foundation in Moscow. With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaching, we believed that the leader most responsible for that historic event should be heard, on his own terms, in the United States. As readers will see, the discussion became much more wide-ranging. --The Editors

KVH/SFC: Historic events quickly generate historical myths. In the United States it is said that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of a divided Europe was caused by a democratic revolution in Eastern Europe or by American power, or both. What is your response?

MG: Those developments were the result of perestroika in the Soviet Union, where democratic changes had reached the point by March 1989 that for the first time in Russia's history democratic, competitive elections took place. You remember how enthusiastically people participated in those elections for a new Soviet Congress. And as a result thirty-five regional Communist Party secretaries were defeated. By the way, of the deputies elected, 84 percent were Communists, because there were a lot of ordinary people in the party--workers and intellectuals.

On the day after the elections, I met with the Politburo, and said, "I congratulate you!" They were very upset. Several replied, "For what?" I explained, "This is a victory for perestroika. We are touching the lives of people. Things are difficult for them now, but nonetheless they voted for Communists." Suddenly one Politburo member replied, "And what kind of Communists are they!" Those elections were very important. They meant that movement was under way toward democracy, glasnost and pluralism.

Analogous processes were also under way in Eastern and Central Europe. On the day I became Soviet leader, in March 1985, I had a special meeting with the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries, and told them: "You are independent, and we are independent. You are responsible for your policies, we are responsible for ours. We will not intervene in your affairs, I promise you." And we did not intervene, not once, not even when they later asked us to. Under the influence of perestroika, their societies began to take action. Perestroika was a democratic transformation, which the Soviet Union needed. And my policy of nonintervention in Central and Eastern Europe was crucial. Just imagine, in East Germany alone there were more than 300,000 Soviet troops armed to the teeth--elite troops, specially selected! And yet, a process of change began there, and in the other countries, too. People began to make choices, which was their natural right.

But the problem of a divided Germany remained. The German people perceived the situation as abnormal, and I shared their attitude. Both in West and East Germany new governments were formed and new relations between them established. I think if the East German leader Erich Honecker had not been so stubborn--we all suffer from this illness, including the person you are interviewing--he would have introduced democratic changes. But the East German leaders did not initiate their own perestroika. Thus a struggle broke out in their country.

The Germans are a very capable nation. Even after what they had experienced under Hitler and later, they demonstrated that they could build a new democratic country. If Honecker had taken advantage of his people's capabilities, democratic and economic reforms could have been introduced that might have led to a different outcome.

I saw this myself. On October 7, 1989, I was reviewing a parade in East Germany with Honecker and other representatives of the Warsaw Pact countries. Groups from twenty-eight different regions of East Germany were marching by with torches, slogans on banners, shouts and songs. The former prime minister of Poland, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, asked me if I understood German. "Enough to read what's written on the banners. They're talking about perestroika. They're talking about democracy and change. They're saying, 'Gorbachev, stay in our country!'" Then Rakowski remarked, "If it's true that these are representatives of people from twenty-eight regions of the country, it means the end." I said, "I think you're right."

KVH/SFC: That is, after the Soviet elections in March 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall was inevitable?

MG: Absolutely!

KVH/SFC: Did you already foresee the outcome?

MG: Everyone claims to have foreseen things. In June 1989 I met with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and we then held a press conference. Reporters asked if we had discussed the German question. My answer was, "History gave rise to this problem, and history will resolve it. That is my opinion. If you ask Chancellor Kohl, he will tell you it is a problem for the twenty-first century."

I also met with the East German Communist leaders, and told them again, "This is your affair and you have the responsibility to decide." But I also warned them, "What does experience teach us? He who is late loses." If they had taken the road of reform, of gradual change--if there had been some sort of agreement or treaty between the two parts of Germany, some sort of financial agreement, some confederation, a more gradual reunification would have been possible. But in 1989-90, all Germans, both in the East and the West, were saying, "Do it immediately." They were afraid the opportunity would be missed.

KVH/SFC: A closely related question: when did the cold war actually end? In the United States, there are several answers: in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down; in 1990-91, after the reunification of Germany; and the most popular, even orthodox, answer, is that the cold war ended only when the Soviet Union ended, in December 1991.

MG: No. If President Ronald Reagan and I had not succeeded in signing disarmament agreements and normalizing our relations in 1985-88, the later developments would have been unimaginable. But what happened between Reagan and me would also have been unimaginable if earlier we had not begun perestroika in the Soviet Union. Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.

Sometimes people ask me why I began perestroika. Were the causes basically domestic or foreign? The domestic reasons were undoubtedly the main ones, but the danger of nuclear war was so serious that it was a no less significant factor. Something had to be done before we destroyed each other. Therefore the big changes that occurred with me and Reagan had tremendous importance. But also that George H.W. Bush, who succeeded Reagan, decided to continue the process. And in December 1989, at our meeting in Malta, Bush and I declared that we were no longer enemies or adversaries.

KVH/SFC: So the cold war ended in December 1989?

MG: I think so.

KVH/SFC: Many people disagree, including some American historians.

MG: Let historians think what they want. But without what I have described, nothing would have resulted. Let me tell you something. George Shultz, Reagan's secretary of state, came to see me two or three years ago. We reminisced for a long time--like old soldiers recalling past battles. I have great respect for Shultz, and I asked him: "Tell me, George, if Reagan had not been president, who could have played his role?" Shultz thought for a while, then said: "At that time there was no one else. Reagan's strength was that he had devoted his whole first term to building up America, to getting rid of all the vacillation that had been sown like seeds. America's spirits had revived. But in order to take these steps toward normalizing relations with the Soviet Union and toward reducing nuclear armaments--there was no one else who could have done that then."

By the way, in 1987, after my first visit to the United States, Vice President Bush accompanied me to the airport, and told me: "Reagan is a conservative. An extreme conservative. All the blockheads and dummies are for him, and when he says that something is necessary, they trust him. But if some Democrat had proposed what Reagan did, with you, they might not have trusted him."

By telling you this, I simply want to give Reagan the credit he deserves. I found dealing with him very difficult. The first time we met, in 1985, after we had talked, my people asked me what I thought of him. "A real dinosaur," I replied. And about me Reagan said, "Gorbachev is a diehard Bolshevik!"

KVH/SFC: A dinosaur and a Bolshevik?

MG: And yet these two people came to historic agreements, because some things must be above ideological convictions. No matter how hard it was for us and no matter how much Reagan and I argued in Geneva in 1985, nevertheless in our appeal to the peoples of the world we wrote: "Nuclear war is inadmissible, and in it there can be no victors." And in 1986, in Reykjavik, we even agreed that nuclear weapons should be abolished. This conception speaks to the maturity of the leaders on both sides, not only Reagan but people in the West generally, who reached the correct conclusion that we had to put an end to the cold war.

KVH/SFC: So Americans who say the cold war ended only with the end of the Soviet Union are wrong?

MG: That's because journalists, politicians and historians in your country concluded that the United States won the cold war, but that is a mistake. If the new Soviet leadership and its new foreign policy had not existed, nothing would have happened.

KVH/SFC: In short, Gorbachev, Reagan and the first President Bush ended the cold war?

MG: Yes, in 1989-90. It was not a single action but a process. Bush and I made the declaration at Malta, but Reagan would have had no less grounds for saying that he played a crucial role, because he, together with us, had a fundamental change of attitude. Therefore we were all victors: we all won the cold war because we put a stop to spending $10 trillion on the cold war, on each side.

KVH/SFC: What was most important--the circumstances at that time or the leaders?

MG: The times work through people in history. I'll tell you something else that is very important about what subsequently happened in your country. When people came to the conclusion that they had won the cold war, they concluded that they didn't need to change. Let others change. That point of view is mistaken, and it undermined what we had envisaged for Europe--mutual collective security for everyone and a new world order. All of that was lost because of this muddled thinking in your country, and which has now made it so difficult to work together. World leadership is now understood to mean that America gives the orders.

KVH/SFC: Is that why today, twenty years after you say the cold war ended, the relationship between our two countries is so bad that President Obama says it has to be "reset"? What went wrong?

MG: Even before the end of the cold war, Reagan, Bush and I argued, but we began to eliminate two entire categories of nuclear weapons. We had gone very far, almost to the point when a return to the past was no longer possible. But everything went wrong because perestroika was undermined and there was a change of Russian leadership and a change from our concept of gradual reform to the idea of a sudden leap. For Russian President Boris Yeltsin, ready-made Western recipes were falling into his hands, schemes that supposedly would lead to instant success. He was an adventurist. The fall of the Soviet Union was the key moment that explains everything that happened afterward, including what we have today. As I said, people in your country became dizzy with imagined success: they saw everything as their victory.

In Yeltsin, Washington ended up with a vassal who thought that because of his anticommunism he would be carried in their arms. Delegations came to Russia one after the other, including President Bill Clinton, but then they stopped coming. It turned out no one needed Yeltsin. But by then half of Russia's industries were in ruins, even 60 percent. It was a country with a noncompetitive economy wide open to the world market, and it became slavishly dependent on imports.

How many things were affected! All our plans for a new Europe and a new architecture of mutual security. It all disappeared. Instead, it was proposed that NATO's jurisdiction be extended to the whole world. But then Russia began to revive. The rain of dollars from higher world oil prices opened up new possibilities. Industrial and social problems began to be solved. And Russia began to speak with a firm voice, but Western leaders got angry about that. They had grown accustomed to having Russia just lie there. They thought they could pull the legs right out from under her whenever they wanted.

The moral of the story--and in the West morals are everything--is this: under my leadership, a country began reforms that opened up the possibility of sustained democracy, of escaping from the threat of nuclear war, and more. That country needed aid and support, but it didn't get any. Instead, when things went bad for us, the United States applauded. Once again, this was a calculated attempt to hold Russia back. I am speaking heatedly, but I am telling you what happened.

KVH/SFC: But now Washington is turning to Moscow for help, most urgently perhaps in Afghanistan. Exactly twenty years ago, you ended the Soviet war in Afghanistan. What lessons did you learn that President Obama should heed in making his decisions about Afghanistan?

MG: One was that problems there could not be solved with the use of force. Such attempts inside someone else's country end badly. But even more, it is not acceptable to impose one's own idea of order on another country without taking into account the opinion of the population of that country. My predecessors tried to build socialism in Afghanistan, where everything was in the hands of tribal and clan leaders, or of religious leaders, and where the central government was very weak. What kind of socialism could that have been? It only spoiled our relationship with a country where we had excellent relations during the previous twenty years.

Even today, I am criticized that it took three years for us to withdraw, but we tried to solve the problem through dialogue--with America, with India, with Iran and with both sides in Afghanistan, and we attended an international conference. We didn't simply hitch up our trousers and run for it, but tried to solve the problem politically, with the idea of making Afghanistan a neutral, peaceful country. By the way, when we were getting ready to pull out our troops and were preparing a treaty of withdrawal, what did the Americans do? They supported the idea of giving religious training to young Afghans--that is, the Taliban. As a result, now they are fighting against them. Today, again, not just America and Russia can be involved in solving this problem. All of Afghanistan's neighbors must be involved. Iran cannot be ignored, and it's ill-advised for America not to be on good terms with Iran.

KVH/SFC: Finally, a question about your intellectual-political biography. One author called you "the man who changed the world." Who or what most changed your own thinking?

MG: Gorbachev never had a guru. I've been involved in politics since 1955, after I finished university, when there was still hunger in my country as a result of World War II. I was formed by those times and by my participation in politics. In addition, I am an intellectually curious person by nature and I understood that many changes were necessary, and that it was necessary to think about them, even if it caused me discomfort. I began to carry out my own inner, spiritual perestroika--a perestroika in my personal views. Along the way, Russian literature and, in fact, all literature, European and American too, had a big influence on me. I was drawn especially to philosophy. And my wife, Raisa, who had read more philosophy than I had, was always there alongside me. I didn't just learn historical facts but tried to put them in a philosophical or conceptual framework.

I began to understand that society needed a new vision--that we must view the world with our eyes open, not just through our personal or private interests. That's how our new thinking of the 1980s began, when we understood that our old viewpoints were not working out. During the nuclear arms race, I was given a gift by an American, a little figure of a goose in flight. I still have it at my dacha. It is a goose that lives in the north of Russia in the summer and in the winter migrates to America. It does that every year regardless of what's happening, on the ground, between you and us. That was the point of this gift and that's why I'm telling you about it.

KVH/SFC: Listening to you, it seems that you became a political heretic in your country.

MG: I think that is true. I want to add that I know America well now, having given speeches to large audiences there regularly. Three years ago I was speaking in the Midwest, and an American asked me this question: "The situation in the United States is developing in a way that alarms us greatly. What would you advise us to do?" I said, "Giving advice, especially to Americans, is not for me." But I did say one general thing: that it seems to me that America needs its own American perestroika. Not ours. We needed ours, but you need yours. The entire audience stood and clapped for five minutes.

KVH/SFC: And do you think President Obama will be the leader of such an American perestroika?

MG: As far as I know, Americans did not make a mistake in electing him. Barack Obama is capable of leading your society on a very high level and of understanding it better than any political figure I know. He is an educated person with a highly developed capacity for dialogue, and that too is very important. So I congratulate you.

About Katrina vanden Heuvel

Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor and Publisher of The Nation.

She is the co-editor of Taking Back America--And Taking Down The Radical Right (NationBooks, 2004).

She is also co-editor (with Stephen F. Cohen) of Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers (Norton, 1989) and editor of The Nation: 1865-1990, and the collection A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy and September 11, 2001.

more...

About Stephen F. Cohen

Stephen F. Cohen, professor of Russian studies at New York University, is the author (with Katrina vanden Heuvel) of Voices of Glasnost: Conversations With Gorbachev's Reformers, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (both Norton) and, most recently, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War (Columbia)

In Iowa, Euphoria Gives Way to Second-Thoughts on Obama - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By JEFF ZELENY

WILLIAMSBURG, Iowa — Pauline McAreavy voted for President Obama. From the moment she first saw him two years ago, she was smitten by his speeches and sold on his promise of change. She switched parties to support him in the Iowa caucuses, donated money and opened her home to a pair of young campaign workers.

But by the time she received a fund-raising letter last month from the Democratic National Committee, a sense of disappointment had set in. She returned the solicitation with a handwritten note, saying: “Until I see some progress and he lives up to his promises in Iowa, we will not give one penny.”

“I’m afraid I wasn’t realistic,” Ms. McAreavy, 76, a retired school nurse, said on a recent morning on the deck of her home here in east-central Iowa.

“I really thought there would be immediate change,” she said. “Sometimes the Republicans are just as bad as Democrats. But it’s politics as usual, and that’s what I voted against.”

One year after winning the election, Mr. Obama has seen his pledge to transcend partisanship in Washington give way to the hardened realities of office. A campaign for the history books, filled with a sky-high sense of possibility for Mr. Obama not just among legions of loyal Democrats but also among converts from outside the party, has descended to an unfamiliar plateau for a president whose political rise was as rapid as it was charmed.

Interviews with voters across Iowa offer a window into how the president’s standing has leveled out, especially among the independents and Republicans who contributed not just to his margin of victory in the caucuses here but also to the optimism among his supporters that his election would be a break from standard-issue politics.

For Democrats, the immediate peril of failing to hang on to some of these swing voters could play out Tuesday in the governor’s race in Virginia, a state Mr. Obama wrested away from Republicans last year, but where the Democratic candidate for governor has struggled to reprise Mr. Obama’s enthusiastic coalition.

In Iowa, Ms. McAreavy fears that the president’s health care plan will shortchange her Medicare benefits and mean infrequent mammogram examinations. She worries that his decision on Afghanistan will mean that her son, a member of the Iowa National Guard, will return to the battlefield. And she believes too many of Mr. Obama’s actions are rooted in Democratic politics.

“All my Republican friends — and independents — are sitting back saying, ‘Oh, what did we do?” Ms. McAreavy said. “I’m not to that point yet, but a lot of people are.”

Mr. Obama still has generally strong approval ratings and the opportunities that come with a Democratic majority in Congress. Public opinion about him remains in flux, particularly as he heads into the endgame of a push to overhaul the health insurance system and nears a decision about whether to expand the war in Afghanistan.

But an erosion of support from independents and disapproval from Republicans suggests that the coalition Mr. Obama built to win the White House is frayed.

In few places did people get a longer and closer look at Mr. Obama than in Iowa, a swing state home to deep strains of both conservatism and liberalism. Mr. Obama was a constant presence here during the formative months of his candidacy. Many voters have pictures of him on their mantles, looking him in the eye as they took a measure of the man and the politician before giving him a crucial victory in the caucuses.

A social studies teacher who saw Mr. Obama on his maiden trip here wonders whether momentum from the election is gone forever. A retired electrical engineer who became a Democrat to support Mr. Obama believes the president too often blames others for his troubles. And a teacher who voted for Mr. Obama because she was fed up with George W. Bush does not trust this administration any more than the previous one.

Yet a laid-off factory worker who returned to school for a degree said Mr. Obama’s support for a new economy had changed his thinking. A public relations executive who changed parties to support Mr. Obama says he saved the nation from fiscal collapse. And a nurse who believes Mr. Obama could be a transformative president, because of health care and other issues, worries the vitriol could endanger his life.

In interviews, the economy emerged as one of the most worrisome undercurrents.

“I’m scared,” said Chris Bollhoefer, 49, who lost his job two years ago at Maytag in Newton. “The competition right now, with all the people who have lost jobs that are highly qualified, really puts you up against the wall trying to compete.”

Mr. Bollhoefer said he approved of the job Mr. Obama was doing. “It’s inspirational to me that he’s trying to do something different,” he said.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama soared, several people said in interviews, but as a president, he often has come across as cautious, tentative and prone to blame his troubles on others.

“I think he was more presidential when he was running for office than he is now,” said Paul Johnson, 58, a student legal services lawyer at Iowa State University. “He seems more subdued, which is probably a result of having to actually deal with the issues on his plate as opposed to just rallying the troops to vote for him.”

Mr. Johnson and his wife, Kathy, are loyal Democrats, but Mr. Obama was not their first, second or third choice during the Iowa caucuses that opened the party’s primary on Jan. 3, 2008. At the time, they favored, in order, John Edwards, Joseph R. Biden or Hillary Rodham Clinton. When Mr. Obama won the nomination, however, they eagerly supported him, and now they say they believe he is doing well, but often wonder if he is assertive enough.

“It’s overdue for him to actually take charge here,” said Ms. Johnson, 57, a social worker in the town of Nevada.

One thing that would sour them on Mr. Obama, they said, would be a steep escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

Even with the complaints, many Democrats said the president had single-handedly improved America’s image in the world. They said he had already accomplished a great deal, considering the raft of crises that greeted him, and they said they believed in his ability to deliver on remaking the nation’s health care system and other priorities.

Candi Schmieder, 40, said she trusted the president. The election in Iowa County, where she lives, ended in a tie in November. Mr. Obama won by 14 votes after absentee ballots were tabulated. If the re-election was held today, she said, she feared the outcome might be different.

“Given all the situations that he’s dealing with — the economy and the war — I think it’s going to take some work,” said Ms. Schmieder, who had never been involved in politics, but said she was drawn to Mr. Obama by his books .

As Mr. Obama approaches the anniversary of his election, the sense of possibility and the dash of romance that moved many voters are no longer apparent. The challenges of governing have eaten away at the optimism. The pace of government intervention also has jarred many voters.

John Sager, a retired electrical engineer, said he was so impressed by Mr. Obama at the United Auto Workers hall in Marshalltown last year that he allowed his name to be promoted on a list of Republicans supporting Mr. Obama before the Iowa caucuses.

“He gave a fairly decent presentation, but that’s what it turned out to be — a presentation,” said Mr. Sager, 77. “I don’t think he should keep hiding behind the fact that he inherited all these problems.”

Kathy Shaffer, 60, a retired school teacher, did not tell her husband, Larry, a staunch Republican, that she had she voted for Mr. Obama until recently. She said she had been frustrated by the Iraq war, fed up with the Bush administration and eager for a change.

Now, she said she regretted her vote, largely because she disapproved of how the government had intervened to help failing financial institutions and car companies. She also fears that Mr. Obama will send more troops to Afghanistan.

“I want to be a Republican domestically and probably a Democrat on foreign policy — I’m in a lose-lose situation,” Ms. Shaffer said.

Asked if her disappointment would keep her from supporting Mr. Obama again, she paused for a moment.

“I hate to vote against someone,” she said. “I want to vote for someone.”

Obama Warns Karzai to Focus on Tackling Corruption - NYTimes.com

Image by IntangibleArts via Flickr

By JEFF ZELENY and ALISSA J. RUBIN

WASHINGTON — President Hamid Karzai was assured of a new term as president of Afghanistan on Monday, but he embarks on it not with warm congratulations from Washington but with an admonition from President Obama to undertake “a much more serious effort” to eradicate corruption in the Kabul government.

Mr. Obama placed a congratulatory call and, he said in the Oval Office, urged Mr. Karzai “to write a new chapter” in the legitimacy of his government. Mr. Obama said he noted that the election had been "messy," but said that the United States accepted the decision because it was “determined by Afghan law.”

Mr. Obama placed his call not long after the Independent Election Commission in Kabul cleared the last obstacle to a second term for Mr. Karzai, announcing that there was no need for a runoff now that his only competitor had withdrawn from the race.

While this was the outcome the international community had lobbied for, it was only the beginning of a new set of problems both for Mr. Karzai, who has been weakened by the election debacle, and for the western governments who have been supporting him.

The Obama administration wants Mr. Karzai and the Afghan government to put into place an anticorruption commission to establish strict accountability for government officials at both the national and provincial levels, senior administration officials said Monday.

In addition, the United States and its European allies are seeking a symbolic gesture from Mr. Karzai, and pressuring the Afghan leader to make a few high-profile arrests of what one administration official called "the more blatantly corrupt" people in the Afghan government.

“I did emphasize to President Karzai that the American people and the international community as a whole want to continue to partner with him and his government in achieving prosperity and security in Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said.

“But I emphasized that this has to be a point in time in which we begin to write a new chapter based on improved governance, a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption, joint efforts to accelerate the training of Afghan security forces, so that the Afghan people can provide for their own security,” the president said.

Mr. Obama said Mr. Karzai had assured him that he understood “the importance of this moment.”

“But as I indicated to him, the proof is not going to be in words; it’s going to be in deeds,” Mr. Obama said. “And we are looking forward to consulting closely with his government in the weeks and months to come, to assure that the Afghan people are actually seeing progress on the ground.”

A senior member of Mr. Karzai’s re-election campaign, Arsala Jamal, acknowledged in Kabul that the president’s victory was marred by the cases of fraud and the months it took to reach a result.

“Three months after the Aug. 20 election, this has not been a good experience for the people,” he said.

“It was damaged because of fraud, because of stupid friends,” he said, explaining that overeager supporters had committed fraud unnecessarily for the president.

“The delay was part of it, the opposition too,” he said, adding that Mr. Karzai’s main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, had damaged the process by denouncing the first round of the election publicly before the election commission had completed its investigations.

Mr. Abdullah withdrew Sunday from the runoff slated for Saturday and the Independent Election Commission, citing concerns about security and the expense of holding an election when there was only one candidate, declared Mr. Karzai the winner on Monday.

The international community and the United Nations congratulated Mr. Karzai and urged him to set about unifying the country, but the way ahead was foggy at best. While there was little doubt that Mr. Karzai would be embraced internationally as the legitimate leader, many serious questions have been raised about the legitimacy of his government.

There had been talk of forming a unity government, but there is little popular support in Afghanistan for that option. For many Afghans a coalition government brings to mind the chaotic period in the 1990s when competing warlords theoretically controlled the country, but in fact no one controlled it and armed strongmen competed for turf in bloody battles that killed many Afghan civilians and destroyed large sections of Kabul.

Afghan political analysts as well as some ordinary people said, the election had undermined Afghans’ faith in democracy and strengthened the leverage of international players — although no one seemed to know how they would be better able to influence Mr. Karzai.

“This massive fraud has detracted from his authority and prestige,” said Hamidullah Tarzi, an Afghan political analyst who served as a minister in two previous governments and said he likes Mr. Karzai.

Jeff Zeleny reported from Washington and Alissa J. Rubin reported from Kabul. Reporting was contributed by Taimoor Shah and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

Letter From Indonesia: Behind high-profile murder case, not your usual caddies - washingtonpost.com

Image by ALWH via Flickr

A culture of permissiveness on and off the links

By Andrew Higgins
Monday, November 2, 2009

TANGERANG, INDONESIA -- Modern Golf Club boasts an 18-hole course scented by tropical flowers, four tennis courts, a squash center and a big swimming pool. It's also the only club where, after a day on the links earlier this year, a golfer was shot twice in the head as he drove from the clubhouse in his BMW.

The chief suspect: a rival middle-aged golfer who, while running Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission, received off-the-green services from the victim's 22-year-old wife. They'd met on the golf course when she was working as his caddie.

In a mostly Muslim country where much of the political elite, including the president, plays golf, the saga has caused a sensation -- and also raised some delicate questions about why so many of Indonesia's caddies are beautiful young women.

At Modern, nearly 200 of the club's 250 caddies are women, mostly in their 20s. "You cannot have an ugly face or a smelly person in the front line," explained Bonnie Umboh, the club's sales and marketing manager. Moreover, she said, female caddies are much better at calming golfers, nearly all men, when they flub a putt or drive into the rough. When women carry golfers' clubs, "they hold their temper."

But, according to some female caddies, that is not all they hold. "They like to pretend they are teaching me how to hit a golf ball, you know, hugging me from behind and touching my thighs," said one Modern caddie. She asked that her name not be used. Groping golfers, she said, "usually give big tips, so I don't mind."

She sometimes meets golfers off duty and charges 500,000 rupiah, about $54, for a night in a hotel "but there are other caddies, top caddies, who get almost 1,000,000 per night."

Modern said it has a strict policy against golfers getting overly intimate with caddies, at least on the course, and encourages the reporting of unwelcome advances. "So far there are no complaints," said Umboh, the sales manager. Before joining Modern's caddie roster, new recruits get training in the rudiments of golf and learn how to drive a golf cart, and to smile a lot.

Golf in Indonesia, like in most of the world, is governed by rules set in Scotland by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, which dates back to 1754. Its rulebook covers how much time a golfer can search for a lost ball (five minutes), the length of club shafts and other arcane details. But the Royal and Ancient has no view on the sex or age of caddies, nor on what players and caddies do together beyond hitting golf balls.

"That is not in our jurisdiction," said Kevin Barker of the Scottish club's Rules Department, "What happens off the course is neither here nor there."

Female caddies are hardly a uniquely Indonesian phenomenon. A British company called Eye Candy Caddies markets itself with the slogan "golf made gorgeous." It charges nearly $400 for a round of golf and an hour of post-game chat in the clubhouse. Its caddies "are not encouraged to fraternize with clients after an assignment has ended," according to a code of conduct. (At least one British club has banned its services.)

But female caddies are far more widespread in Indonesia and often wear more revealing outfits, despite a campaign by Muslim activists to purge "immoral" conduct. In Tangerang, the town west of Jakarta where Modern golf club is located, a local Islamic bylaw prohibits lewd behavior.

Dispute now in court

Exactly what happened at Modern and in a room at the Grand Mahakam Hotel is now under review by a Jakarta court, which recently began the murder trial of Indonesia's busted corruption-buster, Antasari Azhar. Prosecutors allege he had the husband of his former caddie killed to escape blackmail. Azhar has denied any involvement. His lawyers accused prosecutors of presenting "porn material" instead of evidence. Local television carried the proceedings live.

With golf under the spotlight, the Indonesia Golf Association has "asked clubs to strengthen the rules for caddies," said England Rachman, the association's executive secretary. But, said Rachman, golfers and caddies "can do what they want outside of working hours. As long as people are happy this is their personal business."

Rachman said he prefers to have a man carry his clubs when he wants to play a serious game but likes a woman to do it when "I just want to relax." Male caddies, he said, tend to be older and know more about the game, and this means they can spot mistakes and offer advice: "Sometimes I don't like that. Women just follow and smile."

Not all Indonesian golfers are men. The trade minister, Mari Pangestu, a respected American-educated economist, likes to play and uses a male caddie, as do many of Indonesia's more traditional-minded golfers. The president, former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, goes to a military sports club that has only male caddies.

At the Jakarta Golf Club, where Indonesia's late dictator, Suharto, used to play, male caddies still far outnumber female ones, and they're determined to hold the line against what they see as an escalating threat to golf, and their own livelihood. "I'm more experienced and stronger. But players like to pick young pretty ones," grumbled 47-year-old Taufik Hidayat.

Modern Golf Club, meanwhile, has just held a big tournament and gala dinner to celebrate its 14th anniversary. When the golf, sex and murder saga first made headlines, said the sales manager, Umboh, some golfers stayed away from Modern under pressure from their wives. But all the bad publicity, she said, had since become "free promotion. The plus is that people now know where Modern is. They want to come here to play golf."

Shared interests define Obama's world - washingtonpost.com

Image by Mr. Wright via Flickr

In engaging adversaries, the president sometimes unsettles allies

By Scott Wilson
Monday, November 2, 2009

President Obama is applying the same tools to international diplomacy that he once used as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, constructing appeals to shared interests and attempting to bring the government's conduct in line with its ideals.

Obama's approach to the world as a community of nations, more alike than different in outlook and interest, has elevated America's standing abroad and won him the Nobel Peace Prize. But on the farthest-reaching U.S. foreign policy challenges, he is struggling to translate his own popularity into American influence, even with allies that have celebrated his break from the Bush administration's emphasis on military strength, unilateral action and personal chemistry.

Conservatives think Obama is undermining U.S. power abroad by failing to recognize the degree to which countries, whether allies or adversaries, are immune to appeals to shared interests. And critics from opposite ends of the political spectrum say Obama has too often muted his public support for American ideals -- notably human rights and democracy -- in his pursuit of common goals.

The limits of Obama's cool, interests-based approach are visible in Afghanistan, where European allies continue to resist sending additional combat troops to fight an increasingly unpopular war, and in his attempts to assemble a common front against Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program. In Afghanistan, his efforts to reinvigorate the relationships neglected by the previous administration have yielded few tangible results on the battlefield. In Iran, months of careful, culturally sensitive diplomacy have met with a recalcitrance that U.S. conservatives say will never change.

"He's said that from the very beginning we're going to reverse the perception that the United States is arrogant, unilateral and doesn't want any one else's assistance," said William Cohen, the former Republican senator from Maine who served as defense secretary during the Clinton administration. "He's said to others, 'We want your help -- now what can you do?' Now let's see what will be done."

Bridging interests

Obama's commitment to work within a set of international organizations and treaties is an echo of the last sitting U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Woodrow Wilson, except that in Obama's world the United States is more of an equal partner with other nations and less of an unquestioned leader.

As a community organizer, Obama worked to identify the common interests of neighborhoods suffering through the economic aftermath of plant closings and of the politicians elected to represent them. The role requires patience -- a word used consistently by his advisers in regard to reviving Middle East peace talks or reaching out to Iran -- and cultivating a lower profile than the other parties involved.

"There are those who doubt whether true international cooperation is possible given inevitable differences among nations," Obama told an ebullient outdoor audience in Prague in April as he called for a world free of nuclear weapons. "But make no mistake: We know where that road leads. When nations and people allow themselves to be defined by their differences, the gulf between them widens."

The speech was the first of four addresses that effectively won Obama the Nobel Peace Prize last month for creating what committee members called "a new climate in international politics." In an address to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama told the gathered leaders: "Like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests.

"But it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009 -- more than at any point in human history -- the interests of nations and peoples are shared."

On some of the most challenging foreign policy issues that Obama faces, however, his appeal to the shared goals of economic prosperity, national security and a healthy environment has been overtaken by the stronger pull of national interests. This has been true in his dealings with allies and adversaries alike.

During his April trip to Europe, Obama told the Group of 20 summit that he "came here to listen and not to lecture" at a time of economic crisis. But he was unable to secure pledges of additional stimulus spending from such economic powers as France and Germany, historically fearful of inflation.

At the NATO summit that followed, Obama could not win commitments from allies to send significant numbers of additional combat troops to Afghanistan, a resistance among elected European leaders that remains as he considers whether to send as many as 44,000 more U.S. troops.

The Iran challenge

And for months Obama has applied his world-as-community approach to Iran. The promised outreach involves France, a traditional ally, and Russia, a sometimes erratic partner, as he undertakes the first direct diplomacy with the Islamic republic since its founding revolution three decades ago.

The effort began when Obama, two months after taking office, delivered a surprise message to the Iranian people and leadership on the occasion of Nowruz, the traditional Persian new year. He said the United States seeks "a future where the old divisions are overcome."

In addressing the Muslim world from Cairo University less than three months later, Obama said that "no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons" and declared that Iran has the right "to access peaceful nuclear power" if it lives up to its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iranians went to the polls weeks later in balloting widely perceived to be rigged in favor of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama condemned the ensuing government crackdown on street protests but declined to call for the government's overthrow, despite public pressure in the United States to do so.

At the same time, Obama sought help from Russia, which has large financial interests in Iran and has resisted stiffer sanctions against its government. His administration has appealed to Russia's interest in preventing Iran from achieving a nuclear weapon, namely that allowing it to do so would destabilize the Middle East, drive up world oil prices and potentially stir up Islamic militancy in the Caucasus.

"He puts a lot of faith in his persuasiveness and has injected humility as a new element in U.S. foreign policy," said Lee H. Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who served for years as the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "It drives a lot of Americans through the wall. But the idea behind it is, 'How do you best get countries to do what you want them to do?' It remains to be seen how successful he is."

In September, taking a tangible step to improve relations with Russia, Obama abandoned Bush-era plans to station a ballistic-missile defense shield in the Czech Republic and Poland designed to protect the United States from Iran's arsenal. The Russian government had for years complained that the system posed a security threat to the country, already squeezed by NATO's expansion, in a region it has long considered part of its sphere of influence.

Obama announced a scaled-back system that he said would better protect Eastern Europe from attack. The Czech and Polish governments accepted the new plans last month, but conservatives argue that the shift only rewarded an aggressive Russian government to win its help with Iran.

"This was a clear signal that Washington is more interested in currying favor with its strategic competitors than in building or even maintaining its alliances with its traditional allies," said Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "There is no evidence the Obama doctrine is reaping benefits. On the contrary, the United States is increasingly viewed as weak and unreliable by some of its traditional allies."

U.S. and Iranian officials held the highest-level talks in three decades in early October, and later that month they agreed to a plan that appeared to mark a victory for Obama's approach.

Under the draft agreement, Iran would ship most of its low-grade nuclear fuel to Russia for further enrichment so it could be sent back to Iran later for use as medical isotopes. The deal, conceived by the Obama administration, would leave too little uranium inside Iran to produce a nuclear weapon in the short term.

But last week Iran's government reversed course in a sign that its own domestic calculations are still exerting more influence than Obama's brand of international diplomacy.

"There is no naivete here," said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications who helped Obama write many of his foreign policy speeches. "The president knows that nations do not always live up to their responsibilities -- otherwise this would be easy. But if you walk away from the basic bargain that all nations have rights and responsibilities, then you have less ability to marshal the cooperation to resolve these issues, too."

Pragmatism and values

The rights and responsibilities of nations and cultures was a theme at the core of Obama's June speech in Cairo, the most celebrated of his four major addresses. It also recalled the bargain he argued for in Chicago: that the right to healthy neighborhoods came with the responsibility to look after them.

The argument's pragmatism colored other elements of his address. To an audience of students, politicians, clerics and academics, Obama argued for democracy on practical grounds, saying "governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure."

But critics on the left and right have accused the president of sacrificing some of the U.S. principles he has publicly celebrated on behalf of a diplomacy that administration officials often describe as willing to accept progress if a perfect outcome is not possible. Rahm Emanuel, who represented Chicago in Congress before becoming Obama's chief of staff, called him "a realist with a set of ideas."

Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, said Obama "has a very strong aversion of anything that smells of preaching to others from a position of moral superiority, and that sometimes has caused the administration to pull back from direct criticism of dictatorships and their abuses."

"There's an appropriate reaction to the crusading moralism of the Bush administration, but it sometimes goes too far in the direction of hoping that reasoned and quiet persuasion will convince cynical and self-interested authoritarian governments to change their ways," Malinowski said.

Obama also has made it clear through Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he does not intend to lecture China, which is among the largest holders of U.S. debt and an essential player in any agreement on climate change, over its human rights record. He will travel to Beijing this month -- putting off a meeting with the Dalai Lama until he returns to Washington -- in part to seek Chinese support in talks with Iran and in Afghanistan.

And last month the Obama administration outlined a new policy on Sudan that calls for a mix of incentives and potential punishments to entice the government in Khartoum to stop the violence in Darfur and preserve a tenuous peace in the south. As a candidate, Obama called for a no-fly zone over Darfur that the U.S. military would help enforce, an idea absent from the new strategy.

"In France and in the United States, we have a particular conception of democracy but we cannot impose it," said Pierre Vimont, the French ambassador to Washington. "But that doesn't mean we have to give up on human rights. On the contrary, we will insist on them wherever necessary. But we must do so in a way that takes into account their customs and national interests."

Vimont continued: "France has always believed in this, and we're seeing familiarity with what President Obama is saying. This is a point that President Obama must explain to American public opinion."

Balancing friend and foe

The line between domestic and foreign policy blurs in Obama's West Wing. Administration officials say Obama thinks America's strength originates from its economic health, military capability and democratic values -- but only to the extent the country lives up to them. He has frequently held his own story up in his travels abroad as an example of American mistakes and progress, and as a community organizer, Obama advised neighborhood residents to treat city officials with respect in order to always occupy the moral high ground.

Many in the Middle East criticized the Bush administration's call for democratic rights in the Arab world at a time when it was practicing what the International Committee of the Red Cross described as torture and holding Muslim terrorism suspects without trial at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama abolished torture in interrogation, and he promised to close the prison by Jan. 22, 2010, a deadline he is struggling to meet as only a few countries have agreed to take some of the more than 200 suspects detained there.

"There's a traditional ability to project power, but then there is something the president adds to that -- our values and our leadership," said Obama adviser Rhodes. "Our ability to extend civil rights at home, for example, is a foreign policy tool and part of our power that will do far more than any words we might say about promoting democratic change."

But in reaching out to adversaries, Obama has unsettled allies, particularly in parts of the world where the United States has few other friends.

Obama has eased travel restrictions to Cuba and made it easier for U.S. companies to do business on the island, calling on Raúl Castro's government to improve its human rights record in return. But he has not pushed Congress to pass a languishing free-trade agreement with Colombia, a top priority of President Álvaro Uribe, who recently agreed to allow the U.S. military to operate from Colombian bases. That decision enraged Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and more moderate governments in the region, costing Colombia billions of dollars in trade.

Obama also has spoken candidly to Israel's government, calling its West Bank settlements "illegitimate" while asking Arab nations to make a series of diplomatic and economic gestures toward the Jewish state. His call for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to freeze settlement construction -- a Palestinian condition for opening peace talks -- has so far been ignored.

Although Obama has said U.S. support for Israel would never flag, the relationship promoted by the previous White House, where a picture of Bush and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was for a time among the first on display in the West Wing, has become one that a foreign diplomat described as "no longer intimate." A recent Jerusalem Post poll found that just 4 percent of Israelis consider Obama "pro-Israel."

"Our interests are the same with our allies and our adversaries," Rhodes said. "We're saying the same thing to everybody. Our interests are the same no matter what country we're talking to."