Iran: The Revenge - The New York Review of Books

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The following is by an Iran expert who wishes to remain anonymous.

Grave, soft-spoken, the exiled Iranian religious scholar Abdolkarim Soroush is a living record of the Iranian revolution. As a fanatical young supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini, he helped purge Iran's universities of leftists and secularists in the early 1980s. Later, as a founder and editor of Kiyan, a monthly journal of religion and philosophy, he upset his orthodox revolutionary colleagues by arguing that Islamic law should be viewed as a product of its time, subject to alteration as society evolves. Soroush has since denounced Iran's system of government, what he calls its "republic of faith," as harmful both to Islam and to politics, an argument that led to his expulsion from Iranian academic life in 2000 and, more recently, an extended sojourn in Europe and the United States. Until this year, driving troublemakers abroad has been a useful and politically inexpensive way for the Islamic Republic to deal with dissent. Iranian history is full of people who lost their relevance after leaving Iran. But this, so far, has not happened to Soroush.

Iran's summer of discontent started on June 12, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won an election that his reformist opponents, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, declared to have been rigged, setting in motion a large, peaceful protest movement. While it had the support of two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the movement was put down with immense brutality, although it remains, as continuing smaller demonstrations show, very much alive.

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Soroush is one of a handful of dissident public figures who have had a moral and intellectual influence on the protesters throughout the crisis in spite of being outside the country. During their confrontation with Ahmadinejad and his main backer, the country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reform-minded Iranians drew encouragement from the supportive words and actions of Soroush and other expatriates, which they monitored through the Internet and overseas TV stations. In August, Soroush gave his most significant TV interview in Persian in several years, to the BBC's new Persian-language channel, in which he disputed the legitimacy of a religious government that imposes its writ by force. In September, his Web site carried an extraordinarily forthright and eloquent open letter with the title "With God's help, religion and freedom will remain, and tyranny will die." It might as easily have been called "The last rites of the Islamic Republic, by a zealot who turned against it."

Soroush's open letter was addressed to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and it conveyed an ironic awareness of their respective standing as religious authorities. Although Khamenei's supporters refer to him as a grand ayatollah, the highest rank in Shiism's clerical hierarchy, he is known among leading Shia religious scholars to be an indifferent theologian. Since he became Supreme Leader on Khomeini's death in 1989, Khamenei has favored a dry, severe interpretation of Islam—the interpretation favored by the conservative constituency he has courted, and which is rejected by Soroush, who is an authority on the thirteenth-century mystic poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi.

When Soroush addresses Khamenei as simply "Mr. Khamenei," as he did in his letter, this was in contrast to the sycophantic language to which the Supreme Leader is accustomed. In his letter, Soroush speaks as a morally superior outcast and sage, a persona familiar to any reader of mystic poetry. He speaks also as an embodiment of the "Islamic Iran" that Khamenei repeatedly invokes as an ideal to be protected, and which the Islamic Republic, by manipulating religion and neglecting Iran's literary and artistic heritage, has undermined.

Soroush's letter is a coruscating denunciation, and its hybrid style, combining the formal, Arabic-influenced language of the seminary with a rolling, alliterative verve, is a further reminder of its author's two selves. Soroush denounces Khamenei's readiness to "wash blood with blood" and to "disgrace God but not yourself," but he is not despondent—even though most of the country's top reformists are behind bars, and a show trial of nearly a hundred is underway.

On the contrary, Soroush draws the conclusion that now, having turned from an authoritarian into a tyrant, Khamenei is starting his final decline. Alluding to the Supreme Leader's admission that the prestige of the Islamic Republic has been damaged by reports of brutality in the nation's jails, Soroush writes sarcastically, "I salute you for identifying and declaring the squalor and abjectness of religious tyranny.... I want to say to you that a page has been turned in time's ledger and that fortune has turned her back on the regime...."

Soroush believes that the regime's victory is a Pyrrhic one, that the effort of suppressing the demonstrations, murdering and torturing scores of citizens, and staging a show trial has exhausted it. From Soroush's viewpoint, the regime that is morally bankrupt must inevitably fall. This is a recurrent lesson from Iran's national epic, the eleventh-century Book of Kings, which chronicles, in myths and history-telling, the opposition between virtue and power. It may also be a lesson from the last Shah of Iran, who fled the country in 1979 and whose successors are now in conflict.

If Soroush is right, and the Islamic Republic has lost whatever moral legitimacy it once possessed, the main damage was inflicted this summer. In a historic sermon on June 19—one week after the disputed election—the Supreme Leader finally abandoned the fiction of his neutrality in Iranian politics, favoring Ahmadinejad over his opponents and denying widespread fraud in the elections. The following day, Khamenei ordered the Basij—a militia group drawn from the poorer districts whose members receive privileges—and the Revolutionary Guard to attack tens of thousands of peaceful demonstrators in Tehran and other Iranian cities, leading to a bloody carnage in which dozens were killed and thousands arrested or beaten. The summer was punctuated by further protests, also savagely put down. As the regime's leading personalities turned on one other, two events took place that might, one day, be regarded as milestones in the decline of the Islamic regime.

The first was the circulation of reports of murder, torture, and rape from behind the doors of Iran's jails, atrocities that continue and have become a major scandal, managed with spectacular ineptness by the regime. The reports have discredited the Islamic Republic's claims to righteousness and morality, and they have led many Iranians to compare Tehran's most notorious detention center, at Kahrizak, between Tehran and Qom, with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

The second event was a mass trial that told us much about the Islamic Republic's diminishing ability to manipulate public opinion. This trial, of leading reformist politicians and journalists, and also of ordinary demonstrators, began on August 1. It has aimed to destroy the reform movement and convince the public that the reformists have cooperated with foreigners to launch a "color revolution" of the kind that ended other anti-Western regimes in such European countries as Serbia and Ukraine. The trial was widely seen as a failure. The reform movement is not dead, and the desires that animate it, for greater political freedom and personal autonomy, have not been extinguished. And to judge by copious anecdotal evidence and the blogs of people living in Iran, a very large number of Iranians do not believe the confessions they have heard from prisoners; they see the trial primarily as evidence for the Islamic Republic's descent into tyranny.

Rumors of ill-treatment in places such as Kahrizak and the notorious Evin Prison in north Tehran had been circulating for weeks before Mehdi Karroubi—a cleric and presidential candidate who was officially adjudged to have come in fourth in the election, and has since, with Mir Hussein Moussavi, become a leader of the opposition movement—went public with allegations of rape and torture. Karroubi's claims led to a crisis because for the past three decades he has been a member of Iran's political establishment. He has occupied senior posts, including the speakership of the parliament, and cannot easily be dismissed as an opposition troublemaker.

Yet this is what his adversaries have tried to do—particularly after his Web site carried extracts from an account by a man who said he had been sodomized in jail, and then, after lodging a formal complaint, was threatened by judiciary officials. Supporters of the President and the Supreme Leader have accused Karroubi of spreading lies at the behest of Iran's external enemies, and they have called stridently for his arrest. On September 12 a judiciary report described the evidence that Karroubi had presented in support of his claims as "fake," and recommended "decisive" legal action against all who "spread lies" and damage the "prestige of the system."

Allegations of savagery on the part of the security forces, judicial officials, and prison staff are now so widespread, they amount to a damning indictment of the system these people serve. In August, footage was circulated of new, unmarked graves, allegedly those of detainees who had been raped and mutilated, at Tehran's main cemetery. At the beginning of September, a reformist Web site carried the names of seventy-two people who, according to the site, had lost their lives to official brutality since the start of the crisis. (The real number is thought to be higher; many have been intimidated into concealing the circumstances of the deaths of members of their families.)

Then there are the lesser outrages and humiliations that now, after a bloody summer, seem almost mundane. How many Iranians were beaten by the security forces, how many female demonstrators subjected to vile insults by marauding basijis?^[*] How many state employees and students have been threatened for supporting the opposition? The answer is many thousands, and it may be assumed that they and their friends and families have abandoned whatever positive feelings they once had for the Islamic Republic. A peaceful movement of protest can usually be suppressed, but violence and intimidation are costly instruments.

Each brutal action has been followed by a ludicrously incompetent cover-up. In the aftermath of the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman whose death, almost certainly by police firing, was captured on film and seen around the world, Iranian officials and pro-government media outlets claimed, variously, that the film was fake, that the CIA might have killed Neda, that the BBC had arranged her death, and that she was alive and living in Greece. In July, an official from Tehran's prison service announced that a detainee called Mohsen Ruholamini had died from meningitis at Kahrizak; it was later revealed that he, along with others, had died from brutal treatment. Eventually, in late July, Khamenei ordered Kahrizak prison to be closed, and it was announced that several unnamed officials there were being prosecuted. This judicial process, if indeed it exists, may end up like the earlier trial of several members of the security forces for launching a murderous attack on protesting students in a university dormitory in 1999. That trial ended with the conviction of a conscript doing military service for stealing a razor.

The inability of the authorities to prevent the disclosure of atrocities, and Iranians' widespread belief that their leaders are lying to them, show how much the country has changed since the first decade of the revolution. Measured in brutality and scale, the events at Kahrizak and other detention centers are not in the same league as the mass executions of thousands of imprisoned dissidents that Ayatollah Khomeini authorized in 1988. That was Khomeini's attempt, the historian Ervand Abrahamian has plausibly speculated, to "weed out the half-hearted from the true believers" before he died. It was a measure of the regime's discipline and cohesion back then, shortly after the end of the Iran–Iraq War, that the authorities were able to deny for years that the executions had taken place, despite the existence of letters of complaint about the killings from Khomeini's then heir-designate, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri. "The curtain of secrecy," Abrahamian wrote in his book Tortured Confessions (1999), "was so effective that no Western journalist heard of it and no Western academic discussed it."

Nowadays there is no such cohesion, and the curtain is ragged. Despite the regime's attempts to disrupt Internet and mobile phone communications, dissidents have been able to pass around appalling allegations. Iranians have changed considerably since the first decade of the revolution: they are politically more sophisticated, well acquainted with modern technology, and a lot more cynical. But Iran's leaders sometimes seem to forget this. Khamenei has berated the critics of atrocities for neglecting the sacred values that, in his view, form the core of the Islamic Republic; in fact, many Iranians believe that the effect of the atrocities has been to eviscerate that core. The ongoing show trial is another example of the regime's miscalculation. It is based on the premise that Iranians are as credulous and as captive to ideology as they were a quarter of a century ago.

In the 1980s, much of the Iranian public seemed willing to accept staged trials and recantations, and these events often succeeded in their aims to destroy the prestige of opposition groups and impress on people the ideological superiority of revolutionary Islam over rival beliefs. When leading Iranian Communists made public confessions in 1983 and 1984, in many cases after being horrifically tortured, relatively few people denounced these confessions as coerced and, as such, worthless. As dozens of Communists appeared on state television confessing to "treason," "self-worship," "dependency," and an attachment to "irrelevant" ideologies, Khomeini's supporters boasted of the power of Islam to return deviants to the true path, while some former friends of the tortured leftists said they were ashamed to have known them. The "penitent" who was let out of jail (often on condition that he desist from discussing prison life) was typically ostracized by his former colleagues. As Abrahamian wrote, quoting from the response of one Communist to another's confession, "We never expected someone of his reputation to get down on his knees.... It was as revolting as watching a human being cannibalize himself."

By contrast, many, perhaps most, Iranians do not believe what they have seen and heard during the five sessions of the trial of alleged offenders—excerpts of which have been broadcast on state television—that have so far taken place since last June. Many citizens have reacted less to the details alleged and to the confessions than to the wretched condition of the defendants. For many, what was striking about the courtroom appearance of Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, who served as vice-president for the reformist President Khatami and later became Karroubi's aide in this year's election campaign, was neither his blanket acceptance of the public prosecutor's accusations, nor his assertions that the election was fair, nor his description of Khatami's behavior as "treasonous." Instead, for days after state TV broadcast Abtahi's testimony and an "interview" with him, people in Iran spoke with shock and sympathy of his physical deterioration.

When Abtahi was arrested a few hours after the election results were announced, he was a cheerful and portly mullah. The emaciated defendant who appeared in court on August 1 had been stripped not only of his turban and robes, but also of his dignity. In London, an exiled former minister told BBC Persian TV that the Abtahi he had seen in court was not the Abtahi he had known. It's as if the cleric had suffered so much that he had changed into a different person.

So far, during the five open sessions that have been exhaustively reported in the pro-government press, the court has tried scores of leading reformist politicians, journalists, and intellectuals. The reformist politicians included supporters of Khatami when he was president between 1997 and 2005. Some confessed to carrying out missions for armed opposition groups; ordinary protesters said they attacked public property and basijis. Two Iranian employees of European embassies and a terrified French student who took part in a demonstration were charged with acting against national security. (The student was released on bail six weeks later, but so far has not been granted amnesty.)

There was little in the way of cross-examination. The public prosecutor read from charge sheets and the defendants—or, less often, their lawyers—responded. The senior reformists accepted the charges in toto, and their defense consisted of prepared confessions. Some of them thanked the prison authorities for treating them so splendidly, praised the Supreme Leader, and claimed to have experienced enlightenment about the virtues of the regime. Again and again, these defendants testified that the elections were not rigged in any way and that any such claims were absurd. Only a relatively few small fry were allowed to contest their guilt or try to elicit the judge's sympathy. (There is no jury in the Revolutionary Courts.) A drug addict claimed he was out of his mind when he allegedly set fire to military property. A member of Iran's Jewish minority apologized to the Supreme Leader for smashing a bank window.

Taken together, the list of charges provide some insight into the people who devised the trial—the officials in the judiciary and intelligence ministry, and perhaps the Revolutionary Guard, who set out to implicate the reformists and a variety of actual, potential, and imagined enemies in a plot to overthrow the Islamic Republic and abolish the unelected office, the Guardianship of the Jurist, that Khamenei occupies. These alleged foes include the People's Mujahideen Organization, which has been defeated militarily but survives in Iraq and in Europe; monarchist groups; trade union leaders; women's rights activists; local and foreign NGOs; and a considerable number of foreign states, Britain in particular.

They also include Western foundations with a history of promoting democracy and human rights (including Freedom House and the Open Society Institute of George Soros), Western writers on nonviolent struggle, such as the American Gene Sharp, Iranian bloggers, the BBC, and Ahmadinejad's chief opponents Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hussein Moussavi. Some of the information buried in the indictments may be true, for many of these countries, groups, and individuals are, indeed, very critical of the Islamic Republic. For the most part, however, the prosecutor did no more than concoct fantasy.

In the first session, the prosecutor read extensively from what he described as the statement of an unnamed "spy" who had been arrested and was in custody; it read more like the incontinent theorizing of a conspiracy nut with an Internet connection. At one point in this account, the "spy" described a meeting he claimed to have had with the head of an American foundation in Israel, who apparently told him, "Our goal is to foster and promote the ideas of people like Abdolkarim Soroush in Iran."

The main point of the second session, on August 8, was to implicate the British in the riots. (Early in the crisis, the Iranians expelled two British diplomats for "activities incompatible with their status"; Britain expelled two Iranian diplomats in response.) Hossein Rassam, an Iranian employee at the British embassy in Tehran, confessed to arranging and attending meetings between British diplomats and Iranian politicians. The ambassador and his team were apparently engaged in gathering information about Iran and sending it back to the Foreign Office—what diplomats do. But Ahmadinejad's supporters eagerly depicted the "old imperialist" as a prime mover behind what they, in a neat inversion of reality, called the reformist " coup d'état." The third session was dominated by allegations that Mehdi Hashemi, whose father, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is a bitter foe of Ahmadinejad, is a money-launderer and helped fund the Moussavi campaign from the public purse.

Many of the defendants have been accused of capital charges, but the granting of pardon is a recognized part of Iranian, and Islamic, justice, and Khamenei has not shied from using it in the past. For his part, Ahmadinejad has himself urged "Islamic compassion" for all save the "ringleaders" of the protests.

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the country's official and semi-official mass media were in control of the information that was available to Iranians, many more might have swallowed the big lie. Nowadays, for every choreographed hearing, every confessional interview, there is a second, parallel account coming from reformist and opposition Web sites, overseas TV stations, and the rumor mill of a regime that has forgotten how to keep a secret. Some Iranians are so disgusted by the pro-government bias of the state broadcasts that they boycott them. The numbers of viewers of state TV are said to have declined, and at the end of August a reformist newspaper claimed that the station's advertising revenue had dropped dramatically, though not solely for political reasons.

Reform-minded Iranians seldom criticize those who have recanted, although the sympathy felt by some has been tempered by the knowledge that today's oppressed reformists were, in many cases, yesterday's ideologues and fanatics. Admiring speculation swirls around the prisoners who appear in court haggard and worn, and yet have not confessed. Some of them, it is said, have endured unimaginable torments but have refused to give in.

All those hours of interrogating and torturing—in the end, they are unlikely to make a difference. The Iranians who are receptive to theories of a vast conspiracy are the basijis, as well as other hard-liners from Ahmadinejad's core constituency of the urban and rural poor, people who didn't need convincing in the first place. From all the evidence emerging from Iran, the rest, those millions of Iranians who think that theft was committed on June 12, and assault thereafter, have not changed their minds.

Ahmadinejad has survived. Iran continues to sell its oil on the international markets. An Iranian delegation began talks in early October with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany. (Foremost on the agenda will be Iran's disclosure, in late September, of an additional nuclear facility believed by many Western intelligence officials to be designed for a weapons program. Ahmadinejad has refused to negotiate on the subject of Iran's nuclear program, which is what everyone else wants to talk about.) The authorities want to give the impression that, in the Islamic Republic, it is business as usual. But it is not. The economy is moribund. Senior officials are obliged to spend much of their time denying that the country is in crisis. Even Ramadan was different this year. The authorities canceled many public sermons and religious meetings for fear that they would provide a pretext for reformist supporters to come out and demonstrate.

Internal conflict is eating away at the system. A deep rift has opened up between today's ruling hard-liners and the heirs of Khomeini—yesterday's ruling hard-liners. Hassan Khomeini, the Ayatollah's most prominent grandson, boycotted Ahmadinejad's swearing-in ceremony in August, and the family foundation is suing a newspaper, whose editor is appointed by the Supreme Leader, for claiming that the foundation has been infiltrated by "conspirators." The sons of some of Khomeini's closest clerical colleagues are now closely associated with the reformists. Ali-Reza Beheshti, the son of the Islamic Republic's first chief justice, was one of two prominent reformists who were arrested for gathering evidence of torture in jails. (He was later released on bail.)

There is widespread revulsion at the growing political influence of senior officers in the Revolutionary Guard, and their economic power. Iran's leading theologian, the same Hossein Ali Montazeri who objected to the prison executions of the 1980s, has referred to Iran's current system of government—a coalition of the Supreme Leader, the president, and the Revolutionary Guard—as a "military guardianship." Opposed to the hard-liners is a reformist movement that might, in the absence of most of its leaders, become more radical. Thousands of ordinary Iranians gave vent to anti-Khamenei slogans this summer. They no longer resemble a loyal opposition, but a force for deeper change.

At the beginning of September, an ordinary Iranian woman, Zahra Baqeri, the sister of three famous martyrs—one of whom was killed under the Shah and the other two fighting against Iraq in the war of 1980–1988—vented her frustration in an explosive open letter in which she compared the basijis to the "Mongol hordes" and denounced those who "have shut their eyes to the truth because of filthy, material power." Baqeri's fury is shared by many others who devoted much of their lives, and lost members of their family, in pursuit of a dream of justice that never materialized.

Alongside the anger, there is, particularly among the former revolutionaries, a mood of historical introspection, lending itself to ironic comparisons. In her open letter, Baqeri favorably compared the treatment of political prisoners and their families under the Shah to what has taken place under the Islamic Republic. In August a reformist newspaper reprinted a poignant interview with a much-loved revolutionary figure, Ayatollah Mahmud Taleghani. Taleghani had been among the first to enter Evin Prison after the Shah's fall. Standing in a blood-stained cell, Taleghani had described the fall of Evin—which had been built by the Shah to house political prisoners—as one of the revolution's great achievements. "Islam," he was quoted in the newspaper Etemad-e Melli, as having said all those years ago, "has come to free people...in Islam, there is no such thing as a jail."

For millions of Iranians, of course, the whole of their country increasingly resembles a big jail, and this has ramifications for anyone trying to do business with the Islamic Republic. Monitored and bullied by myriad intelligence-gathering organs, many Iranians are dismayed by the West's enduring readiness to negotiate with the Iranians about their steadily advancing nuclear program. The alternative, an increase in pressure on the Islamic Republic, brings its own problems.

Talks in Geneva at the end of September yielded hopeful headlines: the first official bilateral negotiations between Iran and the US in three decades, and an apparent Iranian undertaking to ship some of its low-enriched uranium abroad for further enrichment before being returned to Iran for use in a research reactor—a "farming out" of the process that Iran, hitherto, has balked at accepting. The West's long experience of Iran's negotiating strategy, which centers on providing Russia and China with plausible pretexts to withhold their support for serious sanctions, suggests that the chances remain heavily weighted against a deal that would satisfy the US and its allies. If, as remains unlikely, sanctions-shy Russia agrees to an increase in diplomatic and economic pressure, and the Chinese go along for the sake of consensus, Iran's international isolation will be a pretext for further repression on grounds of "national security."

In the past, Iran's leaders were able to use broad public support for the nuclear program to conceal other, more fundamental cracks. No longer. For those who took to the streets this summer, and most recently, on September 18, when opposition supporters hijacked a pro-government demonstration against Israel to put forward their own grievances, anything that endows the Islamic Republic with legitimacy, including a prestige-enhancing deal with the West, would be regarded as a sell-out and a betrayal—although the demonstrators, by embarrassing the regime, may have helped to bring about a change.

—October 7, 2009

Notes

^[*]See the account of such treatment by the anonymous Iranian woman in "Veiled Threat," The New Yorker, October 5, 2009.

The Known World of Edward P. Jones - washingtonpost.com

The Pulitzer-Prize-winning author may be the most celebrated writer Washington has ever produced. He also may be the most enigmatic.

By Neely Tucker
Sunday, November 15, 2009

Edward Paul Jones is sitting at a table in Guapo's restaurant in Tenleytown early on a midsummer evening, looking down into a glass of red wine. Nobody in the place recognizes him, although he's arguably the greatest fiction writer the nation's capital has ever produced.

His three books, two of them collections of short stories set in black Washington, have been hailed as masterpieces. He's won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critic's Circle award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, a MacArthur "genius grant," the Lannan Literary Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a bunch of (by comparison) trifling stuff. He's won nearly $1 million in literary awards alone, never mind earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties.

And yet he hasn't written a word of fiction in four years. There is not a draft in a drawer, not a scrap of paper with notes for a story or a novel. He's knocked off some nonfiction introductions to classic works and edited a couple of anthologies, but nothing of the sort that made him a name.

So when he swirled the wine around in his glass, looked up and asked if I'd like to hear the opening and closing lines of the first short story he's worked on in nearly half a decade, "The Waiting Room," a story that won't be published for who knows how long, I was startled.

Jones dictated the opener:

"In late May 1956 -- a little more than a year after my mother bought the Fifth Street NW house that was the beginning of her small empire -- she heard a rumor that my father was dying."

Here's how it ends:

"And it would have been a great church had it not been for the dead man and all his flowers way down in front."

When I scribbled it in my notebook, Jones told me that this was the first time it had been written down anywhere. Jones spent 10 years creating nearly all of his Pulitzer-winning, antebellum-era novel, "The Known World," in his head, until he finally set it all down on paper in a three-month rush in 2001 after being laid off from his job at a tax publication. "The Waiting Room" is still locked up tight in his mind, though he dictates the opening and closing three times in a row, down to the dashes and commas, without so much as blinking.

"I write a lot in my head," he says. "I've never been driven to write things down."

Jones is 59. The bar he has set for himself, to more or less to do for black Washington what James Joyce did for Dublin, is in the literary stratosphere. He has done this, so far, in 28 short stories, collected in "Lost in the City" (1992) and "All Aunt Hagar's Children" (2006). The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley wrote after "Hagar's" that Jones was "in the first rank of American letters" and "one of the most important writers of his own generation." In the New York Times, novelist Dave Eggers said "The Known World" was widely considered to be one of the best American novels of the past 20 years, as "its sweep, its humanity, the unvarnished perfection of its prose" made it seem not so much written as "engraved in stone." "Hagar's" he noted, merely had the ability to "stun on every page; there are too many breathtaking lines to count."

This D.C. portraiture is extraordinarily personal, for Jones's turbulent early life has provided the setting for almost all of his stories. He is also, it must be said, a quixotic character who seems to arise from the fantastic world of his own fiction. He has never married and has no children. He never knew much about his father, a Jamaican immigrant, long ago deceased. His beloved mother, Jeanette, died nearly 35 years ago of lung cancer. His only sister, Eunice, was hit by a car in New York and killed two years ago after an angry standoff with the driver. His only brother, Joseph, was born with a severe mental handicap and has always lived in a group home in Southeast Washington.

The family's lone survivor is shy, quirky, sedentary, average height, bespectacled, balding with salt-and-pepper hair and a frazzled beard, endearing in his earnestness, living a semi-hermitic existence.

He makes his home near Washington National Cathedral in an apartment so disheveled that he allows only close friends inside. There is no bed (he sleeps on a pallet), no bookshelves, no couch, nor much to sit on other than a kitchen chair. He does not have a car, a driver's license or any mechanized means of transport, not even a bicycle. He has no cellphone, no DVD player, and his Internet connection is sporadic. Though he loves movies and trash daytime television -- in particular, those judge shows -- he has only a 10-year-old, 13-inch TV and has never had cable. He has never been to a sporting event. He has no deep romantic attachments. He says his closest friend has been Lil Coyne, an elderly woman who for 20 years lived down the hall from him in an apartment building in Alexandria. She died this summer at age 90.

He has a friend cut his hair instead of going to the barbershop. Cooking, he says, is plunking a chicken in the oven "until it doesn't bleed when I stick it." He has a fondness for soul food, most particularly chitlins. If he is to have dinner with friends on, say, Wednesday, "I start worrying about it on Sunday. It sort of eats the whole week up, and then I get there, and I have a wonderful time and wonder what I was so worried about."

"I compare him to Thelonius Monk," says Georgetown University history professor Maurice Jackson, referring to the brilliant, eccentric jazz pianist. "Monk never liked to travel; he liked his own apartment; he got up when he wanted to; he played his own music; but he was always listening, always paying attention. Ed is like that."

Jones says, "I'm not afraid of my own company." And, "I was made to be at home." Carleasa Coates has known Jones since they were both at the University of Virginia more than 30 years ago. Now an attorney in Washington, she cuts his hair and found his current apartment for him. She laughs that " 'quirky' is a term I would safely agree with," in describing Jones, but quickly says that relates only to trivial matters.

"On the things that count as being a man, he's extraordinary," she says. "He's got a big, compassionate heart to go with his big, expansive imagination. He loves his nieces and nephews. He'd be the last to say it, but he's wide open to the world and what happens in it. He cares in a profound kind of way."

He is also an atheist who is committed to writing about the black Southerners who migrated to Washington in the middle years of the 20th century, the friends and neighbors of his youth, people who seemed to believe that God sat on a streetlight up the block. Say, at the intersection of Florida and North Capitol.

"The people I grew up around, almost all of them had been born and raised in the South," he says, during one rainy day when I was driving him through the city. "And, you know, they didn't always go to church, but they lived their lives as if God were watching everything they did."

***

Ed Jones grew up in an unhappy line of low-rent shacks and tenements in Washington, in astonishing poverty, mostly several blocks north and west of the Capitol.

There are writers whose beginnings have little to do with their body of work, and those writers are not Jones. The world of his youth is everything. His mother, whose stern but loving presence influences almost every page of his work, was a dishwasher at Chez Francois restaurant in downtown Washington. She also worked as maid at the Claridge Hotel, in which the restaurant was set. She was a Baptist and had come up from a speck on the map called News Ferry, Va. She was completely illiterate. She worked hard, desperate hours to keep her children one step out of foster care. Once, when she was ill, Jones was indeed taken to a city institution for children in need. The rest of the time, they lived on the hustle, shuffling from one shabby place to the next, a half-step ahead of bill collectors.

"The only thing she did was sign with an X" he said. "Maybe I heard her recite the alphabet, maybe not all the way to Z. She couldn't read at all, so far as I knew. I don't think she could recognize her name."

As a child, he moved so much that it cut off almost all friendships, and this left a lasting mark on the adult. "I have only a vague address and a heart that is breaking," he once wrote in an essay of a bicycle trip at 13, when he tried to find boys who had been his closest friends at an earlier residence. He never found them.

The family moved 18 times in 18 years, another of those Old Testament-like qualities of Jones's youth. They lived at 1004 Fourth St. NW, 1525 Sixth St. NW, 90 Myrtle St. NE, 459 Ridge St. NW, 1708 10th St. NW, 7 K St. NW, 1132 Eighth St. NW, 1217 N St. NW, 1221 Mass Ave. NW, and on and on. Almost all of these addresses can be found in his stories, a world teeming with characters. There was Roscoe L. Jones (no relation), the landlord so mean he'd come take the windows out of your place if you were late with the rent. There was Bishop C.M. "Sweet Daddy" Grace, who ran the United House of Prayer for All People. Grace was such a revered figure that Jones watched Grace's funeral from a front porch across the street, because the word among kids was that Grace would rise from the dead during the middle of the thing.

The bookish, never-popular Jones went to Walker-Jones Elementary School, Shaw Junior High and then Cardozo High, by which time he was recognized to have gifts in math and literature. He earned a scholarship to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., for an undergraduate degree (where he was a classmate of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), and then one to the University of Virginia for a master's in fine arts.

***

He didn't see a doctor, he says, until he was 17. His first dental visit was at 22. He labored for years as a proofreader or columnist for an obscure journal called Tax Notes. He wrote "Lost in the City" while working there in the late 1980s and early '90s. For most of the next decade, he wrote nothing but was thinking deeply about "The Known World," the tale of a black slave owner in Virginia. When he was laid off after 19 years, they gave him two weeks' severance. He lived on unemployment benefits while he hammered out the book in a dozen weeks. (It wasn't that hard, he said in interviews after its publication; he had almost the entire book mapped out in his head before he sat down to write.) It won the Pulitzer Prize.

***

There's an old chestnut about how when you ask a Southerner a question, you don't get an answer -- you get a story. By this standard, Jones is a card-carrying Southerner, an heir to an oral, stream-of-consciousness tradition that leaves people outside the region slack-jawed (in terror or in awe) that people actually speak the English language this way.

On a rainy April morning earlier this year, I was driving Jones around as he gave me a guided tour of his old haunts. We pulled in front of an apartment at 927 P St. NW. With the windshield wipers slapping away the rain, I asked:

"So, how long did you live here?"

This is his reply:

"It was in ... we were in Brooklyn visiting my aunt, and let's see, that place is gone. But before we went, went that summer of '65 to visit my aunt, we lived in this one room, 1132 Eighth St. And there was a hole about this size in the ceiling that went up to the bathroom. And once some guy up there, caught some guy looking down the hole to see what he could see in our place. And they condemned the place while we were gone. And my mother, I guess, was in a hurry, and she moved around the corner to a room, but she didn't get in touch with us. I think probably one of the big problems was she couldn't read or write, and I don't think my aunt had a phone, she didn't have a phone, and so we contacted her by going up to visit. It was a neighbor of hers, somehow we got in touch, my aunt didn't have a phone. So we came back down and get off the bus, in August, from the vacation, because my aunt and my cousin came down with me and my sister. And the place was boarded up [laughs].

"Well, my sister went down to where the landlord lived, and she told us where my mother was, and my mother was in this tiny room with all our stuff. And what happened apparently, each day she went off to work, people broke into her room. So my mother was still working at Chez Francois, and my aunt was down here for a few days. So my aunt took it upon herself to try to find us a place -- to live. So it was 1132, it was few blocks from here, she found that place. Problem is that, and my aunt had no way of knowing this, at 922 N St., my father was living with this woman he had been living with for decades [across the street from their new house].

"We lived here for two or so years."

***

The first time I met Jones was at an independent bookstore owners convention at a hotel on one of Georgia's sea islands in the summer of 2003. I was reading the just-released "The Known World," the tale of a black man who owned slaves, in my room upstairs. I came down to the room of authors -- we were all penned up before we were to go out to talk -- and there was Jones, sitting by himself in a corner. We sat together at dinner. I liked him immensely. He was utterly without pretense, kind, sincere and almost painfully shy.

It was an odd sensation. Jones was the titan of the room, on the cusp of literary fame and international renown, but no one seemed to know who he was, nor did he have any interest in making himself recognized. The rest of us, with our earnest but modest efforts, were only too happy to talk to any bookseller who would listen to us. Jones did not want to talk to anybody at all. He just wanted to go home.

A couple of months later, he turned down an all-expenses-paid trip to Jamaica to discuss his books because he was told the event would be at a hillside resort.

"I don't know that I like cliffs," he explained to me, without irony, "and I thought if I was up there, I might just get blown off the side."

Six years later, he's still the same man: quiet, kind and sincere. He almost always dresses in jeans and loafers, an untucked knit shirt over a slight paunch. He answers his phone, "Yeah?"

He was teaching a fiction-writing course at George Washington University this past spring when I dropped in on him one brisk afternoon in his sixth-floor office. He had a window. Out of the blue, he noted that he could see the spot where the old university hospital stood, the one in which his mother passed away.

"Any day I'm there, I can look across to this big hole, and that's where she died," he said, pointing. He paused, considering. "Here I am, this visiting professor and all the rest of it, and right across there is where my mother died. And she never knew whatever happened to me."

He laughs, a dry, unhappy thing.

(Such a momentous place is in his stories. In "A Rich Man," a story in "Hagar's," the fictional Loneese Perkins dies in the same hospital; she longs to be buried in Harmony Cemetery, as did Jones's mother.)

We walked across campus to his class. There were 11 students with their desks arrayed in a circle. Jones eschewed the podium for a desk among them. He sat down, clasped his hands behind his head, his left leg crossing his right at the knee. Before the class, the students had circulated their short stories to each other. They were now critiquing them as a group.

Jones let them chatter for a second, then coughed. It got quiet.

"Why don't we start with 'Sunday Best,' " he said. This was a student story about an 18-year-old girl with her mother at church. At the very beginning of the story, the girl uses an obscenity to tell her mother, between hymns, that she had sex with her boyfriend the night before.

"Comments, please?" Jones said.

There was a pause beneath the fluorescent lights.

"A Baptist church like that, it's hard to see her doing that," Jones said. The students looked down at their papers or looked at him. He explained the very short episode was a vignette, not a story, because it was just a scene. The girl, he said, "comes off as rather despicable," without a reason for her talking so baldly in church. This could work, he said, if there was more of a motivation for what happened the night before.

"The work is there," he said softly. "There just needs to be more of it."

It was a kind assessment.

The talk moved to another story, "Different Air," about a conversation in a cloistered room. The students talked it up, and Jones cut in; he didn't think the piece was realistic.

"In journalism," he said, "a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step. In real life, you could just start with Obama elected president. But in a story, you have to build how that happens."

A few weeks later, the students invited him for a beer at the Froggy Bottom, a basement pub nearby. There was a pool table, blaring televisions, pitchers of beer, college kids yelling at the top of their lungs. Jones sat at the edge of the booth, straining to make conversation, soldiering on, uncomfortable but doggedly hanging in there, The Good Professor W ho Will Have a Cold One With the Kids.

I had the same feeling I had at the convention in Georgia: Somebody, let this man go home.

***

You can read all about Jones's youth without ever asking him a question. In the story "Common Law," in "Hagar's," a woman is hit by her boyfriend on the second floor of an apartment building at 459 Ridge St. NW. She tumbles down the stairs as a group of wide-eyed children watch. As a child, Jones lived in the first-floor apartment at that address. Had such a fictional woman tumbled down the steps, she would have fallen into his non-fictional lap. He liked that address so much, in fact, that he set the title story of "Lost in the City," next door at 457 Ridge St. NW. The corner shop in "The Store," at Fifth and O St. NW, is the very shop he went into for treats as a child.

"The characters are fictional, but it's important to place them in real houses," he says. "I don't know what it is, but it's much better for me to say so and so lived there, it's a real place."

This grounded-in-reality approach makes sense right up until one considers "The Known World," with its fictional Manchester County, Va., which doesn't exist at all. He just made the whole thing up, in all its stunning reality.

Here's an example:

"Fern and her husband had 12 slaves to their names. In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew one another's business. When the War between the States came, the number of slave-owning blacks in Manchester would be down to five, and one of those included an extremely morose man who, according to the U.S. Census of 1860, legally owned his own wife and five children and three grandchildren. The census of 1860 said there were 2,670 slaves in Manchester County, but the census taker, a U.S. marshal who feared God, had argued with his wife the day he sent his report to Washington, D.C., and all his arithmetic was wrong because he failed to carry a one."

***

There is no single defining event to explaining Jones's personality and its related offshoot, his fiction, how one works with the other, which wire is connected to what. There's no schematic blueprint. He says the gestalt, the worldview of his work, stems from the rootlessness of his youth:

"When you move 18 times in 18 years, you learn that the world is forever shifting; you can't be certain of anything. But if you're in your home, your apartment, and the rent is paid up, and there's reason for the landlord to knock on your door, then you're okay. But once you leave your apartment, once you leave your home, then you can't predict anything. It's not your world; you can't control it."

The decisive influence on his life, though, might be the fate of his mother, rather than their constant migrations. It's impossible to overstate how deeply he has been moved by her travails.

"My mother was a good and kind woman, and she never bothered anybody," he told me at dinner once.

Underneath the carefully modulated tone of the remark, there was a humming sort of rage that such a quiet, church-going woman could come to Washington and be run over by callous men, by a city that didn't particularly worry about the fate of black women. Even at the very end of his mother's life, when Jones rushed into her hospital room where she lay dying, he found that the staff had not bothered to "hook her up to anything."

He was beside her when she passed.

One of his favorite memories of her is when he was a child and told her he was going to grow up to be a doctor and that he'd bring her "five dollars a week!" Recounting that episode more than 50 years later, he was laughing hard, leaning forward onto the table. "Five dollars! It was a lot of money back then!"

And there was the day when a neighbor saw him, as a teenager, shoplifting some beer, and told his mother. She didn't get off work that night until 11 p.m., and was so mad she was pulling switches off trees on the way home.

"You got pulled out of bed in a nice deep sleep, saying 'What did I do?' " he remembered. "Man, the switches still had leaves on them. Sometimes she was too upset and mad and would leave them on there, and you'd get the beating and the leaves would be all over the floor, for the testimony."

She lived long enough to see him graduate from college. He is still thrilled she was there.

When she died, he asked for the best cemetery around and was told that was Fort Lincoln. That's where he buried her.

These are stories about love, of course. And honor and pity and sacrifice.

His first book was devoted entirely to "the memory of my mother." His second was dedicated to his brother, and also to his mother, "who could have done so much more in a better world." His third and most recent book was partially dedicated to the "millions who came up out of the South," and to his mother, "who came as well and found far less than even the little she dared hope for."

Reading the three dedications consecutively, realizing they were written over a 13-year period, makes it difficult not to feel the anger beneath the surface. And the heartbreak.

***

The D.C. characters in Jones's stories seem to believe that B.B. King line that goes, "Nobody loves me but my mother... and she could be jiving, too." They are earthy, hard and calculating, if not flat-out mean. They live completely within the world of black Washington and the Southern towns in which they were born. Whites are rarely seen.

The stories are told from God's point of view, or at least that of someone with a pitiless knowledge of everything that has happened and is going to happen to the characters. They are also almost impossibly dense, somewhere between Faulkner and Joyce and Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman. There are dozens of foreshadowings and flashbacks and references to things that haven't happened yet. "Years later," is a favorite device he'll drop into the middle of a sentence, showing what happened decades after the daily events he's describing.

Consider "Tapestry," the final story in "Hagar's." He calls it a "kind of summing up" of all his work. It's about a couple in Mississippi, Anne and Lucas, who wind up migrating to Washington. The story is half complete before readers are even told the year in which it's set (1932). A large part of the story is devoted to what would have happened to the couple's descendants had they stayed in Mississippi, which, of course, they did not.

There are endless flashes into the future. "Years and years later, she would describe for her grandson, talking into the cassette recorder, the dress Clarice was wearing." "It would be nine years before the work was completed." "They had, of course, never kissed and they would not kiss for the first time until three weeks before they married more than a year later." "None of her descendants were ever to become tapestry women." And, just a few sentences before the end of the story, we see all of Anne's life unfold: "... [T]he train entered Washington, where she was to come to her end more than sixty-eight years later, a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to twenty-one living and three dead, and great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great-grandmother to twins."

One can't help but be moved by the generous attention Jones gives his characters and his stories. It's gone almost completely unnoticed, but the two collections are a matched set: There are 14 stories in "Lost," ordered from the youngest to the oldest character, and there are 14 stories in "Hagar's," also ordered from youngest to oldest character. The first story in the first book is connected to the first story in the second book, and so on. To get the full history of the characters, one must read the first story in each book, then go to the second story in each, and so on.

"The Sunday Following Mother's Day," the seventh story in the first collection, is about a man who kills his wife for no apparent reason. In the seventh story in the second collection, "Root Worker," we meet the killer's sister years later, working as a "day companion" for a wealthy woman who has gone insane.

This is vintage Jones -- the legacy of the black South, an older, church-going black Washington generation confronting its age, its losses, its godless offspring, the ways of a world that neither makes sense nor has any explanation. It's that hazy time after the Great Migration north and before the modern era of the post civil rights movement. It's hard to imagine any of these stories in full-blown color. It's a world etched in sepia.

***

As summer hit its high point, I told Jones I'd like to visit his mother's grave with him. He agreed. We drove out to Fort Lincoln Cemetery off Bladensburg Road early on a sweltering Saturday in mid-July.

We made our way from the street to a circular drive that wound uphill. Jones narrated. "I use to walk up through here. Every weekend, after she died. I lived in Philadelphia. I'd come down on the bus. One would take me to Bladensburg and South Carolina [Avenue], and I'd walk from there."

It is perhaps a mile, each way.

We parked at the top of a hill, in the shade of an overhanging tree. Jones stepped out of the car and surveyed the land spreading out below. It was all markers down in the grass, no headstones. He paused.

"I used to have a map," he said.

We started downhill, tentatively. The last time he was here, some years ago, with his now-dead sister. "I remember holding my niece -- she was a baby -- and watching her walk down to the water spigot. I don't see it now." And there had a been a tree nearby, he recalled from the funeral. "I remember the pastor saying it was nice to have a tree nearby."

But, for whatever reason -- passing time or shifting landmarks or fading memory -- we could not find it, not in nearly an hour of pacing back and forth. At one point, I wandered far out of our original search area, head down, looking at one marker and then the next, hoping to find a marker reading "Jeanette S. Jones." I stopped to look back, for we were now almost out of earshot of one another.

Jones was all alone, mopping sweat from his forehead, from his throat. He was looking in the near distance, standing still, looking in the sunlight, looking for her.

Neely Tucker is a Washington Post staff writer. He can be reached at tuckern@washpost.com.

Obama presses Congress to rework immigration laws - washingtonpost.com

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By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post staff writer
Saturday, November 14, 2009

The Obama administration expects Congress to begin moving to overhaul the nation's immigration laws early next year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Friday, adding that improved border security and a drop in migration caused by the economic downturn make such changes "far more attainable" than in 2007.

"When Congress is ready to act, we will be ready to support them," said Napolitano, President Obama's "point person" on immigration policy issues. "The first part of 2010, we will see legislation beginning to move," she said.

Napolitano's speech, delivered at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress, was aimed at Latino advocates who have expressed skepticism that Obama would fulfill a campaign pledge to push for a "comprehensive" immigration package.

Napolitano reaffirmed Obama's support for a "tough but fair" path for legal status for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

"We will never have fully effective law enforcement or national security as long as so many millions remain in the shadows," Napolitano said.

At the same time, Napolitano sought to reframe the debate from past years, saying lawmakers' earlier demands that the government improve "enforcement first" have been met. She argued that the time to work on immigration issues is when a sluggish economy is dampening illegal migration.

In recent years, the U.S. government has built more than 600 miles of fencing and pedestrian barriers on the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, and more than doubled the ranks of the U.S. Border Patrol, to 20,000 officers, Napolitano said. Meanwhile, because of a shrinking job market and increased enforcement, Border Patrol arrests last year were less than half the 2005 level of 1.2 million.

"These are major differences that should change the immigration conversation. . . . We have gotten Congress's message she said. "Trust me: I know a major shift when I see one, and what I have seen makes reform far more attainable this time around."

Republican critics say that changing laws to allow more foreign-born workers is foolhardy at a time when U.S. unemployment is nearing 10 percent.

"It is ironic that a poor economy is their justification for amnesty," said Rep. Lamar Smith (Tex.). "How can they claim that enforcement is 'done' when there are more than 400 open miles of border with Mexico, hundreds of thousands of criminal and fugitive aliens and millions of illegal immigrants taking American jobs?"

Immigrant advocates said they were pleased the administration is approaching "the moment of truth" for a debate, but said they were still watching to see it and Congress commit real political capital. Congressional watchers also say the issue faces a crowded calendar in the Senate, which is set to take up health care and climate legislation.

Sudan's 'trouser lady' continues to fight decency laws - washingtonpost.com

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Defiant 'trouser lady' continues to fight decency laws

By Stephanie McCrummen
Saturday, November 14, 2009

KHARTOUM, SUDAN -- A few months after she was arrested for wearing pants, Lubna Hussein was lounging around her home in a shady, upper-class neighborhood in this capital along the Nile River. It was a hot afternoon, but the 34-year-old Sudanese journalist was wearing thick jeans adorned with sequins and embroidered flowers.

"Since all this happened, I will only wear pants," she said in the calmly defiant manner that led to her fleeting global celebrity as "the trouser lady," and a less-publicized backlash that has included anonymous death threats and newspaper columns calling her a prostitute. "If you have something to fight for, you can lose your life."

In July, Hussein attempted to shame Sudan's Islamist ruling party by inviting reporters to view her public flogging, a punishment under Islamic law that is sometimes applied here -- by leather whip or bamboo cane of the sort used on camels -- to women deemed to have violated decency laws.

As news spread, her court date drew crowds of women and men protesting in solidarity, and she received support from the likes of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sudanese women started Web sites such as iamlubna.com, and some compared her to Rosa Parks, the American civil rights icon who challenged segregation laws.

Then, the campaign fizzled. Eager to dispense with the negative publicity, a judge sentenced Hussein to jail instead of flogging. She was released days later, and the attention surrounding her case settled into discussions among women about their experiences with Khartoum's vaguely worded decency laws, and the politics of keeping public order.

"When I was young, I used to see people free and wearing any kind of clothes they want," said Hussein, who is Muslim. "Some women were wearing miniskirts. But since the Islamists came, women don't have that power."

Soon after Omar Hassan al-Bashir came to power in a 1989 coup, Islamists in his party began asserting tight control across Sudan, a country whose north, including Khartoum, is mostly Muslim.

In Khartoum, local authorities showed their loyalty by adopting public-order laws requiring, among other things, "decent" dress and conduct.

Over the years, the public-order police have been relatively tolerant, and these days, women's fashions vary widely in the capital, from long black burqas and gloves to skinny jeans. Trousers are fairly common, but head scarves, long skirts and wraps remain standard attire for most Muslim women here. At times, though, police have implemented the law arbitrarily and even bizarrely.

For months, Sudanese women recalled, a man wearing a red bandana around his head and a whip on his waist was posted at a crowded bus station. He would call out to women he decided were showing too much wrist or ankle and whip them on the spot. Sometimes he would spit on them, they said.

Naglaseed Ahmad, who was among those protesting in support of Hussein's case, recalled being arrested as she was demonstrating against the drafting of her fellow university students into the Sudanese army. A judge found her guilty of violating decency laws and ordered another woman, accused of being a prostitute, to administer 10 lashes in front of him.

"The judge, he was smiling the whole time," Ahmad recalled. "He was enjoying these lashes."

Some women say they are harassed by ordinary men who fancy themselves as sort of a vigilante force. Nahid Mohammed al-Hassan Ali, a psychiatrist who demonstrated with Ahmad, said men who know her shout out "Hey, professor!" when her head scarf slips.

Last year, about 40,000 women were arrested on charges of violating public-order laws, according to human rights groups. They say most cases involved Khartoum's poorest women, such as those who sell tea under trees along the capital's sandy streets.

Hussein's case was somewhat unusual in that she is a relatively wealthy professional. She was enjoying an evening of music with friends at a restaurant when police showed up and began picking women out of the crowd, asking them to parade across the room.

Police said Hussein's green pants -- covered to mid-thigh by a shirt -- were too tight. She and several other women were hauled off to the police station. That night, Hussein, angry not only at her situation, but also at seeing a 16-year-old girl being harassed, crying and wetting herself out of fear, began planning her campaign to overturn the decency laws.

"I decided to cry, but in a different way," she said.

Hussein's more moderate critics say the public-order laws reflect values accepted by a majority of people in Khartoum and dismiss her cause as elitist.

There are harsher critics, though. Women demonstrating on the day of Hussein's trial were met by a counter-protest by men, including some carrying containers of acid. "They said, 'After this trial we will use this acid,' " Ali, the psychiatrist, said with a weary laugh. "We are just familiar with this attitude."

At this point, she and others consider the public-order laws another repressive tool of a ruling party aiming to keep society under control.

Ali and others said that changing these laws will be difficult but that there are small signs of revolt. Around Khartoum, women refer to the gap between a short shirt and a skirt as "the separation of church and state." If a skirt is too short, or too open, they mockingly call it "the failure of civilization."

"It's a kind of mutiny, I guess," Ali said. "Because we've been treated so badly."

Yemen's fight with rebels a regional concern - washingtonpost.com

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Sunni-Shiite tensions grow as Saudis allege Iran's involvement

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 14, 2009

MAZRAQ, YEMEN -- Along the jagged, oatmeal-colored mountains of northern Yemen, civil war has transformed the windswept landscape into a canvas of human misery, bolstering al-Qaeda's efforts to create a haven in the Middle East's poorest nation.

It is a war largely hidden from the rest of the world the past five years, and it pits the Hawthi rebels, who are Shiites, against Yemen's government. In recent days, however, it has also drawn in Saudi Arabia. Yemen and Saudi Arabia, both ruled by Sunnis, accuse Shiite Iran of backing the rebels, raising the specter of a proxy war that could elevate sectarian tensions in this oil-rich region.

The fighting could have serious implications for the U.S. anti-terrorism effort in a failing nation where al-Qaeda is gaining strength, Western diplomats and Yemeni analysts say. The war is drawing attention and scarce resources away from efforts to combat poverty, a secessionist movement in the south and piracy along the nation's shores. A prolonged conflict, they say, could further weaken Yemen's government and deepen societal fissures, allowing al-Qaeda militants to thrive.

"The longer the war in the north continues and the longer the problems in the south continue without resolution, the more we pave the road for al-Qaeda," said Yahya Abu Asbu, a Foreign Ministry official and deputy secretary general of the Yemeni Socialist Party. "Yemen will become more dangerous than Somalia."

Ruling party officials concede that the war is siphoning resources from other pressing problems, but they say their priority is to crush the rebellion.

"You cannot say the Hawthis are less dangerous than al-Qaeda," said Yasser Ahmed Bin Salim al-Awadi, who heads the government's ruling bloc in parliament. "Al-Qaeda is not doing something like what the Hawthis are doing now."

The war has forced more than 175,000 Yemenis to flee their homes; many more remain trapped in areas gripped by violence.

Ali Abdu and his family are among the war's newest victims.

They escaped to Saudi Arabia two months ago. But last week, the Hawthi rebels crossed into Saudi Arabia and attacked a Saudi patrol. The kingdom retaliated by bombing rebel positions in Yemen, but also forced Abdu and hundreds of other desperate refugees back across the border.

Evading bombs and bullets, the family reached Mazraq, a crowded refugee camp less than five miles from the front lines.

"It is our destiny," said Abdu, 45, with no hint of emotion. He paused, then added: "Only Allah knows why they are fighting."

The clans

The Hawthis, who believe in the Zaydi branch of Shiite Islam, ruled northern Yemen as a religious imamate for nearly a millennium before being overthrown in a 1962 coup. Ever since, Yemen's rulers have been wary of them and other Zaydi clans. The Zaydis make up more than a quarter of Yemen's population and constitute a majority in the north.

The rebels accuse the government of trying to dilute their religion by installing Sunni fundamentalists in mosques and official positions in some Zaydi areas. The government maintains that Hawthis seek to bring back the Zaydi imamate.

The conflict began in 2004 with a few hundred rebel fighters. It has grown into a full-fledged insurgency that Yemen's undisciplined military has struggled to contain, despite its deployment of military units and resources to the north. Last year, the fighting reached the outskirts of Sanaa, the capital.

In the town of Mazraq on Thursday, the market was crowded with disheveled Yemeni soldiers in ragtag uniforms. Many carried aging Kalashnikov rifles and rode in the back of pickup trucks, chewing khat, a mildly narcotic leaf popular in Yemen.

Yemeni officials expressed confidence that they could crush the rebellion, now that the Saudis were pushing from the north. The kingdom is deeply concerned about having a hostile Shiite region on its southern border.

The rebels say they staged the border attack, which killed a Saudi soldier, because of Saudi support for Yemen. Hawthi rebel commanders have denied Iran is supporting them. Iran, too, has denied arming or financing the rebels. Yemen and Saudi Arabia have not provided credible evidence of Iranian support, Western diplomats and analysts say.

Still, Saudi Arabia's entry into the conflict has touched a nerve with Iran. This week, Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, declared that no nation should "interfere" in Yemen's internal affairs, a veiled snipe at Saudi Arabia. Some analysts say if Saudi Arabia continues to attack the rebels, Iran might decide to back the Hawthis, if it hasn't already, as a way to gain leverage over Riyadh.

"Iran believes the biggest obstacle to its growing influence in the region is Saudi Arabia," said Najib Ghallab, a political researcher at Sanaa University. "To weaken Saudi influence, Iran believes Yemen is the starting point."

Sectarian differences

Many Yemenis say al-Qaeda is already taking advantage of the government's focus on the north. An al-Qaeda ambush this month in the east that killed five security officials raised questions over whether the thinly stretched government can control the entire country. "In this environment, security is weak and the government is busy with wars. This is the environment al-Qaeda wants."

Some officials allege that the Hawthis are allied with the Sunni militants of al-Qaeda, but they provide no evidence. Most analysts view it as an attempt by a weak government to generate support from the United States and other Western powers that fear Yemen is descending into chaos. The Hawthis have long been deeply antagonistic toward hard-line Sunni fundamentalists, making any alliance with al-Qaeda unlikely.

Critics of the government declare that the war can be ended quickly through negotiations. They accuse Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, of engaging in war to bolster his military authority, weaken political rivals and milk more economic and military aid from Western powers.

Awadi dismissed such suggestions. "It's not in the government's interest to make war in the hope it will bring more instability."

As the conflict rages, sectarian and tribal animosities are deepening. In the camp, some refugees said Hawthis had forced Sunnis from their villages.

"They were the first to be exposed to any dangers," Ahmed Garela Al-Balawi, 43, a Zaydi Shiite who fled Haidan, a Hawthi stronghold, said last week.

In Sanaa, government forces have detained Shiites thought to support the Hawthis, human rights activists say. Shiites have been banned from sensitive jobs and were ordered to hand in weapons, said Hassan Zaid, the Shiite leader of the al-Haq party, which supported the Hawthis. His party has since been dissolved.

Awadi doesn't dispute taking action against Hawthi supporters, but he said there were no sectarian motives.

Outside the camp, Ahmed Davish, 37, shooed away flies buzzing around his face. He and his family had arrived five days earlier -- also forced from Saudi Arabia.

In the previous years of war, Davish, who is Sunni, returned to his village of Raza to live side by side again with Shiites. This time, "it's very difficult to return," he said. "You should be a Hawthi, or you will be killed."

A rush to learn English by cell - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

More than 300,000 Bangladeshis sign up for new phone service

By Maija Palmer and Amy Kazmin
Saturday, November 14, 2009

More than 300,000 people in Bangladesh, one of Asia's poorest but fastest-growing economies, have rushed to sign up to learn English over their cellphones, threatening to swamp the service even before its official launch Thursday.

"We were not expecting that kind of response -- 25,000 people would have been a good response on the first day," said Sara Chamberlain, the manager of the discount service. "Instead, we got hundreds of thousands of people."

The project, which costs users less than the price of a cup of tea for each three-minute lesson, is being run by the BBC World Service Trust, the international charity arm of the broadcaster. Part of a British government initiative to help develop English skills in Bangladesh, it marks the first time that cellphones have been used as an educational tool on this scale.

Since cellphone services began in Bangladesh just over a decade ago, more than 50 million Bangladeshis have acquired phone connections, including many in remote rural areas. That far outnumbers the 4 million who have Internet access.

English is increasingly seen as a key to economic mobility, especially as ever larger numbers of Bangladeshis go abroad to find work unavailable to them at home. An estimated 6.2 million Bangladeshis work overseas, and their nearly $10 billion in annual remittances represent the country's second-largest source of foreign exchange.

However, English is also important for securing jobs at home, where about 70 percent of employers look for workers with "communicative English."

Through its Janala service, the BBC offers 250 audio and text-message lessons at different levels -- from basic English conversation to grammar and comprehension of simple news stories. Each lesson is a three-minute phone call, costing about 4 cents.

One basic lesson involves listening to and repeating simple dialogue such as: "What do you do?"

"I work in IT, what about you?"

"I'm a student."

"That's nice."

All six cellphone operators in Bangladesh have agreed to cut the cost of calls to the service by 50 percent to make it more affordable. Chamberlain also said the project team was in talks with the cellphone companies to increase capacity to cope with the unexpectedly high demand.

The launch of the service comes just a few weeks after Grameenphone, the country's largest cellphone operator, held Bangladesh's largest initial public offering. Shares in the company are due to start trading on the Dhaka Stock Exchange next week.

The language lessons target mainly 18- to 24-year-olds, who typically have five or more years of formal education but whose training in English has been weak. Also targeted are people living on less than $145 a month, who would struggle to pay for formal English lessons.

Chamberlain said the service could be developed later to offer tailored English instruction to people in different industries, such as call centers, garment factories and the tourist industry.

-- Financial Times

Palmer reported from London and Kazmin from New Delhi.

Rescuer plans to return tame orangutans to Borneo's wild - washingtonpost.com

Image by axinar via Flickr

A rehabilitator plans to start releasing rescued orangutans back into Borneo's forests. But there are concerns whether the tamed apes will survive out there.

By Andrew Higgins
Saturday, November 14, 2009

PALANGKA RAYA, INDONESIA -- Over the past decade, Lone Droescher-Nielsen, a former Scandinavian Airlines Systems flight attendant, has saved nearly 600 orphaned orangutans in Borneo from almost certain death. Funded by donations from abroad, she has given the apes food, shelter and better health care than many humans in these parts ever get.

Now, the 46-year-old Dane is preparing for a more difficult -- and controversial -- task: returning tame orangutans to the wild. "They were born wild, and they deserve to go back in the wild again," said Droescher-Nielsen, founder and director of the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation and Rescue Project. "That is our ultimate objective."

Early next year, if all goes according to plan, she'll release a first batch of about 75 rehabilitated orangutans into a remote forest in Central Kalimantan, an Indonesian province on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo. Tiny radio transmitters placed under their skin will monitor their movements -- and help answer a big question: Can the animals survive?

Some experts wonder whether orangutans raised by humans will be able to hack life in the forest and whether diseases they might have caught in captivity will harm kin that never left the jungle.

Droescher-Nielsen, whose 10-year-old project has grown into the world's largest primate rescue effort, expects most to make it. "The ones we set free are not going to be wild, but they can manage," she said.

It will take a couple of generations for bad habits picked up in captivity to be completely purged. Disease, she added, shouldn't be a problem because the area selected for the trial release doesn't have a viable orangutan community of its own.

The orangutan -- which means "man of the forest" in a local language -- is one of mankind's closest cousins in the animal kingdom, sharing about 97 percent of its DNA with humans. But it has suffered catastrophically from contact with man.

A century ago, Borneo had more than 300,000 wild orangutans. Today, the number has fallen to about 50,000, most of which live in Central Kalimantan. They could vanish if forests keep getting chopped down at the current rate of what Indonesian environmentalists say equals the size of six football fields every minute. Palm oil plantations, which have expanded rapidly in recent years as demand for the cheap oil surged, have led to an even bigger influx of baby apes at the rescue center.

Droescher-Nielsen initially hoped to start returning orangutans to the wild years ago, but, as forests kept retreating, it became increasingly difficult to find a safe place to put them. The task was further complicated by the fact that rehabilitated apes don't fear humans -- a big problem when many humans see them as a menace and want them dead.

Keeping orangutans fed and sheltered is expensive. The Nyaru Menteng project has a staff of about 200 people. Salaries, food, medicines and other expenses mean that it costs about $2,000 a year for each of the nearly 600 apes in residence. That is more than twice the average annual income in the area. An additional 400 or so of the primates are being cared for in other rehabilitation centers in Borneo.

"I'd like to be an orangutan," joked Nordin, a local environmental activist, who like many Indonesians uses one name. "They get given meals, and when they get sick they get sent to hospital."

Droescher-Nielsen's center has a well-equipped clinic. Adult orangutans spend much of the day in a nearby peat-land forest that is off-limits to loggers and oil palm growers. Each afternoon, dozens come out of the trees for a "social hour" in the main compound. They munch fruit, climb on a jungle gym and play on swings. At night, they are escorted to a cluster of cages; the younger primates are piled into wheelbarrows and taken to a separate sleeping area.

To survive in the wild, the orangutans will have to forget their pampered past lifestyle. Droescher-Nielsen's staff members have devised a number of techniques to try to help prepare the animals for life on their own in the forest. About 125 apes, for example, have been moved onto islands in a nearby river, where they have little contact with humans. Most of their food is still provided, but they have to work much harder to get it: It has been placed in trees, not simply left on the ground.

Some of her center's orangutans, Droescher-Nielsen said, have scant chance of surviving in the wild, so they will have to stay put until they die. This could mean decades, as the animal's average life expectancy is 40 to 45 years. Those likely to stay include the blind, the maimed and apes "just too plain stupid to make it."

Some question whether protecting apes in captivity will contribute to the long-term survival of the species. Rescuing baby orangutans is a "welfare issue, but it is not good for conservation," said John Burton, head of World Land Trust, a British conservation group. He's against returning orangutans that might be carrying human diseases to the forest and thinks that keeping them in expensive rehabilitation centers is "not cost-effective" as it only adds to a "world surfeit of captive orangutans." The main focus, he said, should be on protecting forests and the wild apes that live in them.

Droescher-Nielsen agrees that the fundamental problem is the destruction of trees. But she also says humans must take responsibility for the havoc they've already caused.

"I don't look at this with my brain. I look at it with my heart. I cannot leave these victims," she said. "We're the cause of their becoming orphans. What should we do, just euthanize them? Should we just kill them and say, 'I don't really care?' "

Staff photographer Linda Davidson contributed to this report.

U.S. soldiers' morale down in Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com

Image by The U.S. Army via Flickr

Obstacles to getting mental health care cited in Army survey

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 14, 2009

Morale has fallen sharply among U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, with repeated combat deployments taking a toll on their psychological health and marriages, according to an Army mental health survey released Friday.

The percentage of soldiers who rated their unit's morale as high or very high fell from 10.2 percent in 2007 to 5.7 percent in 2009, according to the survey. Individual morale rates remained steady, with about 16 percent saying their morale was high or very high.

Meanwhile, soldiers in Afghanistan are having greater difficulty getting help for psychological problems, for a variety of reasons, including a shortage of psychiatrists and other mental health workers, the survey showed.

The Army had about 43 behavioral health personnel in Afghanistan when the survey was conducted from April to June, or about one for every 1,100 soldiers. The Army is working to improve that ratio to one for every 700 soldiers, and to assign more mental health providers to brigades and battalions.

As part of that effort, the Army has activated some reserve combat stress units, including one that was preparing to deploy from Fort Hood, Tex, when Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal M. Hasan allegedly went on the Nov. 5 shooting rampage there. Hasan was scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan before the end of the year to serve with a combat stress unit.

Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army's surgeon general, said that the Army is short by about 25 percent of its overall goal for hiring more behavioral health specialists, but stressed that the service would not cut corners in order to fill the slots. "We would never compromise quality simply to get a body out in the field," he said at a Pentagon news conference.

Officials said the obstacles to soldiers receiving mental health care include being spread out in smaller outposts as part of the counterinsurgency effort and Afghanistan's rugged landscape, making travel difficult.

"Even with an optimal ratio" of providers to soldiers, "the terrain and weather makes it quite difficult for us," Schoomaker said.

About 21 percent of soldiers in Afghanistan reported psychological problems such as acute stress, depression or anxiety, which is about the same as in 2007. The findings come as soldiers in the country today face greater exposure to combat than two years ago, the survey showed.

The survey confirmed earlier findings that mental health problems increase along with the number and length of soldiers' combat zone deployments. About 30 percent of soldiers reported marital problems such as infidelity or divorce during the third deployment, compared with less than half that during the first and second deployments.

Similarly, about 30 percent of soldiers who have deployed three times or more meet the criteria for having a psychological problem, compared with about 14 percent on the first deployment and 18 percent on the second deployment, the survey showed. In turn, the usage rates for behavioral health medications including those for combat stress and sleep "increased significantly by the third deployment," the report said. Still, those treating the soldiers complained of a lack of availability of "appropriate psychiatric medication" at all levels of care facilities in Afghanistan.

There were five confirmed suicides among soldiers in Afghanistan this year through the end of May, compared with seven for all of 2008, despite the vast majority of soldiers having undergone suicide prevention training, the report said.

On Friday, the Army also released monthly suicide data for October, during which there were 16 possible suicides, not all of which have been confirmed by medical examiners. There were 133 reported active-duty Army suicides from January through October this year, compared with 115 for the same period last year, according to Army data.