Elsewhere today (372)
Aljazeera:
Israel hits more targets in Lebanon
Friday 28 July 2006, 16:45 Makka Time, 13:45 GMT
Israel's air force has continued to pound Lebanon as its ground forces battle Hezbollah fighters in the country's south.
Lebanese police said that Israel had carried out more than 130 air raids on Friday, killing at least 13 people and wounding many more.
The flurry of air attacks came amid reports that Israeli troops were retreating from the town of Bint Jbeil near the Israeli border.
The first Israeli bombs on Friday fell shortly after dawn, killing two people in their home in the village of Deir Aamiss south of the city of Tyre.
Israeli jets also killed one man when they fired missiles at a building near the southern market town of Nabatiyeh on Friday morning, Lebanese officials said.
A separate Israeli air raid destroyed a deserted four-storey building near the town, a local official said.
The building housed a construction company owned by a Hezbollah member, the officials said.
Hussam Abu Shamet, a Jordanian man in a nearby house, was killed by missile shrapnel in that attack.
Others civilians died elsewhere across southern Lebanon and also in the Bekaa valley where Israel's air force struck at a suspected Hezbollah stockpile of long-range missiles.
At least 450 Lebanese have now died in the 17-day conflict.
Heavy fighting
In southern Lebanon, heavy fighting continued between Israel and Hezbollah as the Israeli army continued to occupy several small Lebanese villages on Friday afternoon.
However, some Israeli troops around the town of Bint Jbeil had also redeployed towards the Israeli border and the frontier village of Marun al-Ras after heavy fighting with Hezbollah fighters, local police said.
Hezbollah announced that its forces had attacked Israeli military units in Talet Masud district and Marun al-Ras, Aljazeera learned.
Israel's army believes that at least 200 Hezbollah fighters have been killed during 17 days of fighting in Lebanon, a military source said on Friday.
Hezbollah has announced the death of 32 of its fighters, including two rescue workers, since the fighting broke out.
Rice may return
Meanwhile, US officials said that Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, would return to the Middle East this weekend if needed.
In London, the prime minister's spokesman said that Tony Blair would seek a UN resolution to end the violence next week.
On Thursday, Lebanon's health minister estimated that as many as 600 civilians have been killed so far.
Aljazeera + Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/20236FF4-957C-4761-B57F-F61EFFCE6705.htm
allAfrica:
First Militia Fighters Hand Over Weapons
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
July 27, 2006
Abidjan
Some 150 militiamen in western, government-controlled Cote d'Ivoire became the first armed fighters to hand over their weapons on Wednesday in a rare breakthrough in the country's hobbling peace process.
They are the first of an estimated 2,000 militia fighters to be disarmed by a 7 August deadline, part of a series of measures aimed at clearing the way for elections in October.
The fighters, who turned up in a pick-up truck, were met by officials from the disarmament, demobilisation and reinsertion (DDR) programme in the western town of Guiglo. Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny and UN representatives were also present.
Each militia fighter will receive a first payment of 125,000 CFA [US$ 240] of a grand total of 499,500 CFA [US $970] for handing in his weapon; the expenses of their return to their village will also be paid along with a small amount to help them re-establish themselves, Ivorian military officials confirmed.
A failed coup split Cote d'Ivoire between a rebel-held north and government-controlled south in September 2002. Since then, a number of militia groups have sprung up in the south. Many of these militiamen say they took up arms to defend their towns and villages against the rebel forces.
The rebels who hold the north, the New Forces, say they will not hand over their weapons until the southern-based government militiamen have handed in their guns.
There is unclear exactly how many arms the militias have in their possession. At the ceremony on Wednesday, fighters handed over automatic guns and a cannon.
Also on Wednesday the UN Security Council condemned a recent spate of violence in Cote d'Ivoire which left at least two people dead this week. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, earlier on Tuesday blamed leaders of the ruling Ivorian Popular Front FPI for inciting their supporters to violence over an ongoing identification programme.
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
Copyright © 2006 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200607270323.html
Arab News:
Arab-Muslim Blood Is Cheap
Lubna Hussain, lubna@arabnews.com
Friday, 28, July, 2006 (03, Rajab, 1427)
The atrocities being committed in Lebanon once again provide us in the Arab world a superfluous, all too frequent and unnecessary reminder of the fact that our blood is cheap. As if Iraq wasn’t enough to prove to us our irrelevance in the global picture, further insults are being heaped onto our mounting sense of humiliation.
The duplicity and flagrant disregard for the destruction of an entire country by the Israeli government, the American president, his neocon cronies and “Yo Blair” have demonstrated beyond doubt that the return of two Israeli soldiers (even though thousands of their Arab counterparts rot in Israeli prisons) equate to the deaths of hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians.
While the rest of the world desperately waited for the announcement of a cease-fire that only America had the clout to negotiate, Auntie Condi arrived to play the fiddle to Israel’s tune as Lebanon burned in the background.
I watch in sheer awe-filled horror the pictures that flood our television screens of children, Lebanese, Palestinian and Iraqi, screaming in agony covered in blood thinking “My God! That could have been my child.”
I constantly reassess what our intrinsic value is in the international marketplace of humanity. What is even more pathetic is that every time I think we have sunk to a new low in terms of our worth Uncle George reminds me that we haven’t quite got to the bottom of his global cesspit yet. Our lives, the lives of our children, our dreams, our aspirations, tantamount to a little less than nothing in his disgust-filled estimation.
As civilians in Lebanon and Palestine are murdered daily by US-made and US taxpayer-funded weapons, President Bush has characteristically shown more interest in the abstract phenomenon of protecting frozen embryos. One would be forced to wonder (given his total disinterest in the sanctity of Arab and Muslim life) that if these embryos were conceived in the Middle East whether Bush would be as enthusiastic about such research or preservation.
And what lesson is it exactly that Bush has set out to teach us? Ah yes! But of course. He wants to show us “Ayrabs” how to behave. How repugnant and downright disrespectful that we speak a queer language that he doesn’t understand!
And what’s even worse is that we camel-herding desert-dwelling bedouins have a whole crazy bunch of oil that would be far better suited to the gluttonous gas-guzzling consumption of his citizens than to our modest campfires.
We should be grateful to Bush. He is, after all, our self-appointed savior and wants to instil within us the etiquette of democracy. No. Not hypocrisy, even though they sound remarkably similar when he pronounces the words (the “Ayrab” definition of hypocrisy would be the United States providing humanitarian aid to Lebanon while rushing precision-guided missiles to Israel in order to obliterate those who it seeks to “help”) but democracy. However, not just democracy in the broad definition of the word, for when we followed his advice and tried to do that by electing Hamas with a sweeping majority we were punished for bringing in the people’s choice.
No, no, no! In the Middle East, democracy, according to the new definition from the “State Department Dictionary,” is “a government that is not necessarily elected by the people but who we think should be elected.”
A sort of color-coded new-improved super-imposable version of the American dream that has become so fashionable in the highest echelons of the US government these days that choosing one is a bit like the political version of selecting the latest Prada handbag. Popular opinion is so definitely last season! But if you think about it, it all makes perfect sense. After all, why on earth should we be allowed to select what we want if it doesn’t happen to coincide with what Rice’s new look for the Middle East is?
Is it not a great affront to her designing talents that we could infringe upon her lovely color scheme by opting for something that might upset her fragile sensibilities? Are we really so tasteless and stupid to possibly think that we could decide judiciously for ourselves when Bush and his wardrobe specialist are so willing and able to give us freedom by confiscating our right to choose? Let’s not forget that this is the same team of Uncle George and Auntie Condi that brought to the world a free, prosperous and secure Iraq! And so what if in the process of this refurbishment hundreds of people have to be massacred? Come on guys. Stop being spoilsports! Haven’t you heard of “collateral damage”? It is a jazzy neocon term that translates to “the deliberate annihilation of Arab civilians.”
I wonder what the catchphrase used for the displacement of three-quarters of a million people from their homes in Lebanon is going to be? “Furniture removal”?
I suppose that the rather conspicuously copious amount of plastic sheeting (2,000 rolls) so generously donated by the US government to the Lebanese has been eagerly dispatched to wrap up the bodies of dead women and children. Or perhaps it could be used as a protective shield when the Israelis conduct one of their US-backed “surgical strikes” (the modern medical equivalent of the amputation of a limb to get rid of a wart)? And so what if such death and destruction is completely avoidable? At least it keeps the American public entertained. Without us in the Middle East all the US news networks would be forced to run stories inspired by Miami Vice and Starsky and Hutch.
As for the Israelis who consistently run amok with shameless impunity thanks to the indulgence and protection of Uncle George, it is truly mind-boggling for me to think that a people who suffered one of the greatest atrocities of recent history can inflict a similar if not worse torment on helpless innocents. They have proved their mettle with the Palestinians. The Lebanese are just a sorry sequel.
And as for the so-called amorphous “War on Terror” that Bush claims to be waging, it all seems like a bit of a sick joke. Perhaps he truly believes that the entire world at large possesses his “special” intellect. He insults our collective intelligence with all his transparent rhetoric and warmongering platitudes. If there is anyone responsible for the creation of future terrorism then the joint accolade should be awarded to him, his minions and his Israeli comrades. It is not just the blood of the Lebanese civilians that their hands are sullied with, but the blood of all those who will lose their lives as a result of the resentment, rage, revenge and retaliation that is inevitable from the complete contempt they have shown toward human life.
So the next time that Americans ask why the world hates them, just tell them to switch on the television. The answer to their question lies below the rubble and ever-expanding graveyards of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and now Lebanon.
* * *
(Lubna Hussain is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.)
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=9§ion=0&article=76980&d=28&m=7&y=2006
Asia Times:
A war without borders in the making
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Jul 29, 2006
A day after killing four United Nations workers, Israel's cabinet has simultaneously called up reservists and announced that there will be no "major offensive" inside Lebanon. This in light of Hezbollah's tough resistance and continued ability to fire rockets at Israel more than two weeks after the latter declared its military objective of finishing off Hezbollah.
Since then, Israel has lost the sympathy of much of world opinion. The United States finds itself completely isolated in its uncritical support for Israel and its "clean break" policy aimed at dominating the region.
"A massive blow to Hezbollah has not yet happened," lamented an Israeli pundit, and another one, Meron Benvenist, writing in the liberal paper Ha'aretz, gloomily predicted that "the major losers in this conflict will be the people of Israel".
Well, don't tell that to the Palestinians, whose leaders are warning of Israel's unilateral "forgotten war" on them, or the Lebanese people, one-fourth of whom have been turned into refugees, with the rest subjected to daily bombardments and missile and artillery strikes.
War and realignment
The US and Israel have pinned their hopes on somehow telescoping this growingly messy conflict to their rosy expectations of a "new Middle East". Accordingly, the region would be cleansed of radical Islamists and turned into a bastion of secular democracy. So goes the discursive subterfuge first penned by Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres a decade ago, now adopted by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose weak performance at the Rome conference was aptly captured by a CNN headline, "Rice versus the world".
Of course, the Arab and Muslim reading of the underlying meaning of this high-brow jargon is considerably different, ie, as a linguistic complement to Israel's warmongering aiming to destroy the Palestinian government, annihilate the defiant Hezbollah, weaken Syria and, perhaps, set the stage for a future attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, with or without US cooperation.
Already, the Arab media are awash with pointed criticism of the US policy of backing Israel's destruction of the fledging democracies in Lebanon and the occupied territories. After all, Hezbollah is a part of Lebanon's coalition government and, per an Israeli media report, only two months ago an Israeli general stated that Hezbollah was moderating and integrating in Lebanon's political process.
But that was then, and Peres is now quoted warning the Lebanese government, "It is us or Hezbollah. This is a war for life and for peace."
Similarly Rice, on her trip to Jerusalem, stated, "I have no doubt that there are those who wish to strangle a democratic and sovereign Lebanon in its crib." The question is, of course, who is the true culprit if not Israel, which has set Lebanon back at least 50 years, according to its prime minister.
Concerning the latter, there are already visible signs of US-Israeli intelligence cooperation on Hezbollah targets, not to mention the United States' replenishing Israel's arsenal, irrespective of the United States' own laws forbidding Israel's use of US-purchased weaponry for offensive purposes.
Thus the million-dollar question: Will this conflict lead to a geostrategic realignment? Certainly pro-Israel pundits, such as the New York Times' Thomas Friedman, hope so. In his recent dispatch from Damascus, Friedman asks: "Can we get the Syrians on board? Can we split Damascus from Tehran? My conversations here suggest it would be very hard, but worth a shot."
Friedman at least shows consistency. A few years ago, this author met him briefly in Tehran prior to the United States' invasion of Iraq, when he was similarly trying to drive a wedge between Tehran and Baghdad, writing disingenuously that "Tehran should really not be a part of the axis of evil".
But, of course, Tehran and Damascus know better than to be fooled by the present US-Israel "divide, destroy and conquer" shenanigans superbly pushed by the compliant US media. Little surprise, then, that both Syria and Iran find themselves subjected to a great deal of disinformation.
In Syria's case, the Syrian news agency denied a report by Sky News, dated July 25, that Damascus was giving vital information about al-Qaeda to the US and had expressed willingness to act as mediator between Tehran and Washington.
Iran, on the other hand, reacted strongly to a report in the New York Sun that scores of its Revolutionary Guards had died fighting alongside Hezbollah, stating in a press release that Iran had "no military presence whatsoever in Lebanon".
The US-Israel design on Syria conforms with what Stephen Walt, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, has written about "bandwagoning" as a form of alliance, that is, "Bandwagoning involves unequal exchange: the vulnerable state makes asymmetrical concessions to the dominant power and accepts a subordinate role."
But in light of the hegemonist intentions of Israel, its superior offensive capabilities and proximity of its threats to Syria, it is highly unlikely that Syria will relinquish its strategic alliance with Iran for the sake of appeasing Israel, no matter how diligently the pundits in the US media try to sell that to Damascus, still ruled by a Ba'athist ideology militating against the notion of allowing Lebanon's metamorphosis into an Israeli satellite at the end of this bloody conflict.
Rather, Syria's national interests dictate guarding itself against the current maneuvers to weaken its regional alliances and to set it up in a long-term US-Israeli grand design to remap the Middle East according to the whims and interests of Israel.
In fact, the present conflict has exposed Israel's military weaknesses and vulnerabilities. As an Israeli analyst has put it, "Israel does not have the overwhelming strategic superiority that it thought it had." With Hezbollah single-handedly delivering a major blow to Israel's military prestige irrespective of the blows it has received so far, any Syrian or other Arab willingness to succumb to the combined "carrot and stick" pressure politics of the US and Israel and thus appear as betraying their own historic self-understanding and ideology is, indeed, a remote possibility.
Meanwhile, in light of al-Qaeda's call on all Muslims to unite against Israel, instead of the much-hoped-for realignment, the US and Israel should worry about an alternative realignment materializing in the midst of the present conflict - that is, a new Shi'ite-Sunni alliance cutting across intra-religious frictions and discords as well as national boundaries for the sake of protecting the abode of Islam against the might of "Israel unchained", the "new Mongols" per an Iranian editorial, and unhinged from any restraining influence by the US superpower (as was the case in, most notably, the Suez crisis).
Consequently, with the initial Israel-US goal of a swift crippling of Hezbollah fast turning into a nightmare quagmire in Lebanon, thus causing a major regional conflagration, the much-dreaded "wider war" seems all but inevitable - it is the wider "war on terrorism" that will bring both al-Qaeda and, by implication, the US back to the Lebanese theater of conflict.
Israel's invasion may, therefore, be cloaked in a new political jargon, but increasingly the ominous prospect of a long war bespeaks a new strategic Middle East where the United States may ultimately accept the legitimacy of Hezbollah. In that case, the US would have to back down from its ferocious demonization of Hezbollah as terrorist pure and simple and accept, however reluctantly, that Hezbollah in many ways meets the description of a national-liberation movement.
Need for US-Iran dialogue
It is in the interests of both the US and Iran to set aside their substantial misgivings about direct dialogue and to engage in constructive bilateral and multilateral dialogue on how to bring the escalating violence in Lebanon to a speedy end.
Iran is understandably incensed by the Israelis' turning of Shi'ite sections of Lebanon into a "mass slaughterhouse", to quote a Tehran daily, and the US needs to show sensitivity to Iran's growing concerns that the invasion of Lebanon might be a pretext for a wider war.
For its part, Tehran's politicians may need to work overtime to exert influence on Hezbollah to refrain from its threat to expand the target of rocket attacks to Tel Aviv and the rest of Israel, and to release the Israeli soldiers as part of a prisoner' exchange. A proactive, conflict-prevention role by Tehran can go a long mile in confidence bridge-building with the international community nowadays concerned about Iran's nuclear program.
As a result, the gravity of the crisis itself dictates a direct meeting between Rice and her Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki, who has been doing his own shuttle diplomacy throughout the region.
The question is whether the US is prepared to eschew its hallucinations of an Israeli-dominated "new Middle East" and adopt the parameters of political realism.
Certainly, Iran faces a similar question, in view of Israel's determination to prove to President Mahmud Ahmadinejad that it is not "fake" and its destructive power speaks for itself.
One thing is certain, religious extremism on both sides of this conflict have a lot to do with the crisis, and if there is any lesson to be drawn it is about the value of political and religious moderation.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review. He is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG29Ak01.html
Asia Times:
Nasrallah's other fight
By Olivier Guitta
Jul 29, 2006
In the past few weeks, Hassan Nasrallah (which means in Arabic "God's victory"), the secretary general of Lebanon's Shi'ite Hezbollah (the Party of God), has almost become a household name.
Even though Nasrallah has become "famous" for starting this new Hezbollah-Israel war and declaring Israel as Hezbollah's mortal enemy, one should not forget that the "big Satan" remains the United States. And that's why Iraq is where Nasrallah's influence can also be felt.
Nasrallah's biography explains how he got close to prominent clerics in Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, in particular the Sadr family. In 1975, when he was only 15, Nasrallah joined the ranks of the Lebanese Shi'ite movement Amal - which Hezbollah broke from after its creation in 1982 - led by Musa al-Sadr.
From 1976 to 1978 he was sent to study in Najaf, Iraq, at the famed Shi'ite seminary the Hawze. There he met most of his mentors, starting with Iranian ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (leader of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979) and also his tutor, ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr (Muqtada al-Sadr's father). He also was in close contact with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (the leading Shi'ite spiritual force in Iraq today).
And finally, he was groomed by future Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi, whom he succeeded after Musawi was killed by the Israelis in 1992. Those two years in Najaf definitely left a huge imprint on Nasrallah's psyche.
And that's why, when it was time to help his Shi'ite brothers in Iraq after the US intervention in 2003, and especially Muqtada, Nasrallah responded. Nasrallah, using the 1982 model of what had worked in Lebanon to kick out the multinational force, adapted some of his tactics in Iraq.
Indeed, Iraq in 2006 looks a lot like the Lebanon of 1983. For example, the Iranian man in charge of this whole operation is Hassan Qommi, who had the exact same job ... in Beirut in 1982. Qommi helped Hezbollah instructors get to Iraq to train Muqtada's Mehdi Army, which has staged several high-profile confrontations with US forces, notably at Fallujah.
Starting in 2003, Hezbollah began building up organizational and military apparatuses in Iraq. For instance, that April, Hezbollah opened two offices in the Iraqi cities of Basra and Safwan. The campaign, targeting moderate Iraqi Shi'ite clerics willing to work with the US, was most likely orchestrated by Muqtada and Hezbollah.
Keep in mind that even though Nasrallah greatly respects Sistani, he is totally at odds with him when it comes to fighting the US presence.
Also in 2003-04, Imad Mughniah, the top Hezbollah operative wanted by most Western secret services for his role in most of the attacks perpetrated by Hezbollah, including the bombings of the US Embassy and the US and French barracks in Beirut in 1983, was sighted in Iraq. Syria had most probably facilitated his entry on to Iraqi soil.
Hezbollah also had a specialty in Lebanon in the 1980s, which was kidnapping foreign citizens. Is it a coincidence that it was happening on a daily basis in 2004 in Iraq?
Knowing that Nasrallah called for suicide bombings against the US forces in Iraq, it was just a matter of time until Hezbollah was ready to strike. The connection with Muqtada is total. For proof of Hezbollah's active participation in the insurgency there are the arrests made in February 2005 by Iraqi authorities of 18 Lebanese Hezbollah fighters taking part in the insurgency.
In a July 11 speech that was really focused on the situation with Israel, Nasrallah made a point of again talking about Iraq. He specifically called for Iraqis to step up their resistance against the US invader. In response, Muqtada offered to send members of his militia to south Lebanon to fight Israel. This is not surprising, since Muqtada declared in 2004 that he was "the striking arm for Hezbollah".
Obviously, Hezbollah as a multinational group cannot be simply reduced to Lebanon and Israel. Its expansion into Iraq fits strategically very well in the plans of its two sponsors: Syria and Iran.
Richard Armitage, former US deputy secretary of state, has said that the United States had a blood debt with Nasrallah's organization. In light of the fact that Hezbollah was, prior to the September 11 attacks of 2001, the organization that had killed the most Americans, and the likelihood of additional killings of US soldiers in Iraq, now would be a good time to repay the debt.
Olivier Guitta is a foreign-affairs and counter-terrorism consultant in Washington, DC. He can be reached at olivierg55@yahoo.com
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG29Ak02.html
Asia Times:
Strength in unity
By Jim Lobe
Jul 29, 2006
WASHINGTON - Hopes by the George W Bush administration for the emergence of an implicit Sunni-Israel alliance against an Iranian-led "Shi'ite crescent" have faded over the past week as Arab public opinion has become increasingly united by outrage over the Jewish state's continuing military campaign in Lebanon and Washington's refusal to stop it, according to Middle East experts.
Fueled by saturation television coverage of the destruction and suffering wrought by Israel's attacks, popular sentiment in both Shi'ite and Sunni communities has moved strongly behind Shi'ite Hezbollah, whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has become a symbol of resistance to Israeli and US power, these analysts agree.
"Resistance rises above sectarianism," said Graham Fuller, a former top Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Rand Corporation. "Sunni masses by and large are not concerned whether Iran, Syria's rulers, or Hezbollah are Shi'ites; they applaud them for their steadfastness and willingness to fight and even die."
The growing Sunni-Shi'ite unity in support of Hezbollah defies hopes by Bush administration officials and their Israel-centered neo-conservative supporters in Washington that fears of an Iranian-led Shi'ite axis stretching from Lebanon across Syria to the new Shi'ite-dominated government in Iraq would provoke Sunni-led states to form a de facto alliance with Israel.
Those hopes were bolstered when, in a break with traditional Arab solidarity over any confrontation with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt denounced Hezbollah for "adventurism" in abducting two Israeli soldiers along the Israel-Lebanon border, the incident that precipitated the current violence and destruction.
Their statements, which were welcomed by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as evidence of the emergence of a "new Middle East", were also cited as evidence, particularly by neo-conservatives, that Iran, believed to be Hezbollah's most important source of arms and external funding, had displaced Israel as the Sunnis' greatest threat.
The theory was most eloquently expressed by Michael Rubin, a hardline neo-conservative at the American Enterprise Institute. "Across Lebanon and the region, Arab leaders see Hezbollah for what it is: an arm of Iranian influence waging a sectarian battle in the heart of the Middle East," he wrote in a July 19 column in the Wall Street Journal titled "Iran against the Arabs".
"An old Arab proverb goes, 'Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; and me, my brother and my cousin against the stranger,'" he went on. "Forced to make a choice, Sunni Arabs are deciding: the Jews are cousins; the Shi'ites, strangers."
But most regional specialists now dismiss this analysis, at least at the popular level. If anything, they say, the impact of Israel's military campaign in Lebanon has confirmed its status as the "stranger", while Hezbollah's resistance has elevated it and those who support it to "cousin", if not "brother", to Sunni Arabs.
"In fact ... there is more of a rapprochement between the Sunni and Shi'ite," said Jean Francois Seznec, a specialist on the Persian Gulf region at Columbia University, who noted that Shi'ite Hezbollah and Iran both support Sunni Hamas in the Palestinian territories and that Sunnis in Syria could be expected to rally behind the Alawi Assad regime if Damascus, which also supports Hezbollah, is drawn into the current conflict.
"The real split here is between the Sunni autocrats and their very own citizens," wrote Fuller in an article for Global Viewpoint. "These Sunni regimes are terrified that Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and even Sunni Hamas are all creating inspirational models of independent mass resistance against reigning US and Israeli power in the region."
That Sunni leaders now feel compelled to follow public opinion was made evident by several developments this past week, beginning with Egypt's rejection of Washington's proposal to hold Wednesday's emergency international conference on Lebanon at Sharm el-Sheikh. As a result, the conference, at which Rice found herself completely isolated in rejecting calls for an immediate ceasefire, was held in Rome instead.
Tuesday's angry and unusually harsh denunciation by Saudi Arabia of what it called "unremitting Israeli aggression", which also warned Washington in particular of unpredictable "repercussions befalling the region, including wars and conflict that will spare no one" if a ceasefire is not quickly achieved, was also taken as a major reversal of its previous views.
"The Saudis thought they could get a ceasefire and be the heroes," said Marc Lynch, a Middle East specialist at Williams College who follows the Arab media closely. "When it became clear that that wasn't going to happen and public opinion was getting really mobilized, then they did a 180-degree turn. That is very significant."
Finally, Thursday's appearance on Al-Jazeera of a new video by al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he implicitly called for unity between Sunnis and Shi'ites against the "Zionist-Crusader alliance", suggested that the most radical Sunni jihadis were not only eager to identify themselves with Hezbollah's resistance, but also see the current crisis as an opportunity for broadening their base.
"Just as Iraq served al-Qaeda's strategy by supplying an endless stream of images of 'heroic mujahideen' fighting against 'brutal Americans' - and became less useful as images of dead Iraqi civilians began to complicate the picture - the Lebanon war offers an unending supply of images and actions which powerfully support al-Qaeda's narrative and world view ... without the complications posed by [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi's controversial anti-Shi'ite strategy in Iraq," wrote Lynch on his blog.
"In that regard, al-Qaeda's open support for Hezbollah might even help to heal the Sunni-Shi'ite breach which Zarqawi worked hard to open [in Iraq] against [Osama] bin Laden's and Zawahiri's advice," he said.
Even before the current Israel-Lebanon crisis, al-Qaeda had been trying to undo the damage caused by Zarqawi's anti-Shi'ite campaign. In his most recent audio message released on July 1, several weeks after Zarqawi's death, bin Laden referred to Shi'ites as "cousins" and called for al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia, as Zarqawi's group is known, to make US forces and their collaborators - rather than the general Shi'ite population - its primary target.
"The Sunni-Shi'ite divide is real, and it's not just being invented by the neo-cons, but if you look at mainstream public opinion, a lot of the Sunni-Shi'ite stuff that the neo-cons and the press are picking up on is the invention of the [Sunni-led] regimes, especially in the Gulf, where Sunni leaders really are afraid of Iran and their Shi'ite populations inconveniently happen to live on the oilfields," Lynch told Inter Press Service.
"For the Arab regimes, playing on Sunni-Shi'ite differences is really a divide-and-conquer [strategy] to prevent the rise of a unified movement against them. But the fact is you're now seeing even very Sunni movements like the Muslim Brotherhood rallying to Hezbollah as the fighter against Israel, while these corrupt, impotent, pro-American governments aren't doing a thing."
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG29Ak03.html
Clarín: Israel y Hezbollah hablan por primera vez
de un posible intercambio de presos
Según el diario árabe Al Hayat, las conversaciones están "en su fase inicial" y cuentan con la mediación de Alemania y la Cruz Roja.
Clarín.com, 28.07.2006
Hezbollah e Israel mantuvieron sus primeros contactos para discutir una eventual tregua y un intercambio de prisioneros, con la mediación de Alemania y la Cruz Roja, informó hoy un diario árabe internacional.
Según el periódico Al Hayat, que se edita en Londres y en numerosos países árabes, entre ellos Egipto, las conversaciones están en su "fase inicial", y los esfuerzos se centran en "fijar las condiciones adecuadas para el intercambio de prisioneros".
Hezbollah capturó a dos soldados israel íes hace dos semanas, y desde entonces Israel ataca el Líbano por aire y tierra. El grupo propuso intercambiar a los efectivos por libaneses presos en Israel, repitiendo otros cambios similares hechos con Israel en el pasado.
Un grupo de diplomáticos alemanes y varios representantes del Comité Internacional de la Cruz Roja (CICR) actúan como mediadores para garantizar la liberación de los presos, según Al Hayat, que citó a fuentes de seguridad libanesas a las que no identificó.
Tres libaneses y más de 8.000 palestinos se encuentran presos actualmente en las cárceles israelíes. Alemania actuó en varias ocasiones como mediadora para el intercambio de prisioneros y rehenes en Medio Oriente.
En 2004, el actual ministro de Relaciones Exteriores germano, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, participó en un intercambio de prisioneros entre Hezbollah e Israel.
Copyright 1996-2006 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2006/07/28/um/m-01242009.htm
Guardian:
Ground invasion ruled out - for now
Olmert resists generals' pressure but approves troop call-up
Ian Black, Jerusalem and Rory McCarthy, Safed
Friday July 28, 2006
Israel resisted calls for a full-scale invasion of Lebanon yesterday and stuck to its strategy of air strikes and limited ground operations to dislodge Hizbullah guerrillas from their border strongholds.
Warplanes and artillery blasted targets across southern Lebanon and radio masts near Beirut. But 80 more Hizbullah missiles hit northern Israel, further hardening the public mood after nine soldiers were killed in one battle on Wednesday.
Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, held off criticism by cabinet colleagues, generals and the media to insist that Israel would carry on fighting without an all-out ground offensive - for the moment.
Mr Olmert fears conjuring up the ghosts of the 1982 war and exposing troops to a protracted guerrilla campaign and the occupation of Lebanese territory. But ministers did approve the call-up of an unspecified number of reserve forces, sending an important signal. Israeli television reported that the mobilisation could come within days.
"We are preparing for any eventuality," Amir Peretz, the defence minister, said last night. "Hizbullah's flags will not fly on our borders again. We must win this."
Major General Dan Halutz, the Israeli military chief, told reporters more time was needed to "finish the job". Operations were moving slowly and carefully to avoid risks, he said.
With the US and Britain resisting calls for an immediate ceasefire, Israel feels at liberty to continue this approach. Even its bombing of the UN observation post at Khiyam drew only a watered down statement from the security council last night which expressed "distress" but no condemnation.
The cabinet also repeated that Israel had no intention of attacking Syria, which would be a dangerous escalation in an already volatile situation. Syria has placed its air defence systems on high alert.
As the soldiers killed on Wednesday were buried, there was a shift in Israel's national mood. "We need to be strong because this is a war for our existence," said Ami Schreier, grieving for his 22-year-old son, Yiftah, an infantry officer who died in a Hizbullah ambush at Bint Jbeil. "If we can't stand it in the rear, the soldiers won't be able to stand it at the front."
There was a realisation that what most Israelis had so far referred to as a "campaign" had become a war - one that is far more widely supported than the disastrous 1982 Lebanon invasion, which has come to be seen as Israel's Vietnam.
"In the Yom Kippur war [in 1973] hundreds of soldiers were killed every day," wrote the columnist Sima Kadmon in Israel's largest daily paper, Yedioth Aharonot. "This war is no less just, and no less a war of no choice, and its young victims have not fallen in vain. Perhaps that should comfort us."
Before the cabinet met, military commentators suggested Israel needed to launch a massive ground operation or use deadlier air strikes and heavy artillery barrages to soften Hizbullah targets.
Newspapers reported that the army wanted to hit Lebanese strategic targets, but that this had not happened so far for fear of weakening the Beirut government. Another suggestion was that Israel would "wipe out" any Lebanese village from which Hizbullah rockets were fired.
Brigadier General Shuki Shachar, the deputy head of Israel's northern command, said his forces were not using all the military power at their disposal. "This is unbalanced warfare, and with unbalanced warfare sometimes you have to not use all your full power. You have to be very accurate, very tricky and fight counter-guerrilla warfare," he told reporters.
Hizbullah has fired about 1,485 rockets since fighting began with a raid across the border and the abduction of two Israeli soldiers on July 12.
Troubling questions remain about Israel's exit strategy and what will constitute a victory. But Ze'ev Schiff, the country's senior military commentator, made clear what was at stake. "Hizbullah and what it symbolises must be destroyed at any price," he wrote in Ha'aretz newspaper. "If Hizbullah does not experience defeat in this war, it will spell the end of Israeli deterrence against its enemies."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1832147,00.html
Guardian:
Only Hizbullah can defend against an Israeli invasion
Attempts to impose an international force would risk destroying Lebanon's government and revive the danger of civil war
Jonathan Steele in Beirut
Friday July 28, 2006
A rally of well-dressed middle-class ladies, perhaps 40 in all, protested outside the UN's offices here on Wednesday, calling for a ceasefire. Representing the Lebanese Council of Women, they handed out leaflets appealing to Kofi Annan to get something done.
They were fewer in number than the recent anti-war demonstrators in Tel Aviv, but more representative. While today's peaceniks in Israel are a lonely, though perhaps slowly growing, minority, the cry for a ceasefire is overwhelming in Lebanon. Why bother to demonstrate when the issue is so obvious?
So my strongest impression of the rally came from Lamia Osseiran, one of its organisers: "The Israelis are radicalising Lebanon, even liberal democrats like me. I took part in last year's demonstrations against Syria. I was a critic of Hizbullah. Now I cannot help but support Hizbullah's fighters who are defending our country." What about Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Haifa? "It's right," she replied. "It's not only Lebanese who should have to suffer. Are human rights available only to Israelis? You can't have winter and summer on the same roof."
Similar views can be heard from many Shias. They have closed ranks behind Hizbullah under the weight of Israeli bombing. Among Sunnis the mood is more complex. The port town of Sidon, south of Beirut, is 90% Sunni. Over the past week it has taken in 70,000 Shia refugees, most of them militant supporters of Hizbullah. They are eager to convince their new Sunni neighbours of the justice of the Hizbullah cause. Whether they have succeeded will not be known until the bombing stops, but every new day of Israel's air strikes on the south lessens the force of the argument that it is all Hizbullah's fault.
The stronghold of anti-Hizbullah feeling is in Lebanon's Christian areas. They have suffered little bombing, and many people argue that Hizbullah is reaping what it sowed. As Youssef Haddad, a young teacher at the American University of Beirut, put it: "If you want a war with Israel, you have to pay the price. I didn't take the decision to attack Israel."
Yet what counts most for now is not the popular reaction but what is happening inside the Lebanese government. Condoleezza Rice seems to have little understanding of the country's political forces. Last year's so-called cedar revolution, with its simplistic "people power" image and the election victory of anti-Syrian parties, apparently led Washington, and alarmingly Downing Street as well, to believe that Lebanon has a radically new and pro-western government.
In fact, Lebanon has a government of national unity in which Hizbullah has two ministers. Being anti-Syrian is not the same as being anti-Hizbullah, and the election winners from the March 14 movement, which developed after the car-bomb murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, wisely recognised that the party is an authentic part of Lebanese society. It was better to have it in the government rather than outside.
Demonising Hizbullah as terrorists or Iranian and Syrian agents confuses the picture. Moreover, the only party that declined to take part in government, the Maronite Christians led by Michel Aoun, made a tactical alliance with Hizbullah. Since the Israeli attacks Aoun has been one of Hizbullah's most vocal defenders.
While accepting Hizbullah's political weight, no Lebanese politician believes that its military wing can be disarmed against its will. Their view has to be the starting point for any discussion of an international force for southern Lebanon, whether it is a beefed-up version of the current UN force, Unifil, or some sort of "coalition of the willing".
In one sense Israel created Hizbullah. Its occupation of Lebanon after 1982 turned a group of suicide bombers into a resistance movement like Europe's second world war partisans. Expecting foreigners to remove Hizbullah's weapons is a non-starter. Israel is taking heavy casualties in attempting it. How would other foreign occupiers have more success?
Earlier this year Lebanese parties were holding a "national dialogue" to work out, among other issues, how to strengthen the Lebanese army and find a different role for Hizbullah's guerrilla forces. "One option would be to absorb the militia into the Lebanese army and another would be to turn it into a national guard under government control," Michel Faroun, an MP from the March 14 movement, said last week.
The dialogue on Lebanon's defence strategy was only exploratory, since the government agreed that no decisions could be taken until Israel withdrew from the land known as Shebaa farms, occupied since 1967. The latest two weeks of Israeli attacks have reinforced Hizbullah's argument that it cannot disarm until the Lebanese army is stronger.
It is not a question of redeploying the Lebanese army in Hizbullah's place. Only Hizbullah knows the terrain well enough, and has sufficient experience and motivation to defend Lebanon against any future Israeli invasion.
The Lebanese government's position on the idea of an international force is not yet clear. Hizbullah and Amal, the other Shia party, insist that the prime minister, Fouad Siniora, only had a mandate in Rome on Wednesday to call for a ceasefire and a prisoner exchange. Although Siniora expressed support for strengthening Unifil, analysts assume he thought this position was safe as long as the mandate and mission are still to be agreed. If the idea took off he would have time to argue that it can only come in with the consent of Hizbullah and Amal.
Attempts to impose a force would risk destroying the Lebanese government and revive the danger of a civil war. Perhaps this is Israel's intention. It has shown great skill in exacerbating splits between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and may think of doing the same in Lebanon.
European governments should resist the idea. Jacques Chirac has rightly said a Nato force is out of the question since the alliance is seen as "the armed wing of the west". Even without this association, any force would risk being seen as Israel's instrument. Israel's plan seems to be either to use foreigners to do its work or, if that fails, to turn south Lebanon into a giant Rafah - the city in Gaza where it demolished hundreds of homes and created a free-fire zone in which anything that moved was shot.
What Lebanon needs, as Siniora said in Rome, is an immediate ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal so that refugees can go home before any more destruction is wrought. The world should take its cue from that.
j.steele@guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1831960,00.html
Guardian: The call that tells you:
run, you're about to lose your home and possessions
Conal Urquhart in Gaza City
Friday July 28, 2006
The voice sounded friendly enough. "Hi, my name is Danny. I'm an officer in Israeli military intelligence. In one hour we will blow up your house."
Mohammed Deeb took the telephone call seriously and told his family and neighbours to get out of the building. An hour later, an Israeli helicopter fired three missiles at the four-storey building in Gaza City, destroying the ground floor and damaging the upper storeys.
Mr Deeb was on the receiving end of a new Israeli tactic of using telephone, radio and leaflets to warn Gazans of impending attacks. The army claims it is an attempt to minimise civilian casualties, but Palestinians say it is a new way of terrorising the population.
Raji Serrani, the director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which has collected several examples of the tactic, described it as "psychological warfare", adding: "Since when did Israel feel the need to warn people that they were about to bomb their homes? They are simply playing with people's minds and inflicting a new panic in Gaza."
The family of Ibrahim Mahmoud in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza were ordered to leave their home by an Israeli intelligence officer. The officer called back one hour later to say she had made a mistake. She ended her call to Mr Mahmoud by telling him to "be safe", he told the Associated Press.
The warnings, which sometimes are followed by an Israeli attack and sometimes not, are happening as Israel continues its latest invasion of the Gaza Strip. Four people were killed and dozens injured yesterday as Israeli tanks patrolled residential areas to the east of Gaza City. Twenty-five people were killed on Wednesday.
Fears that Israel will destroy homes are widespread: 900 residents of the al Nader towers, a complex of 12 apartment blocks in the north of Gaza, fled on Tuesday after 10 Israeli shells landed close to them, killing three residents. According to the PCHR, Israel had also informed Palestinian police that they planned to demolish the towers.
Izzat al Jamal, 38, a Palestinian policeman, moved his wife and eight children out of their apartment to emergency accommodation in a local school. "When they started firing, it was clear it was aimed directly at us and it wasn't a random mistake. I had to leave for the children's sake. I haven't been paid in four months and now I don't even have a home."
Hundreds of families have also moved out of the east of Gaza City in the al Shaaf and al Tuffah suburbs after Israeli tanks took up position on Wednesday. Two tanks were visible on hills above the suburbs and many more could be heard shooting and moving in the narrow streets.
Scores of Palestinian fighters armed with rifles attempted to approach the tanks, which - supported by drones and helicopters - fired shells and machine guns throughout yesterday. At Shifa Hospital, the ambulances lined up to deliver the injured and crowds of men waited to take away the dead.
Dr Jumah Sakkah said the hospital had taken in 16 injured people and two had died. The death toll later rose to four. He said that all of the injured were non-combatants.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1832183,00.html
il manifesto:
Una guerra a doppia morale
Zeev Maoz
Vi è un consenso totale in Israele che la guerra contro gli Hezbollah in Libano è una guerra giusta e morale. Sfortunatamente questo consenso è basato su una memoria corta e selettiva, su una visione del mondo che guarda solo all'interno di sé, e su doppi standard. Questa non è solo unaguerra, l'uso della forza è eccessivo e indiscriminato e il fine ultimo è l'estorsione.Questo non implica che Hezbollah abbia una ragione morale in questo conflitto, ma piuttosto il contrario. Ma il fatto che Hezbollah abbia «iniziato» il conflitto attaccando e sequestrando dei soldati israeliani attraversando una frontiera riconosciuta internazionalmente non sposta il peso della moralità dal lato di Israele. Cominciamo a partire da alcuni fatti. Nel 1982 Israele ha invaso il Libano e occupato la sua capitale Beirut. Nel corso dell'invasione, Israele ha buttato migliaia di tonnellate di bombe su centri abitati da popolazione civile,uccidendo e ferendo gravemente migliaia di civili innocenti. Stime prudenti danno un numero di morti intorno a 14.000 (di cui 5.000 civili a Beirut). La maggior parte dei morti non aveva niente a che vedere con l'Olp, la scusa utilizzata per questa invasione. L'occupazione di diverse parti del Libano si è protratta poi per 18 anni.Durante le operazioni «Responsabilità» (nel 1993) e «Frutti del rancore» (nel 1996) i bombardamenti israeliani a bersagli civili causarono evacuazioni di massa dal sud del Libano; in ambedue i casi il numero di rifugiati stimato fu di più di 500.000 libanesi. Non si ha una credibile stima del numero di civili morti in questi due incidenti,madurante l'operazione «Frutti del rancore », Israele colpì un rifugio civile ammazzando 103 civili compresi donne e bambini. Questo fu certamente un danno collaterale, ma certo non aiuta a dare all'operazione una base morale. Il 28 luglio 1988 le forze speciali israeliane rapirono lo Sceicco Obeid, e il 21 maggio 1994 Mustafa Dirani, responsabile di aver catturato il pilota israelianoRonArad. Israele liha tenuti prigionieri con altri 20 libanesi che aveva catturato in circostanze segrete per lunghissimi periodi senza processo. Questi libanesi venivano trattenuti come «pedine di scambio». SEGUEA PAGINA 4 Apparentemente il rapimento di israeliani a scopo di scambio è moralmente biasimevole,mamilitarmenteda punire quando sono gli Hezbollah a rapire ma non quando lo fa Israele. Gli Hezbollah nel loro attacco alla pattuglia israeliana del 12 giugno, hanno violato un confine internazionalmente riconosciuto. Il fatto è incontestabile. E' tuttavia meno conosciuto il fatto che Israele ha violato lo spazio aereo tutti i giorni da quando, sei anni fa, si è ritirata dal sud del Libano. E' vero che questi voli non hanno ammazzato libanesi, ma una violazione di frontiera è una violazione di frontiera. E anche in questo caso non si può dire che Israele abbia un livello di moralità più elevato. Questo per quanto riguarda la storia del livello di moralità e per passare ad analizzare il conflitto presente. Qual è la differenza fra gli Hezbollah che lanciano i razzi Katyusha contro i centri dove vivono civili israeliani e gli attacchi israeliani contro centri civili a Beirut, Tiro, Sidone emolti villaggi del sud del Libano? L'argomento israeliano che i membri di Hezbollah si nascondono fra i civili suggerisce metaforicamente che la vittima di uno stupro da parte di un gruppo è colpevole perché si trovava nel posto sbagliato nel momento sbagliato. Finora più di 30 civili israeliani sono stati uccisi dai razzi Hezbollah, contro i più di 400 libanesi, praticamente tutti civili. E, cosa più importante, gli attacchi israeliani alle infrastrutture libanesi, aldilà di ottenere l'effetto controproducente di distruggere quella parte di Libano che sarebbe interesse di Israele preservare, vittimizza la popolazione libanese. L'aumentata difficoltà di operare degli ospedali e dei servizi pubblici è un effetto diretto della strategia israeliana. Lo scopo dichiarato degli attacchi israeliani a obiettivi infrastrutturali e contro la popolazione è quello di spingere il debole governo libanese ad attuare la risoluzioneOnu1559 che chiede il disarmo di tutte le milizie in Libano. Questo è un esercizio di estorsione non meno del rapimento dei soldati israeliani da parte di Hezbollah. Questa strategia è un tentativo di ottenere la sottomissione del governo libanese attraverso attacchi sistematici ai suoi cittadini,ma nonvi èunbriciolo dimoralità in questa azione. Questa guerra ha un importante aspetto di propaganda, è una gara di auto-vittimizzazione. Ognuno dei due lavora per convincere la comunità internazionale che è più disgraziato del suo nemico. Comeogni lotta di propaganda, israeliani e libanesi fanno uso dell'informazione in maniera selettiva, distorta e auto-giustificante. Se Israele vuole costruire il suo caso sulla nozione che la comunità internazionale comprerà i suoi beni rovinati, che continui a deludersi. Gli israeliani tuttavia lo devono a se stessi per affrontare la scomodaverità (per prendere in prestito una frase di Al Gore). Israele potrebbe vinceremilitarmente questo conflitto per la sua enorme asimmetrica superiorità militare, ma forse può non conseguire alcuni dei suoi obiettivi politici. Eppure, Israele non ha nessuna superiorità morale né nessuno status speciale quando va nel campo delle rivendicazioni morali. Tragicamente, la battaglia morale è condannata a terminare inunesito in cui tutti i contendenti ne escono come perdenti..
*Zeev Maoz è ordinario di Scienze politiche e direttore del Programma di Relazioni internazionali all'Università della California (traduzione di Sancia Gaetani)
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/27-Luglio-2006/art13.html
il manifesto: Spagna, sul passato dei vinti
le scommesse del presente
Con la democrazia fu restituita a tutti gli spagnoli la sovranità, ma agli sconfitti del 1939 né l'onore delle armi, né il riconoscimento delle loro ragioni.
Repubblica, guerra civile e franchismo, il dibattito sulla memoria nella Spagna di Zapatero. Tra ricerca storiografica, letteratura, musica, teatro e cinema La transizione dalla dittatura alla democrazia senza né rese dei conti né epurazioni pesa ancora oggi sulla costruzione di una memoria condivisa del passato senza omissioni.
Alfonso Botti
Forse nessun paese del vecchio continente, come la Spagna di questi tempi, è segnato dai contrapposti orientamenti di chi si appella al recupero della memoria e chi ritiene che la pietra messa sopra il passato non debba essere rimossa. Della storia si fa, insomma, uso pubblico quotidiano.
I settantacinque anni dalla proclamazione della Seconda Repubblica (1931) e i settanta dallo scoppio della guerra civile (1936) hanno fornito lo spunto. La cornice favorevole l'ha offerta Rodríguez Zapatero, sensibile come nessuno dei suoi predecessori (anche per l'acqua passata nel frattempo sotto i ponti) a guardare senza remore il più recente passato.
Nell'ultima settimana del giugno scorso il congresso dei deputati ha approvato, con il voto contrario del Partido popular, l'astensione di Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya e del Partido Nacionalista Vasco, una mozione presentata nel dicembre 2005 dal coordinatore di Izquierda Unida, Gaspar Llamazares, che dichiara il 2006 «Anno della Memoria» storica, in omaggio alla Seconda Repubblica, definita come «il primo regime realmente democratico della nostra storia» e «antecedente più diretto dell'attuale Stato sociale e democratico di diritto e del sistema delle autonomie realizzato dalla Costituzione del 1978». Il consiglio dei ministri sta per mettere a punto l'annunciata, discussa e, strada facendo mitigata, legge sulla «Memoria storica». Una legge che il Pp avversa, che la sinistra verde e post-comunista vorrebbe usare come grimaldello per invalidare i processi sommari del franchismo contro i combattenti in difesa della Repubblica, prima, e gli antifranchisti, poi, e che il Psoe deve cercare, dopo averla pensata, di non farsi esplodere tra le mani.
Più in generale, la destra grossolana accusa Zapatero di voler riaprire ferite rimarginate da tempo. Di provocare, cioè, nuove spaccature nel paese secondo le linee di demarcazione degli anni Trenta. Quella meno rozza gli rinfaccia di favorire la radicalizzazione dell'avversario. Di preferire, cioè, a una destra preoccupata di rappresentare il centro, una destra estrema, incapace di avere seguito di massa. Ma anche a sinistra, non sono mancate critiche o perplessità, come quella dello storico e opinionista del principale quotidiano, Santos Juliá, che ha giudicato «assurda e contraddittoria la stessa idea di una legge sulla memoria storica», scrivendo che essa rivelerebbe una «tentazione totalitaria», dal momento che sul passato non può essere elaborato un solo racconto che vada bene per tutti i componenti della stessa società (El Pais, 2 luglio). Per meglio orientarsi occorre mettere ordine, distinguere e precisare, partendo dalla fine della dittatura.
L'oblio e la transizione
La transizione dal franchismo alla democrazia avvenne guardando avanti. L'oblio del passato favorì il clima di consenso in cui si realizzò il trapasso al nuovo regime. Si trattò di un orientamento dettato dalla volontà della stragrande maggioranza degli spagnoli per non ripetere le tragiche vicende del passato. Delle quali, però, nonostante tanti conservassero una memoria viva, si conosceva solo qualcosa e in modo storiograficamente inadeguato. Con ciò, non mancò, già allora, una memoria collettiva condivisa. La sostanziarono il disgusto per le esasperate divisioni della Seconda Repubblica, l'orrore per la tragedia della guerra fratricida e la volontà di non ripetere mai più l'esperienza vissuta. Si tratta di uno spezzone di memoria collettiva che è stato spesso sottovalutato e che invece è da esaltare perché rappresenta anche l'unica memoria condivisa realmente esistente.
La transizione non seguì le modalità auspicate dall'opposizione antifranchista, che vi si adattò, suo malgrado, solo quando capì che la strada imboccata da Adolfo Suárez (passaggio da una illegalità legalizzata, il franchismo, a una legalità democratica democraticamente ratificata, sia pure proposta dall'alto e realizzata per linee interne, senza rotture) non aveva alternative. Non vi furono, pertanto, né rese dei conti, né epurazioni. La componente meno impresentabile del franchismo, democratizzatasi per convinzione o convenienza negli ultimi anni della dittatura forní, anzi, personale politico e ministeriale al nuovo sistema. Basti pensare all'inossidabile Manuel Fraga Iribarne, che già ministro e ambasciatore di Franco, continuò ad animare la destra, a nominare candidati alla presidenza del governo, oltre essere dal 1989 al 2002 presidente del governo della Galizia.
Tra il 1975 e il '78, sul piano dello Stato e dei suoi apparati prevalse la continuità. Capo dello stato fu un re voluto da Franco, ma sul piano politico e culturale la discontinuità fu notevole con l'affernazione del pluralismo e un'organizzazione territoriale che riprendeva, spingendola molto oltre quei confini, quella della Seconda Repubblica. A tutti gli spagnoli fu restituita la sovranità, ma agli sconfitti del 1939 né l'onore delle armi, né la dignità calpestata, né il riconoscimento delle loro ragioni. Nei trentanove anni precedenti erano stati solo i caduti franchisti a ricevere tributi, onori e gloria. Innecessario dilungarsi su questo punto. Così come inutile risulta sottolineare che il difficile trapasso alla democrazia (reso tale dalla persistente attività del terrorismo basco e dall'incognita rappresentata dall'atteggiamento che i militari avrebbero assunto nel frangente) si giovò del clima di consenso a determinare il quale non poco concorse l'oblio (o, meglio, il silenzio) del (sul) passato. Si trattava di ricostruire un tessuto comune e quasi un secolo prima Renan aveva illustrato le virtù dell'oblio nella costruzione delle nazioni.
I governi centristi di Adolfo Suárez (1976-1981), Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo (1981-82) e quelli socialisti di Felipe González (1982-1996) fecero poco per riscattare gli sconfitti del '39 e gli oppositori della dittatura successiva. Certamente meno di quello che avrebbero potuto. Iniziarono tuttavia a modificare assetti ed equilibri anche sul piano della memoria, decretando la concessione della pensione ai mutilati dell'esercito repubblicano (5 marzo 1976), trasformado la parata militare della Vittoria in festività delle Forze armate, varando una legge di amnistia (14 ottobre 1977), decretando ancora sui militari di carriera dell'esercito repubbblicano (6 marzo 1978), estendendo la pensione ai familiari dei caduti nella guerra civile (16 novembre 1978), inaugurado il monumento dedicato a tutti gli spagnoli caduti a Madrid nella Plaza de la Lealtad, in occasione del decennale dell'incoronazione del re (22 novembre 1985). E anche i governi popolari guidati da Aznar (1996-2004) non poterono esimersi da compiere, sia pure al rallentatore, passi in avanti nella stessa direzione, affrontando, per esempio, il 27 febbraio e 16 maggio 2001 il dibattito alle Cortes sul maquís (la resistenza armata contro il franchismo, da quest'ultimo definita come banditismo), con il voto di condanna della sollevazione militare espresso dalle Cortes il 13 febbraio 2001, con il riconoscimento morale di chi venne fucilato dai franchisti (21 giugno 2001), fino al voto, sempre alle Cortes, per la riparazione morale ed economica dei prigionieri e di coloro che hanno subito rappresaglie dal franchismo (19 febbraio 2002). Tutto ciò mentre Franco continuava a cavalcare in numerose statue equestri, i nomi delle vie e delle piazze a rievocare i suoi sodali e le pesetas a recare la sua effige.
Gli usi pubblici della storia
Accanto ai passi compiuti nella giusta direzione dai governi democratici, è bene sottolineare che, contrariamente a quanto si sente dire troppo spesso, Repubblica, guerra civile e franchismo non sono stati argomenti tabù o di cui non si sia profusamente scritto e parlato in Spagna negli ultimi trent'anni.
Dalla morte di Franco, le ricerche sulla seconda Repubblica, la guerra civile, il franchismo e la violenza politica che, esercitata durante il conflitto da entrambi i contendenti, poi solo dalla parte vincitrice, hanno fatto passi da gigante. Si sono celebrati convegni nazionali e internazionali, seminari in ogni università; sono usciti centinaia di libri e il dibattito sui media è stato intenso. È stata, anzi, la generalizzata occupazione degli spazi pubblici da parte della storiografia accademica e scientifica a creare gli appetitosi spiragli di mercato nei quali si sono insediati con grande profitto i mestieranti del revisionismo (Pío Moa, César Vidal), pronti a soddisfare le esigenze di lettori nostalgici o dei franchisti militanti. Nessun silenzio od oblio, dunque, sul passato. Se per uso pubblico della storia si intende l'impiego al di fuori dell'ambito specialistico del riferimento al passato, c'è da dire che nella Spagna del dopo Franco il tema della Repubblica, della guerra civile e del franchismo è stato martellante nella letteratura, nel teatro, nel cinema, nella canzone e sulla stampa. Così martellante e di qualità da far giungere potentemente la propria voce al di fuori del paese. Basti pensare all'oscar come miglior film straniero a Belle époque di Fernando Trueba (1993) o allo straordinario successo di opere come Soldati di Salamina (2001) di Javier Cercas, La voz dormida (2003) di Dulce Chacón e Mala gente que camina (2006) di Benjamin Prada, per tacere dell'opera di Manuel Vázquez Montalbán o Antonio Múñoz Molina. Di fronte a tale messe di produzione artistica viene da pensare a un ruolo compensativo delle arti rispetto al discorso pubblico che è mancato finora e che Zapatero si accinge a colmare.
Una legge problematica
Per tirare le fila del discorso, non sono solo mancati nella Spagna del dopo Franco luoghi della memoria per gli sconfitti del '39 o condivisi. È mancato soprattutto un discorso pubblico sul passato. Considerate le modalità delle transizione, tale mancanza non sorprende. Così come non dovrebbe stupire ora la volontà del governo di dare un segnale in questa direzione. Lo sollecita, tra gli altri, l'Associazione per il recupero della memoria storica (Armh), sorta nel 2000 dopo la scoperta di una fossa comune con i resti di alcune vittime del franchismo. E, più in generale, si tratta di una richiesta di giustizia, riscatto e riabilitazione che proviene da settori maggioritari della società, come rivelano inchieste recenti. La destra reagisce in modo rabbioso, osservando che la riconciliazione avvenne con la transizione. Ma così non è stato, né oblio e riconciliazione possono essere presentate come le due facce della stessa medaglia. L'obiettivo della «riconciliazione nazionale», lanciato con forza dal PCE nel 1956, venne condiviso dai socialisti in modo discontinuo fino al 1976 e solo successivamente proclamato ad alta voce. Dalle destre fu accolto in alcuni casi per convinzione, in molti altri per convenienza. Se riconciliazione vi fu nel 1975-78 essa avvenne, comunque, su basi fragili. Poggiò su di un passato che non si era ancora raffreddato e del quale si conosceva ancora storiograficamente assai poco. Basti pensare a quanto è emerso nei tre successivi decenni a proposito della repressione franchista.
Seguendo Maurice Halbwachs, secondo il quale si ha costruzione della memoria all'interno di quadri socialmente (e quindi storicamente) determinati, non diversamente da quanto avviene per le identità, le tradizioni e le nazioni, che lungi dall'esserci consegnate dalla natura sono il risultato di operazioni storico-culturali, il problema che il paese iberico ha oggi di fronte è se esistono le condizioni per costruire un discorso pubblico che sia basato su una memoria condivisa del passato, almeno per quanto riguarda il periodo compreso tra il colpo di Stato di Primo de Rivera (1923) e la morte di Franco (1975). La risposta non può che essere dubitativa. Destre e settori importanti del mondo cattolico continuano a vedere nel tentativo rivoluzionario dell'ottobre del 1934 il punto di partenza della guerra civile. Tacciono le responsabilità dei militari e minimizzano le straordinarie dimensioni della repressione franchista. Da parte della sinistra si continua a raffigurare in termini idilliaci e mitici la Repubblica del 1931, ignorandone gli errori, le contraddizioni e gravi semplificazioni.
Se ricorrendo a una delle «forzature» a cui ci ha abituato, Zapatero restituirà l'onore ai vinti, compenserà uno squilibrio «storico» della democrazia spagnola e segnerà un ulteriore punto a suo favore. Due se adotterà le cautele necessarie a evitare l'accusa di aver trasformato lo Stato in storiografo. Resterà comunque una considerevole distanza tra le aquisizioni della storiografia, il senso comune della gente e i passaggi della politica. Per questi motivi quella che si gioca attorno alla memoria in Spagna è una complessa partita politica e storico-culturale dall'esito incerto.
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/27-Luglio-2006/art67.html
Internazionale:
Il futuro della globalizzazione
Il fallimento dei negoziati di Doha, la scorsa settimana, è un risultato carico di conseguenze negative per il commercio internazionale.
Internazionale, 28 luglio 2006
Con il Medio Oriente in fiamme, il prezzo del petrolio al suo massimo storico, l'economia statunitense che rallenta e il riscaldamento globale che aumenta, non è la cosa più ovvia seguire con apprensione l'esito dei negoziati del ciclo di Doha,che si sono svolti in Svizzera la scorsa settimana. Le trattative sono state sospese a tempo indeterminato: la decisione è destinata ad avere conseguenze sul concetto stesso di sistema di commercio internazionale.
Gli osservatori più esperti potrebbero parlare di inutile allarmismo. In effetti alla vigilia del raggiungimento di tutti i maggiori accordi internazionali, le trattative si sono sempre arenate. E l'intesa sul taglio di dazi e sussidi nel settore agricolo, questione su cui le trattative sono naufragate ancora una volta, è uno dei temi più spinosi e importanti in discussione in seno all'Organizzazione mondiale del commercio (Wto).
Oltretutto mentre sul tavolo principale gli accordi non si fanno, c'è grande abbondanza di intese bilaterali tra i paesi che partecipano alle trattative perché nessuno vuole rinunciare ai vantaggi economici acquisiti fino a questo momento.
Ma, occorre ricordarlo, gli accordi bilaterali di solito non favoriscono i paesi poveri che non hanno potere contrattuale da soli ma invece guadagnano nelle trattative multilaterali quando fanno parte di un gruppo di negoziatori.
Dunque non è allarmismo gratuito quello di chi si mostra preoccupato per la sospensione dei negoziati. Questa volta in gioco non c'è solo la firma di un accordo ma l'idea stessa di liberalizzazione del commercio internazionale.
La colpa del fallimento non può essere attribuita a un solo paese. Ognuno ha avuto le sue colpe: l'India chiedeva meno sussidi e l'abbassamento dei dazi ma era restia a concedere l'abbattimento delle barriere doganali sui suoi prodotti agricoli e industriali; l'Unione europea non avrebbe accettato il taglio dei dazi; il governo degli Stati Uniti, che in passato è stato l'anima delle trattative, alla fine ha dichiarato che un cattivo accordo sarebbe stato peggiore di nessun accordo. E così l'incontro è stato archiviato e rimandato a data da destinarsi.
Qual è il futuro del patto di Doha non è facile prevederlo. Ma una cosa è certa: i negoziati sono stati lanciati dopo gli attacchi dell'11 settembre 2001 anche con l'intenzione di mostrare ai terroristi che un mondo prospero, unito e determinato era in grado di respingere la loro minaccia. Cinque anni dopo, davanti a una nuova ondata di guerra e violenze che sembrano incapaci di risolvere, i leader mondiali erano in Svizzera anche per dare un segnale politico di forza. Hanno fallito. (Liliana Cardile)
La fonte di questo articolo:
The future of globalisation
Internazionale viale Regina Margherita, 294 - 00198 Roma
tel +39 06 4417 301 • fax +39 06 4425 2718 • email posta@internazionale.it
http://www.internazionale.it/home/primopianotxt.php?id=13267
Jeune Afrique: Violences à l'approche des élections,
l'Eglise appelle à voter
RD CONGO - 27 juillet 2006 – AFP
Des violences, qui ont fait un mort et plusieurs blessés, ont émaillé jeudi la campagne électorale à Kinshasa à trois jours d'élections cruciales en République démocratique du Congo (RDC), auxquelles l'église catholique du pays a finalement apporté son soutien.
Un policier a été tué lors de violences qui ont éclaté devant le stade Tata Raphaël de Kinshasa où le vice-président congolais Jean-Pierre Bemba a tenu son dernier meeting avant la présidentielle de dimanche. Un journaliste de l'AFP a vu le corps de la victime étendue sur le sol.
Son corps a été ensuite brûlé et traîné dans les rues adjacentes par des jeunes gens dont certains portaient des tee-shirts à l'effigie de M. Bemba. En début de soirée, la police a pu "récupérer" le corps de la victime, un agent de la Police d'intervention rapide (PIR).
Selon plusieurs témoins, cet homme aurait été tué par balle par le service d'ordre du vice-président lors de heurts entre policiers et militants du Mouvement de libération du Congo (MLC, ex-rébellion que préside M. Bemba).
Selon un policier, des heurts ont éclaté quand des partisans de Bemba ont jeté des pierres en direction de policiers commis à la garde d'un lieu de culte - qui a été plus tard saccagé - près du stade.
Les jeunes gens ont été dispersés à coups de grenades lacrymogènes et ont reflué vers le stade où ils se sont à nouveau heurtés à la police.
Au moins trois personnes ont été blessées, visiblement victimes de chutes ou de coups dans la confusion générale, a constaté un journaliste de l'AFP.
C'est alors que des militaires affectés à la sécurité de M. Bemba auraient ouvert le feu à plusieurs reprises, tuant le policier de la PIR.
Au même moment, une centaine de jeunes partisans de Bemba ont vandalisé et pillé le siège voisin de la Haute autorité des médias (Ham, organe de régulation de la presse).
Plusieurs autres bâtiments ont été dégradés ou partiellement incendiés aux abords du stade, notamment le studio du musicien Werra Son, accusé d'être à la solde du président Joseph Kabila, a constaté l'AFP.
Un poste de police a été pris pour cible et plusieurs policiers blessés par des jets de pierres, a-t-on indiqué de source policière.
Le calme est revenu dans la soirée, alors que les partisans de Bemba quittaient le stade.
Dans la ville de Mbuji-Mayi (centre), trois hommes armés ont abattu mercredi soir la mère d'un candidat aux législatives, en sa présence, et grièvement blessé sa soeur. David Mukeba Mfuta a dénoncé "un crime politique", affirmant à l'AFP que les assaillants le visaient "personnellement".
Cette ville est le fief de l'Union pour la démocratie et le progrès social (UDPS) de l'opposant Etienne Tshisekedi, qui boycotte les élections, et où ses militants empêchent les candidats de faire campagne.
Jeudi, une candidate à la présidence, Catherine Nzuzi Wa Mbombo, a été contrainte d'y annuler son meeting, après que son cortège eut essuyé des jets de pierre, selon une source policière.
Les autorités policières de la province avaient lancé dans la matinée une sévère mise en garde à tous ceux qui chercheraient à perturber les scrutins.
Par ailleurs, l'église catholique a appelé à un vote "massif" dimanche, levant ainsi l'hypothèque qu'elle faisait peser sur un processus électoral qu'elle menaçait jusqu'alors de ne pas reconnaître si des "irrégularités n'étaient pas corrigées".
La conférence épiscopale nationale du Congo (Cenco) a demandé aux électeurs "de manifester clairement leur volonté dans le choix des dirigeants pour un Congo nouveau".
Selon Mgr Laurent Monsengwo, qui préside la Cenco, ce revirement de l'Eglise survient "après une vérification minutieuse des faits et une large enquête", menée notamment auprès de la Commission électorale indépendante (CEI).
Mercredi, les chefs des autres principales confessions religieuses avaient déjà lancé un appel au vote.
© Jeuneafrique.com 2006
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_depeche.asp?
art_cle=AFP31926violeretove0
New Statesman: Diary:
How to live to a hundred and twenty, Fidel-style
John Harris
Monday 31st July 2006
Cubans may still be denied such trifles as free elections, but they have perfect teeth, and there seems to be only one obese person in the whole of Havana, writes John Harris
It's Tuesday, and I am sweating my way around the suburbs of Havana. Along with a cameraman and producer-cum-director, I'm here to author a film for Newsnight about the wonders of Fidel Castro's medical system. Cubans may still be denied such trifles as free elections, but they have perfect teeth, and in the whole city, there seems to be only one obese person.
So, we visit surgeries and clinics, and Havana's cutting-edge biotechnology campus, where "Frankenstein" machines - made up of 20-year-old hardware, mixed up with ad hoc modern components - whirr away, playing their part in the development of a mind-boggling array of vaccines and drugs. Among them are three anti-cancer treatments which are so trailblazing that the US authorities have decided to make an exception to the economic embargo and allow the American firm CancerVax to sign a multimillion-dollar contract.
A very different innovation is the 120 Club, a nationwide association open to anyone who fancies notching up six score years. Fidel turns 80 in a couple of weeks; his personal physician has recently claimed that he will set the country an example by making it to 140. For ordinary Cubans, there is only one problem: if you were born before 1955, state-subsidised cigarettes can be part of your weekly rations, working out at roughly one US cent for 20. When I meet the vice-president of the 120 Club, the question has to be asked: how do absurdly cut-price fags square with the national obsession with preventive medicine? His reply demonstrates a very Cuban logic. "My advice is this - get the cigarettes, but don't smoke them."
Lennon's capitalist philosophy
One of Havana's newest and most popular tourist attractions is Lennon Park, built around a statue of the ex-Beatle and opened in 2000 by Castro, who claimed that he "shared Lennon's dreams completely". Really? Aside from a brief run of fairly useless protest songs, Lennon lived his life as an unapologetic capitalist - proof that, despite its eternal fondness for radical chic, the music business is a case study in the kind of free-market economics at which Fidel would presumably blanch. Take, for example, a choice moment from the Beatles' first US press conference in February 1964. "Will you sing for us?" begged one journalist. "No," Lennon barked back. "We need money first."
Absolutism is back
When I last came here in 1998, the authorities' frostiness towards private enterprise was beginning to show signs of a thaw. Now, buoyed by money from China and Venezuela, they have swung back towards old-school absolutism: no new joint ventures with foreign companies have been agreed in the past year, and even getting a licence for a small restaurant is very difficult, apparently. As far as the Communist Party is concerned, even small business people are always in danger of turning into ethical monsters.
Tommyrot, I'm saying. Two years ago, exiled from the capital by the prohibitive price of even a small flat, my girlfriend and I bought a house in Hay-on-Wye. It came with its own shop, now an outlet selling cookbooks and kitchenware. On the occasions when I put in a few hours, the obligation to 1) talk to strangers and 2) secure money that might otherwise go to Tesco suggest progressive values in excelsis - as happened the other week, when a couple from Birmingham came in. Given what was on the shop stereo, he joined me in a long conversation about the recent death of Syd Barrett; and she bought a wooden spoon. This is surely the kind of heart-warming stuff that members of the Fabian Society call "social capital".
Cameroonian rocket
One last thing. Just before I left for Cuba, I took part in a brief radio debate about David Cameron's very sensible plan to put a rocket under the UK's democracy by opening the selection of the Tories' next London mayoral candidate to a US-style open primary. A participatory website is obviously in order - so, pilfering an old bit of William Hague wordplay, myself and a few friends have already registered a nice domain name: londontorynightmayor.co.uk
John Harris's Newsnight film will be shown on 1 August (BBC2)
This article first appeared in the New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200607310016
The Independent:
Forever in chains: The tragic history of Congo
The most blighted nation on earth goes to the polls this weekend - more in hope than expectation that stability and peace might result. In Congo, mass suffering has been a way of life ever since the Belgian King Leopold enslaved millions in the 19th century. Paul Vallely traces the story of a people for whom the horror never let up
Paul Vallely, 28 July 2006
One picture sums it up. It shows a man named Nsala sitting on the porch of a missionary's house in the Congo. His face is a portrait of impenetrable sorrow.
Before him lie a small hand and foot. It is all that remains of his five-year-old daughter who has - together with his wife and son - been killed, dismembered, cooked and eaten by soldiers.
The photograph was taken during the biggest atrocity in recorded African history. And it was perpetrated not by Africans, but by Europeans.
No one knows how many people died, but it was at least three million men, women and children. Some historians say it was five million, or 10 million. The Encyclopaedia Britannica has said that as many as 30 million people may have perished.
It is but a single chapter in the long and bloody history of the Congo. This weekend, voters go to the polls in Democratic Republic of Congo for the first elections in 40 years, during which havoc has been wreaked by despotism and war. But will Sunday's poll do anything to change lives there for the better?
The first that was written of the hot and humid river basin that straddles the Equator on the west of the great African continent came from Portuguese travellers in the 15th century. They had encountered a place called the Kingdom of Kongo and, with its capital city of Mbanza Kongo, it had a population close to half a million people. It was a highly developed state at the centre of an extensive trading network.
Merchants traded all manner of raw materials, the most precious of which was ivory, but which also included a wealth of manufactured goods such as copper and ironware, raffia cloth and pottery. It was also a centre for the buying and selling of individuals captured in war. Long before the arrival of the Europeans, the slave trade existed. The ruler was a king who rejoiced in the title of "Mother of the King of Kongo".
Not much more was heard of the place in Europe until the great Victorian missionary explorer David Livingstone discovered that quinine was the key to unlocking the African interior. He became a hero and a household name in the second half of the 19th century, but then disappeared into the bush. The New York Herald sent another intrepid Briton to find him, and the young man, Henry Morton Stanley, walked into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations with his greeting: "Dr Livingstone, I presume?"
Across the other side of the globe, King Leopold II of the Belgians read about it over breakfast in the The Times, which was thrown from the continental mail train into the grounds of his palace each morning. (His butler ironed it before the monarch read it.)
Leopold had been of the opinion for some time that "il faut à la Belgique une colonie". He didn't want to miss the chance of getting a good slice of what he called the "magnifique gâteau africain". But he was having a hard time persuading the Belgian government to agree. So he decided to acquire a colony by himself. In doing so, he ignited what came to be called "the scramble of Africa".
Stanley's encounter with the Congo was being hailed as the most important geographical "discovery" ever made in Africa. The king summoned the Welshman and in 1878 commissioned him to go back - under the guise of an international scientific and philanthropic association, which he called the International African Society - to negotiate with the local chiefs.
Over the five years that followed, Stanley concluded some 400 "cloth and trinket" treaties with the Congo chiefs. The Africans thought they were signing friendship pacts, but they were in fact selling their land.
Leopold, who was devious as well as greedy, persuaded the world that he was acting from humanitarian motives. In 1884, the The Daily Telegraph, perspicacious as ever, opined: "Leopold II has knit adventurers, traders and missionaries of many races into one band of men under the most illustrious of modern travellers [Stanley] to carry to the interior of Africa new ideas of law, order, humanity and protection of the natives."
That year, at the Berlin Conference called by Bismarck to carve up Africa - which no African attended, even as an observer - Leopold displayed some nifty footwork. He persuaded the Iron Chancellor that, in order to exclude Germany's rivals, Britain and France, from the important new region, it would be best to declare it a free trade area and give it to him. Not to Belgium, not even to the Belgian crown, but to him personally.
Without ever setting foot there, Leopold II had become the owner of nearly a million square miles of unmapped jungle, 75 times the size of Belgium itself. Ivory was what the king had his eye on. And, though plenty of it was yielded, Leopold struggled to make a profit. In 1895, he tried to give the colony to the Belgian government because it was costing him too much.
But then a Scot called Dunlop invented the pneumatic tyre for his bicycle, and the worldwide boom in rubber began. In the Congo, wild jungle vines that yielded the stuff grew everywhere. The natives would slash them and lather their bodies with the rubber. All that Leopold needed to do was to persuade the natives to scrape it off into huge baskets for him.
He did this by setting quotas of both rubber and ivory for each village, for which they were paid a pitifully low fixed price set by his officials on the ground. Each community was told to provide 10 per cent of their number as full-time forced labourers, and another 25 per cent part-time. It was a form of slavery.
Stanley, who supervised all this, became known in Kikongo as Bula Matari (the Breaker of Rocks), a tag the people later transferred to the Congolese state itself. The scheme was a huge success; by 1902, the price of rubber had risen 15 times in eight years, and it constituted 80 per cent of the exports of "The Congo Free State", as Leopold had dubbed it.
Free is what the people were not. The symbol of Leopold's rule was the schicotte - a whip of raw sun-dried hippopotamus hide cut into long sharp-edged strips which could quickly remove the skin from a man's back. The king established a Force Publique to enforce the rubber quotas. Its soldiers were black - many of them cannibals from the fiercest tribes of upper Congo - but they were led by white officers who routinely supervised the burning of non-compliant villages and the torture and rape of those who were struggling to fill quotas.
One local man spelt out what this meant. "Wild beasts - leopards - killed some of us while we were working away in the forest, and others got lost or died from exposure or starvation and we begged the white men to leave us alone, saying we could get no more rubber, but the white men and the soldiers said, 'Go. You are only beasts yourselves. You are only snyama [meat].' Many were shot, some had their ears cut off."
But the routine penalty for failing to bring in enough rubber was the severing of a hand. Soldiers collected them by the basketload, from the living and the dead. A Baptist missionary wrote a letter to The Times about it: "The hands - the hands of men, women and children - were placed in rows before the commissary who counted them to see that the soldiers had not wasted cartridges." Officers were worried that the men might waste their ammunition on hunting animals for sport, so they required soldiers to submit one hand for every bullet spent. Hands became a grim currency, traded to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas. "This rubber traffic is steeped in blood," the letter-writer said.
Other testimony disclosed how Belgian officers ordered their men "to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, also their sexual members, and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross". This blood-curdling business carried on for more than 12 years before word leaked out. One of the first to blow the whistle was the captain of one of the riverboats that transported the ivory and rubber downstream to port. His name was Joseph Conrad, and eight years later he wrote a book that has shaped the emotional language in which white people discuss Africa.
It was called Heart of Darkness. The atmosphere it conjures is of fetid fever-ridden ports in an Equatorial river basin surrounded by dense tropical rainforest. It is a climate of persistent high temperatures and humidity, as enervating to the soul as to the body. It is a world of madness, greed and violence, centred on a charismatic ivory trader called Kurtz who turns himself into a demigod to the local tribes and gathers vast quantities of ivory. Eventually, he dies - "The horror, the horror," his last words.
When the book was published in magazine serial form in 1899, it did not just expose what Conrad was to call "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience". It also gave backing to the writings of a man whose campaigns on the Congo the public had been reluctant to believe.
ED Morel was a clerk in a Liverpool shipping office who began to wonder why the ships that brought vast loads of rubber from the Congo returned carrying no commercial goods, but only guns and ammunition. He began to investigate the Force Publique and concluded that Leopold's well-publicised philanthropy was in fact "legalised robbery enforced by violence". He wrote: "I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a croniman."
In 1903, the House of Commons debated the Congo atrocities. The British consul in Congo, Roger Casement, was sent to investigate. The year after, he returned with a vivid and detailed eyewitness report, which was made public. His 1904 report, which confirmed Morel's accusations and suggested that at least three million people had died, had a considerable impact on public opinion.
Even then, Leopold countered with a wicked publicity campaign to discredit the reports. He even created a bogus Commission for the Protection of the Natives to root out the "few isolated instances" of abuse. But he reckoned without another recent invention - the camera. Before long, horrifying photographs such as the one of the man with his daughter's little hand and foot, were in circulation.
International opinion was outraged. In America, Mark Twain penned a savage piece of sarcasm called King Leopold's Soliloquy. In Britain, Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired to write the book The Crime of the Congo, which he completed in eight days. Before long, the American President and the British prime minister were pressing the Belgian government to act.
Leopold offered to reform his regime, but few took him seriously. After two years of agonised deliberation, a further report (which confirmed Casement's) and a general election, the Parliament of Belgium annexed the Congo Free State and took over its administration. It paid Leopold £2m to compensate him for his sacrifices.
Renamed the Belgian Congo (to contrast with the much smaller French Congo, now the Republic of Congo, to the west), the region became a "model colony". In the decades that followed the transfer of responsibility to the government of Belgium, large amounts of the wealth produced in the Congo were spent there by the alliance of church, commerce and state.
The missionaries built hospitals and clinics to which large numbers of Congolese had access. Doctors and medics achieved great victories against disease, managing to eradicate sleeping sickness. Many villages had medical posts, and bigger cities had well-equipped hospitals. The church ran schools to which 10 per cent of the people were admitted, comparing favourably with the 6 per cent of the population in school in India and the much lower percentages elsewhere in Africa. The colonial authorities built railways, ports and roads. The mining companies built houses for their staff, provided welfare and technical training.
By the Second World War, production and profits had risen to the point where the Congo was Africa's richest colony. In the 1950s, life expectancy was 55 years (today, it is 51). By 1959, the year before independence, the Belgian Congo was producing 10 per cent of world's copper, 50 per cent of its cobalt and 70 per cent of industrial diamonds.
What was missing was the development of a Congolese elite to take over the running of the place. The Congolese had no rights to own land, to vote or to travel freely. There were curfews in towns and forced labour in the countryside. There was no higher education, except for those who wanted to become priests. The Congolese were encouraged to become clerks, medical assistants and mechanics, but not doctors, lawyers or engineers.
At independence, out of a population of 60 million, there were just 16 university graduates. Educated Congolese were given the status of Sévolués, but this won them few privileges when what they wanted, wrote Patrice Lumumba, who was to become the first prime minister of what became Democratic Republic of Congo, "was to be Belgians and have the same freedoms and rights as whites".
It would come eventually, their colonial masters thought, in perhaps another 100 years. When a Belgian academic suggested a 30-year transition plan was needed, he was greeted with derision. But when the change came, on the back of the sudden tide of African nationalism that swept the continent, accompanied by riots, it happened in just 18 months. The Congo was perhaps the least well-prepared of any colony for independence.
It didn't help that on Independence Day in 1960, King Baudouin arrived to make a speech praising the "genius" of Leopold II, listing the sacrifices that Belgium had made for the Congo and doling out patronising advice. Prime Minister Lumumba responded with an off-the-cuff speech about the "terrible suffering and exploitation" that had been experienced by "we niggers" and promising: "We shall make of the Congo a shining example for the whole of Africa." It was not to be.
Lumumba was charismatic, with extraordinary powers of oratory, but he was volatile. Within days of the independence ceremonies, rebellions and violence broke out. The province of Katanga declared independence. Belgium moved troops in. So did the United Nations. Feeling betrayed, Lumumba requested Soviet military aid.
The local CIA chief telegrammed back to Washington that the Congo was "a Cuba in the making" and that Lumumba was a "Castro or worse". President Eisenhower allegedly authorised that Lumumba be assassinated and a CIA hit man came from Paris with poison to be, bizarrely, injected into the prime minister's toothpaste. (The local CIA man refused to do it.)
The plot thickened with Dag Hammarskjold, the UN Secretary General, dying in a plane crash in uncertain circumstances while trying to negotiate a ceasefire in Katanga. Letters recently uncovered by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggested that South African agents planted a bomb in the aircraft's wheel-bay. And, not long afterwards, the Marxist guerrilla leader Che Guevara appeared in the Congo with 100 men in a plot to bring about a Cuban-style revolution.
Amid all that, Patrice Lumumba had fallen out with the Congo's first president, Joseph Kasavubu. As the pair engaged in a power struggle in September 1960, a military coup overthrew Lumumba in favour of the president. The putsch was staged by the 29-year-old army chief of staff, Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. Five years later, he staged another one, ousting Kasavubu and beginning his own bizarre 32-year rule.
Lumumba was shot in the bush at the command of a Belgian officer. His body was hacked to pieces and dissolved in sulphuric acid, his skull ground to dust and his bones and teeth scattered - some say by a witch doctor from an aircraft along the country's borders, to make sure he could not come back from the dead.
Things did not get better. Mobutu sent the Russians packing, which greatly pleased the Americans. So did almost everything else he did, for he staunchly followed US foreign policy in all key matters. It was the height of the Cold War and Africa had become a proxy battlefield. Keeping the Soviets out was more important than anything else. As long as Mobutu did that, and supported anti-Communist rebels in neighbouring countries, Washington would turn a blind eye to anything else.
Mobutu made the most of that. He set up a one-party state that tolerated no dissent. In the early years, he consolidated power by publicly executing political rivals. One rebel leader had his eyes gouged out, his genitals ripped off and his limbs amputated one by one before he died.
Later, Mobutu switched to a new tactic - that of buying off political rivals rather than killing them. He did so by elevating theft to a form of government. A new word was coined to describe it - kleptocracy. At first, he had tried simply printing more money to pay the bills for his schemes. He issued new stamps, coins and currency notes with his portrait on.
There were posters and billboards everywhere. His personality cult reached its peak every night when the television news began with an image of him descending through clouds from the heavens. He put the story about that even his walking stick had magic powers.
In the early years, he launched an African Authenticity campaign. He renamed the country Zaire in 1971. He ordered everyone to drop their Christian names for African ones, rebranding himself Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga ("The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake"). He outlawed hair-straightening, skin bleaching, the wearing of ties and listening to foreign music. He nationalised foreign-owned firms and handed them to relatives and associates.
When the economy slumped, he printed more money. Hyperinflation followed, and even the central bank bought its hard currency on the black market. But he was a Cold War warrior, so the West bailed him out. The more they gave him, the more he stole. Of the $73m education budget one year, schools got only $8m; he pocketed the rest. So it went with every area of government.
Mobutu's extravagance was legendary. He had villas, ranches, palaces and yachts throughout Europe. Concorde was constantly hired. He didn't just have Swiss bank accounts; he bought a Swiss bank. He didn't just get his wife a Mercedes; he bought a Mercedes assembly plant for her. He stashed away nearly $5bn - almost the equivalent of the country's foreign debt at the time.
Still, the West smiled and paid up to the man Ronald Reagan called "a voice of good sense and good will". The US gave him a total of $2bn over 30 years. The CIA trained and armed his bodyguards. When rebels attacked him, France airlifted in 1,500 elite Moroccan paratroopers. When that wasn't enough, a year later Belgium and France deployed troops (with American logistical support).
All the while, the Congo became Africa's haven for mercenaries, money launderers and diamond smugglers - while its public infrastructure rotted and child mortality rose. Mobutu became the longest-surviving despot of the Cold War era. It was either "Mobutu or chaos", the US said. But the hapless people of the Congo got both.
Then it was over. The Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War ended. The IMF experts who had been brought in to reform his finances - and left after a year in despair - pulled the plug on his loans. The US would lend no more. Mobutu declared an end to one-party rule, but it was too late.
What finished him off was the decision to back the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide. After the Hutu genocidaires were chased from Rwanda in 1994, Mobutu gave them shelter in Zaire. More than that; he issued an order forcing Tutsis to leave Zaire on penalty of death. They erupted in rebellion. Rwanda and Uganda joined in, invading eastern Congo in pursuit of the genocidaires. When they met no resistance - the Congolese army being more used to suppressing civilians than fighting - they marched on the capital Kinshasa.
Mobutu - the "all-powerful warrior", the fifth-richest man in the world, who bled the Congo even more efficiently than King Leopold, and who looted the state into paralysis - escaped on a cargo plane with bullets ripping into the fuselage as it took off. After 20 years of Mobutist dictatorship, in the words of the African historian Basil Davidson: "Zaire remained a state without a nation, a geographical concept without a people." And Kinshasa la belle had become Kinshasa la poubell - the dustbin.
The new man was Laurent-Désiré Kabila. He presented himself as the heir to the murdered Lumumba. Outsiders hailed him as one of the "new breed" of African leaders. Nelson Mandela paid tribute. The US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, stood next to Kabila early on and said that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (or Democratic Republic of Congo as it was re-re-named) would now emerge as "an engine of regional growth". Those who knew Kabila thought differently.
His critics sneered that all he had ever run was a brothel in Tanzania. Others recalled the judgement of Che Guevara who had concluded three decades earlier that Kabila was "not the man of the hour". He was too interested in drinking, bedding women and showing up days late. The lack of co-operation between Kabila and Guevara was what had led to the Cuban-style revolution foundering in the Sixties.
He had not, it seemed, improved with age. Kabila turned out to be another petty tyrant. Secretive and paranoid, he had no political programme and just doled out jobs to family and friends. He made his cousin chief of the armed forces, gave his son a top army job and made his brother-in-law the police chief. Worse, he was as cruel as Mobutu, jailing and torturing opponents, but lacking his skill in playing the ethnic card. He promised elections but never held them.
And he did not learn from Mobutu's mistakes. Put in power by the Rwandans and Ugandans, he decided to distance himself from them by again supporting the Hutus and allowing them to regroup on Congolese soil. Rwanda had learnt the lessons of the past; it immediately flew 2,000 troops to within striking distance of the capital. Uganda joined in. Kabila was only saved because Angola and Zimbabwe came to his rescue, the former fearing that a power vacuum in the DRC would allow Angolan rebels to flourish, the later trying to play the statesman and grab some mining contracts.
The fighting soon stalemated. But no one was bothered; all involved just used the bases they had established inside the DRC to plunder. The war became self-financing as all sides scrabbled for diamonds, gold and timber.
Suddenly, 70 per cent of the Congo's coltan - an essential component in making mobile phones - was being exported through Rwanda. And Congo gold turned into a major Ugandan export. Rwanda and Uganda even began to fight each other at one point over control of Kisangani and its diamond fields.
What broke the stalemate was a coup in 2001. The plot failed, but Kabila was assassinated. His son, Joseph Kabila Kabange, became President. The Congo's warlords were happy, assuming that junior would be a pushover.
But Kabila II had done his military training in China and turned out to be an operator. Within a year, he had successfully negotiated an international peace deal that saw Rwanda withdraw and all the remaining warring parties agree to end the fighting and establish a government of national unity.
Peace has returned to two-thirds of the country - there are factions fighting in the east - and Kabila has delivered the referendum he promised and now, on Sunday, the elections. He is, of course, standing and is, of course, the favourite of the 33 candidates.
The country is still in a dire state. Aid organisations say about 1,200 people die daily due to the effects of the conflict, hunger and disease. The DRC has Aids, low life expectancy and a high rate of child deaths. More than two million Congolese are internal refugees. National output and government revenue slumped - and external debt increased - during the five years of fighting, in which perhaps four million people died.
Even so, this weekend's elections - the first multiparty elections in 40 years - are the biggest and most costly the UN has organised. Another eastern warlord yesterday agreed to lay down arms. Last month, the world's largest mining company, BHP Billiton, said it would open an office in Kinshasa once the election is over. Other big mining groups may follow.
The prospects look a little brighter. It may be too soon - in the two-steps-forward, one-step-back world of contemporary Africa - to be optimistic. But, in their terrible story, the people of the Congo hope that, at last, it may be that a corner is being turned.
The horror: from Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'
Paths, paths, everywhere; a stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through the long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut. The population had cleared out a long time ago. Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon. Only here the dwellings were gone, too. Still I passed through several abandoned villages. There's something pathetically childish in the ruins of grass walls. Day after day, with the stamp and shuffle of 60 pair of bare feet behind me, each pair under a 60lb load. Camp, cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a carrier dead in harness, at rest in the long grass near the path, with an empty water gourd and his long staff lying by his side. A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive and wild - and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. Once a white man in an unbuttoned uniform, camping on the path with an armed escort of lank Zanzibaris, very hospitable and festive - not to say drunk. Was looking after the upkeep of the road, he declared. Can't say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be considered a permanent improvement.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article1201822.ece
The New Yorker: AMERICAN ABSTRACT
Real Jackson Pollock.
by PETER SCHJELDAHL
Issue of 2006-07-31
Half a century ago, on August 11, 1956, an Oldsmobile convertible driven by Jackson Pollock, who was drunk, hit a tree in the Springs, killing the artist and a passenger. It’s a dismal enough anniversary—marked with scant attention by the finest art show in New York this summer, “No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper,” at the Guggenheim—but glamorous, in its way. Pollock, like other doomed artists and martyrs to fame in his era—Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean—advanced and, by destroying himself, oddly consecrated America’s postwar cultural ascendancy. Sometimes a new, renegade sensibility really takes hold only when somebody is seen to have died for it.
Tragedy enhanced Pollock’s status as the first American painter, after the corn-belt realist Grant Wood, to achieve general popular renown, as a shining native son. Born in Wyoming, Pollock came to New York, from California, in 1930. He was mentored at the Art Students League by Wood’s American Scene colleague Thomas Hart Benton. He soon found the Expressionist and Surrealist tendencies of the downtown avant-garde more congenial than Benton’s mannered figuration, partly because he was tormented by a belief that he could never draw properly. But a sense of nationalist mandate stayed with him. It’s an undertone in his famous reply to the German painter and pedagogue Hans Hofmann, who had suggested that he try working from nature: “I am nature.” The glowering Westerner who became known as Jack the Dripper seemed to speak not just for the country but as it, in person: the Great American Painter, at a moment that was hot for Great American thises and thats. His helplessly photogenic, clenched features, broadcast by Life in 1949, made him a pinup of seething manhood akin to Marlon Brando. It wasn’t even necessary that Pollock be a great artist, though he was. Unlike Wood, he countered the humiliating authority of European modern art not by rejecting it but by eclipsing it. Abstraction may have still scandalized most Americans, but suddenly it was a homegrown scandal, with nothing sissified about it. The macho pose, an obligatory overcompensation for aestheticism in the nineteen-fifties, ill suited a man whose ruling emotion was fear, which sprung from an anxious childhood in a ragged, nomadic family. But it sold magazines.
Ed Harris’s surprisingly trenchant 2000 bio-pic, “Pollock,” showed why it isn’t possible to separate the artist’s legend from his work. Pollock’s all-or-nothing ambition channelled the hopes of an idealistic, conspiratorial milieu. His wife, the artist Lee Krasner, the critic Clement Greenberg, the collector and dealer Peggy Guggenheim, and other ardent sophisticates—abetted by pressure from competing new masters, chiefly Willem de Kooning—groomed Pollock like a skittish thoroughbred for the big race. Before his myth became a media circus, it was a cottage industry, though conceived in rigorously artistic terms as an overthrow of Cubist and Surrealist conventions in avant-garde painting—of Picasso, in a word. “No Limits, Just Edges” recovers that focus, more through than despite an absence of big canvases. The show’s limitation to works on paper (credibly termed paintings, not drawings, because even when the format is small and the medium is ink Pollock’s practice obviates the distinction) is a boon to understanding the revolutionary character and protean magic of the drip technique. If there’s a weakness in the show, it’s an overrefinement in the curating, betrayed by the preference of the organizer, Susan Davidson, in league with other scholars, to call Pollock’s procedure “pouring,” a fussy nugget of jargon with no support from the dictionary. (Poured paint plays a supporting role in only some of the work.) Not just more accurate and time honored, the vulgar “drip” resonates with a still potent shock of naked materiality which Pollock originated and which has been a major trope in new art (it was decisive for minimalism) ever since. If we want to be precise about what Pollock did—drawing in the air above a canvas with a paint-loaded stick—the mot juste is “dribble.”
Given that Pollock’s process remains incomparable, taken up by no other significant artist, his work has not ceased to pose problems of how to discriminate among its levels of quality. This show’s abundant service to the eye, in that respect, will come in handy if another anniversary observance, augured a few months ago, comes to pass. I refer to the news that the son of two friends of Pollock’s, now deceased, the photographer and designer Herbert Matter and the painter Mercedes Matter, had turned up a cache of thirty-two previously unknown Pollock works, most of them small drip paintings on board. The son, Alex Matter, and the Matters’ dealer, Mark Borghi, promised to show them this year. A prominent Pollock scholar had pronounced the work authentic, though perhaps “experimental.” Others bitterly demurred. A physics professor decided, based on a fractal analysis of the drip patterns, that the hand that made them wasn’t Pollock’s. All this played out sensationally in the press, accompanied by faintly plausible but unenchanting reproductions. They looked imitative to me. Of course, artists have been known to imitate themselves. The affair seems to have gone to ground for now. Borghi has said, through a publicist, that no exhibition is in the offing. Lacking the free-for-all symposium of such an event, the Guggenheim show enables quieter, more probing reflection.
Start with a fascinating failure from Pollock’s wonder years, 1947-50. “Number 13, 1949,” in oil, enamel, and aluminum paint, a dead spot in a sequence of fiercely energized pictures, has been cited in defense of “the Matter Pollocks.” Like them, it has a blandly decorative effect—in contrast to the unresolved tumult that usually marks a less successful Pollock—but only because a boldly experimental motif proved not to work. After painting an amorphous ground of aluminum, white, red, and green, and before overlaying skeins of dripped white, Pollock executed an irregular network of brushed black diagonal bars. This use of geometric elements recalls earlier work in the show—strenuously forced mergers of regular forms with surreal figuration and expressive gesture—and looks ahead to the artist’s last major drip painting, “Blue Poles” (1952), whose eponymous forms snarl like overloaded lightning rods. In “Number 13,” the bars upstage the drips and downstage the underpainting. Analyzing the work is as instructive as an autopsy. You see the muscles and nerves of an amazing style in repose, which is nothing like the soaring serenity that Pollock attained elsewhere. In his best work, which he produced almost incessantly from 1947 until, after long sobriety, he succumbed to drink again, late in 1950, Pollock mastered a quality reminiscent of van Gogh, who wrote to his brother of being “calm even in the catastrophe.”
From early on in the show, you feel the force, however baffled and flailing, of an ambition to reconcile boundless pictorial space (precedented in Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Miró) with raw, emotionally driven physicality. That’s what came about when, by dripping, Pollock freed line from description and color from decoration in a work like “Untitled [Silver over Black, White, Yellow, and Red]” (1948). Warm colors yearn forward; black bites back; silver is everywhere and nowhere; all, as thick substance, configure a wall-like surface. The picture is an improbable but unalloyed visual fact, with nothing mythic about it—nothing American or not American, certainly. Pollock at his peak burned his past conditioning and present turmoil, his very identity and character as a man, and he burned them clean. There’s nobody to recognize. That’s why it can be hard at first sight to tell a true Pollock from a fake. He prepared us to believe that absolutely anything was possible for him. What determines authenticity for me is a hardly scientific, no doubt fallible intuition of a raging need that found respite only in art.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/art/articles/060731craw_artworld
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