Most Popular War and Peace Posts
Remembering Somali Aid Workers Killed in Bombing
Published November 02, 2009 @ 09:20AM PT
Last year on October 29th, 2008, an Islamic radical youth militia also known as "al Shabab" launched a five-point bombing attack in Hargeisa, Somaliland, and Bossaso, Puntland, in the northeast African country, Somalia. One of the bombs struck inside the UN Development Programme compound where I had served as a consultant a year earlier. To commemorate the anniversary, get to know the cultural and political context, learn a few gory details, and see some very revealing video footage, take a look at this feature story, "Five Bombers in Somalia." It's one of the few places to see much of the story described in one place alongside raw local video of one of the bombings and the aftermath. You can also take a look at the UN's anniversary note here on ReliefWeb.
The bombing was an irony upon ironies. Even during my brief time there, I had a chance to talk to Mohamed Elmi Geele, one of those who perished, about security for aid workers. He and the others were very cautious, particularly in preparing foreigners to drive out into the countryside. For many, his office had been considered one of the safest places to be in Somaliland.
Truth is, the region is getting stronger, more stable, and more hopeful every day. Locally, the attacks were seen as Somaliland's 9/11. And it did more to unite Somalis there behind the UN and the peace and revitalization effort than it provided anything strategic for the radical bombers.
[Photo: A grave outside Berbera, Somaliland, Daniel J Gerstle.]
Chalk Up Another Absurdity on the Gaza War
Published November 01, 2009 @ 01:16PM PT
Egypt is finally opening the border to Gaza but only for three days to allow people who need urgent medical care, etc, to finally get out of their neighborhood-turned maximum security prison. All due respect and consideration to those who were affected by the pre-war rocket fire in Israel, but why would civilians lying in hospitals needing dialysis or advanced surgeries have to wait for a peace deal or for Egypt to negotiate with Israel before being able to go to Cairo for lifesaving medical care?
On Halloween, as most of us are running down the street dressed as zombies, bleeding celebrities, or story book characters, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Abu Dabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Another kind of charade, perhaps. Since last winter's Gaza War, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have predictably fallen into the usual rut. Anyone with any civil approach to resolving tensions gets knocked away from the microphone by someone obsessed with isolating the Other.
While the core dispute about how to allow free passage for innocent Palestinian civilians and trade goods out of the isolated Gaza enclave moves forward at a snail's pace, with tunnels being the controversial steam release, many of the decision-makers are distracted by related but should-be-separate issues of whether one side or the other committed war crimes. The second issue is vital, but does not need to slow down progress on the first issue. On closer look, one of the reasons Israeli authorities claim it is important to limit goods and people going in and out of Gaza is because of do-wrongers posing as the sick or using "dual-use" items such as metals or cans that can be turned into bombs. What do you think?
[Photo: Hebron's old city, West Bank, Daniel J Gerstle.]
Sunday Links about Horrible Things
Published October 31, 2009 @ 06:34PM PT
In my first Sunday links roundup, I use LOLSpeak, double entendres and plenty of snark to summarize grim developments from Russia to Pakistan. Appreciate: this was compiled Saturday night --Halloween-- in my office, which the downstairs security guards accused me of trying to burglarize.
Work/life balance? What are you, European?
Strange Things are Afoot in Papua, Indonesia
Published October 30, 2009 @ 08:23AM PT
Papua province, Indonesia. It's the wealthy soil, mountainous region inhabited largely by Melanesians, the western half of the island of New Guinea. Many of us who check out travel books or have friends in Indonesia kind of understand that the area has that usual colonial / post-colonial fate.
Indonesia cooperates with foreign companies to come and mine, plunder, etc. But when Melanesians fret about losing their land to this kind of development, and seeing little in return, many of them protest. Indonesia, they claim, tends to overreact.
Activists for the Melanesian minority have been beating a drum with reports of disproportionate violence against them, murder, suppression, etc. When news agencies like the BBC ask the Indonesian government for their point of view, they tend to get no answer or peachy or more often - go away you're not allowed in if you're going to ask questions. My friend Nick Chesterfield turned me on to his update site at Manukoreri.net. There's a Papua listserv as well. Even more exciting is this documentary I'm dying to see called, Forgotten Bird of Paradise.
[Photo: Dancing Turtle Media, permission through Manukoreri.net.]
Three Goodbyes for Chechnya's Witnesses
Published October 30, 2009 @ 07:59AM PT
Elena Milashina, a spirited young reporter for Russia's Novaya Gazeta, described the last time she saw her friend, Natalia Estemirova, a history teacher turned human rights investigator in Grozny, the capitol of wartime Chechnya, this past summer. They were up until four a.m., Estemirova was dressed in a light white dress. It was a balmy summer evening. Milashina was keeping her from getting work done, telling stories.
After Estemirova's body was found with five bullet holes in it a few weeks later, dumped on the side of the road in Gaziyurt, Ingushetia, Milashina and their friends and co-workers came back to Grozny for Estemirova's burial. Then, as is Russian custom, they came back again on the ninth day to remember her. Then they came on the fortieth day for one last round of remembrance. Only this time, Milashina recalled, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was in town. But rather than visit Estemirova's grave, the resting place of one of Russia's purest, if not most kind and caring human rights monitors, Putin was with Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, at the grave of Kadyrov's father, Akhmed, a notorious warlord turned Russian ally in the Chechen Wars.
Milashina shared the story this evening, with others, at a gathering at the City University of New York, set up by the Committee to Protect Journalists, PEN, the Chechnya Advocacy Network, and others. I sat in the audience, falling to pieces.
Refugee Detention: A Greek Tragedy
Published October 30, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
Greece is the worst place to be a refugee in Europe. By far. The Greek government shows so little regard for the welfare of the thousands of refugees — most of them from Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia — who cross its borders by land and sea each year that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees recommends other countries not return refugees to Greece — a stinging indictment for any country to receive from the UN Refugee Agency.
That hasn’t stopped the Greek government from continuing abusive policies. In fact, treatment of refugees in Greece is only getting worse.
On 23 October, a UNHCR delegation, escorted by Greek government officials, visited the Pagani refugee detention center on the island of Lesvos. What the monitors found at the center shocked them.
How Wartime Killers Cover Tracks
Published October 29, 2009 @ 07:35PM PT
Outside Granada, Spain, this week, a forensics team, which represents the families of leftist fighters and sympathizers who disappeared in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, dug into a mass grave. Many believe it is the burial place of the renowned poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The story reminds me of reading about the murders committed on both sides of that conflict. It blows my mind that those who chose to kill in cold blood during lulls in the fighting simply threw dirt over the bodies with no fear of getting caught.
By the 1960s, it appeared that many fighting groups coming of age after the lessons of the Second World War tribunals at Nuremburg, particularly groups in Latin America, were not choosing to stop killing, but instead were trying harder at "disappearing" the evidence. Just last month, Spanish authorities arrested Julio Alberto Poch who helped Argentinian nationalists cover their tracks by flying leftist prisoners over the ocean where over time about a thousand of them were, in turn, thrown out of the plane alive, never to be found.
In the 1990s, when the world was mired in debate about whether an international court was necessary, it appeared that even the most sophisticated fighting groups which chose to murder opponents in peacetime (like paramilitaries and soldiers in the Balkans, who after a few attempts to destroy evidence by incinerating bodies in Keraterm, floating them downriver at Visegrad, or in one case allegedly disintegrating them with acid in Kosovo) were now just killing in the open, even on video (Srebrenica), having no belief that any more than a few people would stand trial.
