by | 19 June 2005 · 3:19 pm

Romania’s Role in Freeing Hostages in Iraq

Jim Hoagland’s column in last Thursday’s Washington Post exposed an unusual angle on the hostage-taking business in Iraq.

Three haggard Romanian journalists appeared on al-Jazeera television April 22, in handcuffs and with guns pointed at their heads, to beg for their lives. They would be killed if Romania did not immediately withdraw its 860 troops from Iraq, their captors announced to the world….

There is a happy ending to this particular story: The Romanian government, which rejected any troop withdrawals, managed to win the journalists’ freedom a month after their suffering was exploited on al-Jazeera. With the help of Iraq’s besieged authorities, Bucharest has also unraveled many details of the kidnapping plot.

That investigation in turn contributed to the freeing Sunday of French journalist Florence Aubenas and her Iraqi translator, Hussein Hanoun Saadi. They and the Romanians were held on a “hostage farm” north of Baghdad by one of the local networks that traffic in foreign and Iraqi hostages. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin publicly thanked Romania on Tuesday for its help.

Criminality became ingrained in Iraqi society during the long and brutal rule of Saddam Hussein, and it did not disappear with the U.S. invasion. Many of those who finance or commit the bombings and other atrocities that flash nightly on American television screens, where the violence is interpreted uniformly as a political phenomenon, fight to be able to return to crime-as-usual in Iraq.

The Romanian case also casts new light on the strong connections that united the Iraqi dictator — and other Arab leaders — with the intelligence services and political establishments of the Soviet bloc for three decades. As they made cause against the United States together, they also made money together.

The U.N. oil-for-food scandal is in many ways only a small strand in the vast web of international corruption and violence spun around the Middle East’s oil riches….

The [Romanian] election last December of a democratic government headed by President Traian Basescu [who ran as an anticorruption candidate] has finally opened the files of the Romanian Intelligence Service …

O să fie foarte interesant, cred eu.

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by | 19 June 2005 · 5:16 am

Growth of Papuan Nationalism, 1961-2004

Honolulu-based East-West Center has issued a policy study that is of particular interest to me, for its focus both on Papua and on the construction of national identity.

Pan-Papuan identity is much more widespread and the commitment to a Papuan nation much stronger in 2004 than it was in 1963, when Indonesia thought it was liberating the Papuans from the yoke of Dutch colonialism. Rather than feeling liberated from colonial rule, Papuans have felt subjugated, marginalized from the processes of economic development, and threatened by the mass influx of Indonesian settlers. They have also developed a sense of common Papuan ethnicity in opposition to Indonesian dominance of the local economy and administration, an identity that, ironically, has spread in part as a result of the increasing reach of Indonesian administration. These pan-Papuan views have become the cultural and ethnic currency of a common Papuan struggle against Indonesian rule. Yet the sharp ethnic distinctions Papuans make between themselves and Indonesians reflect the various and complex relationships Papuans have had with the latter.

Despite the sharp distinctions they draw between themselves and Indonesians, the Papuans are themselves diverse. Papuan society is a mosaic of over three hundred small, local, and often isolated ethno-linguistic groups, whose contacts with each other and with non-Papuans has varied significantly. The evolution of Papuan nationalism has therefore gone hand in hand with the creation of a pan-Papuan identity. The first generation to begin thinking of themselves as Papuans were the graduates of the mission schools and colleges established by the Dutch to train officials, police, and teachers after the Pacific War. The study examines two regions to illustrate something of Papua’s ethnic and religious diversity as well as the different ways in which regions have interacted with the world outside Papua. These two regions, Fakfak [on the lower beak of the Bird’s Head] and Serui [on Yapen Island], had displayed some of the strongest pro-Indonesian sentiment prior to 1961. Today, the choice between Papuan and Indonesian identity is a hotly contested issue in Fakfak, while Serui has become anti-Indonesian. The analysis in these case studies sheds additional light on the ways Papuans have negotiated their ways through choices of identity and political orientation.

SOURCE: Constructing Papuan Nationalism: History, Ethnicity, and Adaptation, by Richard Chauvel.

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by | 19 June 2005 · 4:27 am

Beijing’s (and Washington’s) Policies toward the Uyghurs

Honolulu-based East-West Center has just issued a policy study that sounds two notes worth repeating.

Both Beijing and Washington are about to lose crucial political opportunities in this far-flung territory. Beijing’s new hard-line stance, which restricts even language and culture, has galled the many moderate Xinjiang citizens who once grudgingly accepted Chinese political restrictions as a price of regional economic development. The PRC government still has an opportunity to win back these people with a more pluralistic cultural policy that emphasizes support for Uyghur and other policy-relevant minority languages and that eases other cultural restrictions, particularly on religion. Without such a policy shift, as Beijing well knows, Xinjiang could become China’s Kashmir. Yet if current PRC policy stays on course, any change is likely to be even more restrictive, since the government considers its cultural accommodation of the 1980s and 1990s to be a cause of unrest, rather than a solution to it.

The United States, for its part, must make clear to Beijing that current U.S. political imperatives will not distract U.S. policy from supporting human rights, including cultural rights. The Uyghurs have been among the most pro-American citizens in China. They also happen to be Muslims. If the United States wants international partners in fighting terrorism, it should cultivate a cooperative partnership with China, including the Uyghurs. If the Xinjiang region is to be involved in an initiative against international terrorism, then the United States can urge China and its allies to cultivate the Uyghurs—with their knowledge of the language and cultures of Central Asia—as partners rather than as opponents. As Washington has begun to realize, its anti-Uyghur policies, even those targeted only at violent fringe groups, have already generated negative sentiment in Xinjiang towards the United States. Policies perceived as anti-Uyghur or anti-Muslim could well radicalize previously apolitical Uyghurs, pushing them into militant or radical Islamic groups.

SOURCE: The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy, and Political Discourse, by Arienne M. Dwyer (2005).

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by | 18 June 2005 · 9:37 am

Algeria: Split by the Gulf War

Initially, the Gulf crisis, set off by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, drew increasingly marked lines of separation within the Algerian political class. Although all the parties condemned the Western reaction–the massing of troops and weapons in Saudi Arabia–whose aim, according to some, was only to “preserve their interests,” or even “seize control of hundreds of billions of Arab dollars and threaten the Islamic and Arab nation in its security,” the position toward Saddam Hussein’s regime was far from unanimous.

The ISF [Islamic Salvation Front] Islamists proved to be increasingly embarrassed. How ought one to “protect” Saudi Arabia’s appeal for Western troops? Response: “Let us brandish the torch of Islam. Let us brandish the jihad. Down with the servants of colonialism! No to Iraqi intervention in Kuwait, no to the intervention of unbelievers in Saudi Arabia, no to the governments that have compromised with the West. Yes to the peace dialogue. My dear brothers, we reject all intervention in our affairs.” The ISF preacher who gave this speech in Constantine ended it with the search for the inevitable scapegoat, “the Jews, who occupy all the holy places of Islam” (Sigau 1991).

The rejection of “the American war,” which increased after the air offensive by the coalition against Iraq on January 17, 1991, did not signify adherence to the doctrine of Iraq’s sole party, the Baas [= Baath]. From one end of the Maghreb to the other, the violence of the conflict provoked the return in force of the tradition of revolutionary populism, of a movement of unanimity without any possible differences in points of view. And yet, in the many pro-Iraqi demonstrations that occurred in Rabat, in Algiers, and in Tunis, a rift appeared.

On the one hand, there were those who demanded peace, an immediate cease-fire. They spoke of safeguarding the unity of the “Arab nation.” They adopted the tone of the Third World movement of the 1960s, supported in the past by the Moroccan Mehdi Ben Barka and the West Indian writer Frantz Fanon: they denounced the oppression of the peoples of the “Arab nation” by a regime resolved to establish its hegemony over it. The rejection of US intervention against Iraq was accompanied by a denunciation of the petroleum monarchies in the Gulf. They were accused of placing their capital in Western financial institutions when, in the overwhelming majority of Arab countries, social progress remained very slow. But that effort at social clarification collided with the power of consensus based on identity, the sense of belonging to the same “Arab camp.” And the “Palestinian cause” further united people. Some, however, particularly the heads of the human rights leagues, attempted to explain the necessary distinction between Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime and the suffering of the Iraqi people.

On the other hand, in Morocco and Algeria the Islamist movement championed the jihad. The Western view of the Arab world, simplified to the point of caricature, encouraged this movement. Feeding the worship of a fixed past, the Islamist movement assimilated democracy (seen simply as a product of European history) to irreligion, that is, to one of the weapons in the vast conspiracy fomented by the enemies of the Prophet.

The West, out of habit or laziness, has relegated all the Arab countries to a global otherness–a homogeneous whole, sometimes invaded by abrupt fits of fever–without understanding that these peoples, in mobilizing against the war, aspired not to a return to military nationalism, but only to a greater degree of justice.

Public opinion brandished the democratic argument with the slogan “two weights, two measures.” The Algerians emphasized the glaring inequality in the application of UN resolutions. But the majority of them did not embrace Saddam Hussein’s regime. In Rabat and Tunis as well, there was a demand for more rights and not for the withdrawal of the international community.

The tragedy lay in the refusal by the “North” to take these considerations into account. It has then been easy for the Islamists to demonize the idea of democracy, understood as a product of the West and not as a universal principle.

SOURCE: Algeria, 1830-2000: A Short History, by Benjamin Stora (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 208-209

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by | 18 June 2005 · 8:27 am

Algeria: From Pan-Arabism to Islamism

The collapse of the FLN and the ISF‘s rise to power lay in the continuing failures of pan-Arabism and the development of political Islamism.

The Arab defeats by Israel (in 1967 and 1973) led to the crisis in Arab nationalism. The volatile mixture of Islamism and oil led to new conflicts, while the state apparatus originating in Arabism defended itself with concessions and repressions. Given the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) and its parade of atrocities, the persistence of underdevelopment, the lack of resolution of the Palestinian question, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, people in the 1980s were troubled by a queasy sinking sensation and the certainty that the collapse of values would ineluctably be punished. Gradually, for some, the hope of a return to original Islam was carved out. The new power acquired by the Gulf states (especially Saudi Arabia) after the oil crisis appeared to many faithful as a sign of divine providence. Compared to the patent failures of the secular states, which had fashioned their industrial development model on that of Eastern Europe, the international weight acquired by Riyadh gave fundamentalism a new credibility.

In the early 1980s, the landscape of the Maghreb was transformed. With the urban riots in Morocco in 1981 and 1984 and in Tunisia in 1984, and the Algerian outbreak in October 1988, social frustrations were laid bare. The organs for controlling and organizing societies were no longer adequate to stifle their expression. The rise of the individual and the slow acquisition of personal freedoms were translated into the creation of associations (the human rights leagues, for example) and public demonstrations to demand new rights.

That approach required the end of the single-party system, which had failed in its curious mixture of universalism and specificity (Islam and national socialism). The Algeria of 1990, with the multi-party system and elections planned for 1991, opened the way to the nation/society’s appropriation of the freedoms until then confiscated by the party/state. That desire for democracy, which opposed the “forced modernity” proposed by the military, fractured the vision of Arab nationalism, especially since every state baldly obeyed its own logic, its own interests. In practice, every instance of nationalism developed at the expense of pan-Arabic propaganda. The borders, even the most artificial ones coming out of colonization, produced the same state allegiances in the territories they circumscribed, the same networks of sympathies and behaviors that gradually became fixed and institutionalized. Positions were taken, choices made, which the bureaucratic cadres in the states were reluctant to abandon.

Political Islamism emerged as a major factor, and took its place in the void left by Arab nationalism (Peuples méditerranéens, 1990). The populations were barely gathering up the detritus of modernity. They felt that yawning gap–between the rulers and the ruled, between the very rich and the very poor, and between the “North” and the “South”–as an injustice. The rise of Islamism, experienced as the hope for a return to ethics, in combination with the bankruptcy of the single-party system, brought about a need for individual responsibility, which would go hand in hand with the search for a new kinship.

At the same time, the crisis of “Arab Socialism” made a need for personal freedom, or individualized responsibility, appear. Human rights leagues, but also new unionist organizations, women’s movements, cultural associations, and a series of journals began the work of criticism: how could the state become disengaged from the economy? How could individuals assert themselves as political subjects and as citizens? How could the culture, and in particular the representations of Islam, transform itself? That reflection on democracy was still very fragile when the Gulf crisis erupted, with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990.

SOURCE: Algeria, 1830-2000: A Short History, by Benjamin Stora (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 201-202

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by | 17 June 2005 · 10:34 pm

Charles Robert Jenkins and the Japanese Media

I have to confess I’m fascinated by the story of the U.S. Army deserter Charles Robert Jenkins and his kidnapped Japanese wife Hitomi Soga, both of them far outliers by any standard. They’re in North Carolina now, and most accounts of their visit are rehashes of the same wire service stories from AP, Kyodo, Reuters, etc. But one story by Jim Nesbitt, a staff writer for a major North Carolina regional paper, the Raleigh News & Observer, stands out. Unable to get much more than the time of day from an extremely tight-lipped Jenkins, Nesbitt decides to report on the Japanese media coverage. (Yes, I know, reporters covering other reporters is all too common these days, but I think this one works pretty well because Nesbitt is discovering different cultural perceptions, not just reinforcing his own conventional wisdom.) Here’s a sampling.

WELDON — On the tree-lined avenue in front of the two-story brick home of Army deserter Charles Robert Jenkins’ sister, scores of Japanese camera crews and reporters practice an electronic form of brinkmanship.

Sharp-elbowed and competitive, they aim to capture every moment of Jenkins’ first visit to North Carolina since he spent four decades as a defector in North Korea.

But unlike their American counterparts, their focus is on Jenkins’ wife, Hitomi Soga, 46, who was abducted by North Korean agents in 1978 while shopping with her mother in their hometown on Japan’s isolated Sado Island and spirited away by speedboat to the Communist dictatorship.

Since her solo return to Japan in 2002, Soga has become a leading symbol of the abductee saga, her story wrapped in Japan’s enduring interest in the fate of as many as 60 Japanese citizens who were also abducted by North Korea from 1977 to 1983.

Her quest to be reunited with Jenkins, 65, who stayed in North Korea with their two daughters because he feared punishment for desertion, became the focus of negotiations led by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who made a personal appeal to North Korean officials for their release.

In the eyes of the Japanese, this is a love story and a tale of motherly devotion — with Soga at center stage….

Her story is made more poignant by the uncertainty surrounding her mother, Miyoshi Soga, who also disappeared the same day. The North Korean government has never admitted abducting Soga’s mother.

The Japanese see a psychic connection between Soga’s missing mother and her husband’s desire to see his own mom — a wish Soga has said she wanted fulfilled so she and her daughters could meet [her husband’s mother Pattie] Casper.

“It’s a double image,” [New York-based TV Asahi senior producer] Nakamura said. “The union of Jenkins and his mother reflects her [Soga’s] fantasy dream of being reunited with her mother.”

For the Japanese, Jenkins has been a sideshow, a supporting actor whose remarkable story has been seen through the lens of his wife’s saga. They’ve known from the start that he was a 25-year-old Army sergeant who deserted the squad he was leading during a patrol of the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas in January 1965.

Until they hit North Carolina, though, and started talking to U.S. veterans and visiting his hometown in nearby Rich Square, about 25 miles southeast of here, they didn’t realize the anger some have for him.

“The people didn’t really know Mr. Jenkins was a deserter and how serious that was,” said Toshiyuki Matsuyama, a Washington-based reporter for the Fuji News Network. “Now, we’re focusing on the negative aspects of his visit.”…

In the three days Jenkins has been in Weldon, the sight of Japanese reporters interviewing locals at the Weldon Super Market or the Trustworthy Hardware Store on Main Street in Rich Square has become common.

But coverage that has been almost round-the-clock has given Japanese reporters, producers and camera crews little time to explore the local delights.

Tomohiko Murayama, who covers Sado Island for the Niigata Television Network, spent a year as a high school exchange student in Kentucky 20 years ago and wasn’t unhinged by being stuck in Weldon.

“This is the typical small town in the United States, isn’t it?” Murayama said.

Yes! If only the reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the wire services understood small-town America (and Japan) as well as Murayama seems to. Hats off to Nesbitt, too, for an original and informative take on the media circus.

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by | 17 June 2005 · 9:21 pm

Muninn’s Linguistically Fractured Conversations

While Muninn is in South Korea trying to add Korean to his already proficient Japanese and Chinese, he has been posting some charming and insightful accounts of his experiences with the new language and culture. Here’s a little taste:

I have had some of the most interesting conversations talking to random old people and as someone who is interested in the history of East Asia, I especially enjoy those who I have met while on this side of the Pacific pond….

Today I had another one of these experiences, this time, sitting just across from the entrance of Korea’s National Library.

It actually started yesterday when I went to meet a friend who works at the National Library for dinner. While I was waiting I was approached by an elderly man wanting to try out his English on me. It didn’t work very well, as his listening skills were minimal. My Korean sucks too. He managed to tell me he was born in 1932 and after a few more frustrated attempts at making some sentences, I asked him if he spoke Japanese. Of course, he did, he was taught Japanese in elementary school and was only 13 when the colonial period ended.

Once we shifted into Japanese, our conversation moved much more smoothly. However, we both had six o’clock meetings to go to so we agreed to meet again at the library tonight at six to continue our conversation….

It was a wonderful chat, and I’m sure he had many more stories to tell but it was getting cooler and dark, so we exchanged contact info and parted ways. It was then, towards the end of our conversation that I noticed something about his Japanese. He spoke surprisingly well, albeit with a lot of common mistakes that I often hear less skilled Korean speakers of Japanese make, and had a vocabulary roughly equal to his half dozen years in the Japanese education system of the colonial period. He would throw in more difficult Korean nouns, which we either looked up or were similar enough to Japanese that I could often guess them from context. However, what took me longer to notice was something I found fascinatingly similar to how Sayaka and I communicate (a mish mash of English, Japanese, and Chinese): He had basically been using Korean particles and grammatical words (e.g. (으)니까) at least half of the time. One reason, I realized, why this took me so long to notice is that it simply fits so well. It rarely, if ever, altered the order or structure of his sentences.

Also, since I have been here over a week now, these words don’t seem out of place so I didn’t even recognize them as not being Japanese until the end of our conversation. Also, he was essentially doing the reverse of what I have been doing here when I speak to Japanese classmates or Japanese speaking Korean friends. I feel so much more comfortable talking to them in Korean because I can randomly throw in Japanese words or grammar into the various gaping holes of my Korean and not skip a beat in sentence construction. Of course, I know, I am supposed to be filling those holes with real Korean, but you know… I got stuff to say, debates to win, long-winded stories to tell!

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by | 17 June 2005 · 9:01 pm

紐約洋基勝明尼蘇達雙城 4 : 3

Sinography-solver Amritas leads you down the garden path toward the real meaning of this actual headline from a Chinese newspaper, and in the process counters a few myths about Chinese characters. Hint: 明尼蘇達 doesn’t really mean UNTIL BRIGHT NUNS LIVE AGAIN, although it does have something to do with St. Paul, Mingnisuda.

If that’s not enough for you, pay a visit to Language Hat‘s post about a site that lists the most common Chinese characters in order of frequency.

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by | 17 June 2005 · 8:52 pm

Siberian Light on Mongolian Elections

Siberian Light shines a spot on the Mongolian elections:

Nabetz at New Mongols has a look at some international rankings, showing that not all of Russia’s non-European neighbours have problems with democratising, or resisting pressure from Russia and China to maintain pliable authoritarian regimes:

With numbers like this, it’s easy to understand why Mongolia has been able to have nine national parliamentary and presidential national elections in about 15 years–all of them free, fair, and, perhaps most tellingly, friendly (compare elsewhere in the region). That political power has changed been passed back and forth between several parties is an indication that the Republic is advancing more strongly, more peacefully, and more openly than ever….

Hopefully, the example of Mongolia will also bring an end to the sometimes fashionable belief that countries without a Christian tradition and/or occupation by American troops can’t democratise.

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by | 16 June 2005 · 7:42 pm

When the Stars and Stripes Scooped L’Humanité in Algeria

On May 8, 1945, the day the [World War II] armistice was signed, Muslim Algerians paraded in most of the cities of Algeria, with banners bearing the slogan “Down with fascism and colonialism.” In Sétif, the police fired on Algerian demonstrators, who countered by attacking police officers and Europeans. It was the beginning of a spontaneous uprising, supported by the PPA [Algerian People’s Party] militants of Constantinois. In the rural areas, peasants revolted in La Fayette, Chevreuil, Kherrata, and Oued Marsa. Among the Europeans, 103 were listed as killed and 110 wounded. On May 10, the authorities organized a true “war of reprisals”–to borrow the Algerian historian Mahfoud Kaddache’s expression–which turned into a massacre. Shootings and summary executions among the civilian population continued for several days under the direction of General Duval. Villages were bombed by the air force, and the navy fired on the coast. The French general Tubert spoke of 15,000 killed among the Muslim population. Algerian nationalists put forward the figure of 45,000 dead.

SOURCE: Algeria, 1830-2000: A Short History, by Benjamin Stora (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 21-22

The French Communist newspaper L’Humanité, obsessed with purging Vichyites in North Africa, and yet to develop its anti-colonialist stance, readily accepted the possibility that the [Sétif] affair was the work of Hitlerian elements: “Energetic action was taken in North Africa against Fifth Column criminals.” American and British correspondents also accepted the official account. “Rumours of food riots are confirmed in Paris by the Cabinet,” said the New York Times. “At Sétif what was described by the Governor General as ‘Hitlerian elements’ attacked the population while it was celebrating VE day. Troops were used.” Reynolds News even provided details: “Several people were killed when armed bands of Arabs, led by a violently anti-French party known as Manifesto marched down from the mountains on the Town of Setif and fired on the crowd.” Only the Christian Science Monitor’s correspondent Egon Karkeline questioned the official version. “Despite the veil of censorship with which the French government has surrounded the recent riots in Algiers,” he wrote, “it is manifest that these disturbances had a serious character.”

Then, more than a month after the French attack, the United States Army newspaper Stars and Stripes blew the whole story wide open. The Rome edition of the paper, quoting sources in Casablanca, gave a reasonably accurate account of what had occurred, hedging only with “the true picture of events and their cause was obscure.” The Stars and Stripes version was picked up and reprinted in the New York Times, the Manchester Guardian, the London Daily Telegraph, and many other newspapers. This sent Ch.-Andre Julien of the Socialist official daily, Le Populaire, after the story, and on June 28 he wrote the first account in France to give anything like the true picture of what had happened: “Senegalese and Legionnaires were allowed to massacre at will around Sétif. Their path could be followed by trails of fire. In the Jijelti region, where there had been no disorders, other Senegalese murdered and burned at leisure. Planes scattered bombs on Arab tent camps. The military gave the number of victims as between six and eight thousand.” This report brought revised figures from the Ministry of the Interior. The “more than 100” casualties now became 1,200, and it was officially admitted that 50,000 Arabs had taken part in the events of May 8.

All this time there had been an eye-witness account of the first trouble in Sétif. Pierre Dubard of Le Figaro had watched the demonstration and had seen the police violence, but he was unable to get his story past the censor until July 7, two months after the event. When it finally appeared, it confirmed not only Le Populaire’s story, but also most of what had appeared in Stars and Stripes. French official sources were completely discredited, the danger of accepting government statements at face value was amply illustrated, and the manner in which each newspaper’s political line had influenced its version of the Sétif attack had been clearly shown.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 393-394

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