 | NAIROBI, 29 October 2012 (IRIN) - Any hopes for an imminent end to conflict in Ethiopia's Somali region were dashed earlier this month when talks between the government and the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) broke down. |
Oct 29, 2012
Briefing: Ethiopia's ONLF rebellion
Briefing: Ethiopia's ONLF rebellion:
Not guilty plea filed for Philippines' Arroyo
Not guilty plea filed for Philippines' Arroyo: Judge acts on ex-president's behalf after she refuses to enter plea on charges of misusing $8.8m in state lottery funds.
France arrests 'top ETA leader'
France arrests 'top ETA leader': Izaskun Lesaka detained in Macon after being on the run since 2005 for her alleged role in the Basque separatist group.
Hollywood Seeks to Slow Cultural Shift to TV - NYTimes.com
Hollywood Seeks to Slow Cultural Shift to TV - NYTimes.com
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Black Churches in Florida Urge Congregations to Vote - NYTimes.com
Black Churches in Florida Urge Congregations to Vote - NYTimes.com
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Billionaires Going Rogue - NYTimes.com
Billionaires Going Rogue - NYTimes.com
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Behind Scenes, Rifts in South Africa's ANC - WSJ.com
Behind Scenes, Rifts in South Africa's ANC - WSJ.com
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Travel Plans Thrown Into a Tailspin - WSJ.com
Travel Plans Thrown Into a Tailspin - WSJ.com
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More People Opt Not to Work Anymore - WSJ.com
More People Opt Not to Work Anymore - WSJ.com
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The Dating Game Gets Partisan, With Politics a Deal Breaker - WSJ.com
The Dating Game Gets Partisan, With Politics a Deal Breaker - WSJ.com
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Hurricane Sandy Bears Down on East Coast - WSJ.com
Hurricane Sandy Bears Down on East Coast - WSJ.com
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Map of Election Issues in 2012 – State of the Race – WSJ.com
Map of Election Issues in 2012 – State of the Race – WSJ.com
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2012 Election Polls - Presidential Race
2012 Election Polls - Presidential Race
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Europe's Crisis Spawns Calls for a Breakup—of Spain - WSJ.com
Europe's Crisis Spawns Calls for a Breakup—of Spain - WSJ.com
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Historians: Romney Makes Nixon Look Like An Open Book
Historians: Romney Makes Nixon Look Like An Open Book: 
Because he's refused to release more than two years of tax returns, and has rooted his entire campaign in tax, spending, and economic growth plans that lack critical details and defy logical scrutiny, Mitt Romney's critics, starting with senior Obama advisers, have assailed him as the least transparent candidate since Richard Nixon.
It's a catchy attack -- one that recalls not just Nixon's candidacies, but his scandal-plagued presidency and ignominious resignation. Which is no doubt why "least transparent candidate since Nixon" has become one of Chicago's favorite phrases.
But setting aside the Obama campaign's partisan desire to make voters think of Watergate when they hear the name Mitt Romney, there's something to the notion that Romney is unusually opaque compared to presidential candidates in the modern era, according to some presidential historians.
"I think the comparison to Nixon is not a very good one, because ... Nixon may have been a shadier character in some respects -- the Southern strategy, laundering campaign money -- but he abided by the norms of the time in terms of disclosure," said Norm Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute.
Candidates in earlier decades inhabited different political cultures, faced different pressures and different media. In some ways, those differences have made it harder for Romney to get by on a purely superficial appeal to voters. But Ornstein said despite new challenges, Romney stands alone as the least-known quantity to be within grasping distance of the White House in the modern era.
"I think there's nobody like Romney," Ornstein. "Romney is like the Michael Phelps of presidential candidates. if you're looking for gold medals in terms of audacious lying, and adamant refusal to turn over personal information, nobody comes close. I'm sure others would've liked to have done it, but the culture in the past was one where lying attracted some level of approbation and shame."
To Bruce Buchanan, a presidential historian at the University of Texas at Austin, Romney's drawn attention to himself in a unique way.
"Just the fact of avoiding specifics is not all that unusual," he said. "The fact of doing it in the context of claims that other analysts conclude don't add up and not being willing to address those concerns, is a little less common in my memory at least."
Romney's fiscal policies remind Buchanan of Nixon's 1968 campaign, in which he pledged to end the war in Vietnam without providing details -- what came to be known as his "secret plan." Likewise, after winning his first election in 1980 on fairly specific pledges to reduce deficits, cut social programs, and increase defense spending, Ronald Reagan glided to re-election in 1984 largely on the winds of an improving economy.
"In the second campaign it was all gauzy," Buchanan said.
But that was after Reagan, like Obama, had amassed a four-year record.
"Not many have been as under as much scrutiny as Romney because he's saying he can do things that on the face of it seem illogical and un-doable, and that creates more pressure on him to provide specifics," Buchanan said. "That's what's different about Romney."
Of course, the history of presidential politics is littered with candidates who understood the perils of getting too specific.
Not all historians place Romney in historically uncharted territory.
"I feel that Romney has disclosed a bit less than usual, but again, I'm not sure we are in unprecedented territory," says Edward Widmer, a historian and one time speechwriter for Bill Clinton. "You mention Nixon's secret plan for Vietnam was an interesting example of a vague promise that sounded good, without many details offered. Eisenhower also hit a good way of talking about the Korean War in 1952 when he simply said, 'I will go to Korea,' though no one knew exactly what that meant."
To Widmer's point, Romney is by no means the first to run on unrealistic fiscal plans.
"You could go back to a bunch of candidates talking about tax cuts bringing in more revenue," Ornstein said. "I think George W. Bush is pretty close to the top of that list. I suppose you can talk about Lyndon Johnson campaigning on 'guns and butter'" -- the idea that Vietnam War costs didn't have to be offset with higher taxes or cuts to domestic spending.
"But they don't come close to Romney," Ornstein added.
Romney's been pretty candid -- to friendly sources -- about why he's been so platitudinous.
"One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don't care about education," Romney told the conservative Weekly Standard in April. "So I think it's important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies....but I'm not going to give you a list right now."
"I can't remember anyone being that bald faced on it off the top of my head," Buchanan told me. "I suspect it was like that 47 percent comment -- it wasn't intended for a wide audience. It just got picked up and reported."
The other side of the coin is that Romney's life story -- his youth, his early career, his governorship, if not his finances -- are plain to everybody in a way that wasn't possible half a century ago.
"I will say that from a historical perspective, Romney is an open book," says H.W. Brands, also a presidential historian at UT Austin. "All candidates these days are. Not as open, perhaps, as the media would wish. They, for understandable reasons, want everything. But we know a whole lot more about Romney than about, say, John Kennedy."
Because he's refused to release more than two years of tax returns, and has rooted his entire campaign in tax, spending, and economic growth plans that lack critical details and defy logical scrutiny, Mitt Romney's critics, starting with senior Obama advisers, have assailed him as the least transparent candidate since Richard Nixon.
It's a catchy attack -- one that recalls not just Nixon's candidacies, but his scandal-plagued presidency and ignominious resignation. Which is no doubt why "least transparent candidate since Nixon" has become one of Chicago's favorite phrases.
But setting aside the Obama campaign's partisan desire to make voters think of Watergate when they hear the name Mitt Romney, there's something to the notion that Romney is unusually opaque compared to presidential candidates in the modern era, according to some presidential historians.
"I think the comparison to Nixon is not a very good one, because ... Nixon may have been a shadier character in some respects -- the Southern strategy, laundering campaign money -- but he abided by the norms of the time in terms of disclosure," said Norm Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute.
Candidates in earlier decades inhabited different political cultures, faced different pressures and different media. In some ways, those differences have made it harder for Romney to get by on a purely superficial appeal to voters. But Ornstein said despite new challenges, Romney stands alone as the least-known quantity to be within grasping distance of the White House in the modern era.
"I think there's nobody like Romney," Ornstein. "Romney is like the Michael Phelps of presidential candidates. if you're looking for gold medals in terms of audacious lying, and adamant refusal to turn over personal information, nobody comes close. I'm sure others would've liked to have done it, but the culture in the past was one where lying attracted some level of approbation and shame."
To Bruce Buchanan, a presidential historian at the University of Texas at Austin, Romney's drawn attention to himself in a unique way.
"Just the fact of avoiding specifics is not all that unusual," he said. "The fact of doing it in the context of claims that other analysts conclude don't add up and not being willing to address those concerns, is a little less common in my memory at least."
Romney's fiscal policies remind Buchanan of Nixon's 1968 campaign, in which he pledged to end the war in Vietnam without providing details -- what came to be known as his "secret plan." Likewise, after winning his first election in 1980 on fairly specific pledges to reduce deficits, cut social programs, and increase defense spending, Ronald Reagan glided to re-election in 1984 largely on the winds of an improving economy.
"In the second campaign it was all gauzy," Buchanan said.
But that was after Reagan, like Obama, had amassed a four-year record.
"Not many have been as under as much scrutiny as Romney because he's saying he can do things that on the face of it seem illogical and un-doable, and that creates more pressure on him to provide specifics," Buchanan said. "That's what's different about Romney."
Of course, the history of presidential politics is littered with candidates who understood the perils of getting too specific.
Not all historians place Romney in historically uncharted territory.
"I feel that Romney has disclosed a bit less than usual, but again, I'm not sure we are in unprecedented territory," says Edward Widmer, a historian and one time speechwriter for Bill Clinton. "You mention Nixon's secret plan for Vietnam was an interesting example of a vague promise that sounded good, without many details offered. Eisenhower also hit a good way of talking about the Korean War in 1952 when he simply said, 'I will go to Korea,' though no one knew exactly what that meant."
To Widmer's point, Romney is by no means the first to run on unrealistic fiscal plans.
"You could go back to a bunch of candidates talking about tax cuts bringing in more revenue," Ornstein said. "I think George W. Bush is pretty close to the top of that list. I suppose you can talk about Lyndon Johnson campaigning on 'guns and butter'" -- the idea that Vietnam War costs didn't have to be offset with higher taxes or cuts to domestic spending.
"But they don't come close to Romney," Ornstein added.
Romney's been pretty candid -- to friendly sources -- about why he's been so platitudinous.
"One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don't care about education," Romney told the conservative Weekly Standard in April. "So I think it's important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies....but I'm not going to give you a list right now."
"I can't remember anyone being that bald faced on it off the top of my head," Buchanan told me. "I suspect it was like that 47 percent comment -- it wasn't intended for a wide audience. It just got picked up and reported."
The other side of the coin is that Romney's life story -- his youth, his early career, his governorship, if not his finances -- are plain to everybody in a way that wasn't possible half a century ago.
"I will say that from a historical perspective, Romney is an open book," says H.W. Brands, also a presidential historian at UT Austin. "All candidates these days are. Not as open, perhaps, as the media would wish. They, for understandable reasons, want everything. But we know a whole lot more about Romney than about, say, John Kennedy."
Bill Clinton: Romney Is Running To Steal Credit For Obama's Recovery
Bill Clinton: Romney Is Running To Steal Credit For Obama's Recovery: 
Former President Bill Clinton told an Orlando, Fla., audience that Mitt Romney's vague economic plan is part of a scheme to get elected, then steal credit for a President Obama's coming recovery.
Clinton cited recent reports that top economists and financial firms are predicting a strong boost to growth soon, likely matching Romney's current pledge to create 12 million jobs over the next four years, whether or not he's elected.
According to Clinton, America is looking at 4 percent GDP growth soon, double the current rate, as long as "we don't mess it up." The danger then is that Romney will win the election then "cut taxes for wealthy people," "gut the Medicaid program," slash aid to education and scientific research, then claim these policies as the reason an already inevitable short term bump occurred in his first term.
Despite the brief gains, Romney will "take the future out" of the budget, Clinton said, undoing Obama's hard-fought efforts to put the country on a path to more solid gains. That means the president's work navigating the country through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression will be forgotten: "[Obama] won't even get the credit, because [Romney] want[s] to get credit for the 12 million jobs that Obama laid the foundation for."
"Let's give the job to the man who's done the job so he can finish the job," Clinton concluded. "Four more years!"
Obama himself was originally scheduled to attend the rally with Clinton, but had to cancel the trip along with several other campaign events to monitor Hurricane Sandy.
Update: Romney campaign spokesman Ryan Williams responded to Clinton's speech:
Former President Bill Clinton told an Orlando, Fla., audience that Mitt Romney's vague economic plan is part of a scheme to get elected, then steal credit for a President Obama's coming recovery.
Clinton cited recent reports that top economists and financial firms are predicting a strong boost to growth soon, likely matching Romney's current pledge to create 12 million jobs over the next four years, whether or not he's elected.
According to Clinton, America is looking at 4 percent GDP growth soon, double the current rate, as long as "we don't mess it up." The danger then is that Romney will win the election then "cut taxes for wealthy people," "gut the Medicaid program," slash aid to education and scientific research, then claim these policies as the reason an already inevitable short term bump occurred in his first term.
Despite the brief gains, Romney will "take the future out" of the budget, Clinton said, undoing Obama's hard-fought efforts to put the country on a path to more solid gains. That means the president's work navigating the country through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression will be forgotten: "[Obama] won't even get the credit, because [Romney] want[s] to get credit for the 12 million jobs that Obama laid the foundation for."
"Let's give the job to the man who's done the job so he can finish the job," Clinton concluded. "Four more years!"
Obama himself was originally scheduled to attend the rally with Clinton, but had to cancel the trip along with several other campaign events to monitor Hurricane Sandy.
Update: Romney campaign spokesman Ryan Williams responded to Clinton's speech:
"As President Obama falls behind in Florida, his flailing campaign is doubling down on false and discredited attacks. Florida voters know that if the President is reelected, our national debt will climb to $20 trillion, Medicare will be cut by $716 billion, and millions of middle-class families will be hit with tax increases. We can't afford four more years like the last four years. Mitt Romney is offering real change for a real recovery, with 12 million new jobs, rising incomes, and a stronger middle class. On November 6, Floridians and voters across the country will choose his positive agenda over President Obama's increasingly desperate attacks."
Misleading Romney Auto Ad Backfires With Media
Misleading Romney Auto Ad Backfires With Media: 
Mitt Romney's final attempt to swing Ohio polls in his direction is a bit too much for a number of political reporters, and is now facing an aggressive response from the Obama campaign.
In news articles, tweets, and other media, members of the national press, usually reluctant to criticize campaigns directly, have taken Romney to task for running a misleading TV ad creating the false impression that Jeep will ship jobs to China because of President Obama's auto rescue.
"Mitt Romney's campaign has released an ad in Ohio that says he -- and not President Barack Obama -- will do more to help the auto industry, even though Obama's administration is widely credited with helping to turn around General Motors and Chrysler when they faced collapse," writes the Detroit Free Press in an article titled 'Romney takes heat for new ad on jobs, auto rescue'. "In the ad, the Romney campaign also says that Jeep, now owned by Italian automaker Fiat after going through a structured bankruptcy in 2009, is going to make cars in China. While true, that production would represent an expansion or return of jobs to China for Chrysler, not a transfer of North American jobs. It also is a move that analysts say could improve the brand's global standing."
"Romney Ad Wrongly Implies Chrysler Is Sending U.S. Jobs To China," reads a National Journal headline.
The sense that the Romney ad breached already lax standards for honesty in campaign ads was particularly evident on Twitter Sunday afternoon and evening, when many reporters first took note of it, after it began airing in Ohio without public notice.
National Journal's Ron Fournier said there was no sound defense for the Romney ad.
Politico's Ben White tweeted "Wait, not only did Romney camp not back off the erroneous Jeep to China canard, they made an ad out of it? My god"
Chrysler, the company that manufactures Jeep, felt the need to respond publicly that, no, Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its models out of North America to China.
"There are times when the reading of a newswire report generates storms originated by a biased or predisposed approach," Jeep wrote on its official blog.
The Obama campaign has dispatched former auto adviser Steve Rattner to debunk the ad, both in Ohio and nationally. A campaign official tells TPM that Rattner will host a conference call to address the Romney ad with reporters on Monday.
Mitt Romney's final attempt to swing Ohio polls in his direction is a bit too much for a number of political reporters, and is now facing an aggressive response from the Obama campaign.
In news articles, tweets, and other media, members of the national press, usually reluctant to criticize campaigns directly, have taken Romney to task for running a misleading TV ad creating the false impression that Jeep will ship jobs to China because of President Obama's auto rescue.
"Mitt Romney's campaign has released an ad in Ohio that says he -- and not President Barack Obama -- will do more to help the auto industry, even though Obama's administration is widely credited with helping to turn around General Motors and Chrysler when they faced collapse," writes the Detroit Free Press in an article titled 'Romney takes heat for new ad on jobs, auto rescue'. "In the ad, the Romney campaign also says that Jeep, now owned by Italian automaker Fiat after going through a structured bankruptcy in 2009, is going to make cars in China. While true, that production would represent an expansion or return of jobs to China for Chrysler, not a transfer of North American jobs. It also is a move that analysts say could improve the brand's global standing."
"Romney Ad Wrongly Implies Chrysler Is Sending U.S. Jobs To China," reads a National Journal headline.
The sense that the Romney ad breached already lax standards for honesty in campaign ads was particularly evident on Twitter Sunday afternoon and evening, when many reporters first took note of it, after it began airing in Ohio without public notice.
National Journal's Ron Fournier said there was no sound defense for the Romney ad.
Politico's Ben White tweeted "Wait, not only did Romney camp not back off the erroneous Jeep to China canard, they made an ad out of it? My god"
Chrysler, the company that manufactures Jeep, felt the need to respond publicly that, no, Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its models out of North America to China.
"There are times when the reading of a newswire report generates storms originated by a biased or predisposed approach," Jeep wrote on its official blog.
The Obama campaign has dispatched former auto adviser Steve Rattner to debunk the ad, both in Ohio and nationally. A campaign official tells TPM that Rattner will host a conference call to address the Romney ad with reporters on Monday.
Impact of Hurricane Sandy on Election Is Uncertain - NYTimes.com
Impact of Hurricane Sandy on Election Is Uncertain - NYTimes.com
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Oct. 28: In Swing States, a Predictable Election? - NYTimes.com
Oct. 28: In Swing States, a Predictable Election? - NYTimes.com
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Mon, Oct. 29 Electoral Vote Predictor
Mon, Oct. 29 Electoral Vote Predictor: Editorial note: The site is updated every day, usually around 7 A.M. Eastern time. if you are seeing old data, clear your
browser's cache. Usually Ctrl+F5 does the job.
The results were Romney by 4, Romney by 3, Obama by 1 and Obama by 3, respectively. The arithmetic average
puts Romney ahead by 0.75%, a statistical tie. If we exclude Rasmussen (see story below), it is dead even.
In reality, only 538 people get to vote for President--the presidential electors.
As we have been pointing out since
June 4th,
if Obama wins the states the Democrats have won five times in a row, which seems quite likely, he has a base
of 242 electoral votes. He also seems likely to win Nevada and New Mexico, bringing him to 253. How might he
get the remaining 17? The scenarios are below.
The swing states being fought over and the EVs are: Florida (29), Ohio (18), North Carolina (15), Virginia (13),
Colorado (9), Iowa (6), and New Hampshire (4).
Click here for full story
browser's cache. Usually Ctrl+F5 does the job.
National Polls Are Divided
Four national polls were released yesterday, by Gallup, Rasmussen, IBD, and Ipsos.The results were Romney by 4, Romney by 3, Obama by 1 and Obama by 3, respectively. The arithmetic average
puts Romney ahead by 0.75%, a statistical tie. If we exclude Rasmussen (see story below), it is dead even.
Where Do We Stand Now?
The popular vote polls are all well and good, but in the end, don't matter.In reality, only 538 people get to vote for President--the presidential electors.
As we have been pointing out since
June 4th,
if Obama wins the states the Democrats have won five times in a row, which seems quite likely, he has a base
of 242 electoral votes. He also seems likely to win Nevada and New Mexico, bringing him to 253. How might he
get the remaining 17? The scenarios are below.
The swing states being fought over and the EVs are: Florida (29), Ohio (18), North Carolina (15), Virginia (13),
Colorado (9), Iowa (6), and New Hampshire (4).
Click here for full story
Oct 28, 2012
Oct. 26: State Poll Averages Usually Call Election Right - NYTimes.com
Oct. 26: State Poll Averages Usually Call Election Right - NYTimes.com
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Oct. 27: Minnesota Moonlights as Swing State, but Ohio and Virginia Are More Crucial - NYTimes.com
Oct. 27: Minnesota Moonlights as Swing State, but Ohio and Virginia Are More Crucial - NYTimes.com
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Beijing strips Bo Xilai of parliament post
Beijing strips Bo Xilai of parliament post: Disgraced official's expulsion follows removal from party positions and opens way for criminal prosecution against him.
African migrants found dead off Morocco coast
African migrants found dead off Morocco coast: Spanish coast guard recovers 14 bodies and rescues 17 people, while search continues for as many as 70 more passengers.
Millions of Hajj pilgrims celebrate Eid
Millions of Hajj pilgrims celebrate Eid: "Stoning of the devil" marks final ritual of the Hajj and start of the Eid al-Adha holiday for Muslims across the world.
Indian prime minister reshuffles cabinet
Indian prime minister reshuffles cabinet: Manmohan Singh brings in several younger faces as Congress Party prepares for general election in spring 2014.
Syrian jets 'bombard' Damascus suburbs
Syrian jets 'bombard' Damascus suburbs: Activists say government forces continue air raids in the Syrian capital in breach of a truce violated by both sides.
Bomb attack hits northern Nigerian church
Bomb attack hits northern Nigerian church: At least eight people killed and several injured after a suicide bomber drives into church in city of Kaduna.
China officials bow to protests over factory
China officials bow to protests over factory: Authorities in Ningbo city relent and agree not to expand local petrochemical plant after a week of street protests.
Greece arrests editor for 'Lagarde list' leak
Greece arrests editor for 'Lagarde list' leak: Detained journalist defends publishing list of well-known Greeks who allegedly use Swiss banks to evade national taxes.
Hurricane Sandy set to take US by storm
Hurricane Sandy set to take US by storm: New York orders evacuation of over 370,000 people ahead of 'super storm' that could be biggest to ever hit the US.
Show Gmail and Google Drive Results in Google Search
Show Gmail and Google Drive Results in Google Search: I mentioned last week that you can join an experiment that lets you see results from Gmail and Google Drive in Google Search.
Google shows personal results if they are likely to be relevant to your query, but there's an easy way to trigger the results. Start your query with "gmail" to see Gmail results and "drive" to see results from Google Drive.
Unfortunately, you can't use advanced search operators to restrict results to a Gmail label, to messages from a contact, to starred files or use other features because they're ignored by Google.
Google shows personal results if they are likely to be relevant to your query, but there's an easy way to trigger the results. Start your query with "gmail" to see Gmail results and "drive" to see results from Google Drive.
Unfortunately, you can't use advanced search operators to restrict results to a Gmail label, to messages from a contact, to starred files or use other features because they're ignored by Google.
Accusations against generals cast dark shadow over Army
Accusations against generals cast dark shadow over Army:
The accusations leveled against three Army generals over the past six months are as varied as they are striking, the highest-profile of a growing number of allegations of wrongdoing by senior military officials.
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The accusations leveled against three Army generals over the past six months are as varied as they are striking, the highest-profile of a growing number of allegations of wrongdoing by senior military officials.
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What Grounded Travelers Can—and Can't—Do - WSJ.com
What Grounded Travelers Can—and Can't—Do - WSJ.com
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U.S. Airlines Cancel 4,700 Flights Ahead of Hurricane Sandy - WSJ.com
U.S. Airlines Cancel 4,700 Flights Ahead of Hurricane Sandy - WSJ.com
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Al Qaeda-Inspired Groups, Minus Goal of Striking U.S. - NYTimes.com
Al Qaeda-Inspired Groups, Minus Goal of Striking U.S. - NYTimes.com
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A Village Rape Shatters a Family, and India’s Traditional Silence - NYTimes.com
A Village Rape Shatters a Family, and India’s Traditional Silence - NYTimes.com
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Tracking Voters’ Clicks Online to Try to Sway Them - NYTimes.com
Tracking Voters’ Clicks Online to Try to Sway Them - NYTimes.com
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Barack Obama for Re-Election - NYTimes.com
Barack Obama for Re-Election - NYTimes.com
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European Union Exit? Concerns Grow for Britain - NYTimes.com
European Union Exit? Concerns Grow for Britain - NYTimes.com
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After Warning, Hawaii Tsunami Smaller Than Expected - NYTimes.com
After Warning, Hawaii Tsunami Smaller Than Expected - NYTimes.com
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Bob White, a Troubleshooter Plotting Romney’s Trajectory - NYTimes.com
Bob White, a Troubleshooter Plotting Romney’s Trajectory - NYTimes.com
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Hurricane Sandy to Bring ‘Life-Threatening’ Surge - NYTimes.com
Hurricane Sandy to Bring ‘Life-Threatening’ Surge - NYTimes.com
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A Part-Time Life, as Hours Shrink and Shift for American Workers - NYTimes.com
A Part-Time Life, as Hours Shrink and Shift for American Workers - NYTimes.com
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Oct 27, 2012
'Suffering From Paranoia'
'Suffering From Paranoia': 
Xinna, the wife of prominent ethnic Mongolian dissident Hada spoke to RFA this week about her fears for his mental and physical health, as her husband enters his 23rd month of illegal detention following his release at the end of a 15-year formal jail term. Hada was sentenced to jail for "splittism" and "espionage" for his advocacy on behalf of ethnic Mongolians living in China, and released in December 2010, but is still serving out his four years of deprivation of political rights at an unofficial detention center outside Hohhot. Xinna, who was herself handed a three-year suspended jail sentence in May, said she visited Hada last month and described his living conditions in these extracts from three separate interviews:
Hada is being held in a large compound ... surrounded by four lines of barbed wire and a high wall ... in the eastern suburbs of Hohhot. There are armed police on guard outside and state security police on the inside. I heard them saying that they have at least 67 people in there, sometimes as many as 100. Every time we go there, they strip search us, and they go through all of our stuff. Sometimes they even taste food and wine that I bring for Hada. It's like this every time we go in, and again on the way out.
Right now, he is twitching all down the left side of his face. He tries to bite down on it with his teeth, but he can't control it. He is extremely closed in on himself ... and suffering from paranoia. He says someone is trying to poison him, but I am guessing it is because of all the pressure he is under. He has been mistreated and his family taken away from under his nose on two occasions, and I think this has hit him very hard. [The police] told me very clearly that I wouldn't be allowed to visit ... because of the interviews I gave [to foreign media].
They don't even give him toilet paper. He has to rinse himself with water, and no one has taken any notice of him for more than a year now. His mental state has deteriorated, and I wrote to the [Inner Mongolia] political and legal affairs committee about this in September ... [He is] obviously quite sluggish. Every day, after he has had breakfast, he just sits there on his bed with his eyes shut. The doctor checked him over in September at our family's fierce insistence. He examined him, but he didn't treat him. The psychiatrist said in front of me, and in front of the police guarding him, that he recommended [Hada] be sent to a specialist clinic for further treatment. But they haven't let him seek treatment. I am writing a letter today about this issue.
I am [also] writing that even if they won't let me visit [Hada] because I gave media interviews, my son should be allowed to visit him. It has been more than a month now [since our last visit] and I am worried about the state he is in. Our family's Internet connection was suddenly cut off and yesterday, when my son went out, he was followed by state security police. My son is under a lot of stress. The police snatched my son's bag away after he took photos of them. They stopped the bus he was on for 10 minutes and wouldn't let it move on. Finally, they snatched my son's bag from him.
I suddenly discovered today that there are now more surveillance cameras outside my home. There were four before, but now there are eight ... I found it pretty strange. I try to call my mother, my sister and my older brother, but it's hard to get through.
Reported by Qiao Long and Gao Shan for RFA's Mandarin service, and by Grace Kei Lai-see for the Cantonese service. Translated by Luisetta Mudie.
Xinna, the wife of prominent ethnic Mongolian dissident Hada spoke to RFA this week about her fears for his mental and physical health, as her husband enters his 23rd month of illegal detention following his release at the end of a 15-year formal jail term. Hada was sentenced to jail for "splittism" and "espionage" for his advocacy on behalf of ethnic Mongolians living in China, and released in December 2010, but is still serving out his four years of deprivation of political rights at an unofficial detention center outside Hohhot. Xinna, who was herself handed a three-year suspended jail sentence in May, said she visited Hada last month and described his living conditions in these extracts from three separate interviews:
Hada is being held in a large compound ... surrounded by four lines of barbed wire and a high wall ... in the eastern suburbs of Hohhot. There are armed police on guard outside and state security police on the inside. I heard them saying that they have at least 67 people in there, sometimes as many as 100. Every time we go there, they strip search us, and they go through all of our stuff. Sometimes they even taste food and wine that I bring for Hada. It's like this every time we go in, and again on the way out.
Right now, he is twitching all down the left side of his face. He tries to bite down on it with his teeth, but he can't control it. He is extremely closed in on himself ... and suffering from paranoia. He says someone is trying to poison him, but I am guessing it is because of all the pressure he is under. He has been mistreated and his family taken away from under his nose on two occasions, and I think this has hit him very hard. [The police] told me very clearly that I wouldn't be allowed to visit ... because of the interviews I gave [to foreign media].
They don't even give him toilet paper. He has to rinse himself with water, and no one has taken any notice of him for more than a year now. His mental state has deteriorated, and I wrote to the [Inner Mongolia] political and legal affairs committee about this in September ... [He is] obviously quite sluggish. Every day, after he has had breakfast, he just sits there on his bed with his eyes shut. The doctor checked him over in September at our family's fierce insistence. He examined him, but he didn't treat him. The psychiatrist said in front of me, and in front of the police guarding him, that he recommended [Hada] be sent to a specialist clinic for further treatment. But they haven't let him seek treatment. I am writing a letter today about this issue.
I am [also] writing that even if they won't let me visit [Hada] because I gave media interviews, my son should be allowed to visit him. It has been more than a month now [since our last visit] and I am worried about the state he is in. Our family's Internet connection was suddenly cut off and yesterday, when my son went out, he was followed by state security police. My son is under a lot of stress. The police snatched my son's bag away after he took photos of them. They stopped the bus he was on for 10 minutes and wouldn't let it move on. Finally, they snatched my son's bag from him.
I suddenly discovered today that there are now more surveillance cameras outside my home. There were four before, but now there are eight ... I found it pretty strange. I try to call my mother, my sister and my older brother, but it's hard to get through.
Reported by Qiao Long and Gao Shan for RFA's Mandarin service, and by Grace Kei Lai-see for the Cantonese service. Translated by Luisetta Mudie.
Grad school, a leg up — in debt
Grad school, a leg up — in debt:
It’s fitting that the College Board released its trends in college pricing just before Halloween. It’s frightening what many families are paying to help their children realize the American dream of a middle-income-or-better lifestyle.
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It’s fitting that the College Board released its trends in college pricing just before Halloween. It’s frightening what many families are paying to help their children realize the American dream of a middle-income-or-better lifestyle.
Read full article >>
Gaza: A Way Out?
Gaza: A Way Out?: Nicolas Pelham
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Shawn Baldwin/Corbis
An underground tunnel beneath the city of Rafah connecting Gaza to Egypt, June 27, 2010
This week’s arrival in Gaza of the Emir of Qatar and his entourage of fifty Mercedes revived the frenetic pace of activity in the coastal enclave, which has been uncommonly quiet in recent months. On his day-trip spent laying foundation stones for cities, hospitals, and schools all bearing his name, the Emir, Sheikh Hamad Al Thani, came pledging gifts of $400 million in reconstruction, and promised to end the political and economic isolation Gaza has endured since the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas took power six years ago.
For Hamas leaders the trip, the first by a head of state since the siege on Gaza began, heralds their latest attempt to escape political pariahdom, after their hopes of deliverance by the new Muslim Brotherhood–led Egypt ran aground this summer. On August 5, sixteen Egyptian soldiers were gunned down by militants just across Gaza’s borders from Egypt; Egypt suspected the killers had crossed over from Gaza. Fearing the ire of its powerful neighbor, Hamas temporarily barred access to the border, including the vast tunnel complex connecting Gaza with Egypt that serves as Gaza’s economic lifeline. The trucks that cart thousands of tons of raw materials and fuel every day lay silent, and a few of the Gazan government officials and 9,000 tunnel workers who had bothered to make an appearance sat on stools disconsolately counting the lost revenue, which they estimated in the tens of millions of dollars.
The tunnels symbolize Hamas’s paradox: on the one hand, they have enabled Palestine’s main Islamist movement to thrive amid an external siege, and despite a Western boycott to take their place amongst the Islamist parties that have gained or strengthened their hold on power in many parts of the Middle East. Thanks to Gaza’s supply lines to Egypt, its GDP outpaced by a factor of five that of Hamas’s Western-funded rival, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. Further propelling Gaza’s economy, Arab governments across the region, like Qatar’s, have been shifting hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money from the PA to Hamas, signaling what may be a historic shift in Palestinian politics.
Yet the tunnels are also a reminder of just how much of a clandestine underground authority Hamas still is, and how fragile the territory’s recovery may be. Gaza continues to rely on smuggling for even basic goods, and the underground trade can be turned on and off as easily as a tap. The current restrictions, if they continue, could have devastating effects not only on the economy, but on Hamas’s own longevity. “We can’t keep ourselves imprisoned much longer,” a Hamas commander tells me as he and his patrol slouch bootless on mattresses under a makeshift tent erected between the tunnel mouths.
A testimony to human ingenuity and survival instinct, Gaza’s tunnel economy rapidly expanded after Hamas gained control of the territory in 2007. Western powers and the Mubarak government in Egypt saw the rise of Palestine’s Islamists as a national security threat and initially joined Israel’s siege of the enclave, which included a trade ban on all but eight basic goods. (“Why pasta?” protested an incredulous John Kerry when he visited after the largest of Israel’s recent invasions in January 2009.) The maritime blockade—still in force as Israel showed in mid-October, when it impounded another aid vessel—has prevented supplies getting in by sea.
Gazans responded by burrowing under their southern border into Egypt’s Sinai and digging several hundred tunnels, some large enough for vehicles to pass through. This network provides a conduit for goods (and people) not only to enter, but to exit: eggs, scrap metal, and even a shipment of three million carnations have all left Gaza through the tunnels. In the process, the tunnels have also helped Gaza rebuild itself. While international donors failed to deliver $4.5 billion in promised aid for reconstruction in protest at Hamas’s continued rule, tunnel operators have ferried in 7,500 tons of steel rods, cement, and gravel daily, supplying 90 percent of the enclave’s construction materials. According to World Bank figures, construction starts in the first half of 2011 grew by 220 percent.
The economic effects have been remarkable: after notching 6 percent growth in 2008, the Gazan economy grew by 20 percent in 2010 and a whopping 27 percent last year; unemployment in the formal economy fell to 29 percent, its lowest in a decade and an improvement of eight percentage points in a year. A recent International Labor Organization report cited the emergence of 600 “tunnel millionaires”; many of them, seeking somewhere to park their profits, have invested first in land, and then in hundreds of luxury apartment buildings. So great is the demand that Gazans complain builders have to be booked months in advance, and decorators are never available. The UN, which previously warned that Gaza faces an imminent humanitarian crisis, has now concluded that it may be years off: Gaza in 2020 was the title of its recent report.
Even when they are open for business, however, the tunnels have their downsides. Some two hundred workers have been killed, many of them children, who are preferred, as in Victorian mines, for their slight frames. Moreover, part of the tunnel complex lies inside Israel’s self-declared buffer zone, which Hamas forces say is beyond their reach. These tunnels double as portals for smugglers trafficking drugs and weapons, and may, as Cairo alleges, offer Sinai’s militants an escape hatch from Egyptian patrols. Above all, Hamas’s dependence on smuggling has underlined its continued illegitimacy in the eyes of much of the world.
So far, succor has come from Gaza’s wealthier neighbors. Irate that the billions they have been spoon-feeding the Palestinian Authority are serving to perpetuate Israel’s occupation of the West Bank rather than end it, Turkey and the Gulf powers have shifted funding southward. Turkey has contributed $300 million; Saudi Arabia $250 million. And at the end of the airstrip that Gaza’s former Jewish settlers built for themselves, a new town funded by the United Arab Emirates will provide spacious free housing for 11,000 Gazans rendered homeless by Israeli offensives. (The UN calls them “shelters” to avoid the impression that it is resettling refugees in suburban apartments.)
Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images
Posters of Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya (left) and Qatar Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani at a housing development site funded by Qatar, Khan Yunis, Gaza, October 22, 2012
The Qatari government has gone even further. Not only has it donated fuel, which can bring Gaza’s power plant to full capacity—when Egypt lets it pass—and launched a $254 million modernization program. It also opened, this fall, a diplomatic mission in Gaza, which it consummated with the Emir’s October visit and the promise of an additional $150 million. (All of which has been much to the dismay of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. “Opening Gaza without the West Bank is the end of Palestine,” Tayib Abdel Rahim, perhaps the closest adviser to PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, told me recently. “Israel will increasingly treat Gaza as the Palestinian State, and turn the West Bank into its biblical Judea and Samaria.”)
The geyser of aid money has bought the new donors influence. The new Gaza offices of the IHH—the Islamist charity in Turkey that spearheaded the 2010 aid flotilla to Gaza intercepted by Israel—dominate Gaza City’s Katiba Square, newly grassed with turf hauled through the tunnels. The Islamic University has added Turkish to its curriculum. And at the site of the hospital it is building, Qatar has put up renderings of the future facility replete with palm trees and limousines, not withstanding the fact that incomes here are about a hundredth of those in Doha. Tellingly, for a country that is seeking to replace Iranian and Syrian patronage of Hamas, the signs depict Gazans wearing white Gulf Arab gowns. In full Gulf style, Hamas’s prime minister, Ismail Haniya, played host to the Qatari emir in an ornate Arab tent.
But Egypt remains the missing piece in Hamas’s regional jigsaw puzzle. With the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s ideological twin, the Gazan leadership anticipated a rapprochement, and on the night of Mohammed Morsi’s election victory, Hamas loyalists cheered in the streets. Hamas ministers prepared feasibility studies for a highway stretching from North Africa’s farthest reaches to Gaza, and appealed to Gulf labor markets to absorb Gaza’s jobless graduates. The Gaza-Egypt border crossing at Rafah “will open fully and Egypt will supply fuel, medicine, and electricity. No one will be refused entry,” mused Mahmoud al-Zahar, a veteran Hamas leader, as we sat in his garden in July on his return from a meeting with Morsi.
But after the initial welcome, Egypt backed off, swayed both by pressure from western powers negotiating an IMF package and by its security forces’ claims that Gaza was complicit in the August 5 attack. In late September, Prime Minister Haniya arrived in Cairo at the head of a twenty-man Gazan delegation only to find his anticipated audience with Morsi declined and his requests for upgrading ties rebuffed. Egypt, he discovered, remained noncommittal on the Qatari fuel it had blocked after the August 5 attack, on boosting Egypt’s supply of electricity and water to Gaza, and above all, on the launch of a free trade zone on the Gaza-Egypt border that would make Hamas a legitimate trading partner. In a further slight, the foreign ministry described Haniya as a visiting guest, not an official.
Passenger crossings between Gaza and Egypt at the main Rafah terminal, which had reached almost quarter of a million since the start of the year, fell back to levels of a year earlier. And at their common border, Egyptian bulldozers began digging up tunnels with a tenacity Morsi’s predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, had rarely shown. Tunnel traffic dwindled to a third of pre-August 5 levels: had it not been for a significant easing of Israel’s closures on Gaza the impact would have been intense. In a huff, Hamas removed the banner of a smiling Morsi and Haniya holding hands against the backdrop of the pyramids from the walls of its Gaza City parliament, and replaced it with a large portrait of Qatar’s Emir.
Still, Hamas leaders have been quick to appreciate that an attack on Egyptian forces so close to the Gaza border poses a serious threat to their hoped-for alliance with Egypt–not least, because Hamas has faced their own jihadi threat at home. In August 2009, following a spate of militant attacks on such symbols of decadence as Internet cafes, hairdressers, and Christian places of worship, Hamas laid siege to a jihadi mosque and killed its preacher Abdel Latif Moussa and more than twenty of his followers. The assault marked Hamas’s transition from grassroots guerrilla movement to member-in-waiting of the regional security order.
Having routed its jihadi opposition, Hamas backpedalled on its Islamist agenda and resistance against Israel and focused instead on accumulating and protecting its own assets. Its militants evolved into a defensive force, stationed near the border to prevent wildcat rocket fire against Israel and uphold a tahdiya, or calm. They have not always succeeded. Just as Hamas fighters once spoiled the calm by firing at Israel, when their nationalist rivals, Fatah, ruled Gaza, so now Hamas’s own militant rivals now scheme against them. No sooner had the Qatari emir completed his visit this week than Israel retaliated for the earlier maiming of one its soldiers with a series of air and tank strikes, including an attack on the Palestinian exit point into Israel. The following day, Palestinian militants fired eighty rockets and mortars at southern Israel, and Israeli aircraft struck Gaza four times. But although Hamas briefly joined the fray, it restricted its fire to short-range rockets away from civilian areas, and Israel for the moment seems to have refrained from further escalation.
Meanwhile, in Gaza itself, after three summers of zealous patrols, the morality police withdrew from the beaches and began to let shopkeepers again garb unveiled mannequins in mini-skirts. Hamas licensed and sometimes invested in upscale beach resorts along the coast; last year Palestine’s most luxurious hotel opened, replete with a cocktail bar that is somewhat hopefully awaiting an alcohol license.
In its rush to join the haves, Hamas began forgetting its former constituency of have-nots. Haniya’s government assigned only $14 million of its $769 million budget in 2012 to welfare. And for the first time shantytowns are cropping up on the outskirts of Gaza City. In the shanty next to an abattoir, the only meat homeless Gazans can afford for Islamic festivities is a crippled horse bought from a knacker’s yard, slaughtered in the sand outside their shacks and fried in discarded wheel-hubs.
Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images
Palestinians at the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza, September 19, 2012
On occasion discontent among the poor spills over. In late September in Bureij, a refugee camp of over 34,000 people on the outskirts of Gaza City, a three-year-old boy and his one-year-old sister burned to death by a fire started by the candle his family was using because of power cuts caused by Egypt’s interruption of fuel supplies through the tunnels. As an ambulance rushed the family to the hospital, hundreds of camp residents poured into the streets. “Down with Hamas,” they chanted, and then mocked them as “Shias,” because of their close ties with distant Iran. Hamas had to resort to its heavies with clubs to regain control of the camp.
The anti-Hamas protests are not yet a serious challenge to the Islamists’ six-year-old rule, but they suggest how much public perception of Gaza’s leaders may be changing. Once a bedrock of Hamas support, Bureij has wavered ever since Hamas preachers there promised residents sky-high rates of return from a pyramid scheme they set up to fund tunnel construction. It went bust, costing tens of thousands their savings. Predictably, the population rather than Hamas footed most of the bill.
If the frustration grows, what form might it take? At the entrance of the Bureij camp off the main road to Gaza lies a four-story unplastered apartment building, with a mosque called al-Mumineen, or The Faithful, on the ground floor. Above it, in a small square room, I found Abu Walid al-Maqdisi, a 43-year-old reputed to be Gaza’s leading mentor of global Jihad. His group Tawhid (Monotheism) and Jihad claims affiliation with al-Qaeda; Egypt suspects it had a hand in the killing of its soldiers. As it happens, Hamas had released al-Maqdisi from prison two days before the August attack.
My interview was awkward. Al-Maqdisi insisted that he was not under house arrest, but said that intelligence officers I had met on the staircase as I took off my shoes had warned him against speaking publicly. He was surrounded by a dozen acolytes, and my concentration kept wandering as I imagined better places to be than sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a man whose followers had strangled a well-known Italian aid worker in Gaza a year ago in a failed bid to obtain their sheikh’s release. He was also the only person I spoke to in Gaza, however, who justified the killing of Egyptian soldiers. “If they were protecting Jews [across Egypt’s borders],” he told me, “it is permitted to kill them.” And if Hamas forces also prevented jihadi groups from targeting Jews? It was time for me to go.
Abu Walid al-Maqdisi
On the night of October 12, just weeks after my interview, an Israeli drone killed al-Maqdisi and one of his followers, along with a passerby, on a motorbike in a refugee camp, threatening to precipitate another round of fighting. Tawhid and Jihad vowed to spur its efforts to convert Gaza into Islamic state, fire rockets at Israel, and launch attacks inside Sinai, prompting Egypt to put its troops in its south Sinai resorts on alert. Israel increased the pace of its drone attacks on Gaza’s Salafis. The killing also exposed the limits of Hamas’s pretensions to protect its population. Still, fearing that escalation might spoil the impending visit of the Qatari emir, Hamas held fire. According to Salafi groups in Gaza, instead of responding with rockets against Israel or even a statement of protest, Hamas arrested more of their militants and impounded their weapons.
Undoubtedly, Hamas would prefer an open relationship with Cairo. It says it will crack down on its Salafi militants and plug their conduits to Sinai. “More than anyone we seek relations above ground, not below it,” says Zahar, the Hamas leader who sees formal trade ties as the economic counterpart to political recognition. “Once that’s achieved, we will close the tunnels.” But Hamas leaders also flinch from the backlash that would likely come from cutting jihadi conduits, dissolving a business worth hundreds of millions, and joining Israel and Egypt’s anti-jihadi onslaught. Faced with Egyptian demands to crack down on jihadi groups it suspected of perpetrating the August 5 attack, Hamas declared that it had made dozens of arrests, but then quietly released most of the detainees after questioning. Struggling to reconcile both Egypt’s authorities and its own Salafists, Hamas’ leaders have appeared to sit on the fence, leaving both mistrustful of the Gazan leadership.
The protesters in Bureij show no sympathy for radical groups like Tawhid and Jihad; if anything they want a more liberal government. But as elsewhere, an enemy’s enemy can often become a friend. In neighboring Sinai, which has strong linguistic and cultural, as well as economic, affinities with Gaza, jihadi militants have proved adept at harnessing the grievances young Bedouin harbor against the Egyptian authorities. And in Gaza, itself, for all the dividends the government has reaped from the construction boom, the ranks of those left out offer fertile ground for recruits. Once an elite Palestinian militia, Islamic Jihad has acquired a substantial grassroots following, but has so far stopped short of rallying malcontents to openly challenge Hamas. While currently nursing their losses, smaller groups like al-Maqdisi’s, however, might feel less constrained.
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Shawn Baldwin/Corbis
An underground tunnel beneath the city of Rafah connecting Gaza to Egypt, June 27, 2010
For Hamas leaders the trip, the first by a head of state since the siege on Gaza began, heralds their latest attempt to escape political pariahdom, after their hopes of deliverance by the new Muslim Brotherhood–led Egypt ran aground this summer. On August 5, sixteen Egyptian soldiers were gunned down by militants just across Gaza’s borders from Egypt; Egypt suspected the killers had crossed over from Gaza. Fearing the ire of its powerful neighbor, Hamas temporarily barred access to the border, including the vast tunnel complex connecting Gaza with Egypt that serves as Gaza’s economic lifeline. The trucks that cart thousands of tons of raw materials and fuel every day lay silent, and a few of the Gazan government officials and 9,000 tunnel workers who had bothered to make an appearance sat on stools disconsolately counting the lost revenue, which they estimated in the tens of millions of dollars.
The tunnels symbolize Hamas’s paradox: on the one hand, they have enabled Palestine’s main Islamist movement to thrive amid an external siege, and despite a Western boycott to take their place amongst the Islamist parties that have gained or strengthened their hold on power in many parts of the Middle East. Thanks to Gaza’s supply lines to Egypt, its GDP outpaced by a factor of five that of Hamas’s Western-funded rival, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. Further propelling Gaza’s economy, Arab governments across the region, like Qatar’s, have been shifting hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money from the PA to Hamas, signaling what may be a historic shift in Palestinian politics.
Yet the tunnels are also a reminder of just how much of a clandestine underground authority Hamas still is, and how fragile the territory’s recovery may be. Gaza continues to rely on smuggling for even basic goods, and the underground trade can be turned on and off as easily as a tap. The current restrictions, if they continue, could have devastating effects not only on the economy, but on Hamas’s own longevity. “We can’t keep ourselves imprisoned much longer,” a Hamas commander tells me as he and his patrol slouch bootless on mattresses under a makeshift tent erected between the tunnel mouths.
A testimony to human ingenuity and survival instinct, Gaza’s tunnel economy rapidly expanded after Hamas gained control of the territory in 2007. Western powers and the Mubarak government in Egypt saw the rise of Palestine’s Islamists as a national security threat and initially joined Israel’s siege of the enclave, which included a trade ban on all but eight basic goods. (“Why pasta?” protested an incredulous John Kerry when he visited after the largest of Israel’s recent invasions in January 2009.) The maritime blockade—still in force as Israel showed in mid-October, when it impounded another aid vessel—has prevented supplies getting in by sea.
Gazans responded by burrowing under their southern border into Egypt’s Sinai and digging several hundred tunnels, some large enough for vehicles to pass through. This network provides a conduit for goods (and people) not only to enter, but to exit: eggs, scrap metal, and even a shipment of three million carnations have all left Gaza through the tunnels. In the process, the tunnels have also helped Gaza rebuild itself. While international donors failed to deliver $4.5 billion in promised aid for reconstruction in protest at Hamas’s continued rule, tunnel operators have ferried in 7,500 tons of steel rods, cement, and gravel daily, supplying 90 percent of the enclave’s construction materials. According to World Bank figures, construction starts in the first half of 2011 grew by 220 percent.
The economic effects have been remarkable: after notching 6 percent growth in 2008, the Gazan economy grew by 20 percent in 2010 and a whopping 27 percent last year; unemployment in the formal economy fell to 29 percent, its lowest in a decade and an improvement of eight percentage points in a year. A recent International Labor Organization report cited the emergence of 600 “tunnel millionaires”; many of them, seeking somewhere to park their profits, have invested first in land, and then in hundreds of luxury apartment buildings. So great is the demand that Gazans complain builders have to be booked months in advance, and decorators are never available. The UN, which previously warned that Gaza faces an imminent humanitarian crisis, has now concluded that it may be years off: Gaza in 2020 was the title of its recent report.
Even when they are open for business, however, the tunnels have their downsides. Some two hundred workers have been killed, many of them children, who are preferred, as in Victorian mines, for their slight frames. Moreover, part of the tunnel complex lies inside Israel’s self-declared buffer zone, which Hamas forces say is beyond their reach. These tunnels double as portals for smugglers trafficking drugs and weapons, and may, as Cairo alleges, offer Sinai’s militants an escape hatch from Egyptian patrols. Above all, Hamas’s dependence on smuggling has underlined its continued illegitimacy in the eyes of much of the world.
So far, succor has come from Gaza’s wealthier neighbors. Irate that the billions they have been spoon-feeding the Palestinian Authority are serving to perpetuate Israel’s occupation of the West Bank rather than end it, Turkey and the Gulf powers have shifted funding southward. Turkey has contributed $300 million; Saudi Arabia $250 million. And at the end of the airstrip that Gaza’s former Jewish settlers built for themselves, a new town funded by the United Arab Emirates will provide spacious free housing for 11,000 Gazans rendered homeless by Israeli offensives. (The UN calls them “shelters” to avoid the impression that it is resettling refugees in suburban apartments.)
Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images
Posters of Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya (left) and Qatar Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani at a housing development site funded by Qatar, Khan Yunis, Gaza, October 22, 2012
The geyser of aid money has bought the new donors influence. The new Gaza offices of the IHH—the Islamist charity in Turkey that spearheaded the 2010 aid flotilla to Gaza intercepted by Israel—dominate Gaza City’s Katiba Square, newly grassed with turf hauled through the tunnels. The Islamic University has added Turkish to its curriculum. And at the site of the hospital it is building, Qatar has put up renderings of the future facility replete with palm trees and limousines, not withstanding the fact that incomes here are about a hundredth of those in Doha. Tellingly, for a country that is seeking to replace Iranian and Syrian patronage of Hamas, the signs depict Gazans wearing white Gulf Arab gowns. In full Gulf style, Hamas’s prime minister, Ismail Haniya, played host to the Qatari emir in an ornate Arab tent.
But Egypt remains the missing piece in Hamas’s regional jigsaw puzzle. With the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s ideological twin, the Gazan leadership anticipated a rapprochement, and on the night of Mohammed Morsi’s election victory, Hamas loyalists cheered in the streets. Hamas ministers prepared feasibility studies for a highway stretching from North Africa’s farthest reaches to Gaza, and appealed to Gulf labor markets to absorb Gaza’s jobless graduates. The Gaza-Egypt border crossing at Rafah “will open fully and Egypt will supply fuel, medicine, and electricity. No one will be refused entry,” mused Mahmoud al-Zahar, a veteran Hamas leader, as we sat in his garden in July on his return from a meeting with Morsi.
But after the initial welcome, Egypt backed off, swayed both by pressure from western powers negotiating an IMF package and by its security forces’ claims that Gaza was complicit in the August 5 attack. In late September, Prime Minister Haniya arrived in Cairo at the head of a twenty-man Gazan delegation only to find his anticipated audience with Morsi declined and his requests for upgrading ties rebuffed. Egypt, he discovered, remained noncommittal on the Qatari fuel it had blocked after the August 5 attack, on boosting Egypt’s supply of electricity and water to Gaza, and above all, on the launch of a free trade zone on the Gaza-Egypt border that would make Hamas a legitimate trading partner. In a further slight, the foreign ministry described Haniya as a visiting guest, not an official.
Passenger crossings between Gaza and Egypt at the main Rafah terminal, which had reached almost quarter of a million since the start of the year, fell back to levels of a year earlier. And at their common border, Egyptian bulldozers began digging up tunnels with a tenacity Morsi’s predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, had rarely shown. Tunnel traffic dwindled to a third of pre-August 5 levels: had it not been for a significant easing of Israel’s closures on Gaza the impact would have been intense. In a huff, Hamas removed the banner of a smiling Morsi and Haniya holding hands against the backdrop of the pyramids from the walls of its Gaza City parliament, and replaced it with a large portrait of Qatar’s Emir.
Still, Hamas leaders have been quick to appreciate that an attack on Egyptian forces so close to the Gaza border poses a serious threat to their hoped-for alliance with Egypt–not least, because Hamas has faced their own jihadi threat at home. In August 2009, following a spate of militant attacks on such symbols of decadence as Internet cafes, hairdressers, and Christian places of worship, Hamas laid siege to a jihadi mosque and killed its preacher Abdel Latif Moussa and more than twenty of his followers. The assault marked Hamas’s transition from grassroots guerrilla movement to member-in-waiting of the regional security order.
Having routed its jihadi opposition, Hamas backpedalled on its Islamist agenda and resistance against Israel and focused instead on accumulating and protecting its own assets. Its militants evolved into a defensive force, stationed near the border to prevent wildcat rocket fire against Israel and uphold a tahdiya, or calm. They have not always succeeded. Just as Hamas fighters once spoiled the calm by firing at Israel, when their nationalist rivals, Fatah, ruled Gaza, so now Hamas’s own militant rivals now scheme against them. No sooner had the Qatari emir completed his visit this week than Israel retaliated for the earlier maiming of one its soldiers with a series of air and tank strikes, including an attack on the Palestinian exit point into Israel. The following day, Palestinian militants fired eighty rockets and mortars at southern Israel, and Israeli aircraft struck Gaza four times. But although Hamas briefly joined the fray, it restricted its fire to short-range rockets away from civilian areas, and Israel for the moment seems to have refrained from further escalation.
Meanwhile, in Gaza itself, after three summers of zealous patrols, the morality police withdrew from the beaches and began to let shopkeepers again garb unveiled mannequins in mini-skirts. Hamas licensed and sometimes invested in upscale beach resorts along the coast; last year Palestine’s most luxurious hotel opened, replete with a cocktail bar that is somewhat hopefully awaiting an alcohol license.
In its rush to join the haves, Hamas began forgetting its former constituency of have-nots. Haniya’s government assigned only $14 million of its $769 million budget in 2012 to welfare. And for the first time shantytowns are cropping up on the outskirts of Gaza City. In the shanty next to an abattoir, the only meat homeless Gazans can afford for Islamic festivities is a crippled horse bought from a knacker’s yard, slaughtered in the sand outside their shacks and fried in discarded wheel-hubs.
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Palestinians at the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza, September 19, 2012
The anti-Hamas protests are not yet a serious challenge to the Islamists’ six-year-old rule, but they suggest how much public perception of Gaza’s leaders may be changing. Once a bedrock of Hamas support, Bureij has wavered ever since Hamas preachers there promised residents sky-high rates of return from a pyramid scheme they set up to fund tunnel construction. It went bust, costing tens of thousands their savings. Predictably, the population rather than Hamas footed most of the bill.
If the frustration grows, what form might it take? At the entrance of the Bureij camp off the main road to Gaza lies a four-story unplastered apartment building, with a mosque called al-Mumineen, or The Faithful, on the ground floor. Above it, in a small square room, I found Abu Walid al-Maqdisi, a 43-year-old reputed to be Gaza’s leading mentor of global Jihad. His group Tawhid (Monotheism) and Jihad claims affiliation with al-Qaeda; Egypt suspects it had a hand in the killing of its soldiers. As it happens, Hamas had released al-Maqdisi from prison two days before the August attack.
My interview was awkward. Al-Maqdisi insisted that he was not under house arrest, but said that intelligence officers I had met on the staircase as I took off my shoes had warned him against speaking publicly. He was surrounded by a dozen acolytes, and my concentration kept wandering as I imagined better places to be than sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a man whose followers had strangled a well-known Italian aid worker in Gaza a year ago in a failed bid to obtain their sheikh’s release. He was also the only person I spoke to in Gaza, however, who justified the killing of Egyptian soldiers. “If they were protecting Jews [across Egypt’s borders],” he told me, “it is permitted to kill them.” And if Hamas forces also prevented jihadi groups from targeting Jews? It was time for me to go.
Abu Walid al-Maqdisi
Undoubtedly, Hamas would prefer an open relationship with Cairo. It says it will crack down on its Salafi militants and plug their conduits to Sinai. “More than anyone we seek relations above ground, not below it,” says Zahar, the Hamas leader who sees formal trade ties as the economic counterpart to political recognition. “Once that’s achieved, we will close the tunnels.” But Hamas leaders also flinch from the backlash that would likely come from cutting jihadi conduits, dissolving a business worth hundreds of millions, and joining Israel and Egypt’s anti-jihadi onslaught. Faced with Egyptian demands to crack down on jihadi groups it suspected of perpetrating the August 5 attack, Hamas declared that it had made dozens of arrests, but then quietly released most of the detainees after questioning. Struggling to reconcile both Egypt’s authorities and its own Salafists, Hamas’ leaders have appeared to sit on the fence, leaving both mistrustful of the Gazan leadership.
The protesters in Bureij show no sympathy for radical groups like Tawhid and Jihad; if anything they want a more liberal government. But as elsewhere, an enemy’s enemy can often become a friend. In neighboring Sinai, which has strong linguistic and cultural, as well as economic, affinities with Gaza, jihadi militants have proved adept at harnessing the grievances young Bedouin harbor against the Egyptian authorities. And in Gaza, itself, for all the dividends the government has reaped from the construction boom, the ranks of those left out offer fertile ground for recruits. Once an elite Palestinian militia, Islamic Jihad has acquired a substantial grassroots following, but has so far stopped short of rallying malcontents to openly challenge Hamas. While currently nursing their losses, smaller groups like al-Maqdisi’s, however, might feel less constrained.
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