Starting Points

Dec 24, 2009

2003 U.S. raid in Iraqi town serves as a cautionary tale

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 24, 2009; A01

THULUYAH, IRAQ -- Recitation of the Koran, mournful but consoling, played from a scratchy cassette as the men gathered in the funeral tent for condolences. They sipped bitter Arabic coffee, only enough to leave an aftertaste. As they smoked cigarettes, an American helicopter rumbled overhead, its rotors sounding the familiar drumbeat of war.

The men had arrived on this day in June 2003 to pay their respects to Hashim Mohammed Aani, a chubby 15-year-old who was one of three people killed a day before in a U.S. raid through this lush region on the sweep of the Tigris River.

An omen, a soft-spoken former judge called the shy boy's death. Other mourners called it a tragedy. To the rest of Iraq, it was little more than a statistic, incidental in the killing fields the country would soon be reduced to. The raid itself was a footnote.

This is the story of that footnote, a cautionary tale in the Iraq war. It is the story of the raid's unintended consequences -- a chain of events that began as soon as American troops set foot in Thuluyah. As the U.S. military departs Iraq, those events have brought the town full circle, returning it to where it was when Saddam Hussein fell.

Drawing on dozens of interviews and numerous visits since 2003, some chronicled in The Washington Post, it is the story of a town where wild thorns grow among the unadorned tombstones. It begins with a tall, burly 28-year-old who served as an informer for the Americans on that raid. His name was Sabah Kerbul, and the mourners who gathered the next day blamed him for the deaths.

'Like an earthquake'

Perched on a bend in the Tigris, Thuluyah had escaped the ravages of the U.S.-led invasion that March. A 90-minute drive north of Baghdad, the town was beyond the route of the U.S. military, which was bent on occupying Baghdad. Although Thuluyah's men had filled the ranks of the Baath Party, the army and the intelligence, the town was too small to figure in most maps.

Within weeks, though, it would bear the scars of the invasion's confusing aftermath. Eleven days after Saddam Hussein's regime fell that April, one of the first insurgent attacks occurred at the edge of town, along an irrigation canal that over time was nicknamed the Valley of Death. More followed. By June, in response, the U.S. military had devised Operation Peninsula Strike, dispatching helicopter gunships, armored vehicles and edgy troops in the first attempt to quell an insurgency that would only grow more intense.

They arrived in Thuluyah after midnight.

"It was like an earthquake," recalled Mawlud Awad al-Jabbouri, a tall and stocky resident who had served as a brigadier in Hussein's intelligence service.

The soldiers shouted in English. Most of the residents stared back in frightened incomprehension. Like others, Jabbouri raised a white handkerchief, in a universal sign of surrender. With hundreds of others, he was blindfolded, bound with plastic cuffs and forced to lie on his stomach. Helpless, he listened as his wife and five children cried nearby.

"I was afraid they were going to line us up on the wall and shoot us as revenge," he said. Lying next to him was his cousin, Saad Salah Ali, short and balding.

"What do you do?" an interpreter barked at Ali. "I'm a taxi driver," he replied.

From somewhere near, Ali heard another voice. The Arabic was spoken in the town's own dialect. It was familiar, that of a neighbor, someone who lived a few houses away. "Oh, you're a taxi driver," the voice said sarcastically to Ali, a former colonel.

It was Sabah. Others noticed him, too, as he ambled through the crowd in American-issued desert camouflage and pointed out suspected insurgents.

The soldiers soon departed the town, but they left behind myriad grievances articulated in cries for vengeance. No one could do anything about the Americans -- not yet, at least. But they could do something about Sabah.

As in other Sunni regions, the sway of tribes had grown in Thuluyah after Hussein's fall, and their authority and the code that underpinned it bore a desert inflection, austere and merciless. The dead 15-year-old had been a member of one tribe, Sabah was from another, and justice had to be done. And the sheiks, empowered in the anarchy of 2003, their words now law, would mete out their notion of it: Either Sabah's family must kill Sabah, or the sheiks would kill the family.

"The sheiks insisted," Sabah's brother said. "Everyone said he must be killed."

A man named Nadhim Khalil, better known as Mullah Nadhim, was the lone figure to speak out on behalf of Sabah's brother and father. Khalil, the son and grandson of clerics and the head of the Caliphs Mosque, the town's largest, was sympathetic to their pleas. No one had proven Sabah was a traitor, the cleric said. Even worse, he suspected, some of the sheiks were trying to cover up their own collaboration with the Americans by making Sabah a scapegoat. He agreed to meet Sabah the next day.

"But the Kalashnikov was faster than I was," Khalil lamented.

The sheiks had said they would wait no longer, and the next morning, two hours before the call to prayer, Sabah's brother and father led Sabah behind the house.

"Seconds before he died, I told him it's not us. It's the town, and we're just one house, alone. We're standing all alone," the brother recalled, his lips quivering.

Five shots later, Sabah was dead.

A curse, Khalil called it, and he denounced it three days later at the mosque.

"His killing opened the door to hell," he recalled. "It didn't only open it, it broke it down, and it couldn't be closed again."

A new, chaotic reality

The residents of Thuluyah take pride in their origins, their blue eyes testament to their ancestors' flight centuries ago from neighboring Syria. When they arrived, the latticework of canals and branches of the Tigris reminded them of ribs -- the origin of Thuluyah's name in Arabic. Their town would be the heart those ribs protected.

Customs were entrenched. No one could ask a favor of a sheik unless they first spent three days at his home. Lunch for a stranger, any stranger, was requisite.

The sheiks inherited the town in 2003. After Hussein's government fell, there was no one else.

But in the months that followed Sabah's death, those same sheiks were overwhelmed by the dynamics the invasion had set in motion. In that, Thuluyah was a microcosm of the region once known as the Sunni Triangle, populated by poor Sunnis of the countryside with whom Hussein had identified. He had courted them as a pillar of his rule. He had guaranteed their interests and provided them patronage.

Now he had fallen. The village was left to fend for itself against ascendant Shiites and an aggressive occupation that brought U.S. military patrols in Humvees through the town almost every day.

"A ball of string, and nobody knew where it started" was how Abdel-Hamid Shweish, one of the town's two preeminent sheiks, described the new reality.

Khalil, the cleric, was blunter. "It was a tsunami," he recalled.

Khalil, though only 25 at the time, had already led the family's mosque for seven years, and his words assumed more importance as Sunnis turned to religion to reinforce their identity. He saw no end to the occupation. Sectarian strife was mounting. Sunnis here needed a militia to defend their interests.

In October 2004, the first cell of al-Qaeda in Iraq came together. The insurgent group was homegrown but led by foreigners. Only nine people from Thuluyah were members. By 2006, when Khalil said he joined, he estimated that al-Qaeda in Iraq had 500 Thuluyah residents among its ranks.

The group wrapped itself in the rhetoric of faith and fatherland: It would defend the people's dignity against the American occupiers and the Shiites doing their bidding. But its real success relied on a tactic borrowed from organized crime: It adhered to no limits in using violence.

In all, more than 200 townspeople were killed as collaborators. Occasionally, their bodies were doused with gasoline and burned. Insurgents talked of shutting down schools, which they denounced as an instrument of occupation. They ordered women married to policemen to divorce their husbands. It didn't matter. By then, most of the police officers had resigned.

Before sunset, U.S. patrols would venture from their base at a former airfield known as Abu Hleij, renamed Forward Operating Base McKenzie, more worried for themselves than the town several miles away.

"After sunset, life stopped," said Jabbouri, the former brigadier in the Iraqi intelligence service.

Not even the sheiks felt safe. One of them, Hussein Ali Saleh, stationed 10 armed men to guard his house. Another was ambushed, bullets tearing through his leg. He still limps. Grenades were thrown twice at the home of Shweish, who recalled that Thuluyah at the time was a "battlefield." The sheiks received pictures of their meetings with Americans in 2003, as both threat and blackmail. Insurgents soon seized the traditional place of the sheiks in arbitrating disputes.

"The sheiks had no power whatsoever," Jabbouri said. "They could do nothing but fear for their lives."

Then, in 2007, a blurry picture began to make the rounds in Thuluyah.

The tide turns in Thuluyah

The men in Thuluyah have come to hold on to pictures like artifacts, as a way to remember what was. They are not family portraits. They are gory, chronicling the trail of blood that al-Qaeda in Iraq charted during its reign in Thuluyah. Men cling to them in macabre fascination, shocked at how grotesque the violence grew.

One showed what was left of a traffic policeman. In September 2007, armed men killed him, then impaled his head on a metal stake they had driven into the ground at the entrance to the Ishaq Bridge. For four days, as sand from the banks of the Tigris hung in the air like a windblown fog, it stayed there. His family was too afraid to take it down.

"It was not humane, it was not religious, it was not resistance," said Safa Saleh, a resident of the town. He shook his head, recalling the image. "It was something so ugly."

Soon after, Saleh's brother Ibrahim was killed. It was Ramadan, Islam's most sacred month. Saleh was riding with his brother and other relatives in their olive Opel when a gray Opel cut them off. Saleh's brother, a police lieutenant, was kidnapped. After three days of negotiations, and a ransom that included a $1,000 Glock 9mm, his brother's body was returned to him. The hands were bound with electric wire. There were burns to the legs and genitals. In a photo, his head is gone, as if animals had torn it from his body, dragging away parts of his spine with it.

It had been three years of jihad, a time when residents often tacitly accepted killings of people whom al-Qaeda in Iraq deemed collaborators and spies, he said. "But now this?"

"Ibrahim was loved, his morals were good, and he was respected. When he was killed, everyone knew they could no longer stand for it," he recalled. "It moved the entire town to act against the armed men. The ugliness created a revolution inside people."

In a matter of weeks, residents stopped providing shelter to militants. They pleaded for police officers to return to their jobs, offering tips on the whereabouts of insurgents. One of the town's sheiks, whose home was attacked with mortar shells and whose nephew was kidnapped and killed, set up a checkpoint with his own armed men, contesting al-Qaeda in Iraq's control of the streets.

Most importantly, Khalil, the cleric, had turned against the insurgents, denouncing them from his mosque.

After years of fighting, Khalil had come to realize that the insurgency was failing to protect the interests of the Sunni community. Even now, he defends al-Qaeda in Iraq's ideology. "A good project," he said. But in practice, it had only managed to turn sentiments against him and his notion of jihad.

Khalil soon emerged as a leader of an American-backed militia of former fighters, helping cripple the group with intelligence that only a convert could provide. A year later, only a dozen or so of al-Qaeda in Iraq's fighters remained in the town, the rest vanquished by police, Khalil's men and the U.S. military, whose soldiers had become a more common sight at the police station and town hall.

"We had entered a dark tunnel with no light at the end," the cleric said. He nodded, contrite but confident. "The choice that we had made didn't bear fruit."

A cleric's rise and fall

By 2008, Khalil was a man about town.

Crowds spilled outside the doors of his family's mosque, enraptured by his thunderous sermons. He led the council that oversaw the hundreds of armed men who were members of the U.S.-backed militia, and he headed a group of local tribal leaders formed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Khalil was anything but bashful in recommending himself as a possible candidate for parliament. The simple mention of his name, Mullah Nadhim, ensured passage through the numerous checkpoints created in the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Then Iraqi security forces arrested him in May 2009 on charges he criticized as political. The Americans had once embraced Khalil. Now, in the words of a military spokesman, they considered his arrest "a matter for the government of Iraq." In public, Maliki called for Khalil's release. In private, one of Maliki's senior aides said the prime minister had once asked Khalil how many people he had killed while he was a leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Four months would pass before Khalil was freed from a prison in Tikrit.

Celebratory gunfire greeted him as a 12-vehicle convoy of politicians, officers and tribal leaders, sirens blaring, escorted him home on Sept. 18. His enemies, watched by his allies with a wary eye, joined hundreds of others at his manicured villa to pay their respects. But as Thuluyah's fruit trees began losing their leaves, it was clear Khalil no longer commanded the authority he once did.

"Mullah who?" a soldier at a checkpoint asked at the outskirts of town when queried by a reporter.

On a recent Friday, Khalil walked a dirt path that, by his count, he has plied more than a thousand times. In tan sandals and a traditional white robe, a cleric's turban wrapped around his head, he passed ripening pomegranates and bullet holes etched in cement, their edges rounded by time. "Long live Iraq," a faded slogan read on a wall.

Khalil said he no longer had ambitions for parliament. In disgust, he had hid in a drawer a picture of himself with a grinning U.S. soldier. Reluctantly, he seemed to acknowledge his own rise and fall. "If we talk about a strongman these days," he admitted, "there is none."

But at 31, he appeared relaxed, even playful, as he neared the crowded mosque with a retinue of bodyguards, having ended what he described as a mujazafa, a word that can mean adventure or risk.

"Order," he admitted, "has brought an end to the law of the jungle."

Order meant the power of the sheiks, he added, "and that cannot be changed."

Back to normal, sort of

Near Thuluyah's elegant villas, the fuchsia blossoms of the Mirabilis jalapa sometimes grow wild. They are known as the 4 o'clock flower, renowned for their ability to stay underground, lost to any garden for so long that they are eventually forgotten, only to sprout again when conditions change.

These days, one of the plants is blossoming near the house of Shweish, the leading sheik.

"These six years are like a rain cloud that arrives in summer," he said. Shweish spoke slowly, with a quiet sense of authority that comes with the expectation of being obeyed. "It comes, and just as quickly, it's gone."

Saleh, the other preeminent sheik, these days receives guests not with a retinue of 10 guards but with a prepared speech that he gingerly holds in hands furrowed like drought-stricken land.

"Iraqis are brothers from north to the south, from east to west," he declares.

In a less formal moment, the 82-year-old boasted that he and his colleagues have again seized the authority over matters of life and death. "Right now, praise God, we have the first word again in Thuluyah," he said.

Shweish put it more bluntly. "I am where I started," he said.

A footnote to the war, as incidental as it was forgettable, wrecked and remade Thuluyah. Hundreds were killed, farms turned to desert. "Thuluyah's suffering was part of Iraq's suffering," Khalil lamented. "Our reality is its reality." As the Americans leave, the men gathered for lunch at the house of Jabbouri, the former brigadier, and wondered at the recent past.

"We should blame ourselves," said Ali, Jabbouri's cousin, who had heard Sabah's voice during the U.S. raid. "We have to take responsibility for the spark that we ignited."

"Actually it was our fault," Jabbouri added. "We were the problem."

"Why do we blame ourselves?" Ali went on. "Because we clapped our hands in the beginning. We brought these people to us."

Bathed in an afternoon sun, the room turned silent.

The war never had to happen, he meant.

"Everything has its price," he said, "but as a town, we paid a very high price."

The past remains alive

There is a story often recounted in the most traditional stretches of Iraq, where the unforgiving ways of the desert hold sway. In one telling, a Bedouin's father was killed, and a vendetta followed. Forty years had passed, and the Bedouin had yet to exact his revenge.

Why, he was asked.

"Laisa baad," he replied. Not yet.

Near the citrus groves and fields of wheat and vegetables where he killed his son six years ago, before ferrying the corpse to the cemetery a mile away in a pickup truck, Sabah's father recalled the execution with anger.

"What happened has happened," he said. His eyes were steely, his body taut. "I don't want to turn back the pages of the past."

Son Salah intervened, apologizing.

"Forgive my father," he said. "He is very angry at the past."

Salah walked to the dirt road outside. His hands shook, and his body trembled. Unshaven, with the sinewy build of a day laborer, he nervously smoked Kent cigarettes.

"He is my brother," he blurted out, "from my flesh, from my blood."

After Sabah's death, the father and brother, both of whom fired the shots that killed Sabah, fled the town. They would not return for three years.

"This was the injustice of Thuluyah and its sheiks," Salah said.

A crime, he called it.

His brother's grave lies down a road that meanders outside town, past parched irrigation canals, denuded orchards and olive trees coated with dust. The cemetery is washed of color. There is no shade to give respite from the sun. Save for the wind and the sound of distant cars, it is quiet, making the place feel even lonelier.

Only three broken bricks scarred white by bird droppings mark the grave, a rough pile of riverine gravel, mud and straw. Scrub brush, bearing thorns, grows nearby.

"We still haven't put the tombstone," Salah said softly. "We haven't had time."

He stood with his hands clasped tightly behind his back, one balled in a fist.

Census: Florida, Nevada had more Americans move out than in

Image via Wikipedia

By Carol Morello
Thursday, December 24, 2009; A01

After decades of rapid growth in which housing developments sprouted in swamps, farmland and deserts, the number of Americans moving to several states in the South and the West has slowed sharply because of the recession and housing bust, according to Census Bureau figures released Wednesday.

The longtime magnets of Florida and Nevada, which had benefited most as people fled the dreary cold of the Northeast and Midwest, saw more Americans move out than move in during the year that ended July 1. California also had a net loss of so-called domestic migrants, although in all three states the impact was blunted by immigration from other countries and by natural growth because of births.

The state population figures foreshadow a political realignment that will occur after the 2010 Census, which is used to determine the reapportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. Texas, which had the biggest population growth last year, 478,000 people, is among the states that stand to gain seats, and states in the Northeast and Midwest could lose.

Image by bored-now via Flickr

The economic downturn and the upheaval it has spawned are creating an unusual set of challenges for next April's national count. Foreclosures and job losses have caused many to give up their homes and move in with friends and family, and Census Bureau officials fear that those people could be undercounted. As the latest data suggest, hard times have led many people to abandon once-booming locales, and increasing numbers of others to stay put, when they cannot sell their houses or land new jobs.

The economy has also reshuffled the growth rates of states, transplanting some onto the losing side of the ledger for the first time in recent memory, according to William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.

Arizona, for example, was ranked in the top five states in population growth every year of this decade, until this past year. Just 15,000 Americans moved into the state, down from 55,000 the previous year. Georgia's growth rate, usually about 2 percent, has been cut in half.

Conversely, the District's growth rate of 1.6 percent almost tripled from the previous year. Virginia gained 87,000 people, more than half of them new residents. Maryland's population grew by 41,000, but the state had a net loss of 11,000 domestic migrants. That was offset by about 20,000 people who moved to Maryland from other countries.

California and New York had repeatedly been in contention for losing the most American residents to other states; both states are now losing fewer residents than before.

Image by satosphere via Flickr

But it is Florida and Nevada that had the most stark reversals of fortune. In the first half of the decade, they were usually among the top five in both population gain and growth rate. They now rank among 23 states that are losing more Americans than they gain.

These annual estimates are not an exact count. Although the census estimated that Florida gained 114,000 people last year because of immigration and births, researchers at the University of Florida said they thought the population had actually declined for the first time since the end of World War II, when many military personnel based in Florida left the state to go home, said Stan Smith, head of the school's Bureau of Economic and Business Research. Even so, the increase is the smallest since 1949, he said.

"Florida was a state people moved to," said Frey, adding, "It was a growth machine, and it just sort of stopped."

Nevada's population would have been virtually stagnant last year, if not for 11,000 newcomers from other countries who more than offset the net loss of 3,800 American residents.

Both states have built their economies around growth, and their state budgets are in dire straits.

"From Florida's point of view, it's cataclysmic," said Isaac Eberstein, director of the Center for Demography and Population Health at Florida State University. Florida has no personal state income tax, only taxes on sales and property, Eberstein noted. "We've shifted all taxes onto the people coming in, whether new residents or tourists," he said.

Smith said he expects that the state's population growth will pick up when the economy improves, although probably at a lower level. Baby boomers will retire soon, and the state should continue to attract immigrants from Latin America, he said. But birth rates are expected to decline, and other states are aggressively competing to attract retirees.

"I think it's more of a temporary blip than a permanent change," Smith said. "But temporary doesn't mean really short-lived."

Nevada faces hurdles as it tries to return to the growth rates of 3 to 4 percent that it enjoyed throughout most of the decade. Last year, its population increased just 1 percent.

Nevada State Demographer Jeff Hardcastle said legalized gambling in other states and on Indian reservations has ended Nevada's onetime monopoly on casino gambling, and rising fares for travel to the state are drags on any recovery.

"I used to joke a 3 percent growth rate in Nevada was considered a recession," Hardcastle said, with no humor discernable in his voice. "I don't think anybody was fully expecting this to happen. And I don't think anybody has a good handle on what's going to happen next."

Yemen still wedded to child marriages

Image by laeli via Flickr

Heather Murdock THE WASHINGTON TIMES

SAN'A, Yemen | Thirteen-year-old Sally al-Sabahi stood outside the courthouse earlier this month fiddling with her smudged, half-polished nails. She was hoping to get a divorce, but her husband did not show up.

When Sally was 11, her father married her to 23-year-old Nabil al-Mushahi, a cousin. Since the wedding, she has run away from her husband's home three times.

"I was afraid of him since the first day," she said in her parents' tiny, windowless, stone home after the failed court date. "I don't want to get married again until after I am dead."

Sally said she wants a divorce because her husband beat, berated and regularly attempted to rape her. When asked whether he succeeded in the sexual assaults, her long eyelashes lowered toward the floor against her black veil, and she picked at the faded orange and green sheet she was sitting on. She did not answer.

Arranged marriages for girls as young as 9 are common in many parts of Yemen. About half the women in the country are married before they are 18, according to Ahmed al-Quareshi, the head of the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children.

Image by Martin Sojka via Flickr

The Yemeni parliament has been debating for almost a year a law that would make 17 the minimum age for marriage, but the measure is fiercely contested and has been blocked by hard-line religious leaders.

"It's a part of their social structure," Mr. al-Quareshi said. "It's a tradition to allow marriage at an early age."

Early marriages are especially common in the countryside, where more than 70 percent of Yemen's 22 million people live, said Shada Nasser, a lawyer and children's rights advocate. Rural mothers, often illiterate and former child brides themselves, don't consider bucking the system, she said.

The young brides, robbed of childhood and education, grow up afraid of their husbands and resenting their children.

"They had dreams," Ms. Nasser said, "But early marriage broke those dreams."

As Yemen - the poorest country in the Arab world - seems to grow poorer every year, the child-bride population is growing fast, according to Ms. Nasser. Parents look for husbands for their little girls so they will have fewer mouths to feed.

Money paid by husbands to their brides' families is also an important source of income. Almost half of Yemenis live on less than $2 a day, according to the United Nations.

Before marriage, many future husbands promise the girls' families that they will not have sex with their brides until the girls are mature, which is generally considered to be about 15 years old. About 10 percent to 20 percent of the new husbands break that promise, according to Ms. Nasser.

It is not just poor families that marry their daughters before puberty, according to Naseem ur-Rehman, a spokesman for the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF. "It cuts across social and economic variations," he said.

Sometimes, he said, children are married to strengthen tribal relationships.

The early marriages often have dire consequences.

Women who give birth before they are 18 are almost eight times as likely to die in labor than those who give birth in their 20s, Mr. ur-Rehman said. In some parts of Yemen, women are about 60 times more likely to die in childbirth than in the United States.

Fawziya Youssef was 12 when she died in early September, according to Mr. al-Quareshi. Fawziya and her husband, 26, had been married for only a year.

Fawziya died of severe bleeding while delivering a stillborn baby after three days of painful labor. Her parents, however, do not think she died because she was married too young, said Mr. al-Quareshi. In their village in the Hoedeida governorate, it is the custom to marry girls before they are 13.

Fawziya's parents are heartbroken, but have no recourse.

"There are no laws saying that this is a crime," Mr. al-Quareshi said.

In February, a bill that would set a minimum marriage age was put to a vote in parliament. It passed 17 to 13, according to Fouad Dahabahi, a legislator. But before the president could sign it, it was blocked. A prominent sheik and several other Muslim religious leaders had objected, saying it contradicted Islamic law, which allows girls to be married at age 9.

Although most members of parliament disagreed with the sheik privately, according to Mr. Dahabahi they were worried about appearing un-Islamic. They sent the bill to be re-examined by committees on health, the constitution, Islamic law and human rights.

Mr. Dahabahi said he supported the bill because when he was 19, he was married to a 13-year-old girl named Intisar.

Soon after they were married, she became pregnant. She got very sick, and her frail health and misery haunted the family for years. "She was a child when she was a mother," he said.

The bill, he said, is also delayed because parliament members prefer not to argue publicly about such a controversial issue. And, as in many bodies in the Yemeni government, parliament has trouble getting things done because it is in session only five months a year.

Other lawmakers said they oppose the law because setting a specific age for marriage is an unnecessary bow to Western culture.

"Why do we have follow [Western] traditions?" asked parliament member Mohammad al-Hamzi. "God created the girl, and knows when she is ready."

Mr. al-Hamzi said that girls who marry before puberty should not, and normally do not, have sex with their husbands. But, he added, "If something bad happens to her, she has the right to go to the judge and ask for a divorce, like Nujood."

Last year, 10-year-old Nujood Ali went to court alone to seek freedom from an abusive husband. She sued for divorce against her father's will. She won because a sympathetic judge believed that her husband had raped her.

Nujood's case made news around the world and inspired parliament to consider a minimum legal age for marriage. But when she tried to register for school, Nujood was initially refused because she had been exposed to sex. The teacher said she could taint the other children, according to Ms. Nasser, who also represented Nujood.

When Nujood heard about Sally's bid for freedom, she pledged to give her $500 out of royalties from a biography being published about her. That is half the money Sally will need to repay her husband if she is granted a divorce.

Even though the judge believed that Nujood had been raped, she still had to give her ex-husband $200.

To get a divorce, Sally must produce written proof and a witness to the abuse.

A few weeks ago, during an Islamic holiday, Mr. al-Mushahi came to Sally's family home. The roof of the house is a blue plastic tarp, and household water is lugged inside in dirty yellow jerrycans. Sally said she wanted to stay with her family. Her parents begged her to go back to her husband.

For three days, Sally refused to eat, and threatened to kill herself. Her parents relented, and told Mr. al-Mushahi it was over.

"As I told you before, I tried to convince her, but she doesn't want you anymore," Sally's father, Mubkhoot Ahmed, barked into his cell phone at his son-in-law after he failed to appear in court.

Mr. Ahmed blamed himself for marrying off his daughter too young and for believing that Mr. al-Mushahi would not touch her before she was ready.

Sally said that when she was 11, she knew nothing about marriage, but agreed to the match because she would be lavished with gifts for the first time in her life. Her father supports his wife and five children by selling ground chili powder in the market. Sometimes he makes $2.50 a day. Sometimes he makes nothing.

"I was thinking only about jewelry and clothes," said Sally, slapping her hands together.

Her father said he was afraid that Mr. al-Mushahi would be embarrassed that Sally abandoned him, and try to take his daughter by force.

In a country with little government control outside the capital, he said he is prepared to protect his family the old-fashioned way.

"I have only weapons to protect myself," he said.

Dec 23, 2009

Report Says Afghan Anti-Drug Effort Lacks Strategy

Image by ChuckHolton via Flickr

By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — The United States-led counternarcotics effort in Afghanistan, which is critical to hopes of cutting off the flow of money to the Taliban and curtailing rampant corruption in the central government, lacks a long-term strategy, clear objectives and a plan for handing over responsibility to Afghans, the State Department inspector general said in a report issued Wednesday.

“The department has not clarified an end state for counternarcotics efforts, engaged in long-term planning, or established performance measures,” said the 63-page report, an audit of work done by the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

Among other things, the report found that the military and civilian lacked clear delineation of roles; that civilian contracts for counternarcotics work were poorly written and supervised from thousands of miles and many time zones away; and that the United States embassies in Afghanistan and Pakistan did not coordinate well on the problem.

The effectiveness of drug-control efforts is critical to President Obama plan for the Afghanistan war, which entails sending additional troops to Afghanistan.

The Taliban finance many of their operations through the illicit drug trade, forcing payments for the cultivation, processing and shipment of opium, and netting $70 million to $400 million a year, according to estimates from the U.S. Defense Department and the United Nations. Afghanistan produces roughly 90 percent of the world’s illicit opium.

The report calls it essential that the threat of eradicating that trade come from a force controlled by the Afghan government. But it adds that the State Department has no clear “strategy for transitioning and exiting from counternarcotics programs in Afghanistan.”

American officials have harshly criticized corruption in the government of President Hamid Karzai. Much of that, the officials say, has to do with officials’ enriching themselves from the flow of narcotics. Mr. Karzai has promised to prosecute people involved in the drug trade.

Despite what it says is a consensus that eradication of poppy crops is essential, the report notes that in midyear a decision was made to shift from eradication efforts to financing interdiction of drug traffickers.

While the United States military has begun engaging more heavily in counternarcotics efforts, the inspector general found that “there is no agreement on appropriate roles for either civilian agencies or the U.S. military.”

The report also found that while contractors performing counternarcotics work are generally meeting the terms of their contracts, those contracts are often “poorly written, with overly optimistic goals” and “vague performance measures.”

Partly because the United States Embassy in Kabul is shorthanded, there is no monitoring from inside the country of seven counternarcotics contracts valued at $1.8 billion, the report said. Instead, monitoring is conducted “many thousands of miles away in a different time zone.”

The report, initiated by the Middle East branch of the inspector general’s office, said coordination in the Kabul embassy of the various entities involved in antinarcotics efforts was “generally ad hoc and informal.”

Coordination between the American embassies in Kabul and Islamabad, it said, was “limited.”

It also listed the profound handicaps undercutting that effort, “including a weak justice system, corruption and the lack of political will” in the Afghan government, and the overpowering economic incentives that lead farmers to grow poppies.

Among other things, the report recommends setting “a defined end state” for counternarcotics programs; establishing benchmarks for the shift toward an Afghan takeover of those programs; and establishing in-country monitoring of contractors.

The report was based on meetings with embassy personnel in Kabul and Islamabad, visits to Kabul and four Afghan provinces, and meetings with United Nations, United States military and coalition government officials.

Hanoi Weighs Price Controls, Tightens Grip

Foreign Investors Grow Concerned as Conservative Factions in Vietnam Reverse Liberalization Trend Amid Downturn

By JAMES HOOKWAY

HANOI – Vietnam is considering putting price controls on a broad array of products and is cracking down on certain personal and political activity, in a sharp reversal of what has been a move toward more-open markets and a more-open society.

Foreign businesses worry about the threat of price controls—something many analysts consider a hallmark of Vietnam's Marxist past. That comes after authorities last month blocked access to Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, following cases in which several bloggers were detained, then released, on charges of criticizing the government. In October, nine people were given stiff sentences for calling for pro-democracy protests.

Carlyle Thayer, a veteran Vietnam watcher and professor at the Australian Defense Academy in Canberra, says conservative factions in the ruling Politburo are tightening their grip on the country as Vietnam's economic worries—especially inflation and fallout from currency devaluations—grow. He says he expects more crackdowns and arrests to come in the run-up to the country's 2011 Party Congress, a major political event that will aim to map out Vietnam's political and economic direction for the following five years.

In turn, the crackdowns threaten to curtail investment and economic growth in the country.

For years, foreign donors and investors hoped that rapid growth would lead to more political debate and economic freedom here, cementing the country's emergence as one of Asia's most dynamic new economies and an important link in the global supply chain.

That's what happened in some other fast-growing countries in the region. In the 1980s and 1990s, the strengthening economies of South Korea and Taiwan helped pro-democracy movements overcome military-backed regimes.

But in Vietnam, leaders seek a path to a quick expansion of the country's $100 billion economy without spurring any grass-roots clamor for more freedom.

Now, the price-control unit of Vietnam's Finance Ministry is drafting proposals that, if implemented by the government, would compel private and foreign-owned companies to report pricing structures, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal and corroborated by Vietnamese officials.

In some cases, the proposed rules would allow the government to set prices on a wide range of privately made or imported goods, including petroleum products, fertilizers and milk to help contain inflation as Vietnam continues pumping money into its volatile economy. Typically, the government applies this kind of aggressive measure only to state-owned businesses, and it is unclear whether Vietnam will write the wider rules into law.

Myron Brilliant, senior vice president for international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, wrote to Vietnamese officials, in a Dec. 15 letter viewed by The Wall Street Journal, saying the plan will "serve as a disincentive to new direct investment in Vietnam."

Vietnamese citizens, meanwhile, are having to give up some political and social freedoms they previously enjoyed, as their Communist leaders struggle with a series of currency devaluations and a worsening inflation problem.

Diplomats are raising their voices over Internet curbs. "This isn't about teenagers chatting online," U.S. Ambassador Michael Michalak told a donor conference on Dec. 3. "It's a question of people's rights to communicate with one another and to do business."

Swedish Ambassador Rolf Bergman, speaking on behalf of the European Union at the same conference, urged Vietnam "to lift all restrictions on the Internet."

Vietnamese government officials didn't respond to requests for comment, except to confirm the existence of the draft price-control plans.

Emerging economies have reversed course during times of crisis before. In Vietnam's neighborhood, both Malaysia and Thailand have used capital controls to stabilize currencies, while unexpected legal rulings are a frequent hazard to doing business in countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines.

Vietnam, a country of 86 million, was considered by many economists to be a surer bet with less political risk. Analysts called it "the new China," and major global names from America, Japan, and South Korea—including U.S. corporations such as Ford Motor Co., Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp.—were among those who set up operations there.

Now, Vietnam's worsening human-rights record is encouraging some important trade partners to shake off their previous reluctance to condemn the country, in part because they worry that rising international criticism could make it harder to expand trade ties there.

Many economists and analysts say the country's leaders are panicking over how quickly Vietnam is lurching from boom to bust and back again, and are taking drastic measures—politically and economically—to restore their grip on the country. The country's recent economic ups and downs have, says one long-time Vietnam-based analyst, "shaken the authorities' confidence in the notion that economic reform and opening is automatically good."

The contrast with the older Vietnam—the Vietnam that helped define the term "pioneer market" among investors—is striking. In the years leading up to Vietnam's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2007, the ruling Politburo attempted to put its best face to the world by appointing an economic reformer, Nguyen Tan Dung, as prime minister. It encouraged local media to expose corruption and fraud, while dissidents were given limited space to vent their criticism of Vietnam's one-party system. Religious groups were granted more freedom to practice their faiths.

At the same time, the economy quickly expanded, driven by foreign manufacturers who flocked to take advantage of Vietnam's low labor and land costs. Much of that economic story is still in place. The World Bank expects Vietnam's economy to expand 5.5% in 2009. That's a much better performance than many of its neighbors. Economists such as Ayumi Konishi, the Asian Development Bank's country director for Vietnam, say the country's long-term prospects are still rosy.

But the World Bank's growth forecast is weaker than the 8%-plus rates that Vietnam has come to depend on. Widening trade and budget deficits have forced the government to devalue its currency three times since June 2008, most recently in November, when it shaved 5% off the value of the Vietnamese dong. That move spurred fears of rising inflation, prompting a scramble among many Vietnamese to store their wealth in gold or dollars instead.

Professor Thayer, of the Australian Defense Academy, and other analysts note that leaders such as To Huy Rua, chief of the party's propaganda committee, and military intelligence chief Nguyen Chi Vinh, have become increasingly influential since Vietnam's economic problems began to set in last year, largely at the expense of Mr. Dung, the reform-minded prime minister. Mr. Rua is believed to be suspicious of free-market capitalism and critical of the country's transition toward a more open economy. Attempts to reach him weren't successful.

Similarly, analysts say key economic policy makers also harbor a strong conservative streak, and observe that the country has halted economic reforms before, notably during Asia's 1990s financial crisis. People familiar with the price-controls issue say a number of diplomatic missions, including that of the U.S., have raised the price-cap issue with Vietnam. Officials at the U.S. embassy in Hanoi didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

The biggest losers in Vietnam's step back into the past, are the country's dissidents, journalists and bloggers. Several bloggers and activists were detained for writing comments critical of Vietnam's encouragement of Chinese companies to mine for aluminum ore in the country's central highlands region. The mining plan has become a lightning rod for various dissident groups in Vietnam, and opponents include war hero Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who led Vietnamese forces against French and U.S. troops in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

Some detainees were released after promising not to raise political issues again, but lawyer Le Cong Dinh was arrested in June for defending antigovernment activists.

Six people were sentenced on Oct. 9 for allegedly "conducting propaganda against the state" for demanding multiparty elections online and through public gestures, such as hanging banners on bridges. They included a prominent novelist, Nguyen Xuan Nghia.

On Oct 7, three other people were jailed for the same offense—something the U.S. embassy in a statement said it found "deeply disturbing."

Write to James Hookway at james.hookway@wsj.com

From Guantánamo to Desk at AlJazeera

Image via Wikipedia

By BRIAN STELTER

Of the 779 known detainees who have been held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — terrorism suspects, sympathizers of Al Qaeda, people deemed enemy combatants by the United States military — only one was a journalist.

The journalist, Sami al-Hajj, was working for Al Jazeera as a cameraman when he was stopped by Pakistani forces on the border with Afghanistan in late 2001. The United States military accused Mr. Hajj of, among other things, falsifying documents and delivering money to Chechen rebels, although he was never charged with a crime during his years in custody.

Now, more than a year after his release, Mr. Hajj, a 40-year-old native of Sudan, is back at work at the Arabic satellite news network, leading a new desk devoted to human rights and public liberties. The captive has become the correspondent.

“I wanted to talk for seven years, to make up for the seven years of silence,” Mr. Hajj said through an interpreter during an interview at the network’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

Among Al Jazeera’s viewers in the Arab world since the 9/11 attacks, perhaps nothing has damaged perceptions of America more than Guantánamo Bay. For that reason, Mr. Hajj, who did a six-part series on the prison after his release, is a potent weapon for the network, which does not always strive for journalistic objectivity on the subject of his treatment. In an interview, Ahmed Sheikh, the editor in chief of Al Jazeera, called Mr. Hajj “one of the victims of the human rights atrocities committed by the ex-U.S. administration.”

But Mr. Hajj has not restricted himself to Guantánamo and his own incarceration. He has expanded the network’s coverage of other rights issues, including press freedom in Iraq, Palestinians in Israeli prisons and the implications of the USA Patriot Act. On a Wednesday morning in mid-August, Mr. Hajj pushed Al Jazeera’s news desk to cover a hunger strike by political prisoners in Jordan, and he happily pointed to a nearby television when the Jordan news scrolled on the bottom of the screen.

Nor has his experience radicalized him: he said that, despite his upbringing in a violent and often repressive country and his experience in detention, he maintained a sustaining belief in democracy and the rule of law.

Terry Anderson, an Associated Press correspondent who was detained in Lebanon from 1985 to 1991 by Islamic fundamentalists, said he could understand Mr. Hajj’s chosen assignment.

“In prison, what do you do? You think about your life. You think about what you were doing, and how it led you here,” Mr. Anderson said.

Mr. Hajj’s story is well known to Al Jazeera viewers, but not to most Americans. (As with the experiences of many detainees at Guantánamo Bay, his version is uncorroborated by American officials or any documents.) After working at a beverage company and then trying to start a business in Azerbaijan, he began working as a cameraman for Al Jazeera in 2000. He was captured on Dec. 15, 2001, trying to cross the border back into Afghanistan with his camera and a correspondent.

He later came to believe that the Americans were seeking another Al Jazeera cameraman, one with a similar name who had recorded an interview with Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 attacks.

After being detained by local authorities in Pakistan, Mr. Hajj was transferred into American custody and, he says, tortured and beaten at a prison at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. He was moved to Kandahar and then transported to Guantánamo Bay in mid-2002. Looking back, he says he thinks that he was sent there in part because he was a journalist.

“I had seen a lot of things that I shouldn’t have seen,” he said, citing the treatment of prisoners at Bagram in particular. Mr. Hajj claims that in lengthy interrogations he was asked for details of the network’s staff, policies and processes and that some guards started calling him “Al Jazeera” as a nickname.

He said an interrogator once asked him, “How much does bin Laden pay Al Jazeera for all the propaganda that Al Jazeera supplies?”

“You’re asking the wrong question,” he replied, emphasizing that bin Laden was not a propaganda partner of Al Jazeera, “he’s a newsmaker.”

In American custody, he tried to keep practicing journalism, he said, writing eyewitness accounts for his lawyers and family members, interpreting fellow detainees’ stories of abuse and even making drawings of forced feedings during a hunger strike.

“I felt that I needed to document this for history,” he said, “so that the next generation knows the depth of the crime that was committed.” He audibly emphasized the Arabic word for depth as he spoke.

During the interview, Mr. Hajj displayed a deep wound on his left leg, which he said he suffered when he was pinned against cell bars during a beating at Guantánamo. He reiterated that the emotional trauma was more extensive than the physical; he says he continues to see psychotherapists.

Asked about questioning about Al Jazeera, a Pentagon spokesman said members of the media “are not targeted by U.S. forces, but there is no special category that gives members of media organizations immunity if captured engaging in suspicious, terror-related activity.” The spokesman added that all detainees were treated humanely while in custody.

According to Zachary Katznelson, the legal director for Reprieve, a human rights group that represented Mr. Hajj, the allegations changed over the years: “First, he was alleged to have filmed an interview of Osama bin Laden. It was another cameraman. So, that allegation disappeared. Then the U.S. said Sami ran a jihadist Web site. Turns out, there was no such site. So that allegation disappeared. Then, the U.S. said Sami was in Afghanistan to arrange missile sales to Chechen rebels. There was no evidence to back that up at all. So that allegation disappeared.”

Mr. Hajj’s release, back to Sudan on a stretcher, came in May 2008 after lobbying by human rights groups and the government of Sudan. The Pentagon spokesman said Mr. Hajj’s release to Sudan “indicated our belief that the government of Sudan could effectively mitigate the threat posed” by him.

Since his release, he has put on weight and honed his rhetoric. He splits his time between Al Jazeera and the Guantánamo Justice Center, a group he co-founded for former detainees. Through the center he is helping to prepare legal action against former President George W. Bush and officials of his administration.

Even during a translated interview, he remained keenly sensitive to language, calling the detainees at Guantánamo “captives,” to call attention to what he says is a “place outside of law.”

When a visitor mentioned “enhanced interrogation techniques,” an American term that characterizes harsh treatment of detainees, Mr. Hajj interrupted the interpreter and said, in Arabic, “instead of torture?”

“We are giving the wrong impression” with that term, he said. “We as journalists are violating human rights because we are changing the perception of reality.”

Oddly, while in a prison sanctioned by American authorities, Mr. Hajj put his faith in the American political system. He gathered bits of news from the guards and, leading up to the 2004 election, was sure that American voters would reject Mr. Bush, which would lead to his freedom. When the guards informed him that the president had been re-elected, he was stunned.

“I was sure I would outlive Bush,” he said.

Kyrgyz President Blamed in Homicide

Image via Wikipedia

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW — A prominent opposition journalist in Kyrgyzstan, whose autocratic president has been courted by the United States as an ally for the war in Afghanistan, died on Tuesday after being thrown last week from a sixth-story window, his arms and legs bound with duct tape.

The journalist, Gennadi Pavlyuk, was on a business trip in Almaty, the commercial capital of neighboring Kazakhstan, when he was attacked on Dec. 16, the authorities said. He was in a coma before dying of severe trauma on Tuesday. His colleagues said he was 40 years old, with a wife and son.

Opposition politicians in Kyrgyzstan blamed the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, for the killing, saying that he was escalating his efforts to eliminate dissent in the country. Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman said the government had nothing to do with the attack on Mr. Pavlyuk.

Since taking power in 2005, Mr. Bakiyev has steadily tightened his grip on Kyrgyzstan, a poor former Soviet republic in the mountains of Central Asia, and in recent years, numerous opposition leaders and journalists have been attacked. Some have died, and rarely if ever has anyone been held accountable.

In just the last few weeks, a well-known political scientist, a former senior official and a journalist were severely beaten in Kyrgyzstan. They all attributed the attacks to the security services, according to local news media.

While human rights groups have assailed Mr. Bakiyev, the United States has largely focused on maintaining good relations with him in order to keep an important air base on the outskirts of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, that supports NATO’s mission in Afghanistan.

Mr. Bakiyev announced in February that he would evict the United States from the base. After intensive lobbying by the Obama administration, he reversed course in June, in return for additional rent and other concessions.

In July, Mr. Bakiyev easily won another term as president in an election that international monitors said was marred by widespread fraud.

Investigators in Kazakhstan said Mr. Pavlyuk arrived in Almaty on Dec. 16 and checked into a hotel before leaving with an unidentified man. Two hours later, he was pushed out the sixth-floor window of a rented apartment in a residential building, landing on a first-floor canopy.

A roll of the duct tape that had been used to bind his hands and legs was found in the apartment.

Mr. Pavlyuk was the former chief editor of the Bishkek edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a major Russian tabloid newspaper based in Moscow.

Over the last year, he had become more politically active, working closely with Omurbek Tekebaev, a former speaker of the Kyrgyz Parliament who is a senior opposition leader.

To support Mr. Tekebaev’s party, Mr. Pavlyuk was planning a new opposition Web site.

Mr. Tekebaev said in a telephone interview that he had no doubt that the Kyrgyz government had ordered Mr. Pavlyuk killed because he had become more outspoken against the president. Mr. Tekebaev said the Kyrgyz security services often lured people to nearby countries and killed them.

“They do that to avoid suspicion. They do their activities outside of Kyrgyzstan,” Mr. Tekebaev said. “This is not the first time that this has happened abroad to a member of the opposition. We believe that this was a political killing directed at intimidating the news media. It is an attempt at frightening society.”

Almaz Turdumamatov, Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman, said he hoped that the police in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan would conduct a thorough inquiry and bring the culprits to justice.

“The murder of any person, whether a journalist or not, concerns us,” Mr. Turdumamatov said. “Who is responsible for this must be determined by the investigators.”

Asked about the opposition’s allegations that its supporters were being persecuted, he said: “It is unfortunate that this killing happened. But it is wrong to say that this was connected to any kind of political motivation.”

In an interview in July at the presidential residence, Mr. Bakiyev suggested that journalists who had been attacked might have been involved in shady dealings or were perhaps just unlucky.

“Sometimes, things happen by chance,” Mr. Bakiyev said. “For it to have been purposeful from a political point of view, that sort of politics doesn’t exist here.”

Daniil Kislov, chief editor of Ferghana.ru, a Web site based in Moscow that covers Central Asia, said Mr. Pavlyuk’s killing had shocked journalists in the region because it was so brazen, as if it were an organized crime hit.

Mr. Kislov said the killing reminded him of the slaying of another Kyrgyz journalist, Alisher Saipov, who contributed to Ferghana.ru and the Voice of America. Mr. Saipov was shot to death in 2007 while waiting for a taxi in a Kyrgyz city. No one has been arrested in the case.

“These killings are being done by people who are absolutely convinced that they will never be caught and never be punished,” Mr. Kislov said.

Mr. Pavlyuk was chief editor for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Bishkek in 2006 and 2007, said the newspaper’s current chief editor, Aleksandr Rogoza.

Mr. Rogoza said Mr. Pavlyuk had a lifelong affection for Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, which is famous for its beauty and is one of the largest mountain lakes in the world.

“He wrote a lot about the lake,” Mr. Rogoza said. “He built a house there, and he spent a lot of time there. He just loved that place.”

Liu Xiaobo: China's top pro-democracy dissident goes on trial

The trial of leading Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo for 'state subversion' lasted just a few hours Wednesday as supporters and diplomats barred from attending thronged the courtroom in near-freezing cold. A verdict is expected Friday.

By Jonathan Landreth Correspondent
posted December 23, 2009 at 6:13 am EST

Beijing —

The subversion trial of Liu Xiaobo, China's most prominent dissident, opened and shut in Beijing on Wednesday in strict secrecy without an immediate outcome. The verdict is now expected to be postponed until Christmas Day.

The delay and the degree of secrecy – even Mr. Liu’s wife was barred from the courtroom – contrast sharply with the widespread international attention that the case against the Tiananmen-era pro-democracy activist has drawn.

It is "quite unusual" for a Chinese criminal trial to be left hanging this way, said Teng Biao, a prominent human rights lawyer and one of 60 people who stood outside the courtroom Wednesday in near-freezing temperatures before he and seven others were removed by plainclothes police. “Although I cannot predict the outcome, it is very likely that Liu Xiaobo will be guilty and imprisoned for at least five years under Chinese criminal law," he told The Monitor by telephone.

Liu's attorney Ding Xikui, speaking to The Monitor by telephone in defiance of a court order barring press interviews after he left the roughly three-hour morning trial, said the court would announce a verdict on Friday.

Held for a year without trial

Liu faces up to 15 years in prison, the maximum sentence for "incitement to subvert state power," a catchall charge often used by Chinese prosecutors to silence critics of the one-party government.

The essayist and literary critic was detained on Dec. 8, 2008, apparently for his role in drafting "Charter 08," a call for greater democracy in China. The charter, initially signed by 300 people, was published on the Internet two days later to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It has since attracted more than 10,000 signatures, mostly from mainland Chinese.

Meanwhile, Liu was held in a secret location for six months, then formally arrested and transferred to Beijing's Detention Center No.1.

During Wednesday's trial, about 30 supporters hung up and handed out yellow ribbons of support outside the court. Another 30 onlookers, including about a dozen Western diplomats and 50 police, stood by watching, according to eyewitness accounts.

The defendant's brother-in-law, Liu Hui, who was allowed into the courtroom, told The Associated Press that prosecutors had charged Liu Xiaobo with crimes they called "serious."

"Absolutely not," says Teng of the charges against Liu. "His actions, including the organization of Charter 08 and his publishing essays and articles, all deserve constitutional protection, but the Chinese government is used to putting the outspoken away."

US Embassy political officer Gregory May, barred from the courtroom, told reporters sequestered outside that Washington called on Beijing to release Liu "immediately" and "to respect the rights of all Chinese citizens to peacefully express their political views."

Signs of support proliferate

Liu, a former university professor and an outspoken critic of the government, previously spent two years in prison for his role during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and three years in a "reeducation through labor" camp for challenging one-party rule in Web postings.

The decision by Chinese authorities to bring Liu to trial defied international condemnation and drew protests from leading authors, including Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, and Wole Soyinka.

Though Liu's supporters outside the courthouse had their yellow ribbons taken away by police, followers of the trial using the social networking site Twitter added yellow ribbons to their online profile pictures.

"There are more and more and Chinese people participating in the defense of human rights, but since there's no judicial independence, if the Chinese government wants to continue its persecution, it can,” says Teng. “There is little we can do but continue our work.”

– Wang Ping contributed reporting.

New East-West Center Publications (free, pdfs)

Image by wertheim via Flickr

Repression and Punishment in North Korea: Survey Evidence of Prison Camp Experiences, by Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland. October 2009.
Japan's Approach to Building Peace: A Critical Appraisal and the Way Forward, by Kuniko Ashizawa. December 16, 2009.
The Cambodia-Thailand Conflict: A Test for ASEAN, by Sokbunthoeun So. December 10, 2009.
The Democratic Party of Japan and North Korea Policy, by Yoichiro Sato. November 16, 2009.

Repression and Punishment in North Korea: Survey Evidence of Prison Camp Experiences, by Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland. East-West Center Working Papers, Politics, Governance, and Security Series, No. 20. Honolulu: East-West Center, October 2009. 39 pp. Paper, $3.00.

The penal system has played a central role in the North Korean government's response to the country's profound economic and social changes. Two refugee surveys--one conducted in China, one in South Korea--document its changing role. The regime disproportionately targets politically suspect groups, particularly those involved in market-oriented economic activities. Levels of violence and deprivation do not appear to differ substantially between the infamous political prison camps, penitentiaries for felons, and labor camps used to incarcerate individuals for misdemeanors, including economic crimes. Substantial numbers of those incarcerated report experiencing deprivation with respect to food as well as public executions and other forms of violence. This repression appears to work; despite substantial cynicism about the North Korean system, refugees do not report signs of collective action aimed at confronting the regime.

Such a system may also reflect ulterior motives. High levels of discretion with respect to arrest and sentencing and very high costs of detention, arrest and incarceration encourage bribery; the more arbitrary and painful the experience with the penal system, the easier it is for officials to extort money for avoiding it. These characteristics not only promote regime maintenance through intimidation, but may facilitate predatory corruption as well.

Image by Akoaraisin via Flickr

Japan's Approach to Building Peace: A Critical Appraisal and the Way Forward, by Kuniko Ashizawa. Asia Pacific Bulletin, No. 45. Washington, D.C.: East-West Center in Washington, December 16, 2009. 2 pp. Electronic.

On the eve of President Obama's first visit to Asia in early November 2009, the new Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)-led government announced a new assistance package to Afghanistan amounting to US$5 billion over the next five years to support reconstruction and stabilization. This new package will, in effect, quadruple Japan's annual assistance, making it the second largest financial contributor to Afghanistan's reconstruction among individual donor states after the United States. Kuniko Ashizawa describes Japan's approach to peacebuilding in Afghanistan and other areas of conflict.

The Cambodia-Thailand Conflict: A Test for ASEAN, by Sokbunthoeun So. Asia Pacific Bulletin, No. 44. Washington, D.C.: East-West Center in Washington, December 10, 2009. 2 pp. Electronic.

The current conflict between Cambodia and Thailand, both members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), provides a test case for ASEAN to act as a key player in resolving disputes among its members. A failure by ASEAN to do so would reduce its credibility and impede the realization of an ASEAN community by 2015. Sokbunthoeun So discusses the Cambodian-Thai conflict and the implications for ASEAN.

Image by Akoaraisin via Flickr

The Democratic Party of Japan and North Korea Policy, by Yoichiro Sato. Asia Pacific Bulletin, No. 43. Washington, D.C.: East-West Center in Washington, November 16, 2009. 2 pp. Electronic.

When President Obama met Prime Minister Hatoyama of Japan in November 2009, a variety of contentious bilateral issues were on the table. However, despite divergence between the two countries on the military base issues in Okinawa and disagreement over Japan's emphasis on building an East Asian Community, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) government will stay closely aligned with the United States in terms of its basic North Korea policy. Yoichiro Sato discusses the new Japanese government's policy toward North Korea.

Backlist of recent titles in the Asia Pacific Bulletin publication series:

The United States-Indonesia Comprehensive Partnership and the New Yudhoyono Administration, by Thomas B. Pepinsky. Asia Pacific Bulletin, No. 42. Washington, D.C.: East-West Center in Washington, August 17, 2009. 2 pp. Electronic.

Bill Clinton in North Korea: Winners and Losers, by Denny Roy. Asia Pacific Bulletin, No. 41. Washington, D.C.: East-West Center in Washington, August 11, 2009. 2 pp. Electronic.

The ASEAN Inter-Governmental Commission on Human Rights and Beyond, by Hao Duy Phan. Asia Pacific Bulletin, No. 40. Washington, D.C.: East-West Center in Washington, July 20, 2009. 2 pp. Electronic.

Dec 22, 2009

After Expelling Uighurs, Cambodia Approves Chinese Investments

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By SETH MYDANS

BANGKOK — China signed 14 deals with Cambodia on Monday worth approximately $1 billion, two days after Cambodia deported 20 ethnic Uighur asylum seekers under strong pressure from Beijing.

The deportation, in defiance of protests by the United States, the United Nations and human rights groups, came on the day before a visit to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, by Vice President Xi Jinping of China.

The package of grants and loans was signed at the end of Mr. Xi’s visit. The Cambodian Foreign Ministry quoted Mr. Xi as saying: “It can be said that Sino-Cambodia relations are a model of friendly cooperation.”

The exact value of the agreements was not announced, but the chief government spokesman, Khieu Kanharith, said they were worth $1.2 billion. “China has thanked the government of Cambodia for assisting in sending back these people,” he said. “According to Chinese law, these people are criminals.”

Members of a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority living mostly in western China, the 20 Uighurs said they were fleeing persecution in a crackdown that followed riots in which the Chinese government said at least 197 people were killed.

Hundreds of Uighurs have been detained since then and several people have been executed for involvement in the rioting. At least 43 Uighur men have disappeared, according to Human Rights Watch.

Image by Stuck in Customs via Flickr

Twenty-two Uighurs entered Cambodia about a month ago, aided by a Christian group that has helped North Koreans fleeing their country. Two of the Uighurs have disappeared, the Cambodian government said.

Before being deported, several of the asylum seekers told the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Cambodia that they feared long jail terms or even the death penalty, according to statements reported by The Associated Press. In the statements, which had been provided to the United Nations in support of asylum applications, the Uighurs described chaotic and bloody scenes during the rioting.

“If I am returned to China, I am sure that I will be sentenced to life imprisonment or the death penalty for my involvement in the Urumqi riots,” said a 29-year-old man.

Another man, a 27-year-old teacher, said: “I can tell the world what is happening to Uighur people, and the Chinese authorities do not want this. If returned, I am certain I would be sent to prison.”

China is Cambodia’s leading investor, committing hundreds of millions of dollars for projects including dams, roads and a headquarters for the government Council of Ministers in Phnom Penh. In October, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China met Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, in Sichuan, China, and concluded a deal worth $853 million.