Elsewhere Today 439
Aljazeera:
Morocco votes in parliamentary poll
By Ahmed El Amraoui in Rabat
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 07, 2007
12:29 MECCA TIME, 9:29 GMT
Moroccans are voting in elections seen as a test of the country's willingness to boost democracy.
Polling booths opened at 8am (0800 GMT) on Friday for voters to elect a 325-member assembly.
More than 15 million people are eligible to vote, but there are concerns that turnout will be low.
The number of voters in the north African kingdom has declined from 67 per cent in the 1984 elections to 51 per cent in 2002.
Voters are choosing from 33 political parties and 13 independent candidates. Thirty of the seats will be allocated to women.
The Islamic Justice and Development Party (JDP) is expected to make gains and undermine power of other progressive, socialist, liberal and conservative parties.
The latest polls predict the JDP will expand its representation in parliament from 42 of the 325 seats to 70 or more.
The party is particularly popular among the poor in many of the country's marginalised communities. It says it will tackle corruption.
Due to the diversity of political parties in the country, it is unlikely that a single party will win a single majority, so the country will be governed by a coalition.
Polling will take place at 7,380 voting offices across the country. The polls will close at 7pm and results are expected on Sunday.
A new government will be formed after several weeks of talks between political parties and palace officials.
Boycott
Two parties are boycotting the polls, the Democratic Path (Annahj Addimocrati) and the Amazigh Democratic party (Al-hizb addimocrati al-Amazighi).
The Democratic Path, founded in 1995, has never taken part in an election, arguing that political life has not witnessed changes and that parliament has no real legislative power. The king still selects the country's prime minister.
The Amazigh Democratic party says the it boycotts the elections because of "the lack of recognition of Amazigh identity and the Amazigh language in the constitution, as well as the state's continuing strategic marginalization of Amazigh concerns".
Turnout
Despite widespread awareness campaigns educating citizens on the importance of voting, the authorities anticipate that slightly more than half of the three million new electorates have registered to vote.
The government adopted new electronic methods to encourage voter registration and set up a special internet site (www.elections.gov.ma) where citizens could find answers to common questions about the registration and voting process.
The country's ministry of interior has allowed voters to register by sending their national ID card number and date of birth by SMS to a toll-free phone number.
Some Moroccan newspapers have highlighted cases of fraud such as handing out cash advances to voters ahead of the polls - accusing some political parties of intimidation.
Election fund
Most of the main political parties competing in this year's elections are learning from past mistakes and campaigning for job creation and tangible economic growth.
The Moroccan government has allocated $61m to fund organising the current legislative elections, which are Morocco's eighth, and the second since the ascension of King Mohammed VI to the throne in 1999.
The elections are also the first in Morocco since the parliament approved the new political parties' law in October 2005, which aimed at reforming political life and increasing transparency.
For the first time in modern Moroccan history, an international group of 43 multinational observers have been granted the right to monitor the elections under the supervision of the United States' National Democratic Institute.
The Moroccan Consultative Council for Human Rights has also been officially entrusted with supervising and co-ordinating the monitoring effort.
Source: Al Jazeera and Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E1D2FB2C-E52E-4A63-A6C4-5059470566F6.htm
AllAfrica:
U.S. Warns of Terrorist Attacks in Country
By Paul Ohia
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
7 September 2007
Days ahead of September 11 commemoration of the terrorist attacks on the United States by the Al-Qaeda Network, the American Consulate in Lagos has raised alarm over a threat on Western and US interests in Nigeria.
A similar warning in June 2005 led to the closure of embassies in Lagos and Abuja for some days. Then, a US military spokesperson, Major Holly Silkman, speaking from Dakar, Senegal, had confirmed the terrorist threat thus: "There was some kind of threat made and it was through telephone call."
Yesterday, the US mission said it received information that American and other Western interests in the country are at risk of a terrorist attack without giving the name of any group behind the pilot.
A press statement issued by the Consulate said potential targets included diplomatic buildings and businesses in Abuja and Lagos.
"The US Mission in Nigeria has received information that US and other Western interests in Nigeria are currently at risk for terrorist attacks," the embassy said in a consular statement sent via e-mail to US citizens in Nigeria.
"Potential targets include official and commercial installations in Abuja and Lagos," it said, without elaborating.
An embassy official who spoke to THISDAY last night said he was yet to be briefed on the development.
Following the statement, expatriates were urged to take security steps, including varying routes to and from work and avoiding bottlenecks.Lagos is known for its long traffic jams while traffic is light in Abuja.
The embassy told US citizens to be vigilant and be aware of their surroundings at all times, saying "analysis has shown that individuals who appear to take basic personal security measures are often passed over by terrorist groups as a potential target."
But a US official has played down the embassy warning saying the advisory was based on "very non-specific threat information."
"I'd steer you away from the idea that this was some major terror plot and I'd kind of point you more in the direction of things associated with Nigerian local kinds of actions," said the US State Department official, who asked not to be identified.
"No one should think that this means that Osama bin Laden is planning a major attack in Nigeria," the official said from Washington.
"That's not the level of what we are talking about. Local organisations, as far as I understand it, is the nature of the threat," he added.
"This was described to me as one of these things where they had some very non-specific threat information."
The cautionary statement followed the arrest September 4 of three men in Germany suspected of planning massive attacks on targets in Germany used by US citizens.
Al-Qaeda has previously indicated its interested in Nigeria. In 2003, its leader, Osama bin Laden, included Nigeria in a list of six countries he said he wanted to see liberated from enslavement by Washington.
A February 2005 United Nations report said Al-Qaeda established "recruiting and training bases in Northern Nigeria, where majority of Muslims live."
Some critics say the warning may not be unrelated to the attempt by US to justify its new idea of an African Command and that with September 11 fast approaching, there is great need for the country to warn its citizens to be more cautious.
But according to Rudy Stewart, a spokesman at the US embassy in Abuja, the statement was issued as a "prudent'" measure.
Nigeria is the largest US trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa, largely because of oil imports. The country accounts for 11 percent of US crude imports and is the fifth biggest source for US oil imports.
Al-Qaeda previously attacked US interests in Africa when it bombed the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on August 7, 1998.
Foreign Affairs Minister, Chief Ojo Maduekwe, did not respond to THISDAY's calls to seek his comment on the development.
But a top government official said the Federal Government was ready at all times to contain any external aggression.
Analysts believe while Nigerian Muslims like Kenyan and Tanzanian Muslims are generally peaceful, the conditions exist in parts of Nigeria for foreign Jihadists to use the legendary hospitality of their hosts to plan terrorist attacks.
The US military has created a new African Command, known as Africom, stationed in the Gulf of Guinea, due to begin operations next month to safeguard the region's oil interests against rebel or terrorist attacks.
Africom will not have any permanent units or bases.
Analysts say that a tragic terrorist attack on US installations in Lagos will not affect oil production in the Niger Delta but will raise the overall risk profile of the country and tear apart the political coalition of the new President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua.
Prior to the warning, a former US ambassador to Nigeria, Dr. Princeton Lyman, had said that after the dreaded Middle East terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, was chased out of Afghanistan, it has shifted base to Nigeria where its influence is growing by the day.
Lyman quoted a United Nations investigation which he said uncovered Al-Qaeda's surreptitious training and building bases in Nigeria in support of his conclusion that the country is a natural target for terrorists seeking to expand their operations.
Copyright © 2007 This Day. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709070009.html
AlterNet:
Hooked on War: Thomas Friedman's Deadly Addiction
By Norman Solomon, CounterPunch
Posted on September 7, 2007
Reading his "Letter From Baghdad" column in the New York Times this week, you'd never know that Thomas Friedman has a history of enthusiasm for war. Now he laments that Iraq is bad for the United States - "everyone loves seeing us tied down here" - stuck in the "madness that is Iraq." And he concludes that the good Americans who have been sent to Iraq will not be deserved by Iraqis "if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids."
The column, under a Baghdad dateline, is boilerplate Friedman: sprinkled with I-am-here anecdotes and breezy geopolitical nostrums. For years now, the man widely touted as America's most influential journalist has indicated that his patience with the war in Iraq might soon run out. But, like the media establishment he embodies, Friedman can't bring himself to renounce a war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue.
On the last day of November 2003 - eight months after the invasion - Friedman gushed that "this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan." He lauded the Iraq war as "one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad."
But the assumptions built into a Friedman column are murky outside the context of his worldview. "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist," Friedman wrote approvingly in one of his explaining-the-world bestsellers. "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
Those words appeared in Friedman's book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, but the passage first surfaced (with a few tweaks of syntax) in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, 1999, near the end of a long piece adapted from the book. Filling almost the entire cover of the magazine was a red-white-and-blue fist, with the caption "What The World Needs Now" and a smaller-type explanation: "For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is."
The clenched graphic could be seen as the "hidden fist" that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without." While the cover story's patriotic fist was intended as a symbol of the globe's need for multifaceted American power, the military facet had been unleashed just as the magazine went to press. By the time the star-spangled cover reached Sunday breakfast tables, NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia were underway; the U.S.-led bombing campaign would last for 78 straight days.
Writing columns and appearing on broadcast networks to assess the war, Tom Friedman was close to gleeful. (The man was widely viewed as a liberal, whatever that meant, and "the liberal media" provided Friedman with many platforms that often seemed to double as pedestals.) Interviewers at ABC, PBS and NPR ranged from deferential to fawning as they solicited his wisdom on the latest from Yugoslavia.
Even when he lamented the political constraints on the military options of the 19-member NATO alliance, Friedman was upbeat. "While there are many obvious downsides to war-from-15,000-feet," he wrote after bombs had been falling for more than four weeks, "it does have one great strength - its sustainability. NATO can carry on this sort of air war for a long, long time. The Serbs need to remember that."
So, Friedman explained, "if NATO's only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let's at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are 'cleansing' Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted."
He added: "Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too...."
The convenience marbled through such punditry is so routine that eyebrows rarely go up. The chirpy line "Let's at least have a real air war," for instance, addressed American readers for whom, with rare exceptions, the "real air war" would be no more real than a media spectacle, with all the consequences falling on others very far away. As for rock concerts and merry-go-rounds, we could recall - if memory were to venture into unauthorized zones - that any number of such amusements went full throttle in the United States during the Vietnam War, and also for that matter during all subsequent U.S. wars including the one that Friedman was currently engaged in cheering on.
If the idea of civilians trying to continue with normal daily life while their government committed lethal crimes was "outrageous" enough to justify inflicting "a merciless air war" - as Friedman urged later in the same column - would someone have been justified in bombing the United States during its slaughter of countless innocents in Southeast Asia? Or during its active support for dictators and death squads in Latin America? For that matter, Friedman could hardly be unaware that for several weeks already American firepower had been maiming and killing Serb civilians, children included, with weaponry including cluster bombs. Today, Iraqi civilians keep dying from the U.S. war effort and other violence catalyzed by the occupation; meanwhile, of course, not a single concert or merry-go-round has stopped in the USA.
When righteousness moved Friedman to call for "lights out in Belgrade," he was urging a war crime. The urban power grids and water pipes he yearned to see destroyed were essential to infants, the elderly, the frail and infirm inside places like hospitals and nursing homes. Targeting such grids and pipes would seem like barbarism to Americans if the missiles were incoming. Any ambiguity of the matter would probably be dispelled by a vow to keep bombing the country until it was set back 50 years or, if necessary, six centuries. But Friedman's enthusiasm was similar to that of many other prominent American commentators who also greeted the bombing of Yugoslavia with something close to exhilaration.
The final paragraph of Thomas Friedman's column in the New York Times on April 23, 1999, began with a punchy sentence: "Give war a chance." It was a witticism that seemed to delight Friedman. He repeated it, in print and on national television, as the bombing of Yugoslavia continued. A tone of sadism could be discerned.
This article is adapted from Norman Solomon's new book Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State, which just came off the press. For more information, visit: MadeLoveGotWar.com
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/61853/
Asia Times:
In gold we trust
By Chan Akya
Sep 8, 2007
United States currency notes carry the motto "In God We Trust". Well, not anymore, we don't. Put a letter "l" into the second word and you just may have a winner.
With the global financial system basically dysfunctional, the issue for hard-working Asians is where to put their money. I would suggest looking at physical commodities such as gold and oil, if only the prices hadn't already jumped. The price of gold surged above US$700 an ounce on Thursday to its highest level since May 2006.
How the system works
In a previous article, [1] I explained how banks typically function as intermediaries for risk and liquidity across the system. Over the past few weeks, though, banks have come up against a wall of their own making, namely the failure to trust one another in terms of overnight lending.
Typically, central banks set a target rate, which is observed by banks lending to one another in the overnight window to balance total cash in the system. In proportion to their deposits, banks must hold reserves with the central bank, on which a specific deposit rate - usually 100 basis points below the target borrowing rate - is paid. When a bank runs short of such a cash amount, it has to borrow from another bank to maintain the level of reserve; such borrowing is priced at the target rate. Failure to source enough borrowing from another bank would push the cash-short bank to borrow from the central bank itself, at a penal rate that is usually set 100 basis points above the target rate. This is called the discount-window rate.
The interbank market is a different kettle of fish, as this is where banks borrow from one another for all other purposes, including funding their overseas assets (for example, European banks buying US-dollar-denominated assets will need to borrow US dollars from one another). Rates at which banks will borrow from one another determine the London Inter Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR), which is set daily in London based on a poll of 16 prime banks. The theory is that borrowing rates should not exceed the penal rate mentioned above (ie, target plus 100 basis points usually) because then banks could simply approach the central bank for funds.
In the staid world of banking, though, this borrowing from a central bank therefore carries a stigma, ie, that the bank is not trusted by other banks and therefore needs to approach the central bank for money. Hence many banks would rather pay over the penal rate in the interbank market than risk their reputation by approaching the central bank.
Of course, it is not just banks that individual depositors can go to. In many cases, they go to money-market funds, which offer higher deposit rates than banks do, and typically provide a form of principal protection in excess of the cap that is in place for deposit insurance in many countries. This normally attracts wealthy people and companies with excess funds on their balance sheets for any operational reason. Such money-market funds typically buy commercial paper.
Commercial paper (CP) is a slight variation on the theme of interbank borrowing. The idea is to expand the pool of potential borrowers in the market, and this is achieved by issuing short-term notes that are typically of high quality. With a CP program in place, borrowers can access the funding market that will tap both banks and money-market funds. Asset backed commercial paper (ABCP) refers to CP programs where some form of collateral, usually of very high quality, is used to underpin the quality of the program and thereby provide increased safety for anyone buying notes issued by the entity. Typically, ABCPs are used by financial entities to arbitrage between short-term borrowing rates and longer-term yields available on such securities.
Now that we are this far into the alphabet soup, I might as well add structured investment vehicles (SIVs) to the mix. These are specialized financial entities that invest in higher-risk (but still highly rated) assets, such as derivatives issued on financial assets such as mortgages and credit-card debt outstanding. These securities have a lot of mind-numbing abbreviations such as RMBS, CMBS, ABS and CDOs, but in effect, all point to the same thing: a financial derivative on relatively illiquid underlying assets.
How it broke down
In the past few weeks, as European banks started disclosing the level of their potential losses from buying US subprime assets, two things broke down. First, the various money-market funds started facing redemptions once it turned out they too had exposure to derivatives written on US subprime assets. They then had to stop purchasing ABCP and CP in the market, putting the onus on banks to carry the entire burden.
Banks, of course, were the main sponsors of SIVs, although some of the largest ones facing the biggest issues now are actually run by non-bank financial entities such as brokers and hedge funds. In any event, once the SIVs could no longer fund themselves in the CP market, their game was up - their assets were illiquid because of the current level of losses in the underlying securities (borrowers defaulting on their obligations much more frequently than was initially assumed, which helps to drive the price of derivatives down a whole lot faster).
This meant that many bank-sponsored SIVs had to be absorbed by their sponsors, which in turn caused the banks to record both investment losses and stretch their capital. Under the rules of global banking, having assets ranging from loans to derivatives attracts various degrees of capital requirement to ensure that banks have enough of their own equity at stake in investments rather than only risking the money from depositors or other banks that help to fund their own book. When risky assets are purchased wholesale, no one knows for sure how valuable these assets are and therefore how much loss the banks have to take.
In this environment, banks stopped trusting one another. LIBOR has jumped well past the circuit-breakers such as penal overnight borrowing that exist, because of this lack of trust. Even as the US Federal Reserve cut its discount rate to just 50 basis points over the target rate, banks found it difficult to convince one another of their stability and solvency.
That lack of confidence among banks has put paid to any central-bank efforts to hike rates, as required by looking at rising global economic growth and inflationary pressures. Instead, the Federal Reserve has signaled a willingness to cut rates this month, and the European Central Bank, which pre-announced a hike for September just last month, had to backtrack hastily this week and keep rates on hold. Even all of that flip-flopping has not helped in the interbank market, because LIBOR remains stubbornly high.
What to do
When trust breaks down across banks, investors have no option but to walk away from financial assets. This has already happened, as gold prices surged above $700 an ounce, and oil prices hit a new high for the year (US$77 a barrel). The preference for commodities is bothersome for central banks, as high input prices make the task of cutting interest rates (as demanded by banks) less defensible.
More important, central banks in the US and Europe have lost credibility with investors. They are no longer trying to prevent inflation, but appear more concerned with preserving the lot of bankers. This suggests greater value destruction for global investors, particularly for Asians investing in financial assets in Europe and North America.
Neither the US dollar nor the euro has any credibility in this situation, which means that the average Asian saver has no option but to purchase gold as a store of value. Even as US dollar bills proudly carry the motto "In God We Trust", I think it's time for Asians to put their trust in gold instead.
Note
1. Asia and the vicious cycle of bank bailouts, Asia Times Online, August 11, 2007.
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/II08Dj02.html
Clarín: En un nuevo incidente aéreo,
Gran Bretaña interceptó aviones de guerra de Rusia
La Royal Air Force localizó ocho jets rusos cuando se acercaban al espacio aéreo británico. Moscú respondió que los vuelos sólo atravesaron aguas neutrales. El episodio se suma a otros casos que desataron roces diplomáticos entre ambos países, entre ellos el escándalo por la investigación del asesinato en Londres de un ex agente de la KGB.
Clarín.com
06.09.2007
La Fuerza Aérea de Gran Bretaña volvió a interceptar ocho aviones de guerra rusos que se aproximaron al espacio aéreo británico, informó hoy el Ministerio de Defensa en Londres.
Cuatro Tornados F3 de la Royal Air Force (RAF) salieron del condado de Yorkshire y Lincolnshire, en el norte de Inglaterra, en las primeras horas de la mañana. Los jets rusos Tupolev Tu-95 "Bear" interceptados dieron la vuelta. El portavoz de la Fuerza Aérea rusa, Alexander Drobyshevski, respondió que su país se atuvo al derecho internacional.
"Los vuelos sólo atravesaron aguas neutrales y no hubo acercamiento alguno a la frontera aérea de ningún gobierno extranjero", dijo el coronel según la agencia Interfax.
Gran Bretaña y Rusia siguen enfrentados desde hace meses por el caso del ex espía ruso Alexander Litvinenko, asesinado por envenenamiento el pasado 23 de noviembre en Londres. La tensión diplomática entre ambos países escaló recientemente tras la expulsión cruzada de funcionarios diplomáticos de la embajada rusa en Londres y británica en Moscú.
Durante el verano tuvieron lugar varios incidentes de este tipo. En los últimos meses se ha acusado a Rusia de estar reviviendo métodos de la guerra fría y de estar reforzando su poder militar, en particular después de que el presidente Vladimir Putin anunciara la reanudación permanente de vuelos de patrullaje de largo recorrido por primera vez desde la caída de la Unión Soviética.
Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2007/09/06/um/m-01493713.htm
Guardian: A police state?
Crying wolf won't protect civil liberties
If the left rejects every challenge to individual freedom, it will miss its chance to regain the influence lost under Blair
Conor Gearty
Friday September 7, 2007
The argument for compulsory DNA testing of the entire population and all visitors to the UK, so eloquently put by Lord Justice Stephen Sedley, has provoked another bout of anxious navel gazing by civil libertarians. Sedley is no reactionary but rather one of Britain's most progressive judges, a man with an impeccable record of legal activism. If even this kind of person is now joining the Reids, Howards and the rest on the authoritarian side, does this mean Britain's much-battered freedom has at last lurched into terminal decline? Is the police state that so many have warned about for so long finally on its way?
Fortunately the position is rather more complicated than this. Just as the right is given to moral panics (teddy boys, hippies, hoodies) so the left regularly succumbs to freedom frenzies. Earlier this summer it was concern about police use of CCTV material. In days gone by it was extending police powers of search. Long before that it was the prosecution of journalists and civil servants under the Official Secrets Act. Each generation of committed civil libertarians has been convinced it is sure to be the last. Every home secretary is always the worst ever - until the next one comes along. No wonder the community as a whole treats civil libertarians much as the villagers did the boy assigned to look after sheep in Aesop's fable. But what words do we have left if the wolf does finally and truly arrive? A fresh, more cautious approach is called for.
We can start by being more careful about language. The term civil liberties is confusing in that it includes both a commitment to the liberty of the individual and to political freedom, but these are not the same. The first is a liberal idea, rooted in that old English notion of the individual being above and beyond the state and with a natural right not to be interfered with by it. Supporters of this idea are the people who break CCTV cameras and are affronted by being asked to stop smoking in public places. This kind of libertarianism is often quite reactionary and in its absolute form it is always being overridden - and rightly overridden - by government in the name of the public good.
This perspective is better viewed as a presumption in favour of freedom, a reminder to us all that we need to be clear that there is, to use the language of human rights, a pressing social need for our interventions and that the exact extent of the damage we do to personal freedom has to be warranted by the goal we are seeking to achieve. Advances in technology are always throwing up fresh opportunities for public good via new invasions of this kind of liberty. Sedley's proposals fit within this tradition: they deserve to be debated and not dismissed out of hand as heretical.
Political freedom is different and should be much less easily susceptible to democratic override. The deployment of terrorism and public order law to control, sometimes to curb completely, political speech and public demonstrations is a serious matter. It is clear that, from this civil libertarian perspective, there are aspects of the Blair-Brown legislative record on these matters that give rise to legitimate concern.
But critics need also to acknowledge the broader context. We are getting a lot of controlling legislation, it is true, but this does not mean past generations were much freer: in earlier days the local militia just shot you. Whatever might be said about this or that individual clause, much of today's legislation - some of it mandated by human rights law, paradoxically - represents civil libertarian progress, a move out of, rather than into, a police state.
Past generations of civil libertarians had battles on their hands that were far worse than those we confront today: the 1930s and the 1980s were particularly severe, with police powers being deployed in a draconian fashion against hunger marches and striking miners, as a coherent part of what unreconstructed Marxists would call a straightforward class war. Old Labour was very much alive to the impact of such police aggression on civil liberties: the coalition between the worker and the intellectual was a source of great civil libertarian solidarity in days gone by, but this is much less the case today - Labour has lost the cohesiveness on issues of freedom and liberty that used to be such a feature of the party.
This is not to say that the state of freedom in Britain today does not give cause for concern. A recent survey of British attitudes, conducted by the National Centre for Social Research and the LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights, found two disturbing trends in public opinion. First there has been a marked decline in support for civil liberties since the mid-1990s - the exact moment when the then opposition Labour party decided to drop its long-standing commitment to their protection. Second, even the support that remains drops still further when the public are invited to take into account the need to act to prevent terrorist attacks.
The reduction of the civil libertarian-minded, intellectual wing of the Labour party to an eccentric rump, to be mocked rather than admired, is one of the most damaging pieces of work that the successive administrations of Tony Blair have done in this area. That effort at marginalisation would not have been as successful as it was had there not been a broader uncertainty on the left about how to react to religious extremism and political violence in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. It is as though the party lost its civil libertarian nerve some time during the early and middle Blair years and has since found it very hard to recover its sense of principle.
Though it is early days, the atmosphere under the new regime is already markedly different - and it has come through some severe tests, such as the Glasgow and London attacks, without having jettisoned its principles. In Britain, government leaders have a special responsibility to set the right tone. There is a reasonable chance that the liberal intelligentsia can regain its place in the foreground of politics. If civil libertarians do not choose to see this, and go on treating every proposal as though it were an already enacted law and evidence of a police state, then the risk is that the new team will give up trying to engage in a serious discussion and revert to the bad habits of the past.
· Conor Gearty is professor of human rights law and director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics; his latest book, Civil Liberties, will be published next week.
c.a.gearty@lse.ac.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2164199,00.html
il manifesto:
Imparate da Bologna
Bifo
06 Settembre 2007
All'inizio venne Cofferati. Nell'autunno del 2005 il sindaco di Bologna lanciò una campagna contro i lavavetri. Secondo lui c'era un racket e bisognava colpirlo. I carabinieri si misero alla ricerca del racket, e dopo qualche tempo dovettero smentire la tesi del sindaco. Non c'è nessun racket, sono solo poveracci che chiedono danaro in cambio di un lavoro utile: lavano vetri e se vuoi puoi dargli mezzo euro. Ma la gente si incazza. L'automobilista che alle sette di mattina, incolonnato in una fila eterna respira gas di scarico è triste, rabbioso, aggressivo. E come non capirlo? Va al lavoro. I prezzi salgono. I salari scendono. E quando sei incazzato hai bisogno di prendertela con qualcuno, possibilmente più debole e più povero. Il lavavetri è perfetto.
In Italia sta nascendo un nuovo partito. Anche se si chiama democratico quel partito ha deciso di presentarsi sulla scena con una campagna che non si può qualificare altrimenti che razzista. Per conquistare il consenso della gente troviamo qualcuno che sia più miserabile di tutti e scarichiamogli addosso la miseria di tutti quanti. Ha funzionato, può funzionare ancora.
Chi sono i lavavetri? Scocciatori, risponde il benpensante irritabile che è in ciascuno di noi. Arresteremo tutti gli scocciatori? Quella di lavavetri è una definizione di tipo razziale.
Perché perseguitare un poveraccio che fa il gesto di lavarti i vetri della macchina? Invece di chiedere l'elemosina propone uno scambio normale. E' il libero mercato, no? Ma ai lavavetri è precluso.
A Bologna adesso si parla di mandare in galera coloro che scrivono sui muri: non piacciono al sindaco della città.. Keith Haring e Basquiat, Rammelzee e Chamberlain e Dash sono considerati grandi artisti e le loro opere adesso si vendono nei musei, ma prima hanno sporcato con i loro segni i muri delle strade di tutte le città americane. E le paperette di Pea Brain, e le facce digrignanti di Cane k8, non sono forse l'arte più interessante che si sia vista a Bologna negli anni '80? Ma per Cofferati gli artisti sono da mettere in carcere. Forse Cofferati odia i graffitisti perché ce n'è uno che scrive sui muri: Cofferati mi fa pena, e un altro che scrive Bologna non merita un sindaco fascista.
Il suo amico Dominici sindaco di Firenze dice che ha riletto Lenin prima di lanciare il suo pogrom. Bravo. Che gli dobbiamo fare a questi lumen proletariat, caro compagno Vladimir Ilic? Noi che siamo il partito della classe operaia mica possiamo tollerare questi straccioni. Già che c'è il bolscevico Dominici dovrebbe dirla tutta. Il compagno Vladimir nel 1918 non esitava a invitare allo sterminio, quando si trattava di raddrizzare le gambe ai lunpen e ai kulaki. E la Kolyma, compagno Domenici, la tua Kolyma la metti a Scandicci?
Dicono che questo è il solo modo per ottenere un po' di consenso. Incitare al pogrom contro i poveracci è un modo per avere quel consenso che il centrosinistra non sa ottenere altrimenti.
Però io ci penserei due volte. Ad esempio, il primo di questi democratici amanti dell'ordine, il sindaco di Bologna di cui dicevo poc'anzi, nel primo anno del suo mandato aveva un consenso così maggioritario che qualcuno diceva pare bulgaro. Dopo tre anni di stress ininterrotto ha talmente scassato le scatole che Renato Mannheimer ha fatto un sondaggio nel mese di giugno. Il consenso è sceso al 39%: Cofferati ha perso. La sinistra ha perso Bologna. La perderà, alle prossime elezioni, accetto scommesse, e non la riconquisterà mai più.
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/06-Settembre-2007/art1.html
il manifesto:
«Sono provvedimenti inutili e dannosi»
Pisapia, presidente della commissione incaricata da Mastella di riscrivere il codice penale
Carlo Lania
06 Settembre 2007
«Per fortuna non è stato deciso niente e c'è ancora la speranza che la ragionevolezza prevalga. Certo è che se i provvedimenti di cui si parla fossero veri, ci troveremmo di fronte all'incapacità di affrontare problemi reali con risposte adeguate e efficaci. Ancora una volta si pensa di risolvere tutto solo con nuovi reati e più carcere. Un errore sociale e politico, ma anche giuridico». Non piacciono a Giuliano Pisapia i nuovi provvedimenti con cui il governo, in nome di una battaglia contro illegalità diffusa e criminalità organizzata, finisce col mettere nel mirino lavavetri e mendicanti. E il suo è il giudizio di un addetto ai lavori. Avvocato, ex presidente della Commissione Giustizia della Camera, è stato nominato dal ministro Mastella presidente della commissione incaricata di riscrivere il codice penale. «Le proposte che ho sentito sono del tutto in contrasto con il programma dell'Unione, quindi la maggioranza non potrà approvarle a meno che non voglia ancora una volta tradire gli impegni elettorali e lo spirito della coalizione».
In tema di giustizia le priorità dell'Unione erano infatti ben altre.
C'era la stesura di un nuovo codice penale che prevedesse il carcere solo per i reati più gravi, riservando invece sanzioni diverse dalla reclusione per tutta una serie di reati di non particolare gravità. Ma c'era anche un altro punto, fondamentale perché collegato con l'attualità, che prevedeva espressamente l'esclusione di sanzioni penali per violazioni di disposizioni amministrative.
Come è il caso dei lavavetri e dell'ordinanza di Firenze.
Esatto. La gravità delle ordinanze di Firenze e di altre analoghe è che riportano a una logica di punizione collettiva, mentre la responsabilità penale deve essere individuale e personale. Quell'ordinanza inoltre non distingue tra due casi totalmente opposti: c'è una differenza sostanziale tra chi si offre di pulire un vetro e riceve in cambio dei soldi dati volontariamente e chi invece pretende, anche con le minacce e la violenza, somme di denaro in cambio di una prestazione peraltro non voluta.
Non ci sono però solo i lavavetri. Si parla anche di una possibile custodia cautelare obbligatoria per una serie di reati come il furto e la rapina.
Non ci posso credere, se così fosse sarebbe estremamente preoccupante, sarebbe il retaggio di un passato che si sperava superato in quanto, e lo dice anche la Costituzione, la carcerazione preventiva è si ammissibile ma non può essere obbligatoria, ed è ammissibile solo in presenza di determinati presupposti che non possono essere esclusivamente la gravità del reato. Tant'è vero che oggi non è prevista neanche per i reati di mafia. L'obbligo della custodia cautelare contrasta con la decisione presa ormai vent'anni fa di superare il codice fascista.
Però il ministro Mastella sembra puntare molto su questo punto. E tra l'altro si appella alla categoria del diffuso allarme sociale, categoria che non rischia di essere pericolosa?
Il diffuso allarme sociale può essere un elemento di valutazione, ma ogni decisione legislativa deve essere presa sulla base di situazioni di fatto e non di sensazioni che possono non corrispondente alla realtà. Ma se posso vorrei fare una polemica.
Prego
Quello che colpisce di più è che si propongono nuovi pacchetti, inutili e controproducenti, mentre da almeno cinque mesi è fermo in parlamento un disegno di legge che anticipa alcune proposte elaborate dalle commissioni per la riforma del codice penale e di procedura penale e finalizzato anche ad accelerare i tempi del processo, ma non a scapito delle garanzie. Non si esamina quel ddl approvato all'unanimità dal consiglio dei ministri, però si va avanti in senso diametralmente opposto.
Eppure esiste una richiesta di maggiore sicurezza da parte dei cittadini. Come si risponde?
Chiunque non si rende conto di questa richiesta ha gli occhi un po' appannati. Quello alla sicurezza è un diritto che deve essere garantito dalla Stato. Detto questo il problema è la risposta da dare. Ecco quello che diversifica la destra dalla sinistra: non il dovere di dare ai cittadini la sicurezza che chiedono, ma gli strumenti scelti. Non si può pensare di usare lo stesso strumento, cioè il carcere, per fatti completamente diversi.
E quale sarebbe una risposta di sinistra?
Vi sono ad esempio sanzioni diverse dal carcere, anche non penali, molto più efficaci ma non esclusivamente repressive. Sanzioni che però devono essere accompagnate anche da interventi di carattere sociale che impediscono alla marginalità diffusa di diventare preda della criminalità organizzata.
Se le proposte del governo dovessero passare, incideranno in qualche modo nella riscrittura del codice?
No. Se venissero approvate sarebbe addirittura inutile proseguire in una riforma del nostro sistema penale che va in senso completamente opposto.
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/06-Settembre-2007/art16.html
Internazionale:
Sperare per forza
Il compito degli scrittori è farci guardare nell'abisso dell'orrore. Ma anche offrire una via di fuga da una noia insopportabile
Nick Hornby
Internazionale 709, 6 settembre 2007
***
I libri del mese
Comprati
• Skellig, David Almond
• Clay, David Almond
• Il giardino di mezzanotte, Philippa Pearce
• Queuing for beginners, Joe Moran
• La strada, Cormac McCarthy
• Salvo complicazioni, Atul Gawande
• Come un romanzo, Daniel Pennac
Letti
• Skellig, David Almond
• Clay, David Almond
• La strada, Cormac McCarthy
• The Brambles, Eliza Minot
• Queuing for beginners, Joe Moran
• American born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang
***
Avevo in mente un attacco davvero intelligente per la mia rubrica di questo mese, un incipit che avrebbe provocato, ispirato e forse anche divertito i due o tre di voi più di buon umore. Leggendo il romanzo di Eliza Minot avevo elaborato alcune osservazioni sulle gioie dell'imitazione realistica.
Leggendo quelli di David Almond volevo dirvi di lasciar perdere la letteratura per i grandi e di passare ai libri per bambini e ragazzi. Poi ho letto Cormac McCarthy e mi è sembrato tutto inadeguato, un po' come cercare di raccontare i fatti miei ai newyorchesi l'11 settembre 2001.
La strada può tranquillamente essere considerato il libro più disperato che sia mai stato scritto. Come probabilmente saprete, parla della fine del mondo. Due sopravvissuti all'apocalisse, un uomo e suo figlio, vagano attraverso la più grigia devastazione alla ricerca di cibo.
Per gran parte del libro l'uomo si chiede se sparare al figlio e risparmiargli così ulteriori sofferenze. A volte trovano inattese riserve di cibo e di acqua, altre crani umani o i resti di un neonato su un barbecue. Ci sono momenti in cui supplichereste l'uomo di sparare a voi invece che al ragazzino. Siete voi che state soffrendo sul serio.
Leggere La strada è come trovarsi al funerale di una persona morta giovane a cui volevate bene. Da una parte siete felici perché la cerimonia è commovente e sapete che la ricorderete per tutta la vita, dall'altra essere lì è l'ultima cosa al mondo che avreste voluto.
A cosa si pensa leggendo un romanzo così doloroso? Mia moglie, che l'ha letto prima di me, ha giurato a se stessa di diventare più pratica in vista della fine del mondo: la sua scarsa immaginazione culinaria davanti a qualche interiora di animale avvizzite e a un paio di vecchi pezzi di motore l'ha lasciata con la sensazione che, se le cose dovessero volgere al peggio, si rivelerebbe probabilmente una madre inadeguata.
A me invece sono venuti in mente quegli articoli sulla morte del romanzo che ogni tanto spuntano fuori: non troverete da nessuna parte un saggio così inquietante e provocatorio.
Per la maggior parte del tempo, comunque, si prova una terribile empatia, forse soprattutto se si hanno dei figli. E alla fine ci si rende conto che l'unica cosa che possiamo fare è portarcela dietro per giorni. "Il romanzo è anche un monito", dice una delle recensioni citate sulla quarta di copertina della mia edizione tascabile.
Be', dopo averlo letto starò attento a non premere il bottone dell'olocausto globale. E se mai dovessi incontrare qualcuno deciso a farlo, farò del mio meglio per parlare con lui (sarà sicuramente un maschio) e convincerlo a cambiare idea.
È importante ricordare che La strada è il prodotto dell'immaginazione di un uomo: il mondo letterario spesso tende a credere che la visione del mondo meno consolatoria possibile sia la Verità. Quante volte avete letto l'aggettivo "deciso" usato per descrivere un romanzo in senso positivo? Cosa c'è di male a essere un po' indecisi ogni tanto?
McCarthy è fedele alla sua visione, ed è questo che dà al romanzo la sua formidabile forza. Ma forse, quando arriverà il giorno del giudizio, ci sorprenderemo a dividerci i panini e a cantare Bridge over troubled water, invece di mangiare il cervello dei nostri figli col cucchiaino.
Certo, è compito degli artisti costringerci a guardare nell'abisso dell'orrore. Ma è compito loro anche offrire calore, speranza e forse una via di fuga da una vita che a volte può sembrarci insopportabilmente noiosa. Non vorrei dover scegliere tra una cosa e l'altra: mi sembrano entrambe importanti.
Ed è più che legittimo non aver voglia di leggere La strada. Alcune scene del libro sono rimaste annidate nella mia memoria anche se non volevo. Non permettete a nessuno di dirvi che dovete leggerlo.
Ed ecco finalmente il mio attacco sull'arte dell'imitazione. Non sono bravo a fare le imitazioni. Ne faccio solo una in modo passabile: Mick Jagger. Ma solo come appare in quell'episodio dei Simpson in cui Homer va al parco tematico del rock and roll. Non è gran che, lo ammetto, ma è mia e quando la faccio i miei figli ridono.
Probabilmente è solo perché somiglia molto all'originale e non perché sia particolarmente divertente (non faccio mai cose divertenti). Uno dei lati più piacevoli di The Brambles di Eliza Minot è l'invidiabile abilità con cui l'autrice riesce a rendere i dettagli della vita familiare, al punto che, be'… se alla fine non vi viene da ridere è solo perché The Brambles parla di come tre fratelli adulti affrontano la morte del padre. Eppure c'è qualcosa nella felice scorrevolezza del libro che genera una specie di euforia infantile: "Come fai? Fallo di nuovo!".
C'è un dialogo, in particolare, in cui una mamma tenta di spiegare il mistero della morte ai suoi bambini. Minot descrive il casino in cui ci si ficca in queste situazioni in un modo così affettuoso e autentico che si finisce per detestare il mucchio di robaccia finta e pretenziosa che consumiamo nella nostra vita di lettori.
The Brambles, però, non è perfetto: c'è una svolta nella trama che sovraccarica la narrazione senza aggiungere molto alla storia. Ma è chiaro che Eliza Minot è pronta per creare qualcosa di davvero speciale.
È stato un mese di letture davvero significative, ora che ci penso. Ho letto un classico moderno che mi ha tolto qualsiasi voglia di vivere, ho scoperto un paio di giovani scrittori e poi mi sono imbattuto in un genere che conosco molto poco ma che potrebbe essere determinante per il mio futuro di lettore e di scrittore.
Ho concluso da poco il mio primo romanzo per ragazzi (o forse solo su di loro) e il mio editore americano mi ha chiesto di andare a Washington a fare una presentazione.
Uno degli scrittori che partecipavano all'incontro insieme a me era un certo David Almond, che non avevo mai letto. Un paio di giorni prima il suo romanzo Skellig era stato votato come il terzo libro per ragazzi più importante degli ultimi settant'anni (il primo è Luci del Nord di Philip Pullman, il secondo Il giardino di mezzanotte di Philippa Pearce).
Ho letto Skellig in aereo e, a prescindere dalle classifiche, posso dirvi che è uno dei più bei romanzi pubblicati negli ultimi dieci anni. E non ne avevo mai sentito parlare. Voi sì?
Skellig è la storia, meravigliosamente semplice ma anche terribilmente complicata, di un ragazzo, Michael, che trova un angelo malato nel suo garage. Una creatura puzzolente e brontolona che va pazza per il takeaway cinese e la birra scura. Nel frattempo la sorellina di Michael giace in condizioni disperate in ospedale, sospesa tra la vita e la morte.
E più o meno la storia finisce qui: Skellig non è un libro lungo e l'unico inconveniente di leggerlo da grandi è che finisce subito: un dodicenne riuscirebbe a farlo durare, rimanendo un po' di più nel mondo esaltato e triste creato da Almond. Skellig è un libro per ragazzi perché è facile da leggere e perché i protagonisti sono dei bambini.
Ma credetemi, è un libro per tutti e l'autore lo sa bene. In un punto del racconto, Mina, un'amichetta di Michael che invece di andare a scuola studia a casa, prende un libro di Michael e lo sfoglia.
"Sì, sembra bello", disse. "Ma che significa l'adesivo rosso?".
"È per lettori esperti", risposi. "Indica l'età giusta per leggerlo".
"E se altri lettori volessero leggerlo? E William Blake dove lo metterebbero? ‘Tigre! Tigre! Fiamma accesa/ nelle foreste della notte'. È per i lettori migliori o per i peggiori? A che età lo dovresti leggere? E se fosse per i lettori peggiori, i lettori migliori dovrebbero evitarlo perché è troppo stupido per loro?".
Le osservazioni di Mina riassumono quello che ho cercato di dire in questa rubrica fin dall'inizio.
Per la prima volta negli ultimi tre o quattro anni ho letto due libri di fila di uno stesso autore e, anche se Clay non è elegante come Skellig, è comunque straordinario: un mito precristiano ambientato nel nordest dell'Inghilterra alla fine degli anni sessanta.
All'improvviso mi rendo conto che potrebbero esserci decine di scrittori come David Almond, gente che produce capolavori che io ignoro perché sono più vecchio dei lettori a cui sono destinati.
Nel frattempo però i bei libri continuano ad arrivare. American born Chinese di Gene Luen Yang è una graphic novel intelligente e ben disegnata sull'imbarazzo di avere radici incerte. Sharp teeth di Toby Barlow è un romanzo sui lupi mannari a Los Angeles. È scritto in versi sciolti. Ed è eccezionale. Adesso non ricordo se ho già gridato al lupo in precedenza e ho raccomandato altri romanzi in versi sciolti.
Probabilmente sì. Dimenticateli, perché questo è quello giusto. Ne avevo ricevuto una bozza e avevo augurato all'autore ogni bene. Detto questo, però, confesso che non mi ci vedevo proprio a leggere un intero romanzo sui lupi mannari in versi sciolti.
Poi ho dato un'occhiata alla prima pagina, sono arrivato in fondo, ho girato, ho letto la seconda pagina e… insomma, avete capito. Non vi devo certo spiegare come si arriva alla fine di un romanzo. Ma la mia voglia di continuare a leggerlo fino in fondo mi ha stupito. Pensavo che non fosse una cosa seria: mi aspettavo, che so, una satira sull'industria cinematografica.
Ma il bello di questo libro è che è serissimo. Può essere violento da far rivoltare lo stomaco (i lupi mannari non se ne stanno certo con le mani in mano), ma anche tenero e piacevolmente complicato. C'è un intreccio parallelo che parla di gang rivali e dà al libro un bel tocco noir. I versi sciolti fanno esattamente quello che voleva Barlow: danno intensità al libro, senza essere una distrazione e senza rendere difficile la lettura.
Sharp teeth è ambizioso come qualunque altra opera letteraria, perché sotto tutto quel pelo di lupo si parla di identità, comunità, amore, morte e di tutte quelle cose che vorremmo trovare nei nostri libri.
Non so cosa farà Barlow dopo questo romanzo. Ma è probabile che Sharp teeth si insinuerà profondamente nell'immaginario collettivo dei giovani dark più incasinati.
mi sembra di essere immerso da anni nell'appassionante Queuing for beginners: the story of daily life from breakfast to bedtime di Joe Moran. In realtà è passato solo un mese, ma nel frattempo sono stato sottoposto a una specie di centrifuga mentale e la mia anima si sente cinquecento anni più vecchia.
Dopo McCarthy è difficile ricordare quei giorni spensierati in cui potevo perdermi in aneddoti sui semafori pedonali e in storielle sociali fatte di pendolari e di pause sigaretta (nel 1949 fumava l'89 per cento degli inglesi, ed eravamo ancora una vera potenza mondiale).
Suppongo che potrò recuperare lentamente un po' di speranza se mi metto a leggere P.G. Wodehouse e le biografie sportive. Ho quasi finito il libro di Joe Moran e mi piacerebbe leggere l'ultimo capitolo sulla buonanotte. Ma che senso ha, alla fine? Non ci saranno letti né trapunte in futuro e, se ci saranno, serviranno a coprire i resti in putrefazione delle nostre famiglie. Che fanno di bello in tv?
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Internazionale:
L'Iraq non è il Vietnam
Oggi bisogna essere idioti per mostrarsi nostalgici della guerra americana in Indocina
Christopher Hitchens
Internazionale 709, 6 settembre 2007
Le ragioni per cui detesto il presidente George W. Bush sono varie. E molte hanno a che vedere con la sua beata idea che la "fede" sia, in sé, una virtù. Questa mentalità compiaciuta spiega quasi tutto, dall'espressione tronfia del suo volto al modo in cui, quando era governatore del Texas, firmò tutte quelle condanne a morte senza batter ciglio.
Spiega come mai ha abbracciato l'ex sgherro del Kgb Vladimir Putin, citando come base del loro bel rapporto il fatto che Putin portasse un crocifisso. Bush è convinto che non esistano prove dell'evoluzione delle specie, che la ricerca sulle cellule staminali sia qualcosa di sacrilego e che l'islam sia "una religione di pace".
Comunque sia, ho sempre concordato con lui su una questione laica: il regime di Saddam Hussein andava rovesciato da tempo. So che alcuni critici dell'intervento in Iraq attribuiscono anche questa scelta a motivi religiosi. E che molti evocano la lezione del Vietnam.
Ho scritto migliaia di parole per cercare di dimostrare che non ci sono analogie tra i due conflitti. Ma poi, intervenendo al recente raduno dei veterani delle guerre all'estero, il presidente Bush ha detto che una sconfitta in Iraq sarebbe un altro Vietnam. Mentre mi dispero e mi chiedo se Bush non cerchi il suicidio politico, riespongo rapidamente i motivi per cui, dando man forte ai suoi critici su questa tesi, il presidente commette un errore.
1) Il Vietminh e in seguito il Fronte di liberazione nazionale (Nlf) vietnamita furono, durante la seconda guerra mondiale, alleati di Stati Uniti e Gran Bretagna contro le potenze dell'Asse; il partito iracheno Baath era invece dall'altra parte.
2) Il Vietnam si era opposto al colonialismo francese, sconfiggendolo a Dien Bien Phu: la "guerra" vera era perciò finita prima che gli Stati Uniti inviassero delle truppe nel paese.
3) Il successivo conflitto fu combattuto per mantenere una divisione forzata di un paese che cercava di riunificarsi; nel caso dell'Iraq è successo il contrario.
4) La leadership vietnamita si appellò all'Onu; i saddamiti e i loro alleati jihadisti hanno assassinato l'inviato Onu arrivato in Iraq.
5) Il Vietnam non aveva mai minacciato nessun altro paese; sotto Saddam Hussein, Baghdad ha invaso due suoi vicini, dichiarandone uno parte integrante dell'Iraq.
6) Il Vietnam fu vittima di armi chimiche; l'Iraq ha usato metodi illegali simili e ha cercato di sviluppare armi nucleari e biologiche.
7) I regimi sostenuti da Washington in Vietnam tendevano a identificarsi con una minoranza confessionale (quella cattolica), escludendo le forze laiche, nazionaliste e buddiste; il governo iracheno può anche avere una connotazione settaria, ma almeno attinge a popolazioni maggioritarie finora represse (curdi e sciiti), mentre l'ambasciata americana cerca di attenuare le divisioni religiose ed etniche anziché alimentarle.
8) Il presidente Eisenhower ammise che, se in Vietnam si fosse votato, avrebbe vinto Ho Chi Minh; i successori del partito Baath si sono rifiutati di partecipare alle elezioni in Iraq e i loro alleati jihadisti hanno minacciato di uccidere chiunque fosse andato a votare.
9) In Vietnam gli americani usarono metodi e armi che prendevano di mira i civili. Oggi chi porta avanti una guerra indiscriminata contro gli innocenti è chi mette le bombe nelle strade di Baghdad.
Quest'elenco non è esaustivo, ma metterà in guardia da ogni paragone semplicistico. Si potrebbe aggiungere che tra i risultati della rivoluzione vietnamita ci fu una forma sicuramente rozza di socialismo di mercato, ma anche una certa modernizzazione; una forte resistenza all'espansionismo cinese; e una spedizione militare che depose il regime genocida dei Khmer rossi in Cambogia.
È vero che il crollo dell'avventura americana in Indocina fu seguito da una pesante repressione e dall'esilio di un numero enorme di vietnamiti. Ma fu un fatto minore, se paragonato alle enormi perdite provocate dalla guerra. In Iraq il genocidio, la repressione e l'aggressione hanno preceduto l'intervento della coalizione e sono stati condannati da una serie di risoluzioni dell'Onu.
Bush ha tenuto il suo discorso proprio mentre il ministro degli esteri francesi Bernard Kouchner era in visita a Baghdad e abbracciava alcuni combattenti iracheni e curdi per la libertà, come il presidente Jalal Talabani. Ci vuole una bella idiozia politica e morale per scegliere, in un momento simile, di mostrarsi nostalgico della guerra americana in Indocina, ereditata dal moribondo colonialismo francese.
Se un punto è assodato nella memoria americana e internazionale, è che la guerra del Vietnam fu nel migliore dei casi una scelta folle e nel peggiore una campagna di aggressione e atrocità.
Ma l'ironia non colpisce solo Bush. Basta cambiare il nome del paese di cui parliamo e diventa chiaro che in Iraq non stiamo combattendo i vietcong ma i Khmer rossi, come alla fine i vietnamiti dovettero fare a nome nostro.
La logica della storia è spietata e Bush non sarà l'unico ad accorgersene.
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Jeune Afrique:
19 morts dans l'attentat à la bombe (nouveau bilan)
ALGÉRIE - 7 septembre 2007 - par XINHUA
19 morts et 107 blessés ont été enregistrés dans un attentat à la bombe survenu jeudi à Batna, dans l'est de l'Algérie, a annoncé vendredi le ministère algérien de l'Intérieur et des Collectivités locales, dans un communiqué.
Jeudi, le ministère algérien avait fait état de 14 morts et une soixantaine de blessés dans cet attentat à la bombe.
L'explosion a eu lieu jeudi après-midi, lorsque les habitants locaux sont descendus dans la rue pour accueillir le cortège du président algérien Abdelaziz Bouteflika, en tournée d'inspection dans cette région.
Les actes terroristes n'ont absolument rien à voir avec les nobles valeurs de l'Islam, a souligné M. Bouteflika, dans une déclaration radio-télévisée peu après l'attentat.
"La reconciliation nationale est un choix statégique du peuple algérien, un choix irréversible", a fait remarquer le président algérien, condamnant ce genre d'attentats terroristes visant à saboter le processus de paix et de reconciliation nationale.
Le terrorisme sévissait en Algérie dans les années 1990, faisant plus de 150 000 morts, sans compter un dégât matériel important. Ces dernières années, la situation sécuritaire s'est améliorée dans le pays, mais des attentats sporadiques existent encore.
Un double attentat suicide a ciblé le 11 avril dernier le Palais du gouvernement, situé au coeur de la capitale algérienne, faisant 30 morts. Trois mois après, un autre attentat s'est produit contre une caserne dans le nord du pays, qui a coûté la vie à au moins huit militaires.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=XIN00637mortsnalibu0#
La Repubblica:
Sicurezza e serietà
di GIUSEPPE D'AVANZO
Prima che un Paese normale, dovremmo essere in grado di diventare - ne è una pre-condizione - un Paese serio, e serio vuol dire capace, responsabile, attendibile. Può essere utile affrontare alla luce di queste categorie - responsabilità, capacità, attendibilità - le iniziative che il governo progetta di contrapporre a una diffusa ondata di panico morale provocata da quella che viene definita "microcriminalità" e concentrata, in quest'occasione, contro i miserabili che occupano spazi pubblici - lavavetri, vagabondi, mendicanti - e il piccolo mondo criminale che vende beni e servizi alla società "per bene": prostitute, piccoli spacciatori di droga. Per necessità semplificatoria, si farà a meno di quel che, nel nuovo senso comune penale, il governo cinicamente giudica superfluo.
Per un momento, allora, lasciamo in un canto qualche questione pur assai essenziale: come, ad esempio, che le politiche pubbliche in tema di sicurezza ridisegnano il profilo stesso della società (e varrebbe la pena discuterne, no?); che molte esperienze hanno messo in dubbio l'efficacia delle politiche criminali nel controllo dei conflitti e dei fenomeni illeciti; che il senso di insicurezza non è necessariamente connesso all'esistenza di pericoli "concreti", ma spesso ha a che fare con il genere, l'età, l'esperienza di vita, la familiarità con l'ambiente in cui si vive, il senso di appartenenza a una comunità.
Via tutto questo. E via (anche se magari leggendolo scopriremmo che l'utopista era molto pragmatico al punto da sostenere che "la grandezza delle pene deve essere relativa allo stato della nazione"), via pure la lezione di Cesare Beccaria che credeva gli uomini liberi e uguali: in fondo nei think tanks (Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute), che furono la fucina della ragione penale dei neoconservatori, avevano già in odio "la perversione dell'ideale ugualitario apparso con la Rivoluzione francese". Via questa roba da filosofi. Affidiamoci soltanto al programma del governo. Non al programma originario: quello, prevedeva il carcere solo per i reati più gravi e mai il carcere per violazione di disposizioni amministrative (come sono le ordinanze di un sindaco). Occupiamoci soltanto del disegno annunciato, ex novo. Nel ripensamento affiora subito un primo indizio di inattendibilità perché non c'è risposta alla domanda: che cosa è cambiato rispetto a un anno fa? Pare niente, se il ministro dell'Interno scrive al Corriere della Sera (30 agosto): "Troppo spesso la politica costruisce polemiche su uno stato della sicurezza che amplificano stati d'animo che non possono valere come giudizi generali. I dati ci dicono un'altra cosa".
Epperò, senza un'esplicita ragione, Giuliano Amato annuncia "tolleranza zero", "una lotta all'illegalità così come fece Rudolph Giuliani da sindaco di New York". La mossa svela, quanto meno, un'inversione di rotta e quindi un'incapacità nelle scelte del passato. Per farla corta. Ci sono, in competizione tra loro, due modi di fare polizia: "polizia intensiva" (a "tolleranza zero") e "polizia comunitaria" (o community policing o "polizia di prossimità"). Fino ad oggi in modo condiviso e inaugurata addirittura dal centro-destra di Berlusconi, la nostra scelta era caduta sulla "polizia di prossimità" che ha il suo "caso di scuola" a San Diego, negli stessi anni del governo newyorchese di Giuliani. In tre anni in quella città della California, con l'aumento degli effettivi di polizia di solo il 6 per cento, il numero degli arresti diminuì del 15 per cento. Al contrario, New York - che nelle classifiche della criminalità dell'Fbi in quel 1993 (Giuliani diventa sindaco) si collocava all'87esimo posto su 107 città (non era poi tanto malmessa) - sceglie il metodo della "polizia intensiva" che fece aumentare gli arresti del 24 per cento (314.292 persone soltanto nel 1996); i poliziotti di 12 mila unità; il budget della polizia del 40 per cento (2,6 miliardi di dollari, un importo quattro volte superiore ai fondi concessi agli ospedali pubblici) con un'opzione che provocò il taglio di un terzo dei finanziamenti ai servizi sociali della città e il licenziamento di 8.000 addetti. Con il nuovo indirizzo di "tolleranza zero" fa capolino una traccia di inattendibilità. Anche fingendo di non sapere che la "polizia intensiva" non colpisce singoli delinquenti, ma alcuni gruppi sociali, e per di più alla lunga non è efficace come si crede, dove sono i soldi? Le casse dello Stato permettono di far crescere del 10/20/30 per cento le risorse delle polizie centrali e comunali? Troverà consenso, in caso contrario, una manovra che, per assicurare quei finanziamenti, riduca nelle città del 10/20/30 per cento il bugdet dei servizi sociali, già stressati dalla "cura Berlusconi"?
Contro queste difficoltà si è già, peraltro, scontrato il centro-sinistra quando, nel 1999, il governo D'Alema, dopo la consueta ondata di panico provocata da alcuni assassinii a Milano, adottò una serie di misure repressive (criminalizzazione di alcuni illeciti minori, poteri rafforzati per la polizia, pugno di ferro nelle carceri) che non mutarono di un pelo né la percezione della sicurezza né la sicurezza (il centro-sinistra perse le elezioni). L'oblio di quell'esperienza fallimentare può essere un indizio di irresponsabilità. D'incapacità tocca invece discutere, quando si affronta quel che, per Amato, è "uno dei maggiori problemi di sicurezza nel nostro Paese, in questo momento": la criminalità romena.
La leva per scardinarla c'è. Dice Amato: "Ogni cittadino comunitario (i romeni lo sono) può registrarsi all'anagrafe di un altro Paese solo se ha i mezzi leciti di sostentamento. Se non li ha, va a casa". Quel che Amato non dice è che il governo italiano (inattendibilità), per rendere esecutiva questa norma europea (direttiva numero 38), deve definire qual è la soglia minima richiesta al cittadino immigrato. Quanto deve guadagnare per definirsi "in grado di sostenersi"? 500 euro al mese? 800? L'esecutivo, in un anno, non ne è venuto a capo (incapacità). Sarà per questo che, molto sottilmente, il ministro dell'Interno si defila e chiama in causa il ministro della Giustizia come ha fatto a Telese Terme, il 29 agosto: "Quando uno viene arrestato poi non te lo puoi ritrovare davanti dopo tre mesi. Questo si chiama certezza della pena. E questo compito tocca al ministro della Giustizia".
La certezza della pena è una litania, buona per tutti gli usi, a destra come a sinistra, ma semanticamente povera. Non costa niente evocarla, ma lascia le cose come sono nel congegno - il processo - che dovrebbe assicurarla. Ora, in Italia, il processo è inefficiente e interminabile. Ha incrociato e moltiplicato nel tempo i difetti di tutti i modelli a disposizione. E' un ordigno perverso e maligno che, al più sanziona prima dell'accertamento e, quando accerta le responsabilità, non riesce a punirle.
Lasciamo cadere allora quelle iniziative che vogliono ripristinare antichi reati già cancellati dal centro-sinistra (i mestieri girovaghi) o già censurati come illegittimi dalla Corte Costituzionale (è il caso del reato di mendicità). Occupiamoci soltanto del processo, unico padre possibile dell'effettività della pena. Per rianimarlo ci sarebbe voluto un Giustiniano e una coesa volontà politica e non un Parlamento impotente dinanzi alla pressioni delle lobby dei magistrati, dei politici, degli avvocati.
Il ministro di Giustizia, da buon democristiano, si è mosso come ha potuto con l'ambizione di chiudere i tempi del giudizio in cinque anni. Ha anticipato qualche proposta già pronta. Il consiglio dei ministri l'ha approvata. Il disegno di legge è incagliato da cinque mesi alla Camera dove pure il governo può contare su una larga maggioranza (incapacità). Quel che si annuncia - l'inversione dell'onere della motivazione (il giudice deve motivare perché scarcera non perché "carcera"), un processo "speciale" per furti, rapine, stupri etc, nuove regole di carcere preventivo - renderà soltanto quel ferro più arrugginito, storto, inutilizzabile di quanto già oggi non sia (irresponsabilità). Per tenere in carcere chi lo merita e ridurre il danno, si poteva correre ai ripari con una banale tecnologia applicando le leggi che già ci sono.
Oggi capita che, condannato a Milano, un imputato risulta incensurato perché il giudice che decide se tenerlo in carcere fin dal primo giudizio (come è possibile) non sa che quello è già stato condannato a Pescara, magari per lo stesso reato. Sarebbe necessario un casellario giudiziario aggiornato e una banca dati efficiente, ma non ci sono né alcuno sembra ci stia lavorando (incapacità).
Già c'è - pare - materia sufficiente per dire della serietà della discussione di questi giorni, ma c'è un ultimo, definitivo argomento: il Parlamento da oggi a fine anno non ha sedute a disposizione per approvare il "progetto sicurezza" del governo. Il Senato, per i prossimi 45 giorni, si occuperà di Finanziaria. Che, per i successivi trenta, sarà all'ordine del giorno della Camera per poi ritornare al Senato, prima delle ferie natalizie. In ogni caso se il "pacchetto" prevede anche soltanto una lira di spesa in più non può essere discusso durante la sessione di bilancio. Il governo potrebbe muoversi con un decreto legge, è vero, ma è difficile che voglia tirarsi addosso un'altra rogna, dopo le difficili mediazioni in programma per tagli, tasse e tesoretto. Per sapere della serietà bisognerà dunque aspettare l'anno prossimo.
(7 settembre 2007)
http://www.repubblica.it/2007/09/sezioni/politica/piano-sicurezza/
commento-sindaci/commento-sindaci.html
Mail & Guardian:
Honouring Steve Biko
Editorial
07 September 2007
This month marks the 30th anniversary of the death of black consciousness leader Steve Bantu Biko. How do we honour him? No doubt Biko would have been happy with the turn of history. President Thabo Mbeki has been an enthusiastic proponent of black consciousness and of pan-Africanism, so much so that organised political formations of these two ideologies have withered and died on the political vine.
This week the Pan Africanist Congress breathed what is undeniably its last political breath. Most of its members of Parliament have crossed to the African People's Convention. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Black People's Convention and the other formations of the best BC organisations have long lost relevance.
But Biko remains a founding son of the South African democracy; his ideas no less germane and prescient than they were 30 years ago.
In urban centres these include the fractured debates about employment equity and empowerment. In rural areas, where Biko's analysis of society is still sorely and painfully relevant, racial relations reflect the neo-feudal arrangements of the Seventies. Be this the treatment of farmworkers, farm dwellers or the ordinariness of the ugly between whites and blacks, it's clear that the path is still long.
Black consciousness is vital still in an era where so many power relations reflect yesterday rather than tomorrow. But how do some of today's stewards argue for that power? Often, unfortunately, it is in the language of powerlessness; in racist terminology that calls some black people "native assistants" and "coconuts". This view can brook no difference of opinion among black people; and, as Sowetan editor Thabo Leshilo argues on these pages this week, it is a no less racist perspective.
Black consciousness is not the chauvinism which seems to suggest that no white South Africans or those of a lighter black hue should ever take leadership positions in the country. Neither is it a narrow-minded understanding of who and what an African is.
Though we claim no mantle as the interpreter of Biko in the 21st century, a thorough reading of his work suggests his vision was of a black identity that understands and asserts its own worth without detracting from the worth of anyone else.
A further worrying trend that can cast aspersions on Biko's legacy is one which, in turn, makes "Africanism" and "black consciousness" pejorative descriptions. Too often, in our political discussion, do we hear people discounted as "Africanist" or "BC", as if these are bad things. The tendency to label and to isolate is one we must lose.
The logical step up from black consciousness is non-racialism, with its promise of a common humanity. This is a path from which we should not stray. There is a constitutional and a human imperative on us to do so.
For crying out loud
Snot en trane in the media this week. The South African Broadcasting Corporation pulled out of the South African National Editors' Forum, citing the organisation's descent into an ethical swamp.
This, after a Sanef media statement that supported the principles underlying the Sunday Times's exposé of the health minister's shenanigans at a Cape Town hospital, part of which was gleaned from her medical records.
There was a second theme to the SABC's pull-out and that was its treatment in the press. For a long time now the SABC has decried the column inches that newspapers devote to the broadcaster. "For how long," said chief executive Dali Mpofu, "must we ignore and actually sponsor the ideologically driven low-intensity war long declared by the commercial media against the public service broadcaster?"
This position misunderstands the SABC: it is ours (publicly owned) and it is highly visible; the key provider of news and current affairs to the majority of the country. It is, arguably, more interesting - and of greater public interest - than all the other parastatals. And it reports to Parliament, rather than to the executive. Media attention comes with the turf.
The debates the SABC and the Sunday Times raise are both vital in a young democracy: what degree of scrutiny of leadership will be palatable? Will our mores settle around a French turn-the-other-cheek model? Or will we follow the robust Nigerian and Kenyan models of journalism, where the right to privacy is tested and limited every day?
What of our ethical decision-making? Are our newsroom systems strong enough? In the Sunday Times judgement last week Judge Mahomed Jajbhay challenged the media to improve these to enhance credibility.
And what of dignity? Mpofu set the broadcaster's compass when he said: "We cannot remain quiet while our mothers and our democratically chosen leaders are stripped naked for the sole reason of selling newspapers." He is choosing a definition of dignity that will not allow the scrutiny of the powerful. Or is dignity something far simpler: the assurance of a common humanity, the extension of the beautiful - but basic - rights contained in our Constitution? Can skelms hide behind the veil of dignity; should incompetence be allowed to so shroud itself?
These are vital debates for a vital institution. Leadership demands that the SABC not throw its toys out of the cot, but throw its hat into the ring of debate and contestation. The politics of tantrum and of boycott are just so passé.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=318540&area=/insight/insight__editorials/
Página/12:
Charles Darwin
Por Adrián Paenza
Viernes, 07 de Septiembre de 2007
En este apasionado viaje por distintos lugares de la vida, quiero recuperar un texto del científico inglés Charles Darwin, quien con su teoría sobre la evolución y la selección natural cambió la historia de la humanidad para siempre.
Darwin estuvo mucho tiempo en la Argentina. Desde 1831 a 1836 viajó como naturalista a bordo de la nave inglesa “H.M.S. Beagle”. En realidad, Darwin formaba parte de una expedición que pretendía dar la vuelta al mundo en barco.
Después de leer el texto que escribió en 1833, se darán cuenta de que muchas de las cosas que nos pasan a los argentinos tienen un origen más antiguo del que nosotros mismos creemos.
Siempre existe la tentación de creer que todo tiempo pasado fue mejor. Bien. Puede ser que haya habido momentos del pasado que fueran mejores. Pero seguro que yo también puedo mencionar momentos actuales que son mejores que los del pasado.
En todo caso, lea el comentario que hizo sobre los argentinos en 1833. Y después, lo invito a un minuto de reflexión.
Extractos de una nota publicada en Ciencia Hoy, Volumen 6, Nº 31. Revista de Divulgación Científica y Tecnológica de la Asociación Ciencia Hoy.
“Durante los últimos seis meses, he tenido lo oportunidad de apreciar en algo la manera de ser de los habitantes de estas provincias [del Plata].
Los gauchos u hombres de campo son muy superiores a los que residen en las ciudades. El gaucho es invariablemente muy servicial, cortés y hospitalario. No me he encontrado con un solo ejemplo de falta de cortesía u hospitalidad. Es modesto, se respeta y respeta al país, pero es también un personaje con energía y audacia.
La policía y la justicia son completamente ineficientes. Si un hombre comete un asesinato y debe ser aprehendido, quizá pueda ser encarcelado o incluso fusilado; pero si es rico y tiene amigos en los cuales confiar, nada pasará. Es curioso constatar que las personas más respetables invariablemente ayudan a escapar a un asesino.
Parecen creer que el individuo cometió un delito que afecta al gobierno y no a la sociedad.
(Un viajero no tiene otra protección que sus armas, y es el hábito constante de llevarlas lo que principalmente impide que haya más robos.)
Las clases más altas y educadas que viven en las ciudades cometen muchos otros crímenes, pero carecen de las virtudes del carácter del gaucho. Se trata de personas sensuales y disolutas que se mofan de toda religión y practican las corrupciones más groseras; su falta de principios es completa.
Teniendo la oportunidad, no defraudar a un amigo es considerado un acto de debilidad; decir la verdad en circunstancias en que convendría haber mentido sería una infantil simpleza.
El concepto de honor no se comprende; ni éste, ni sentimientos generosos, resabios de caballerosidad, lograron sobrevivir el largo pasaje del Atlántico.
Si hubiese leído estas opiniones hace un año, me hubiese acusado de intolerancia: ahora no lo hago. Todo el que tiene una buena oportunidad de juzgar piensa lo mismo.
En la Sala de Buenos Aires no creo que haya seis hombres cuya honestidad y principios pudiesen ser de confiar.
Todo funcionario público es sobornable. El jefe de Correos vende moneda falsificada. El gobernador y el primer ministro saquean abiertamente las arcas públicas. No se puede esperar justicia si hay oro de por medio.
Conozco un hombre (tenía buenas razones para hacerlo) que se presentó al juez y dijo: ‘Le doy doscientos pesos si arresta a tal persona ilegalmente; mi abogado me aconsejó dar este paso’.
El juez sonrió en asentimiento y agradeció; antes de la noche, el hombre estaba preso. Con esta extrema carencia de principios entre los dirigentes, y con el país plagado de funcionarios violentos y mal pagos, tienen, sin embargo, la esperanza de que el gobierno democrático perdure. En mi opinión, antes de muchos años temblarán bajo la mano férrea de algún dictador. Como deseo el bien del país, espero que ese período no tarde en llegar.”
(29 de noviembre al 4 de diciembre de 1833) *
Ahora sigo yo: ¿no es maravilloso encontrarse con escritos de una persona que casi dos siglos atrás describió lo que nos pasa hoy? ¿Cuál fue entonces el tiempo pasado en el que todo fue mejor? ¿No era, acaso, que la corrupción era producto de la era de la globalización y de fines del siglo XX? ¿No era verdad que los héroes vivían en esas épocas?
Obviamente, no creo tampoco que todo tiempo pasado haya sido peor. Sólo propongo no creer que porque uno no lo vivió, fue mejor. Algo así como que cuando una persona se muere, pasa a ser intachable e impoluta.
Somos, ni más ni menos, que un conjunto de miserias y virtudes. En todo caso, un promedio de ellas. A algunas personas, la “agujita” les marca un poco más arriba. Y a otras, más abajo. La gran mayoría vive (vivimos) en un término medio. Y sólo unos muy privilegiados o depravados tienen la posibilidad de escaparse de la media, tanto sea por la mayor excelencia o por la perversión de sus actos.
Somos, en todo caso, humanos. Y peleamos por una sociedad mejor, más generosa, solidaria y con una mejor repartición de la riqueza. Ese sería un buen paso. Más allá de la revolución científica, este siglo debería estar marcado por haber logrado una distribución más equitativa de la riqueza material, pero también de la intelectual. Ese es el desafío.
* Excepto las cartas, los textos son de Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of “H.M.S. Beagle”. Edited from the MS by Nora Barlow, 1933, Cambridge University Press, pp. 197-200. Traducción Ciencia Hoy.
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http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-90949-2007-09-07.html
The Independent:
Switzerland: Europe's heart of darkness?
Switzerland is known as a haven of peace and neutrality. But today it is home to a new extremism that has alarmed the United Nations. Proposals for draconian new laws that target the country's immigrants have been condemned as unjust and racist. A poster campaign, the work of its leading political party, is decried as xenophobic. Has Switzerland become Europe's heart of darkness?
By Paul Vallely
Published: 07 September 2007
At first sight, the poster looks like an innocent children's cartoon. Three white sheep stand beside a black sheep. The drawing makes it looks as though the animals are smiling. But then you notice that the three white beasts are standing on the Swiss flag. One of the white sheep is kicking the black one off the flag, with a crafty flick of its back legs.
The poster is, according to the United Nations, the sinister symbol of the rise of a new racism and xenophobia in the heart of one of the world's oldest independent democracies.
A worrying new extremism is on the rise. For the poster – which bears the slogan "For More Security" – is not the work of a fringe neo-Nazi group. It has been conceived – and plastered on to billboards, into newspapers and posted to every home in a direct mailshot – by the Swiss People's Party (the Schweizerische Volkspartei or SVP) which has the largest number of seats in the Swiss parliament and is a member of the country's coalition government.
With a general election due next month, it has launched a twofold campaign which has caused the UN's special rapporteur on racism to ask for an official explanation from the government. The party has launched a campaign to raise the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to reintroduce into the penal code a measure to allow judges to deport foreigners who commit serious crimes once they have served their jail sentence.
But far more dramatically, it has announced its intention to lay before parliament a law allowing the entire family of a criminal under the age of 18 to be deported as soon as sentence is passed.
It will be the first such law in Europe since the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft – kin liability – whereby relatives of criminals were held responsible for their crimes and punished equally.
The proposal will be a test case not just for Switzerland but for the whole of Europe, where a division between liberal multiculturalism and a conservative isolationism is opening up in political discourse in many countries, the UK included.
SWISS TRAINS being the acme of punctuality, the appointment was very precise. I was to meet Dr Ulrich Schlüer – one of the men behind the draconian proposal – in the restaurant at the main railway station in Zürich at 7.10pm. As I made my way through the concourse, I wondered what Dr Schlüer made of this station of hyper-efficiency and cleanliness that has a smiling Somali girl selling pickled herring sandwiches, a north African man sweeping the floor, and a black nanny speaking in broken English to her young Swiss charge. The Swiss People's Party's attitude to foreigners is, shall we say, ambivalent.
A quarter of Switzerland's workers – one in four, like the black sheep in the poster – are now foreign immigrants to this peaceful, prosperous and stable economy with low unemployment and a per capita GDP larger than that of other Western economies. Zürich has, for the past two years, been named as the city with the best quality of life in the world.
What did the nanny think of the sheep poster, I asked her. "I'm a guest in this country," she replied. "It's best I don't say."
Dr Schlüer is a small affable man. But if he speaks softly he wields a big stick. The statistics are clear, he said, foreigners are four times more likely to commit crimes than Swiss nationals. "In a suburb of Zürich, a group of youths between 14 and 18 recently raped a 13-year-old girl," he said. "It turned out that all of them were already under investigation for some previous offence. They were all foreigners from the Balkans or Turkey. Their parents said these boys are out of control. We say: 'That's not acceptable. It's your job to control them and if you can't do that you'll have to leave'. It's a punishment everyone understands."
It is far from the party's only controversial idea. Dr Schlüer has launched a campaign for a referendum to ban the building of Muslim minarets. In 2004, the party successfully campaigned for tighter immigration laws using the image of black hands reaching into a pot filled with Swiss passports. And its leading figure, the Justice Minister, Christoph Blocher, has said he wants to soften anti-racism laws because they prevent freedom of speech.
Political opponents say it is all posturing ahead of next month's general election. Though deportation has been dropped from the penal code, it is still in force in administrative law, says Daniel Jositsch, professor of penal law at Zurich University. "At the end of the day, nothing has changed, the criminal is still at the airport and on the plane."
With astute tactics, the SVP referendum restricts itself to symbolic restitution. Its plan to deport entire families has been put forward in parliament where it has little chance of being passed. Still the publicity dividend is the same. And it is all so worrying to human rights campaigners that the UN special rapporteur on racism, Doudou Diène, warned earlier this year that a "racist and xenophobic dynamic" which used to be the province of the far right is now becoming a regular part of the democratic system in Switzerland.
Dr Schlüer shrugged. "He's from Senegal where they have a lot of problems of their own which need to be solved. I don't know why he comes here instead of getting on with that."
Such remarks only confirm the opinions of his opponents. Mario Fehr is a Social Democrat MP for the Zürich area. He says: "Deporting people who have committed no crime is not just unjust and inhumane, it's stupid. Three quarters of the Swiss people think that foreigners who work here are helping the economy. We have a lot of qualified workers – IT specialists, doctors, dentists." To get rid of foreigners, which opponents suspect is the SVP's real agenda, "would be an economic disaster".
Dr Schlüer insists the SVP is not against all foreigners. "Until war broke out in the Balkans, we had some good workers who came from Yugoslavia. But after the fighting there was huge influx of people we had a lot of problems with. The abuse of social security is a key problem. It's estimated to cost £750m a year. More than 50 per cent of it is by foreigners."
There is no disguising his suspicion of Islam. He has alarmed many of Switzerland's Muslims (some 4.3 per cent of the 7.5 million population) with his campaign to ban the minaret. "We're not against mosques but the minaret is not mentioned in the Koran or other important Islamic texts. It just symbolises a place where Islamic law is established." And Islamic law, he says, is incompatible with Switzerland's legal system.
To date there are only two mosques in the country with minarets but planners are turning down applications for more, after opinion polls showed almost half the population favours a ban. What is at stake here in Switzerland is not merely a dislike of foreigners or a distrust of Islam but something far more fundamental. It is a clash that goes to the heart of an identity crisis which is there throughout Europe and the US. It is about how we live in a world that has changed radically since the end of the Cold War with the growth of a globalised economy, increased immigration flows, the rise of Islam as an international force and the terrorism of 9/11. Switzerland only illustrates it more graphically than elsewhere.
Switzerland is so stark an example because of the complex web of influences that find their expression in Ulrich Schlüer and his party colleagues.
He is fiercely proud of his nation's independence, which can be traced back to a defensive alliance of cantons in 1291. He is a staunch defender of its policy of armed neutrality, under which Switzerland has no standing army but all young men are trained and on standby; they call it the porcupine approach – with millions of individuals ready to stiffen like spines if the nation is threatened.
Linked to that is its system of direct democracy where many key decisions on tax, education, health and other key areas are taken at local level.
"How direct democracy functions is a very sensitive issue in Switzerland," he says, explaining why he has long opposed joining the EU. "To the average German, the transfer of power from Berlin to Brussels didn't really affect their daily lives. The transfer of power from the commune to Brussels would seriously change things for the ordinary Swiss citizen."
Switzerland has the toughest naturalisation rules in Europe. To apply, you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years, pay taxes, and have no criminal record. The application can still be turned down by your local commune which meets to ask "Can you speak German? Do you work? Are you integrated with Swiss people?"
It can also ask, as one commune did of 23-year-old Fatma Karademir – who was born in Switzerland but who under Swiss law is Turkish like her parents – if she knew the words of the Swiss national anthem, if she could imagine marrying a Swiss boy and who she would support if the Swiss football team played Turkey. "Those kinds of questions are outside the law," says Mario Fehr. "But in some more remote villages you have a problem if you're from ex-Yugoslavia."
The federal government in Berne wants to take the decision out of the hands of local communities, one of which only gave the vote to women as recently as 1990. But the government's proposals have twice been defeated in referendums.
The big unspoken fact here is how a citizen is to be defined. "When a Swiss woman who has emigrated to Canada has a baby, that child automatically gets citizenship," Dr Schlüer says. But in what sense is a boy born in Canada, who may be brought up with an entirely different world view and set of values, more Swiss than someone like Fatma Karademir who has never lived anywhere but Switzerland?
The truth is that at the heart of the Swiss People's Party's vision is a visceral notion of kinship, breeding and blood that liberals would like to think sits very much at odds with the received wisdom of most of the Western world. It is what lies behind the SVP's fear of even moderate Islam. It has warned that because of their higher birth rates Muslims would eventually become a majority in Switzerland if the citizenship rules were eased. It is what lies behind his fierce support for the militia system.
To those who say that Germany, France, Italy and Austria are nowadays unlikely to invade, he invokes again the shadow of militant Islam. "The character of war is changing. There could be riots or eruptions in a town anywhere in Switzerland. There could be terrorism in a financial centre."
The race issue goes wider than politics in a tiny nation. "I'm broadly optimistic that the tide is moving in our direction both here and in other countries across Europe, said Dr Schlüer. "I feel more supported than criticised from outside."
The drama which is being played out in such direct politically incorrect language in Switzerland is one which has repercussions all across Europe, and wider.
Neutrality and nationality
* Switzerland has four national languages – German, Italian, French and Romansh. Most Swiss residents speak German as their first language.
* Switzerland's population has grown from 1.7 million in 1815 to 7.5 million in 2006. The population has risen by 750,000 since 1990.
* Swiss nationality law demands that candidates for Swiss naturalisation spend a minimum of years of permanent, legal residence in Switzerland, and gain fluency in one of the national languages.
* More than 20 per cent of the Swiss population, and 25 per cent of its workforce, is non-naturalised.
* At the end of 2006, 5,888 people were interned in Swiss prisons. 31 per cent were Swiss citizens – 69 per cent were foreigners or asylum-seekers.
* The number of unauthorised migrant workers currently employed is estimated at 100,000.
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2938940.ece
The Nation:
Why We Must Leave Iraq
As the Bush Administration presses to extend the surge,
what will Democrats in Congress do?
Cast your vote in the Nation Poll.
editorial
[from the September 24, 2007 issue]
As Congress gathers to hear the reports of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, no amount of Administration spin can hide the ugly reality in Iraq. A surge that should never have been tried and that could never have succeeded has predictably failed. While violence in some parts of Baghdad has declined to June 2006 levels, the number of deaths from political violence has increased in Iraq as a whole. Ethnic cleansing has proceeded apace, and the humanitarian catastrophe, already staggering, has worsened. Some 2.5 million Iraqis are now refugees in neighboring countries. Another 2 million are internally displaced. And despite Bush Administration claims to the contrary, most of Iraq's cities and towns still lack regular electricity, sanitation and other basic services, and suffer from economic depression. Up to half of Iraqis are unemployed.
The stated purpose of the surge was to create enough security in and around Baghdad to give Iraqi politicians breathing room to pursue reconciliation. But with the exception of some very minor recent concessions on de-Baathification, the Shiite-led government has stuck to positions that have prevented most Sunnis from participating in the government. Moreover, it is increasingly difficult to speak of an Iraqi government that has power or authority outside Baghdad's Green Zone. Real power resides with the militias on the ground, which are competing for resources and influence throughout much of Iraq. Even within the Green Zone, some seventeen ministries have withdrawn their support from the government and increasingly act as independent fiefdoms handing out resources to loyal constituents.
The surge has done nothing to change this-in large part because the United States, despite its sizable military and substantial economic largesse, is powerless to coerce or cajole change in the centers of power. Any gains the surge has produced may be gone tomorrow, like a footprint washed away by the tide.
The surge has thus been a cruel hoax on the American people and on our servicemen and -women (more than 600 of whom have been killed and 4,000 injured since the surge was announced). It is yet another Administration bid to stave off public pressure to withdraw and thus to avoid admitting failure. This irresponsibility-this morally indefensible sacrifice of American and Iraqi lives in pursuit of unachievable goals-must end. The Iraq War has long been lost, and it is time to bring it to a close. We continue to believe that a complete withdrawal of US forces, carried out as quickly as possible, is the best course of action for the United States, Iraq and the region.
The question before Congress and the nation should not be whether to give the surge more time but how best to end the occupation. So far the Administration has been able to thwart Congressional efforts to force a withdrawal-first with the surge and now with its dire warnings of a disaster in store for Iraq, the region and US interests if we withdraw. Also troubling, several Democratic presidential candidates seem to have bought into these worst-case scenarios and have begun to slow their timetable for withdrawal, adding new conditions for a pullout. Some are even calling for keeping a sizable residual force in Iraq or neighboring countries indefinitely. Congress must resist White House claims about the surge's "success" and deny additional funds for the occupation, instead pursuing reconciliation and reconstruction, at home and abroad. As the Administration presses its PR offensive for an extended surge and open-ended occupation, it is critically important that we let our representatives know we're fed up with the war and want the troops home-now. Otherwise, Congress is unlikely to buck White House pressure.
Those who support a residual US force in Iraq argue that a complete withdrawal would hamper our ability to deter Al Qaeda attacks, sectarian atrocities and regional war. We believe that any good accomplished by a residual US force would be outweighed by the harm it would do.
Consider the question of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which at most has a few thousand fighters. Local Sunni groups tolerated them in the past because they were allies against the occupation. Now that the Sunni tribes expect a US withdrawal, they have begun to turn against Al Qaeda. And if the Sunnis aren't able to eliminate the jihadis, the Shiites and the Kurds will, with the blessing if not the outright help of neighboring countries like Syria, Turkey and Iran, which do not want Al Qaeda to gain a foothold in the area. And as regional expert Flynt Leverett has pointed out, conventional ground troops are useless for counterterrorism missions. A residual force in Iraq (or in neighboring Kuwait) would further inflame popular opinion against the United States in the Arab and Muslim worlds and be a boon to jihadi recruitment.
As for intervening to stop sectarian atrocities, US military forces in much larger numbers have not been able to stop the violence that has claimed nearly 2,000 Iraqis a month or to prevent the ethnic cleansing that has displaced millions. It is not clear why a smaller force would be any more effective. The sad fact is that much of the ethnic cleansing has already taken place-on our watch. To be sure, a US withdrawal may lead to an intensification of the civil war, as different factions make a grab for power. But stability among these factions can be established only after a US withdrawal. Indeed, any US forces will be destabilizing because one group or another will try to draw them into the battle on their side. Only after we commit to a complete withdrawal will there be any hope of international mediation and a lasting settlement based on a balance of forces not subject to US favoritism and power maneuvers, suspected or real.
As to the concern that a complete withdrawal will lead to regional war, as different countries intervene in Iraq's civil war: This is a naïvely self-centered view of the Middle East and its problems. For all its democratic and human rights shortcomings, the region is resilient and capable of managing conflict. It survived fifteen years of civil war in Lebanon and almost a decade of brutal war between Iran and Iraq. It will survive the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. It was the Saudis and Syrians who in 1989 brokered an end to the war in Lebanon, not us. And Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia have the greatest stake in keeping the Iraqi conflict contained and therefore can be counted on to control their allies in Iraq once US forces withdraw.
More important, a commitment to a complete US withdrawal would open the way for international mediation and peacekeeping efforts, under the auspices of the United Nations, the Arab League or the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Indeed, it may be the only way to develop a regional concert of powers that can work with Iraqis to stabilize the country and control the conflict. Only by removing US forces and ending all claims to permanent bases can Washington increase the possibility that other countries will assist Iraq. The best way to prevent regional destabilization is to refocus our regional efforts and help Iraq and its neighbors cope with the humanitarian crisis we helped create. We can begin by helping to organize assistance for Syria, Jordan and Lebanon to resettle their Iraqi refugees. We can press Gulf countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia not to buy US weapons and host US troops but to open their doors to their Iraqi neighbors. And we can talk with Syria and Iran about our common interest in an Al Qaeda-free region instead of threatening to overthrow their governments.
Not only is withdrawing from Iraq in our national interest; it is also the moral, responsible thing to do. There is one way to atone for our illegal invasion and reckon with the human catastrophe our occupation has caused: End the occupation and abandon the pretense that only American power can bring order and democracy to the region. Then there will be a fair test of the Iraqis' willingness to settle their differences and of the international community's ability to assist them. And then we will be able to prove our nonimperial claims and play a constructive role in the region and world.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070924/editors
The New Yorker:
Real Food
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
September 3, 2007
I was nine years old, sitting stiffly at the dining table in my blue-and-white school uniform, and across from me sat my mother, who had come home from work at the university registry, elegant in her swishy skirt, smelling of Poison perfume and saying she wanted to watch me eat. I still do not know who told her that I was skipping lunch before school. Perhaps it was the houseboy, Fide. Perhaps it was my little brother Kenechukwu, who went to school in the morning and came home just before I left. The firm set of her mouth told me that I had no choice but to eat the garri and soup placed on the table. I made the sign of the cross. I plucked a morsel from the soft lump of garri. I lightly molded it with my fingers. I dipped it into the soup. I swallowed. My throat itched. I disliked all the variants of this quintessential Nigerian food, whether made from corn, cassava, or yams, whether cooked or stirred or pounded in a mortar until they became a soft mash. It was jokingly called “swallow,” because one swallowed the morsels without chewing; it was easy to tell that a person chewing garri was a foreigner.
“Hurry up,” my mother said. “You will be late for school.” We had garri for lunch every day except Sunday, when we had rice and stew and sometimes a lush salad that contained everything from baked beans to boiled eggs and was served with dollops of creamy dressing. The soups gave some variety to lunch: the yellowish egusi, made of ground melon seeds and vegetables; onugbu, rich with dark-green bitterleaf; okro, with its sticky sauce; nsala, with beef chunks floating in a thin herb-filled broth. I disliked them all.
That afternoon, it was egusi soup. My mother’s eyes were steady behind her glasses. “Are you playing with that food or eating it?” she asked. I said I was eating. Finally, I finished and said, “Mummy, thank you,” as all well-brought-up Igbo children were supposed to after a meal. I had just stepped outside the carpeted dining area and onto the polished concrete floor of the passage when my stomach churned and recoiled and the garri and soup rushed up my throat.
“Go upstairs and rinse your mouth,” my mother said.
When I came down, Fide was cleaning up the watery yellowish mess, and I was sorry he had to and I was too disgusted to look. After I told my mother that I never ate garri before school, that on Saturdays I waited until nobody was looking to wrap my garri in a piece of paper and slip it into the dustbin, I expected her to scold me. But she muttered in Igbo, “You want hunger to kill you,” and then told me to get a Fanta from the fridge.
Years later, she asked me, “What does garri really do to you?” “It scratches my throat,” I told her, and she laughed. It became a standing line of family teasing. “Does this scratch your throat?” my brothers would ask. Following that afternoon, my mother had boiled yams, soft and white and crumbly, made for my lunch; I ate them dipped in palm oil. Sometimes she would come home with a few wraps of warm okpa, which remains my favorite food: a simple, orange-colored, steamed pie of white beans and palm oil that tastes best cooked in banana leaves. We didn’t make it at home, perhaps because it was not native to our part of Igboland. Or perhaps because those we bought on the roadside from the women who carried them in large basins on their heads were too good to surpass.
I wish I ate garri. It is important to the people I love: My late grandmother used to want to have garri three times a day. My brother’s idea of a perfect meal is pounded yam. My father once came home from a conference in Paris, and when I asked how it had gone he said that he had missed real food. In Igbo, another word for “swallow” is simply “food,” so that one might overhear a sentence like “The food was well pounded, but the soup was not tasty.” My brothers, with affectionate mockery, sometimes ask whether it is possible for a person who does not eat swallow to be authentically Igbo, Nigerian, African.
On New Year’s Day of the year I turned thirteen, we went to my Aunt Dede’s house for lunch. “Did you remember?” my mother asked my aunt while gesturing toward me. My aunt nodded. There was a small bowl of jollof rice, soft-cooked in an oily tomato sauce, for me. My brothers praised the onugbu soup—“Auntie, this is soup that you washed your hands well before cooking”—and I wished that I, too, could say something. Then my boisterous Auntie Rosa arrived, her wrapper always seeming to be just about to slip off her waist. After she had exchanged hugs with everyone, she settled down with her pounded yam and noticed that I was eating rice. “Why are you not eating food?” she asked in Igbo. I said I did not eat swallow. She smiled and said to my mother, “Oh, you know she is not like us local people. She is foreign.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/03/070903fa_fact_adichie
ZNet | Mideast
What's next for Nahr al-Bared
by Jamal Ghosn; Electronic Lebanon; September 07, 2007
Victory celebrations are dominating the Lebanese airwaves for the foreseeable future and presidential election "campaigns" here are in full swing. The issue of reconstructing the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp will never see the light of day in any of the Lebanese media outlets, whether pro-government or opposition - just like the humanitarian crisis at Baddawi refugee camp has failed to capture any front page headlines over the past three months. The sole exception being when the disgruntled double-refugees attempted to return home, only to find themselves accused of attacking the Lebanese army. An assault by the army resulted in the death of three returning Palestinian refugees. Apparently human suffering with no potential political gain is not newsworthy.
Living conditions in the Palestinian refugee camps have never been easy. Lack of basic amenities, sub-par health care, and overcrowded schools are the common denominators between all the camps on Lebanese territory. None of the densely populated camps are in a condition to host a sudden influx of tens of thousands of twice-displaced refugees. Naturally, the overflowing Baddawi will not be a viable home for the Nahr al-Bared residents who will move back to their homes (reconstructed or not). The skeletons of buildings will be patched up, most likely by the refugees themselves with the help of the handful of activists that still care about the plight of Palestinians. These death-infested, bomb-riddled structures will make for a more dignified living than the pre-fabricated cardboard boxes, designed for nuclear families rather than traditional Palestinian extended ones, that have surfaced as alternative homes courtesy of some generous donors. Of course, the sea-front strip of the camp will be kept off-limits by the Lebanese army for questionable future development.
Hopes for real aid materializing from the Lebanese or other Arab governments for the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared are delusional. The precedent was set by the snail-paced reconstruction of south Lebanon following the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon. And unlike the residents of south Lebanon, the Palestinian refugees do not enjoy the strong political backing of any major Lebanese or regional power. No propaganda machines will be mobilized for their sake. History shows that media coverage of the camps only occurs when it means casting Palestinians in a negative light. Never has a media campaign been dedicated to addressing the cyclical victimhood of the residents of the camps. They are on their own and at the mercy of often failed, albeit generous, promises.
Sadly, the repopulation without proper reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared would not lead to standards of living much different than those in Ein al-Hilwe or Sabra. The lack of utilities and infrastructure will not be missed much as the residents of Nahr al-Bared faced the same problems even before the birth of Fatah al-Islam and the destruction of the camp. Over the years, Palestinian refugee camps have been decked with a constant dose of heavy artillery of Lebanese government, Arab, and international neglect. Neglect as ravaging as the half-ton bombs airlifted from the US and other third-party allies like Jordan to be dropped on Nahr al-Bared. The attention given to Nahr al-Bared will rapidly wane, and as always none of the humanitarian or political issues associated with the Palestinian camps will be addressed. Meanwhile, a new generation of Palestinians can now claim their own painful memories of the ongoing struggle for existence. The refugees from Nahr al-Bared and elsewhere are left, until further notice, with only hopes and prayers that the next incident involving one of their camps will not be as bloody and devastating as previous episodes.
Jamal Ghosn is a 28-year-old strategy consultant from Beirut. He has covered Lebanese affairs on his blog for over two years.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=13713
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