Monthly Archives: November 2004

by | 18 November 2004 · 10:09 am

Kyushu Grand Sumo Tournament

After 5 days of the Kyushu Grand Sumo Tournament, veteran ozeki Musoyama (Hawai‘i yokozuna Musashimaru’s old stablemate) has decided to retire after losing 3 in a row, while fellow ozeki and Fukuoka hometown favorite Kaio (4-1) has recovered nicely after losing his first bout. But the only rikishi with perfect records are: the Mongolian yokozuna Asashoryu, and Japanese veteran Kotonowaka.

More at That’s News to Me.

UPDATE, Day 10: Asashoryu remains 10-0, but Kotonowaka has faded to 6-4. Sekiwake Wakanosato and Mongolian maegashira #1 Hakuho are both at 9-1, while ozeki Kaio and the Russian and Bulgarian rookies Roho and Kotooshu are at 8-2.

UPDATE, Day 11: The very next day after toppling Kaio, Hakuho upset the superman himself, Asashoryu. Fans hurled their zabutons toward the ring in celebration. (No drink cups. Sumo wrestlers often topple into the front rows, but never attack their audience.) Now three rikishi are tied at 10-1–Asashoryu, Wakanosato, and Hakuho–with Kaio only one win behind at 9-2.

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by | 18 November 2004 · 7:56 am

How the Japanese Changed Colors

History blogger Rhine River notes an article by Rotem Kowner in Ethnohistory 51.4(2004):751-778 (on Project Muse), entitled “Skin as a Metaphor: Early European Racial Views on Japan, 1548–1853” from which I’ll quote a few passages (omitting footnotes).

The Europeans divided Asians at this period [before the Enlightenment] into three types of color: black, shades of brown, and white. The Japanese and Chinese were evidently white, and this color judgment was related to their habits and abilities. Whereas the “black people” of Asia were regarded as inferior, suggests Donald Lach, “the whitest peoples generally meet European standards, may even be superior in certain regards, and are certainly good prospects for conversion.” Indeed, in contrast to European explorers in other parts of the globe, the Jesuits did not express any racial superiority toward the Japanese. Some may have felt a certain cultural superiority, but this did not prevent them from admiring the Japanese for their dignity, courtesy, sense of honor, and rationality….

Linne’s followers maintained his focus on color as a major component of their racial classification: The Scottish anatomist John Hunter (1728–1793) depicted Mongoloids as brown, whereas Johann Blumenbach was apparently the first to depict the peoples of East Asia as yellow. This color better suited the Japanese, for whom the designation brown was frequently far from reality. The Europeans could easily see yellow in others’ skin color because it is so vague, and it was enough that a few members of a group were perceived as such to generalize the characteristic to the whole group.

In 1775, the year Blumenbach’s book was published, the Swedish botanist and Linne’s disciple Charles Peter Thunberg (1743–1828) left for Japan. Thunberg, who worked as a physician at the Dutch mission for one year, was the first naturalist of the new school to examine the Japanese. A decade later, when Thunberg wrote his own account of his experience in Japan, he depicted the Japanese as having “yellowish colour over all, sometimes bordering on brown, and sometimes on white.” …

The most influential testimony on late Tokugawa Japan, however, was the writings of the German physician and naturalist Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866). The erudite von Siebold, who was employed by the Dutch mission in Nagasaki in the 1820s as Kaempfer had been over a century earlier, took special interest in the origins of the Japanese. Reviewing previous writings on the theme, von Siebold examined four notions regarding Japanese ancestry: they were descendants of the Chinese, of the so-called Tartaric race, of a mixture of more Asian races, or of the aborigines of the archipelago. Like Kaempfer, von Siebold disputed the Chinese hypothesis because of historical evidence, differences in language, and physical traits. He noted, curiously, that the hair color of young Japanese ranged from brown to blond and that among the higher classes the skin color was white and pinkish red (“as among our European women”), whereas the lower classes ranged from copper red to sallow earthlike colors.

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by | 17 November 2004 · 8:17 am

Robert Kaplan’s "Modest Degree of Fatalism"

On 14 November 2004, Robert Kaplan published an op-ed piece (filed from Guam!) in the New York Times headlined Barren Ground for Democracy.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, communist satellites like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary promptly evolved into successful Western democracies. This transition was relatively easy because the countries boasted high literacy rates, exposure to the Enlightenment under Prussian and Hapsburg emperors, and strong industrial bases and middle classes prior to World War II and the cold war. In retrospect, it seems clear that only the presence of the Red Army had kept them from developing free parliamentary systems on their own.

But the idea that Western-style democracy could be imposed further east and south, in the Balkans, has proved more problematic. Beyond the Carpathian mountains one finds a different historical legacy: that of the poorer and more chaotic Ottoman Empire. Before World War II, this was a world of vast peasantries and feeble middle classes, which revealed itself in Communist governments that were for the most part more corrupt and despotic than those of Central Europe.

Unsurprisingly, upon Communism’s collapse, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania struggled for years on the brink of anarchy, although they at least avoided ethnic bloodshed. Of course, Yugoslavia was not so lucky. Though democracy appears to have a reasonably bright future there thanks to repeated Western intervention, it is wise to recall that for 15 years it has been a touch-and-go proposition.

Undeterred, Wilsonian idealists in the United States next put Iraq on their list for gun-to-the-head democratization. But compared with Iraq, even the Balkans were historically blessed, by far the most culturally and politically advanced part of the old Turkish Empire. Mesopotamia, on the other hand, constituted the most anarchic and tribalistic region of the sultanate.

In addition, the Balkans are affixed to Central Europe, and were thus a natural extension of it as NATO expanded eastward. Iraq is bordered by Iran and Syria, states with weakly policed borders and prone to radical politics, which themselves have suffered under absolutism for centuries.

Western intellectuals on both the left and right underplayed such realities. In the 1990’s, those supporting humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia branded references to difficult history and geography as “determinism” and “essentialism” – academic jargon for fatalism. In the views of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, group characteristics based on a shared history and geography no longer mattered, for in a post-cold war world of globalization everyone was first and foremost an individual. Thus if Poland, say, was ready overnight for Western-style democracy, then so too were Bosnia, Russia, Iraq – and Liberia, for that matter.

That line of thinking provided the moral impetus for military actions in 1995 in Bosnia and in 1999 in Kosovo: interventions that reclaimed the former Yugoslavia into the Western orbit. But the people who ordered and carried out those interventions, liberal Democrats in general, were canny. While they agreed with the idealists’ moral claims, they realized that it was the feasibility of the military side of the equation that made the interventions ultimately worth doing. Yes, they also favored democracy in places like Liberia, but they were wise enough not to risk the lives of Americans in such endeavors. They intuited that a modest degree of fatalism was required in the conduct of international affairs, even if they were clever enough not to publish the fact.

via Oxblog

I certainly share Kaplan’s “modest degree of fatalism”–if not downright pessimism–but I think he overstates his case as a result of his unfortunate inclination toward historical and cultural determinism (and essentialism), which I don’t share to the same degree. In fact, I’m adamantly antiessentialist. That’s why I like to focus on exceptions and outliers.

For one thing, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland did not “promptly” transform themselves into respectable democracies. They started rather painfully well before 1989. Hungary revolted very bloodily in 1956, Czechoslovakia more peacefully in 1968, and Poland all during the 1980s. Each led eventually to very modest reforms and tiny cracks through which civil society could begin to sprout.

Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania didn’t get the same headstart. I remember a Romanian telling me in 1983-84, “We’re not the Poles. When trouble comes, we take our sheep up into the mountains until it passes.” Maybe this only supports Kaplan’s case for cultural determinism–or essentialism.

A second issue is Kaplan’s claim that Bosnia and Kosovo are now within the “Western orbit.” That doesn’t speak too well for the Western orbit. Remember the exit strategy? It was just around the corner in 1998, and still just a few corners away in 2002. I’m sure European wisdom will prevail eventually, perhaps before the next fin de siècle.

Finally, I think Kaplan underestimates the power of redemptive suffering. I suspect redemptive suffering might help explain how Japan and Germany overcame their catastrophic militarism after World War II, and even how Afghans have begun to overcome their self-defeating fractiousness–at least enough to complete a national election of historic import. But perhaps my notions of redemptive suffering just betray the determinative cultural legacy of my Judaeo-Christian heritage. Or perhaps it was my Shiite, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Plains Indian Sundance heritage in a prior life.

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by | 16 November 2004 · 7:46 am

The Early 1940s Japanosphere

On 12 December 1941 Japan’s media announced that the four-day-old hostilities in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, together with the four-year-old China Incident, were henceforth to be referred to as the Greater East Asia War (Dai Toa senso). During the next three and a half years, the word “Greater East Asia” reverberated through radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, academic monographs, Diet speeches, classrooms, and barracks. No other term so frequently surfaced in discussions of Japan’s war aims. Imperial forces were waging a “holy war” to cleanse Greater East Asia of Chiang Kai-shek, communism, and Anglo-Saxons in order to build a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Asians could live and prosper under Imperial Japan’s benevolent tutelage.

So closely was Greater East Asia identified with wartime propaganda that the term abruptly dropped out of sight in 1945 and has since been shunned. Japanese writers are loathe to employ something so tainted with emotional associations. Consequently, they have adopted the American nomenclatures: “World War II,” and “Pacific War.” Neither is very satisfactory. The former is too broad, because Japanese forces did not participate in the Soviet-German conflict, nor did they operate in Europe. The latter is too narrow, because it suggests that the war was basically oceanic and in doing so fails to reflect the major fighting that took place on the Asiatic continent. Despite its awkward connotations, “Greater East Asia War” remains the most accurate designation for a struggle that in Japan’s perspective encompassed the Indian and Pacific oceans, East and Southeast Asia.

How far did the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere extend? From the moment the term made its public debut at an August 1940 press conference called by Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, its magnitude remained vaguely defined. Conceptions of the Sphere varied in accordance with individual inclinations and external circumstances. Available evidence clearly suggests, however, that the entire Hawaiian archipelago consistently fell within its envisioned boundaries, both before and after 7 December 1941.

Before 7 December public discussions about Greater East Asia usually referred to Hawaii indirectly through the term Nan’yo (South Seas). Nan’yo, which was said to lie within Japan’s “lifeline” (seimeisen) and “life sphere” (seimeiken) had its nucleus in the Micronesian mandated islands, but at times was said to include Melanesia and Polynesia. Before 7 December mention of Hawaii as part of Nan’yo was usually done indirectly. For example, early in 1941 a book on Hawaii translated into Japanese by former University of Hawaii instructor George Tadao Kunitomo appeared in the “New Japan Sphere Series” [Shin Nipponken sosho] of a Tokyo publisher. There were also, to be sure, more direct intimations of Hawaii’s position. In a booklet published in September 1941 the retired army officer and ultranationalist Kingoro Hashimoto explicitly included Hawaii in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Hashimoto’s public identification of Hawaii with Greater East Asia was consistent with a classified study prepared several months earlier in the Research Section of Navy General Staff. Dated 29 November 1940 and entitled “Draft Outline for Construction of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” this secret (it was stamped gokuhi) report cast Hawaii’s future disposition in sharper focus than did any public document that appeared before the Pearl Harbor attack.

Authors of the “Draft Outline” stated that the objective for establishing a Sphere was: “… to create a new culture by the sharing of respect, by mutual good neighborliness, friendship, joint defense, and economic cooperation in an area with Japan [literally “kokoku” or “imperial country”] as the nucleus and including [a list of nations] … Hawaii.”

The Sphere was to be divided geographically into three concentric subspheres: inner, middle, and outer. The inner subsphere would consist of the Japanese archipelago, Korea, and Manchuria. The middle subsphere would be formed by most of China and all of Nan’yo, “including Hawaii.” The third, outer subsphere, would include “such outer areas as are necessary for the complete economic self-sufficiency of Greater East Asia.”

Defining political relationships within the Sphere, the document enumerated four categories: lands to be annexed outright by Japan; autonomous protectorates; independent states with “unbreakable” defense and economic ties with Japan; and independent states with close economic ties with Japan. Australia, New Zealand, and India fell into the final category. Hong Kong, Thailand, and the Philippines (with the exception of Mindanao, which had a J apanese population of twenty-six thousand) were put in the third category. Indochina and the Dutch East Indies were in the second category. The first category included Guam, Mindanao, and Hawaii. In other words, a Navy General Staff research report recommended, over a year before the outbreak of hostilities with the United States, that the Hawaiian Islands be incorporated into the Japanese Empire.

SOURCE: Hawaii Under the Rising Sun: Japan’s Plans for Conquest After Pearl Harbor, by John J. Stephan (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1984), pp. 135-137

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by | 15 November 2004 · 6:27 pm

South Vietnamese Resentment of the North

Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, emerged in the years immediately after the end of the Vietnam War with remarkably little physical change. The colonial-era buildings that gave the place its distinctive character still stood in the centre of the city untouched by anything like the madness that had occurred in Phnom Penh. In 1981 what was immediately apparent to a visitor who had known the city before was the absence of the chaotic traffic of yesteryear in this early period of communist rule. It was not hard to see other changes, from the police drafted down from the north in their ill-fitting uniforms, to the drabness of daily dress, particularly among the women on the street. Except on Sunday; when fashion consciousness triumphed over communist austerity; or in private homes, there were almost no women to be seen wearing the distinctive and graceful ao dai.

Yet beneath the clear signs that this was a city being ruled by a very different government, it was not hard to detect remnants of attitudes that harked back to the recent pre-communist past. Perhaps the most obvious, one that has been remarked on by many who visited at this time, was the determination of the city’s inhabitants to continue calling it Saigon. In doing so they enshrined the feeling of distinctiveness that cut across political boundaries. It was not surprising that Madame Nguyen Phuoc Dai, the former South Vietnamese lawyer, senator and renowned owner of the Bibliotheque Restaurant, insisted that the city’s name was Saigon. In a city where standards of service and cuisine had sharply declined, a visit to Madame Dai’s was almost de rigeur in the early 1980s, not least because she was ready to give free rein to her feelings about rule from the north. But to hear the city called Saigon by Dr Quong Quyen Hoa was another matter.

Dr Hoa had been the Minister for Health in the southern Provisional Revolutionary Government while the Vietnam War still raged. A pediatrics specialist, she had gone into the local maquis in 1968. When I met her in 1981 in a house full of beautiful antique furniture and porcelain, she consistently spoke of the city as Saigon and she was dressed in an ao dai of the finest silk. But more significantly she was vehement in her criticism of the way in which the government in Hanoi was treating those who had fought on its behalf in the south. ‘We have been recolonised by the north,’ she told me. The members of the Provisional Revolutionary Government had been discarded by a northern-dominated regime which formulated plans for Saigon, and southern Vietnam generally with little if any regard for local conditions. As for Vietnam’s Soviet friends, Dr Hoa said that like most southerners, indeed like most Vietnamese, she tolerated them for the moment because they were needed. But they too would only be transients on the Vietnamese stage.

Whatever Dr Hoa’s feelings about Hanoi’s errors, she was clearly not suffering materially and I felt that I gained a more representative assessment of life in Saigon from Phuong, a Vietnamese who had studied in Australia and now worked for the city government, earning what was then the equivalent of US$14 a month. He confirmed the tensions between northerners and southerners, a situation marked by the northerners’ arrogance and their doubts about the extent of revolutionary zeal among Saigon’s population. With a wry smile, Phuong observed that the northerners had good reason to have these doubts, not least because the population of greater Saigon, including Cholon, still counted upwards of 800 000 ethnic Chinese who had never identified their interests with any state, communist or otherwise. Phuong’s comment rang true, for only the week before in Hanoi the Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Nguyen Co Thach, had told me the government was going to ‘break’ Chinese control of commerce in the south. They did not do so then, and nearly twenty years later they still have not done so. The Chinese merchants are still there, and Thach is dead.

As for Saigon’s ethnic Vietnamese population, Phuong continued, of course there was dissatisfaction. You did not have to have held an important position in the pre-liberation government to dislike many of the changes that had taken place. But to think this was a sign that dissatisfaction would be translated into any serious action was absurd. Southerners, in any event, loved to grumble, and too many foreign journalists who were now visiting Saigon were ready to look at life in the city and wonder how ‘nice people’ like him could put up with the conditions that existed, and which were obviously less attractive than what could be found in the West. So much was unsatisfactory; he noted wryly, but it was far from insupportable. And, he concluded rather tentatively, even someone as apolitical as he was found the fact that the whole of Vietnam was now governed by a Vietnamese regime was important.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 217-219

How many “national” liberation movements end up being regional, ethnic, or religious recolonizations on a smaller scale? (Or, in Indonesia’s case, a larger scale.)

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by | 14 November 2004 · 1:28 pm

Origin of the Yokozuna Rank in Sumo

On the occasion of the opening of the November Grand Sumo Tournament, here’s an account of the origin of the highest rank, yokozuna, usually translated ‘grand champion’ to distinguish it from the former highest rank, ozeki ‘champion’.

The conventional genealogy of yokozuna begins with Akashi Shiganosuke in the early seventeenth century, but there is no record that such a wrestler ever existed, much less that he was made a yokozuna. Instead, the institution of the yokozuna has its origins in the licenses Yoshida Zenzaemon granted to two wrestlers–Tanikaze Kajinosuke and Onokawa Kisaburo. In November 1789 he authorized each of them to perform a solo ring-entering ceremony while wearing a white rope (the yokozuna) around their waists. This innovation was part. of the efforts by Yoshida and the other leaders of professional sumo in Edo to increase the status of the sport, efforts that culminated with the 1791 sumo performance before Shogun Tokugawa Ienari. [Sumo was previously considered too low-brow for noble tastes.]

Yoshida’s innovation was not immediately adopted as standard practice. In fact, for nearly forty years, no further licenses to perform the solo ring-entering ceremony while wearing the decorative rope were granted. The license was revived in 1828, but by the end of the Tokugawa shogunate only nine such licenses had been awarded. The institutionalization of the practice in the early twentieth century involved a series of innovations beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in the official recognition of the yokozuna as the highest rank in sumo.

For a century after Yoshida’s grant to Tanikaze and Onokawa, the highest sumo rank continued to be ozeki [‘champion’]. During this time, the word “yokozuna ” still referred merely to the rope worn by the wrestler licensed to perform a solo ring-entering ceremony. In fact, Tanikaze did not even hold the highest rank of Ozeki in the tournament after which he was awarded the yokozuna license; he was at the second-highest rank of sekiwake. Shiranui Dakuemon, awarded the license in 1840, was subsequently demoted to sekiwake for a tournament.

It was not until May 1890 that the word “yokozuna” appeared in the banzuke (the table of rankings printed before each tournament). Ironically, the motive for printing the term was to placate rather than to reward, and the consequences were entirely unintended. For the first time there were more than two ozeki listed on the banzuke. Two new ozeki had just been promoted, but the two reigning ozeki were left in place. This unprecedented situation was dealt with by writing the two extra names on tabs protruding from the top sides of the printed banzuke. The ozeki with the weakest record in the previous tournament, Nishinoumi, was one of those listed on the tabs. Since he had just been awarded a yokozuna license, he felt slighted and complained to the Sumo Association that a wrestler as honored as he deserved better treatment. To pacify him, the association put the characters for yokozuna next to his name. Once the precedent was established, it became the custom to write these characters alongside the names of ozeki with the license, but there was still no official yokozuna rank.

Shortly after the term “yokozuna” entered the banzuke rankings, a private campaign was started to distinguish ozeki with the yokozuna license from those without it. Jimmaku Kyiigoro had received a license, the ninth issued, in 1867. In 1895, he started a campaign to erect a monument to wrestlers who had been honored with the license. The monument was erected in 1900 without the involvement of the Sumo Association or the Yoshida family (which still claimed sole authority to issue the yokozuna license).

The Sumo Association finally recognized yokozuna as an official rank in 1909, the pivotal year in which the Kokugikan was opened, the referee’s costume was redesigned, and the newspaper Jiji shinpo started regularly designating tournament champions. The Yoshida house, however, which continued to award the yokozuna license, refused to accept the association’s interpretation of the yokozuna as a rank. It was not until 1951 that the Yoshida family finally agreed that the yokozuna was indeed a rank. In short, the lofty status that is now widely perceived as the very symbol of sumo’s “two-thousand-year history” emerged only in the nineteenth century and was finally accepted as an official rank around fifty years ago.

SOURCE: Japanese Sports: A History, by Allen Guttmann and Lee Thompson (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2001), pp. 143-145

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by | 13 November 2004 · 3:13 pm

Politics and the Ethiopian Famine 1984-1985

[Cultural Survival’s Report]

When [Peter] Niggli, Bonnie Holcomb, and the research director of Cultural Survival, Dr. Jason W. Clay, arrived in Sudan in February 1985 to interview the Tigreans and others who had escaped over the border, the resettlement issue was an interesting sideshow to the main famine story. Western journalists and diplomats in Ethiopia had caught glimpses of people being herded onto trucks and airplanes. One U.S. diplomat went so far as to say that “the selection process recalled Auschwitz.” From the little that could be discerned, resettlement appeared to be yet another indication, if any was needed, of the Marxist regime’s insensitivity to its own people. But there the issue ground to a halt for lack of evidence. Resettlement areas simply were off limits to almost all foreigners, except those on prearranged tours to model camps. The government denied that the program was not voluntary or that it was motivated by any factor besides the humanitarian desire to relocate drought-stricken peasants to more fertile areas in the west and southwest of the country. Western relief officials stationed in Addis Ababa, whose presence depended on the good will of the local authorities, tended to back up the regime’s assertions….

Cultural Survival, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, came to Sudan with especially impressive credentials. Founded in 1972 by a group of social scientists at Harvard University, its reports on endangered ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have criticized right-wing and left-wing governments alike and have been utilized by the World Bank, USAID, and foreign governments to judge a country’s human rights record and need for development assistance. Clay’s team interviewed 277 Ethiopian refugees at six sites in eastern Sudan … using local translators who were not connected with the TPLF [Tigrean People’s Liberation Front]. (Bonnie Holcomb, who speaks Oromo, helped with some of the translations.) All interviews were taped and then translated a second time by other translators back in the United States. More than half those interviewed were selected at random and, in almost all cases, involved more than 5 percent of the total population of each camp. This was a statistically huge sample. (Harris Polls, for instance, rely on .0004 of 1 percent of the U.S. population.) As Clay told me in a letter, “Methodologically, you cannot touch [criticize] the data that we collected” about conditions in Ethiopia ”as it relates to the refugees in Sudan.” …

To my knowledge, no study of the Great Leap Forward in China or the actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was as well packaged as was Cultural Survival’s Politics and the Ethiopian Famine 1984-1985, a 250-page monograph, served up with an array of attractive maps, whose results–if you could wade through the overwhelming details (few could)–were absolutely devastating.

“All those interviewed insisted that they had been captured by government troops and forced to resettle…. Ten percent of all those interviewed reported that they witnessed people being killed who tried to escape.” More than 40 percent said they were beaten. More than 85 percent said they had been separated from at least one member of their immediate families; 70 percent were separated from all members of their immediate families. Amete Gebremedhin, a Tigrean in her early forties, stated that after she and a group of other captured women protested to the militia about being separated from their husbands and children, “the soldiers laughed and said: ‘What do you care about your children, you will find new ones in Asosa.'” …

Everyone interviewed said people had died en route to the resettlement sites; 60 percent said they actually saw people die. Clay’s analysis of the death figures was the most comprehensive and the most controversial part of his research.

The death rates reported by the refugees ranged from 33 deaths per 10,000 people per day to 270 deaths per 10,000. These rates are extremely high given that the camp populations were comprised almost entirely of adults. Such figures were consistently reported from a number of different refugees from different areas. Furthermore, they were relayed by people who did not know each other…. Some of the resettled people were undoubtedly malnourished as a result of declining agricultural production in their homelands, but many had not experienced famine until they were captured for resettlement….

These figures raise … the question of how many of the 400,000 people who were resettled by June of 1985 are still alive. If even the most conservative estimates of the death rate (33 per 10,000 per day) are halved and then halved again (i.e., reduced by 75 percent), then 50,000 to 100,000 of those resettled in this massive program may already have been dead by July 1985.

[Diplomat and NGO Reaction]

The figure of “50,000 to 100,000” dead set the aid communities in Khartoum and Addis Ababa ablaze. It was a higher death rate than that at the emergency feeding camps on the Sudanese border at the height of the famine, and most of the Ethiopians who perished in Sudan were children and old people–of which there were very few in the resettlement program. Father Jack Finucane, the head of Concern, an Irish aid group in Addis Ababa, saw the death rates in an article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal about Cultural Survival’s report and told a group of sixty foreign aid workers assembled on October 19, 1985, at the RRC headquarters, “I’ve read it and I don’t believe it.” Finucane said that in visits he and other members of Concern made to the resettlement area, there were no indications of any such horrors. But as it turned out, one month earlier, at a private meeting at the Hilton Hotel where only Western ambassadors and some aid officials were present, Finucane told a different tale; about a half million people were being displaced in “horrible conditions.” Of seventy-seven resettlement areas, only two or three had succeeded, he had said. In a July 29, 1985, letter to his home office, Finucane wrote it was safe to assume that 25 percent–or 125,000–of the settlers had died.

Finucane’s reversal, whereby he independently confirmed from the Ethiopian side the main points of Cultural Survival’s Sudan-based research, only to deny it all at a public forum in the presence of Ethiopian officials, was laid out in a November 3, 1985, article by David Blundy in the Sunday Times (of London). When Blundy, then one of the paper’s leading foreign correspondents, asked the chair of the Band Aid coordinating committee in Addis Ababa, Brother Augustus O’Keefe, about the discrepancy, O’Keefe replied, “That was a private meeting [the meeting between Finucane and the ambassadors]. I won’t talk about it. The press have done a lot of damage here. I have never heard about any problems with resettlement.”

It was a familiar pattern: back up the research of Cultural Survival and Berliner Missionswerk in private, but condemn it in public. The Red Cross League, for example, did a study on resettlement in the summer of 1985 that corroborated much of what Clay’s resettlement study had found, including the death rate. But the report was kept secret. (Oddly enough, the Canadian Embassy in Addis Ababa was a true believer in resettlement, even in private. One Canadian diplomat actually told me that the West had to get involved in a big way in resettlement, in order to have “influence here.” When I mentioned to another Canadian official, whom I met in Sudan, that Canada was assisting resettlement through funding to private agencies involved in the program, he got very angry and proceeded to launch a tirade against U.S. human rights abuses in the Third World. At the time I knew of no other country about which the views of the Canadian and U.S. governments were as divergent as on Ethiopia. Officials in the U.S. State Department and National Security Council had been extremely critical of Canada’s policy toward resettlement. In Addis Ababa, the two embassies literally represented opposing camps. Some of the Canadians I met appeared absolutely driven about proving that–at least as far as Ethiopia was concerned–they had a foreign policy truly different from that of the United States. In Canada itself this policy was criticized. This was one of the stranger aspects of the famine emergency.)

The spinelessness of the aid community in Addis Ababa was demonstrated a few months later, in December 1985, when the inevitable happened–one of their own went public about the appalling consequences of resettlement. Medecins sans Frontieres [MSF] published a report entitled, “Mass Deportation in Ethiopia,” alleging that with a death rate of 20 percent, as many as 300,000 people were likely to die in the resettlement program, of which up to 100,000 already had. The report noted that “one of the most massive violations of human rights” was “being carried out with funds and gifts from international aid.” The French group quickly was expelled from Ethiopia, while the rest of the aid community chastised the group for getting involved in “politics” when it should have been keeping its nose to the grindstone of relief work. Apparently, nobody in Addis Ababa was drawing the distinction between “politics” and gross violations of human rights. The kiss of death to the French group’s presence in Ethiopia was administered by the United Nations, which publicly defended resettlement by saying that the French organization’s charges could not be taken seriously because it was the only group in the field making such accusations….

[U.S. Media Reaction]

In early 1986, MSF took its case to the court of U.S. public opinion, which barely paid attention, even though the United States was providing almost as much aid to Ethiopia as was the rest of the world combined. A Washington press conference, among other activities, got the French doctors onto the front page of The New York Times for a day and into the editorial pages of several important dailies. But the story had difficulty making the evening news on the major networks because there was no footage of the settlers being abused. Also, this was the period of the Challenger disaster. Therefore, the impact of MSF’s revelation on the general public was marginal. And as one refugee official in Washington explained to me, “Suzanne Garment of The Wall Street Journal was the only big columnist to write about it, so everyone around here dismissed it as just a right-wing issue.” As limited as MSF’s effect was, it was still greater than that of Cultural Survival. This was in a way unfortunate because MSF, a relief group whose investigation was not as well grounded academically proved a much softer target for supporters of resettlement than did the Harvard-based Cultural Survival…. The daily news media, by this time obsessed with the southern part of the African continent in place of the Horn, did little to put the findings into perspective or to investigate the matter further. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal was a constant exception to this rule, but like all opinion pages, it didn’t have quite the credibility of a hard news section, and the page’s conservative slant meant that liberals often distrusted it….

Even after Clay and Holcomb’s report was published, journalists tended to write about the skeptical reaction in the relief community, rather than to hunt down the actual victims in order to hear their firsthand accounts….

As I see it, the fundamental flaw in the resettlement story was that it was a foreign news item with no domestic spinoff. Because the United States, despite its generous aid, was not influential in Ethiopia–and had not been for a decade–it was a tragedy for which the Reagan administration bore absolutely no responsibility. Although private donations to certain charities were indirectly assisting resettlement, as were public donations from other governments, USAID always was careful to channel U.S. aid to relief operations unconnected with the program. Thus, there was nothing to dig up against the administration, and the herd instinct in the media never was activated. Even after the MSF visit, journalists almost never raised the matter at State Department briefings. Ethiopia had been “lost” years before, and U.S. interests were not being jeopardized by the inhuman actions of Ethiopia’s regime. The country now was part of that zone of darkness where literally anything could happen away from the television cameras. Had the deaths occurred at the hands of a colorful madman, like Idi Amin or Muammar Gaddafi, or even someone less well known but just as crazy, like the former “emperor of the Central African Empire,” Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the story could have been rescued from oblivion. But Mengistu was far too efficient a killer to be distracted by buffoonery, so his crimes had little mass-market appeal….

But, again, it wasn’t only the media, nor even just the human rights organizations that weren’t interested, but Western governments as well…. In fact, as a National Security Council staffer revealed, after the United States got independent intelligence confirmation of the main findings of Clay’s report, Secretary of State George Shultz was ready to enter a U.N. resolution condemning the Mengistu regime, but backed down after receiving absolutely no support from the United States’ Western allies, who did not want their aid programs in Addis Ababa jeopardized.

SOURCE: Robert Kaplan, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Vintage, 2003), pp. 111-127

Has anything at all changed in the modus operandi of the International Community™ since 1984? Anything?

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by | 12 November 2004 · 8:45 am

Vichy Indochina

During the Second World War a pro-Vichy regime, headed by Admiral Decoux as Governor-General, continued to exercise administrative control over the countries of French Indochina. It did so at the pleasure of the Japanese, who permitted this exercise of apparent French sovereignty in exchange for what Tokyo saw as a vital concession to its interests: the unfettered opportunity to move troops unhindered through the countries of Indochina and to use their territory for the stationing of its aircraft. The Japanese aircraft that sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse in December 1941, leaving Malaya and Singapore without naval protection, took off from airfields in Cambodia. Then, as the tide of battle began to swing decisively against them, the Japanese in March 1945 no longer saw any benefit in allowing the French to exercise even the constrained power they had retained to this point. In a swift and effective coup de force they overturned the Decoux regime and embarked on a belated effort to promote ‘independent’ states in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, while maintaining effective control over all three countries.

This was a climactic moment, for it was recognised, most particularly in Vietnam, as a sign that French colonialism’s days were numbered. From this point on, and with the Vietnamese communists led by a remarkable set of talented individuals of whom Ho Chi Minh was only one, the stage was slowly being set for three decades of bitter hostilities, the years of the First and Second Indochina Wars. First the French and then the Americans sought to stem the tide of communist revolution but, as hindsight has made crystal clear, their efforts failed and the countries along the Mekong that once made up Indochina all finally came under communist control in 1975.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 177-178

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by | 12 November 2004 · 7:55 am

Indochina Makeover, 1966-1981

In the space of fifteen years, from 1966 to 1981, the character of the three countries of former French Indochina that bordered the Lower Mekong changed dramatically; Many of the changes were tragic, almost all were irrevocable. In Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam the bitter years of the Second Indochina War ushered in a period of deeply flawed peace before, in the case of Cambodia and Vietnam, former comrades-in-arms became sworn enemies. The communist victories of 1975 were the prelude to a series of events far different from those most observers had predicted as likely to occur. It was not just that the names of cities and countries changed, so that in a unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, while Cambodia became Democratic Kampuchea. The changes that took place were much more fundamental than those associated with nomenclature. And in the case of Cambodia what took place was scarcely believable.

The bloodbath that many had thought likely to follow a communist victory in Vietnam never took place. Certainly, there was retribution. Of a million persons singled out for ‘re-education’ because of their links to the defeated regime, more than 100 000 endured harsh conditions as they were locked away for long periods in remote and unhealthy labour camps. There they were expected to reflect on their ‘sins’, absorb Marxist thought, and open new areas for agriculture. Yet it seems unquestionably the case that the 30 000 or 40 000 Lao sent for re-education–a dramatically higher proportion of the population–suffered even harsher treatment at the hands of the victors than those who were interned in Vietnam. It was as if the Lao communists were determined to show that their country’s legendary reputation for gentleness and an easygoing approach to life no longer had a place in the new; ideologically oriented scheme of things. But neither in Vietnam nor in Laos did anything take place to match the tyranny and slaughter that overtook the population of Democratic Kampuchea once Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and the victors began their radical restructuring of society.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 194-195

Asiapages finds that ultra-Maoist Pol Pot’s cremation site has turned into a tourist attraction.

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by | 11 November 2004 · 6:27 pm

Good Soldier Outlier: Two Commanding Officers

During my stint as company clerk of HQ Co., 95th Civil Affairs Group, in Ft. Gordon, GA, in 1970-71, I served under two commanding officers (COs): one white, one black, both former enlisted men.

The white captain was a grizzled, foul-mouthed, unambitious hillbilly who took good care of his men but otherwise wasn’t officer material. However, I believe he had received a battlefield commission, which would indicate a capacity for inspirational leadership under extraordinarily dire circumstances–when push came to shoot, to coin a phrase.

I don’t remember his name, but I would sometimes get mysterious phone calls from supply sergeants or mess sergeants in other units with whom he had worked out some mutually advantageous exchange of rations or equipment. And on one occasion I became embroiled in his defense of one of his greenest soldiers, a 17-year-old who had bought a ring on credit from a jewelry store in Augusta whose letterhead motto was “Serving servicemen for over 50 years”–or words to that effect.

The owner had written to ask the CO to intervene and force his lowly private to stop defaulting on his ring payments. The CO was not sympathetic, and asked me to draft a letter saying the jeweler should have known better than to extend credit to a minor without an adult cosigner. In my response I included a gratuitous rhetorical slap at the end, asking whether the store’s motto might be more accurately rendered, “Serving ourselves at the expense of servicemen for over 50 years.” He read it, grunted, and signed it. I posted it, and we never heard anything more about that soldier or his ring.

Capt. Parham was the opposite in almost every respect: all spit-and-polish, demanding yet diplomatic, ambitious for himself and his men, and determined to make a difference. He was an inspiring boss.

In an effort to improve relations with the off-base community, he organized an excursion to Gracewood State School and Hospital for the mentally retarded, just down Tobacco Road a ways. (Tobacco Road runs right into Ft. Gordon.) We were all in uniform and caused quite a stir, with many shouts of “Look at all the soldier boys! Look at all the soldier boys!”

Capt. Parham and I were both taking college courses toward a degree, and I typed up more than a few of his term papers. One of them was about Flannery O’Connor, I remember. I took two extension classes from Augusta College: a physical anthropology course and then a humanities course that was mostly Greek and Roman classics. I remember reading Plato during one all-night shift guarding the motor pool.

It was during Capt. Parham’s time that a chess fad passed through the Orderly Room. In fact, he probably initiated it. I’ve never played much chess, but at that time I happened to know precisely one opening, the Queen’s Gambit, which I put to good use the one time I couldn’t avoid a challenge. I checkmated my opponent in about 3 moves, acquired a reputation as a chess genius, and no one challenged me again. At least not until Capt. Parham brought in a checkerboard one day, challenged me, and proceeded to wipe my checkers off the board in short order.

Capt. Parham had ambitions for his men, too. And I let him down big time. It wasn’t just that I didn’t meet his high standards of spit and polish. He recommended me for NCO (Non-Commissioned Officers) school, and I was too stupid to know what I was getting into. It wasn’t until I got to Ft. McClellan, AL, and met a few representatives of my prospective cohort that I started getting cold feet, despite their enthusiasm about the presence of so many women on base at the WAC School there. Fortunately, I was asked as soon as I reported for duty whether I really wanted to be there. I replied, “No, sir!” and was on the next bus back to Ft. Gordon.

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