Are War Crimes Prosecutions Fair?

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda yesterday sentenced three men to life in prison for their role in the Rwandan genocide of the early 1990s.

War crimes trials are an interesting phenomenon. They exist because the world believes the perpetrators of genocides and mass murders should be held accountable. This is a sound humanitarian theory, but it's interesting who gets prosecuted.

A New York Times story about the sentencing mentions the possible role played by France in the genocide, saying "The Tutsi rebels have argued that the militant Hutu, perhaps with France's help, may have been involved, hoping to create the pretext for a long-planned extermination of the Tutsi." No one from France was tried.

A story in Australia's PerthNow says, "The genocide saw extremist Hutu militia slaughter minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus over 100 days, leading to accusations that Western nations watched them unfold without moving to stop them." But no one from a Western nation has been tried.

A similarly awful situation is currently underway in the Congo. Flagrant human rights abuses occur daily, which leads the Times correspondents to wonder if similar justice could ever be pronounced there. They quote an Africa scholar, who says, "'Everybody has dirty hands' in eastern Congo."

The United States government knew about Hitler's concentration camps long before it chose to enter World War II. That decision has always seemed hideous. Practical, perhaps, but still hideous.

In college, I studied the Indonesian massacre of 1965, in which almost one million Indonesians were murdered by their neighbors on suspicion of being communists. No one knows who fueled and provoked the incident, but many believe that the CIA was involved (1965 was the height of anti-Communist fervor in the CIA, and they did plan similar missions elsewhere).

In Indonesia, and in World War II Germany, and now with Rwanda, those in authority have tried to say that the genocides were "spontaneous." A genocide is never spontaneous. It's a planned and systematic strategy, and also the boiling-over of generations of indrawn hatred. But it is definitely not spontaneous. The very idea of a "spontaneous" genocide is ludicrous—when was the last someone randomly turned to his neighbor and said, "I was going to go to the store today, but I think I'll exterminate your entire family instead."

When it comes to crimes against humanity, very few hands are clean. Such is the nature of these crimes. Although the men who received their sentences yesterday no doubt deserved that and maybe worse, it all comes back to the Times quote. Everybody has dirty hands. This might be part of the reason why the world is so enthusiastic (but still so selective) about prosecuting war crimes after the fact. (After all, no sentence could ever really even out what happened in Rwanda.)

For those who doubt that the prosecution is selective, understand that some people think George Bush should be tried for war crimes based on the US military's torture record and the civilian deaths in Iraq. If prisoner torture and civilian deaths in Iraq seem like necessary "collateral damage" in times of war, perhaps that's a semantic rather than a realistic differentiation. What's the difference between a "war crime" and "war"? Legally speaking?

I don't know. Also, is it fair that regular US soldiers, acting on the implicit encouragement of their superiors, received court martials for their role in the prisoner abuse scandal while those at the top of the military chain of command got off scot-free? Because that's certainly not the philosophy the UN is currently practicing in the Rwanda case.

Chasing pirates in Africa

Jeffrey Gettleman, who writes for the New York Times, has a story up today about his time chasing pirates on the deck of an Italian Navy ship.  According to international reports, piracy more than doubled in 2008, and will continue to do so.

Everyone understands that, Johnny Depp franchises aside, pirates are bad, but Gettleman also delves into the somewhat sensitive territory of why they might be good.  In particular, he says pirate revenue supports several Somali villages that otherwise get no assistance from their weak central government.

A story by Dina Ezzat in Egypt's Al-Ahram covers the problem in more detail: the Somali government is on the brink of failure, and other countries hesitate to intervene because they don't want to ignite an international conflict.  Ezzat says pirates kidnap humanitarian aid shipments as well as trade vessels.  Keep in mind, though, that Egypt stands to lose a lot of revenue if the pirate situation isn't stopped and shippers detour their vessels around the Cape of Good Hope.  So they have a vested interest in whatever intervention is necessary to stop Somali piracy.

Meanwhile, a Reuters story in Somalia's Hiiran suggests that the economic crisis will starve the poorest residents of the world, leading to food riots.  A mere fraction of the money that has gone into the financial rescue packages worldwide could make a huge difference.

"It is an issue of global peace and security," said the Executive Director of the World Food Programme.

To recap:  Driven by poverty and lack of government oversight, some poor Somalis have started to earn a lucrative living through piracy in the Gulf of Aden, off the Horn of Africa. By doing this, however, the pirates are driving shipping revenue away from Egypt, a state already "worried by the expanding influence of political Islam."  Should further financial woes beset Egypt, one can only assume that this would bolster their own more militant groups (an example personified best by a pre-invasion Iraq).  The Egyptian government would like to intervene in Somalia, but this would look opportunistic when that country has already suffered so many decades of war.  Meanwhile, foreign governments have put much of their financial werewithal into financial bailouts, worried about "systemic risk" to the world economy.  Even a fraction of the bailout money would have made a major difference to poor nations, according to the UN World Food Programme.  It's safe to assume that they include Somalia in "poor nations", since it is already at risk of "security" issues such as food riots and the growth of terrorism due to desperate poverty.  But on the other hand, even if foreign governments had donated this money to the World Food Programme, the aid would never have reached the poor citizens of Somalia because of the pirates who have sprung up and are currently helping give money to the poor people of Somalia.

Kashmir: a new Gaza?

Abdus Satar Ghazali, executive editor of the American Muslim Perspective, has an essay in Al-Ahram about how the United States is reshaping the Middle East and South Asia.

In From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman writes that Arab Palestinians were shuffled between Syria and Lebanon following World War II. The PLO evolved and became a symbol not just of the Muslim voice, but of a growing (international) sense of Muslim disenfranchisement. He has been criticized for it, but that's probably why Columbia University scholar Rashid Khalidi wrote that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is central to the Arab identity.

Today, the Hindu carries a short story called "Pakistan invokes the K word."  The K-word is "Kashmir," the contested borderland between India and Pakistan.  Originally granted to India by international convention, Pakistanis believe Kashmir should belong to them and refer to it as "Indian-occupied."  Military clashes are common along the border.

The question is: is Kashmir turning into a new Gaza Strip?  A central stalemate and a romanticized ideal for both sides?  A built-up store of resentments that no geographical boundary will ever be able to resolve?  (It's already gone a long way in this direction - terrorism has made the region almost uninhabitable.)

And what role do journalists have in the creation and maintenance of such a dispute?

Ponder this: the Hindu article is titled "Pakistan invokes the K Word." In fact, Pakistan invoked the K word after agreeing to ban a militant group, and the delegate only pushed for a "resolution."  On the surface, this was not intolerant.

Meanwhile, Ghazali blames the US for reshaping Pakistan.  In fact, it's the Pushtu tribes along the Pakistan-Afghan border who are pushing for more territory, and might in future get it.

The point is, neither of these articles seems completely honest, but both contribute to a sense of a 'threatened' Pakistan, territory beset on all sides.  This is exactly how resentments and fears breed monsters.  We've already seen it happen to a greater extent in the Middle East.

Why do they Hate Us, Again?

This was the question on everyone's minds following the September 11 attacks. Since then the question has been mocked as simplistic, ignorant, hawkish, and Bushian. So how did it become part of the general debate over terrorism? Some people blame the media, but when I Googled the question "Why do they Hate us" I found essays by several journalists (many of Arab descent) who'd tried to argue this with humanity and sense. Some of the ones I liked most are posted below, with commentary.

Mohsin Hamid, in the Washington Post. Hamid lived part of his life in America and part of it in Pakistan. He says, "How does someone like me reconcile his affection and frustration? Partly by offering a passionate critique. And partly by hoping for change -- by appealing, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. did, to what is most attractive about the United States, to what it claims to stand for, to what is best in its nature." Interestingly, this King-ian philosophy often appeared in Barack Obama's speeches, too.

Fareed Zakaria, in Newsweek. Zakaria goes over the same policy history as Hamid, but he also says, "As we strike Afghanistan it is worth remembering that not a single Afghan has been tied to a terrorist attack against the United States." The moral here seems to be that the "Muslim world" is not some monolithic entity.

One of my favorite articles is Peter Ford's, in the Christian Science Monitor. Since he's writing a news story, Ford interviews Muslims from all over the world. He writes, "the buttons that Mr. bin Laden pushes in his statements and interviews - the injustice done to the Palestinians, the cruelty of continued sanctions against Iraq, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the repressive and corrupt nature of US-backed Gulf governments - win a good deal of popular sympathy."

Although his article isn't as good as some of the others, Olivier Roy does make an interesting point in The New York Times when he says, "[These terrorists] are for the most part Westernized Muslims living or even born in Europe who turn to radical Islam. They did not turn fundamentalist because of Iraq, but because they felt excluded from Western society."

Roy's remark is interesting because it leaves one wondering: Why would young Muslims feel alienated from their British or French peers, even prior to September 11th? In Orientalism, Edward Said says that the colonial nations (England, France) have a long history of stereotyping Arabs. Is this what some of those young kids felt? That next to their European friends, they would always be "the other"? No matter how fluent they were in English, or how much pop music they listened to?

My thoughts: it's naive to pretend that there isn't virulent anti-American sentiment in many, many Arab nations. Dislike for American policy is a part of those nations' popular consciousness. And there are valid historical reasons for it. But it's also naive to pretend that the Arab world is all about hating America. Like Anne Garrels says in Naked in Baghdad, Iraq was a very complex place prior to the US invasion. Maybe anti-Americanism offers an outlet, but it is not the only root of the problem.

Tomorrow: looking at this question through the eyes of several major English-language newspapers from the Arab world.

Colonialism? Not my cup of tea

There is a popular idea among certain—usually educated—Indians. I've heard it referred to many times in conversation. Someone will bring up the blank unfairness of colonialism, and others will respond with: well, hold on. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don't we [Indians] owe the British colonial system something?

At the risk of being absolutist, I'm not really sure that we do. In the United States, we owe the British some of our cultural and political institutions. That's because the Pilgrims were Englishmen, and indeed, referred to themselves as such for years.

But Indians of the subcontinent? Not so much.

The first exhibit in the "we owe the British something" gallery is: education. Christian missionaries opened many schools in British India. They spread literacy to the outer reaches, perhaps, but they also spread Christianity. One might even say that, at least in the early days of empire, the first aim was really only tangential to the second. One might also say that while the British might have contributed "education" to India, it was a uniquely British education, one that refused to acknowledge the value or validity of anything Indian. In other words, the British taught Indians to discriminate against themselves. While that may have helped the colonial powers, it didn't do much for Indians. (See this essay on the myth of the Aryan invasion. The French author falls into the same trap of assuming that enlightened Europeans must bring the light of knowledge to the Indian masses, but still...)

The second exhibit is: railroads. But it was Indians, not British, who built the railroads through India and, to a lesser extent, Africa. Today, most of India's rural population still lives at least 70 miles away from a railway station. The British used Indian labor to build the infrastructure that was convenient to the British.

In other words, nothing the British did in India was undertaken with the goal of fortifying India, but rather of creating in India a more "model" colony, one easier for the British to administer. That Indians learned to disrespect their own labor and institutions was hardly a tragedy for the British.

The answer to the question, what do we owe the British? is highly complicated and individual. Some people will say the bad outweighs the good, others will say the good outweighs the bad. Overall, though, it's worth remembering that the British looked out for their own interests while they were in India. "Indian interests" did not exist for them as a separate concept from "British interests," and this attitude colored everything they did during their colonial rule.

Note: I am using words like "British" and "they" in a strictly historical sense. It barely needs saying that modern Britishers do not colonize other nations.

Note, 2: This week's posts are brought to you by Orientalism, Edward Said's 1978 book about pre- and post-colonial scholarship.

Note, 3: As an American of Indian descent, my relationship with colonial England is more complicated than I'm admitting.

Thoughts on National Geographic and Orientalism

I'm finally reading Edward Said's Orientalism, after years of quoting snippets in papers and conversations (yes, I've been that person). With Said's theories in mind, I realize now what bothered me about Malaria, the epic treatise on the disease that recently appeared in National Geographic.

After a 2002 ethical snafu ended his career at the New York Times Magazine, one might expect author Michael Finkel to be more circumspect about flouting journalistic convention. Finkel is that rare breed—he's such a great storyteller that he sometimes forgets not all journalistic rules exist to be broken.

But it's not Finkel's signature lack of quotes that bothers me here, nor even his melodramatic personification of the malaria parasite itself. What bothers me is this: Finkel wrote a 6000-word essay on the ravages malaria has wrought on the people of Africa. He focused at length on Zambia, using that government's broad anti-malaria efforts as a case study for what other nations might adopt.

But Finkel does not quote a single African. Let's remember that in Finkel's article, it is Zambians who are catching, fighting, curing and dying from this disease. And yet, as far as Finkel is concerned, the twenty-first century might as well be the early days of empire, when all non-European people were considered "savages" fresh from the bush.

Omissions like Finkel's create a world of misconceptions and imperfect information. And the consequences of acting on imperfect information are vast, particularly from the perspective of global health policy.

Finkel's only possible defense could be that he didn't know or wasn't aware of the historic voicelessness of the people of Africa. But ignorance and lack of self- and social-awareness are hardly much of a defense. Finkel owed it to Zambia to let its people represent themselves. Instead, the closest he comes is quoting a Maryland-based scientist with an ethnic-sounding name.

As journalists we must be more honest about our biases, and more aware of where our work falls in the global spectrum of intellectual debate.

Combating "Orientalism" and voicelessness is not just a question of fairness. It is imperative if we want to formulate and implement policies—or even just function—in a globalized world.

The Drop Heard 'Round the World

The US economy is now officially in recession. Barack Obama is at work on a New-New-Deal, which economists are already discussing even though the tenets have not been drafted.

But the impact will not be on Americans alone. In India, the Hindu reports that John McCain flew over and talked financial shop with Indian PM Manmohan Singh (no contest as to who's the better economist there) but that the Indian economy expects to see less capital inflow and a decline in Indian exports. Remember, however, that this is an economy that was previously predicted to grow at 10% a year.

In Japan, the Asahi Shimbun reports that Japanese companies expect the downturn to last at least until 2010. Also, several major Japanese insurance companies have taken a battering in the stock market of late.

According to the China Daily, a government think tank there has predicted the economy will continue to grow at 9.8% (this seems overly optimistic, unless "think tank"="PR factory" in China). They do admit to a slump in housing prices and a drop in the CPI, but they expect a rise in industrial output. (Either China's industrial sector is the bionic man of the global economy, or something is fishy...also, no mention of a drop in exports...)

Germany's finance minister feels Germany has done all it can to help with the EU bailout, according to Deutsche-Welle. To be fair to Germany, that seems to be true. Economics have long agreed that Germany's economy suffered the most as a result of accepting the Euro. It appears they're still paying reparations for World War II.

The Russian construction industry is down, but Putin thinks it's "unfair" that international markets can negatively affect Russian stock prices, says the Moscow Times. Unfair? That's the recession in a nutshell. At least from where I sit. A seat that is not in a financial services office.

Italy, which has the largest budget deficit in the EU, just doubled the value-added tax on PayTV, which apparently has some Italians up in arms, according to Corriere della Sera. And by some Italians, I mean Rupert Murdoch, who owns the leading Italian PayTV stations "by a long chalk." Despite the skyrocketing costs of satellite TV, people are still immigrating to Italy in record numbers.

There are more nations to cover—originally I envisioned a G7+3 roundup—but in the meantime, read and ponder. Two points emerge from the mashup: 1) the economy is global, man. 2) journalism is global, too. (Some might say 2 follows from 1, but I am not of that group)