MY POLICE STATE VACATION

Current Affairs

In the customs line at Tashkent International Airport, a digital screen positioned above the X-ray machine informs visitors to Uzbekistan of items that are prohibited in the interest of peace and security. Narcotics are first, followed by materials encouraging religious extremism, fundamentalism, or separatism. When I recently visited the Central Asian nation, memorably referred to by pizza magnate and former Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain as “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan,” I was carrying none of the above.

I was, however, slightly concerned that my profession itself might not be on the list of state-approved activities—as suggested, perhaps, by the fact that said state plays host to the world’s two longest imprisoned journalists.

Fortunately, not being Uzbek myself meant I’d be spared the rehabilitative services the government reserves for its in-house opposition. Even among torture-states, Uzbekistan has achieved some impressive levels of brutality. Treatments have ranged from having suspected dissidents boiled to death to freezing them in icy cells to simple “asphyxiation with a gas mask,” as the U.S. State Department noted in 2001, shortly before it appointed Uzbekistan one of its key BFFs in the War on Terror.

But I wasn’t in Uzbekistan for journalistic purposes; I would not be investigating its various unbecoming practices, such as the forced labor in its cotton fields or its forced sterilization of women. Nor, curious as I may have been, did I intend to look into the story of permanent president Islam Karimov’s daughter Gulnara, a Harvard University alumna whose career as a diplomat-cum-pop diva-cum-fashion designer-cum-racketeer has for the moment ended in house arrest.

Instead, my itinerary centered around viewing pretty monuments and drinking cheap vodka, and I didn’t want this disrupted by any official misreading of my intentions. For that reason I had exercised borderline paranoia when applying for my letter of invitation (LOI) from the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs back in August—a document that would supposedly facilitate my acquisition of an Uzbek visa. Required to provide a letter from my employer as part of the LOI application process, I tasked my mother with fabricating a temporary identity for me as a client services and marketing liaison in the innocuous business of rental property management in Spain. (Having failed to adequately rehearse this exotic new title, I subsequently went with the deer-in-headlights option whenever any Uzbek asked what my job was.) READ MORE AT CURRENT AFFAIRS.

When statues mean more than people

Al Jazeera English

Recently on my Facebook news feed, a post materialised from an American research scientist at New York University whose CV includes work on a "joint peace-building project" between that institution and the University of Duhok in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

The post featured two photographs of ancient ruins in Duhok that had been on the receiving end of graffiti in the form of Kurdish flags, which the research scientist had used to equate the graffiti artists with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) - known, among other things, for itsdestruction of antiquities and archaeological sites.

"Dear Kurdish nationalists that did this," he wrote, "you're no better than [ISIL] and you're spineless cowards who, if you had an ounce of courage, would be on the frontlines and not vandalising priceless history."

Never mind that it's not up to Western visitors to dictate to long-exploited populations how precisely to manifest personal or collective aspirations, or that comparing flag painters to decapitation-happy jihadists is a bit extreme.

It bears adding that this particular fellow is himself a veteran of the United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan, two locations where the US has engaged in its fair share of vandalism - not to mention widespread slaughter. Apparently, human beings just aren't that "priceless". READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Ethiopia’s Oromo Protest ‘Development,’ Displacement and Death

TeleSUR English

“This government is at least better than previous ones,” remarked a 74-year-old Eritrean man to me last month in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, his longtime residence. Clad in a tattered grey suit and speaking to me in Italian, the man was peddling a book of useful Amharic phrases he had compiled for the foreign visitor, proceeds of which would go toward the purchase of a second-hand comforter for his bed.

As it turned out, his assessment of the relative superiority of the current Ethiopian administration was for good reason: two of his children had been killed by a previous ruling outfit, the Derg military junta that took power in 1974 and began eliminating suspected opponents in droves.

Although that particularly bloody epoch came to an end in 1991, many a resident of Ethiopia might nowadays still have cause to complain about homicidal activity by the state. In the Oromia region surrounding Addis Ababa, for example, there are claims that more than 200 people have been killed by Ethiopian security forces since November 2015, when protests broke out in response to the government’s so-called “Master Plan” to expand the boundaries of the capital by a factor of 20.

As a Newsweek article explains, the Oromo inhabitants of the region viewed the plan as “an attempted land grab that could result in the forced eviction of Oromo farmers and the loss of valuable arable land in a country regularly plagued by drought.”

This was no doubt a valid concern given the government’s established tradition of wantonly displacing Ethiopians in the interest of “development”—that handy euphemism for removing human obstacles to the whims of international and domestic investment capital.

Comprising some 35 percent of the population, the Oromo are Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group and have regularly decried discrimination by the ruling coalition party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which is dominated by ethnic Tigrayan interests. Politically motivated detention, incarceration, and other abuses have long characterized the landscape in Oromia, and the current protests have seen children as youngas eight arrested.

Apparently, torture has also been a difficult habit for security forces to break.

And while the government has opted to shelve the Master Plan for now, protests in Oromia have continued. When I recently visited the town of Woliso, one of many protest sites in the region, residents pointed out that cancelling the plan wouldn’t bring back the dead people. READ MORE AT TeleSUR ENGLISH.

ON TRIAL: The Special Tribunal for Lebanon

The Washington Spectator

On Valentine’s Day 2005, a suicide bomb blast close to Beirut’s seaside promenade killed billionaire former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, along with 21 others.

The crime was catapulted to the front lines of international jurisprudence, thanks to the diligent work of Lebanese political partisans and like-minded forces in the global community—who shared a less-than-thinly-veiled goal of sticking it to Syria and/or Syria’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah. The result: a Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which operates in The Hague with United Nations backing. On trial are five Hezbollah members accused of orchestrating the bombing.

The selective nature of justice in this case is rather obvious given that Lebanon’s veritable glut of political assassinations over past decades has not produced any similar effort, even on the domestic level. As Lebanese criminal justice expert Dr. Omar Nashabe notes in a paper published by the American University of Beirut, assassinations and “numerous other serious crimes committed in Lebanon since 1975 have either gone unresolved, unpunished, or were white-washed by amnesty laws and international silence.”

And while apologists for the STL cast it as a precedent-setting move in the fight against impunity, the fact that the court has hosted testimony by Lebanese sectarian warlords-cum-politicians—themselves with the blood of Lebanon’s civil war still on their hands—would seem to nip that claim in the bud.

Nor have the tens of thousands of victims of regular Israeli rampages across the country been deemed special enough for a tribunal aimed at holding their murderers accountable. Never mind that the court, which advertises itself as “the first tribunal of its kind to deal with terrorism as a distinct crime,” defines terrorism in part as something “liable to create a public danger.”

In wantonly bombing Lebanese apartment buildings, family vehicles, and the like, Israel would seem to have terror down to an art.

Israel, it bears mentioning, has been categorically exempt from suspicion in the Hariri killing, despite its history of interference in Lebanese politics and the fact that it benefited mightily from the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon—one outcome of the assassination.

Beyond its focus on “terrorism,” the STL is unique in other ways, as well. For one thing, it’s a trial in absentia, since none of the defendants has been delivered to the court. As former defense counsel member Philippe Larochelle recently explained to me, the best-case scenario for the prosecutors in the end is that “you get a conviction for five ghosts.” READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR.

Israel: No promised land for Ethiopian Jews

Middle East Eye

GONDAR, Ethiopia—Recently in the northwestern Ethiopian city of Bahir Dar, I had the pleasure of encountering an Israeli tourist who was displeased by the superior fees charged to foreign visitors for entrance to the country’s museums, churches, and other sites. Ethiopian citizens pay much less.

Never mind that the per capita annual income in Ethiopia - $550 according to the World Bank’s last calculation - is less than the price of the average round-trip ticket from Tel Aviv to Addis Ababa.

According to the Israeli, the disparity in entrance fees was tantamount to “racism” - a curious choice of vocabulary, no doubt, for a white person hailing from a state that has racism rather down to an art, and even more curious in the context of Ethiopia in particular.

The Ethiopian community in Israel at present numbers about 135,000 people. The arrival of Ethiopian Jews to the Jewish state began in the 1970s, when, as a BBC article notes, “the Israeli secret service Mossad organised their immigration through refugee camps in Sudan,” where they were fleeing war, famine, and persecution. In the 1980s and '90s, the Israeli military staged two major covert airlift operations, dubbed “Operation Moses” and “Operation Solomon” respectively. After that, migration continued in slightly less dramatic form.

While the influx of Ethiopian Jews may have assisted numerically in establishing Israel as the official homeland for Jews worldwide, thereby counteracting rightful Palestinian claims to the area, the resulting skin-colour scheme has proved unwelcome to many sectors of the Israeli population.

For Ethiopians in Israel, racism and discrimination have been the name of the game. Obstacles to a reasonably gratifying existence have included curtailed educational and employment opportunities, with many children forced into what has in recent years often amounted to a segregated school system. A March 2016 article in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported that, “among [Israeli] children finishing 12th grade in 2013 and taking exams, only 26 percent of students of Ethiopian origin achieved matriculation results enabling acceptance to university, compared with 52 percent of the general population”.

Fifty-two, it turns out, is a bit of a recurring number. In 2013, the same paper reported that “nearly 52 percent of Ethiopian-immigrant families [in Israel] are below the poverty line”. As would be expected, unemployment rates for Ethiopian Jews are higher and wages are lower.

Meanwhile, practices aimed at the societal exclusion of dark-skinned Jews have reportedly ranged from decisions by certain landlords not to rent properties to Ethiopian-Israeli families to a recurring denial of marriage licenses to Ethiopian-Israelis in the central Israeli city of Petah Tikva. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Hillary Clinton's faux feminism

Al Jazeera English

Last year, while researching an essay for an upcoming collection titled False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, edited by Liza Featherstone, I discovered that Clinton had deleted a rather incriminating section from the paperback edition of her autobiography.

In the original version, she detailed the lengths to which she went as secretary of state under Barack Obama to ensure the success of the 2009 coup d'etat in Honduras against slightly left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya.

After the coup, Clinton explained, she and select regional counterparts "strategised on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future".

Never mind that the Honduran people had already chosen Zelaya for the immediate future. In the United States' view, apparently, opting for anything less than totally right-wing in Latin America is also a "false choice". READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Dirty Golf: Barack Obama Does Argentina

TeleSUR English

Let’s say you’re the president of the United States and you decide to stage an official excursion to Argentina, the first bilateral visit by an American head of state in nearly two decades. Do you: 

A) time your trip to exactly coincide with the 40th anniversary of a right-wing coup staged by a military junta that went on to forcibly disappear tens of thousands of people in said country, with the encouragement of none other than the United States? 

or 

B) visit some other time? 

If you’re Barack Obama, you apparently go with the first option. When it is then suggested to you by concerned observers that your itinerary may be lacking in the sensitivity department, you decide to spend merely the eve of the coup anniversary in Buenos Aires and then the actual anniversary, March 24, playing golf in southern Argentina. This, of course, also comes off as one hell of a sensitive arrangement. 

Last Thursday, less than a week before Obama’s scheduled descent upon the Argentine nation, U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice announced that the president would use his visit to pledge a “comprehensive effort” toward declassifying additional Defense Department and intelligence records pertaining to the period of the military dictatorship. 

But while Team Obama will undoubtedly milk this promise for all the brownie points it can, those of us with more than a feigned interest in human rights may be forgiven for not jumping for joy. For one thing, “declassification” does not literally translate as such in the American lexicon, as there are inevitably items deemed in need of redaction and other truth-obscuring measures. 

For another, as historian Greg Grandin notes in his recent book on Henry Kissinger, the notorious former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor “himself has noted that the sheer volume of foreign policy paperwork makes it impossible to determine ‘which documents were produced to provide an alibi and which genuinely guided decisions.’” READ MORE AT TeleSUR ENGLISH.

Let’s say you’re the president of the United States and you decide to stage an official excursion to Argentina, the first bilateral visit by an American head of state in nearly two decades. Do you:

A) time your trip to exactly coincide with the 40th anniversary of a right-wing coup staged by a military junta that went on to forcibly disappear tens of thousands of people in said country, with the encouragement of none other than the United States?

or

B) visit some other time?

If you’re Barack Obama, you apparently go with the first option. When it is then suggested to you by concerned observers that your itinerary may be lacking in the sensitivity department, you decide to spend merely the eve of the coup anniversary in Buenos Aires and then the actual anniversary, March 24, playing golf in southern Argentina. This, of course, also comes off as one hell of a sensitive arrangement.

Last Thursday, less than a week before Obama’s scheduled descent upon the Argentine nation, U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice announced that the president would use his visit to pledge a “comprehensive effort” toward declassifying additional Defense Department and intelligence records pertaining to the period of the military dictatorship.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Dirty-Golf-Barack-Obama-Does-Argentina-20160321-0026.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Let’s say you’re the president of the United States and you decide to stage an official excursion to Argentina, the first bilateral visit by an American head of state in nearly two decades. Do you:

A) time your trip to exactly coincide with the 40th anniversary of a right-wing coup staged by a military junta that went on to forcibly disappear tens of thousands of people in said country, with the encouragement of none other than the United States?

or

B) visit some other time?

If you’re Barack Obama, you apparently go with the first option. When it is then suggested to you by concerned observers that your itinerary may be lacking in the sensitivity department, you decide to spend merely the eve of the coup anniversary in Buenos Aires and then the actual anniversary, March 24, playing golf in southern Argentina. This, of course, also comes off as one hell of a sensitive arrangement.

Last Thursday, less than a week before Obama’s scheduled descent upon the Argentine nation, U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice announced that the president would use his visit to pledge a “comprehensive effort” toward declassifying additional Defense Department and intelligence records pertaining to the period of the military dictatorship.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Dirty-Golf-Barack-Obama-Does-Argentina-20160321-0026.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Facebook without borders: reflections from South Lebanon

WARSCAPES

During a recent drive along the Lebanese border with Israel, I posted a photograph to Facebook taken from the south Lebanese town of Adaisseh. Facebook immediately asked if I wanted to specify the location as “Misgav Am, Hazafon, Israel.”

In addition to spawning a temporary panic attack, as generally happens when I am confronted with the inescapability of Big Brother, Facebook also piqued my curiosity. Once I had retrieved my laptop from where I had flung it in fright, I Googled the name and found that the top two suggested searches were “Misgav Am kibbutz” and “Misgav Am terrorist attack.” I went with the latter.

According to a dispatch from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) dated 9 April 1980, three Israelis had been killed the previous day during an assault on the kibbutz nursery by five Palestinian commandos from Lebanon, who were themselves all subsequently killed. The Israeli victims included a soldier and a two-and-a-half-year-old child.

Then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s views on the matter were quoted as follows: “Evil men who are bent on the destruction of Israel carried out this barbaric crime.” Incidentally, the article notes, Begin’s assessment was issued “as he received the Stephen Wise Award from an American Jewish Congress leadership mission visiting Jerusalem.”

Begin and other top Israeli officials attended the funeral in Misgav Am for the child and one of the other victims. According to the JTA, the words of poet Chaim Nachman Bialik were invoked at the service—and translated less-than-poetically by the news agency as: “Even Satan has not yet invented revenge for a little child’s blood.”

But if Satan hadn’t gotten around to it yet, others surely had. Since the foundation of the state of Israel more than three decades earlier, the Israelis had carved out a name for themselves in the massacre business—dispensing with children and older humans alike—under the pretense of responding to Arab aggression. READ MORE AT WARSCAPES.

LETTER FROM BEIRUT

The Washington Spectator

In recent years, many a Western journalist has descended upon the Lebanese capital of Beirut to captivate audiences with tales of the magically multisectarian life in the city, with its seemingly irreconcilable elements: Hezbollah and nightclubs, hijabs and billboard lingerie ads.

In 2010, The New York Times travel section discovered that, “[i]n a city of many faiths—Christian, Sunni, Shiite, Druze—at least one religion is universally practiced: sun worship,” and that “hordes of heliophiles . . . cultivate their bronzed exteriors” at high-end beach resorts. Never mind that the majority of Lebanese face serious impediments, both financial and religious, to baring their exteriors at such locales.

A Lebanese public committed to superficial materialism is perhaps an easier sell than reality, and the Times offers a “final Beirut investment tip: suntan oil.”

Another self-appointed promoter and political-cultural observer of the territory is roving celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who declares Lebanon “fully functioning, more or less” despite its history of hostilities and its 18 different recognized sects. Beirut, he insists, is a wonderland “EVERYONE should visit.”

As official history tells it, the Lebanese civil war was a 15-year-long affair that was brought to a close in 1990. Characterized by ever-evolving battle lines, inter- and intra-sectarian showdowns, foreign meddling, massacres, assassinations, and a bloody invasion by Israel in 1982, the conflict resulted in an estimated 150,000 deaths. At least 17,000 more “disappeared”—and those unknown fates are but one reason the war is far from over and done with.The country does indeed appear to be functioning rather well these days, especially when compared to neighboring war-stricken Syria. But as impressed as the international Orientalist community may be by the juxtaposition of Islam and mini-skirts, the fact of the matter is that Lebanon itself remains in the throes of its own civil war.

I met recently in Beirut with a Lebanese humanitarian worker who has conducted extensive interviews with families of the missing. He described the families as inhabiting a world akin to a “time capsule that is mummified,” unable to grieve properly and condemned to a psychological limbo in the absence of any definitive information regarding their loved ones. READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR.

Colombia's challenging peace process with FARC

Al Jazeera English

Recently on Twitter, Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian President until 2010, took it upon himself to tweet the following line in English: "In Colombia human rights is an exclusive privilege of leftist people."

Never mind that the thousands of "leftist" and other kinds of people summarily executed on Uribe's watch were not in possession of a detectable abundance of human rights.

A pillar of Uribe's deplorable legacy, the so-called "false positives" scandal, saw the Colombian military murder an untold number of civilians and dress the corpses up as guerrillas belonging to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Latin America's longest-running civil war has left some quarter of a million people dead and displaced millions more.

It's not clear what precise incident prompted Uribe's Twitter rumination, but a common tactic of the right-wing Colombian elite - and their international allies - has been to accuse opponents of invoking the human rights discourse to get away with terrorism.

Such allegations naturally obscure the role the Colombian state itself has played in terrorising the population.

A 2014 Al Jazeera documentary features testimony by a former female paramilitary commander who describes collaborative village massacres by the army and paramilitary units - the purpose of the latter being to partially conceal government involvement in mass slaughter: "We killed 15-year-olds … and 16, 20 and 50-year-olds." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.