Avuncular American

Israel: Swift Sword, Into Foot

In the heady days after the Six Day War, when the IDF vanquished numerically superior forces on three fronts, retired US Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall wrote Swift Sword: The Historical Record of Israel's Victory, June 1967.  Now, the title might have to be Spin Swiftly: Israel Inflicts Own Goal In Showdown With Aid Flotilla.

All the spin in the world isn't helping this time.  The Israeli MFA deployed its multilingual team of spokespeople, native speakers of English, French, Arabic, and the infinite diversity of languages brought back from the diaspora by the Aliyah.  To little avail.  When the IDF commandos wind up alienating 81 year old diplomats like retired US Ambassador Edward Peck, they probably have lost already.  What are they going to do, sink the next ship with Nobel Peace Prize winners aboard?

Israel may have the best spinners, but if the message is in contradiction to your very foundation - "Let my people go" - then audiences will quickly figure it out.  Yes, it would be nice if the Palestinians could deploy their own diaspora, who probably have as wide a linguistic background as the Israelis.  For now, they choose people whose imperfect command of English and of PR 101 leaves them at a distinct disadvantage.  The other problem: Israeli spokespersons represent a country, and Palestine does not yet have that status.

Which brings us to the heart of the problem.  As Israeli writer Amos Oz says today ("Israeli Force, Adrift On the Sea") in the New York Times

the only way for Israel to edge out Hamas would be to quickly reach an agreement with the Palestinians on the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as defined by the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

Amen.  Minus that, flotillas will continue to float - and rockets will resume flying.

(Image: Mother Jones)

From the Pillars of Hercules

The image, thanks to NASA, and the change to my blog description ("from the medina of Tangier") provide hints as to changes afoot at Avuncular American.  In case you're wondering about the title of this post, here's help.

For the next couple of weeks, I will be transitioning to a new job, which will involve cultural diplomacy from a fascinating place in the Maghrib.  The Old American Legation in Tangier, Morocco, will be my home, running TALIM, the Tangier American Legation Institute for Maghrib Studies.

I've even set up the skeleton of a blog, which I hope you'll read as I settle in.

Avuncular American will continue, though maybe at a relaxed pace, since I'll have my hands full running a combination cultural center, museum, research library and conference site.

To all my faithful readers, thanks.  And stay tuned!

Algerian Elections June 1990

The most impressive tactic in the mass demonstration was the silence.

The bearded FIS - French acronym for the Islamic Salvation Front - demonstrators wound their way up the hills of Algiers in perfect order, even arranging their own ambulances in case of mishaps (there were none).  The silence was eloquent, and it showed better than any banner or slogan that the new party could impose discipline.  But could it get out the vote?

(image, Jurist, University of Pittsburgh)

It was spring 1990, and I had just arrived in Algeria to take up my new job at the American Embassy as head of the political section.  I had actually left a tropical paradise several months early to get to Algiers in time to cover the first contested elections since Algerian independence in 1962.  I knew it would be interesting, but I was unaware that I'd be a witness to a sea change in this North African country's history.

Twenty years later, we can look at Algeria's municipal and regional assembly elections of June 12, 1990 as a dangerous experiment in democracy, one that degenerated into a quasi-civil war after the Army canceled parliamentary elections that the FIS was slated to win in January 1992.  But that conventional wisdom is based on a certain determinism.  Algeria need not have descended into more than a decade of bloodletting.

In spring 1990, then Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid, two weeks before the elections, raised hopes when he said that "the time of top-down governance is over.  Ruling party and opposition must be elected, not co-opted or parachuted in by the machine."  Few believed that he was sincere.  After all, street signs in Algiers pointed to the "Headquarters of The Party," as in the single party, the FLN that had led the country to independence from France.

That blasé attitude was certainly present in a little corner restaurant where I'd stopped for lunch on June 12, taking a break from my urban walkabout to observe polling sites.  The man at the table near mine, a civil servant, wasn't even voting.  "Why bother?" he scoffed, "we know what the results will be."  That would have been true before June 1990, but that day, it was to be different.  The party that got out the vote would win.

And that's what the FIS did.  In polling place after polling place, I came across the ubiquitous FIS election observers.  All the parties were authorized to place their watchdogs at the election sites; only the FIS did it with any regularity.  Truth be told, some of the small "democratic" parties probably didn't have sufficient members to allow other than a symbolic presence.  But even the ruling FLN was absent.  Like my lunchtime friend, they said "why bother?"

The rest is history.  The FIS' 4.5 million votes were double that of the FLN, and left all other parties in the dust.  FIS members took up positions as mayors of Algiers, Oran, and all the major cities.  It maintained its hold on municipal and regional assemblies until its dissolution after the January 1992 coup.

Years later, I listened to an Algerian general at an international conference refer to "democratic terrorism" to explain the FIS electoral victories of June 1990 and December 1991, as if voting were somehow illegitimate if you disagreed with the results.  We know where that attitude led.

The world still hasn't come to grips with the quandary of what to do when the "wrong" side wins, especially when it's an Islamist party.  In Gaza, the Hamas winners of the January 2006 elections are still waiting to do their victory lap...

Obama: No Crying Over Spilt Oil

Poor President Obama.  All those pundits trying to get him to become the Emoter-In-Chief.  At least Frank Rich in today's New York Times advises him to take a course more in keeping with his character: "Don't Get Mad, Mr. President.  Get Even."

Once the leak is plugged (you see, I'm the incurable optimist), once the cleanup is underway, then is the time for systemic action.  It has to do with oil people embedded in the Interior Department and Monsanto people writing safety regulations in the FDA, and lobbyists in bed with politicians in Congress.

Thanks, by the way, to IdiomsByKids.com for the great illustration above. As we already know thanks to Malia Obama, the kids get it.

No use in crying over the disaster caused by, as Frank Rich calls them, the "corporate corner cutters."  That CCC of corrupt conniving capitalists - as opposed to virtuous capitalists, who really do exist - has to be kept under the thumb of regulators.  But that is for the aftermath, once BP (aided, perhaps, by the US Navy's deep sea specialists) plugs the flood of oil spewing from the ocean's floor.

Meanwhile, deploy the CCC.  You thought that the Civilian Conservation Corps went the way of the Depression and the ensuing New Deal.  Well, you're right.  And wrong.  The CCC lives.

Under a glowing photo of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Conservation Corps, consisting of 3,000 18 to 25 year olds (with over 100,000 alumni since its inception in 1976), is able to deal with many environmental disasters, including

Oil Spills, Search-and-Rescue, and more --There are specially trained oil spill cleanup crews and search and rescue crews.

That is just what we need, at least until the Obama Administration creates and trains a similar Federal corps.  Maybe Arnold will allow Barack to Federalize the CCC - the state needs all the revenue it can get, and BP could be made to pay the bill.

Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida - what are you waiting for?  Write to the CCC's Director David Muraki (david.muraki@ccc.ca.gov). 

Diego Garcia: Freedom's Footprint, or Enduring Injustice?

Note: This article appears in the "Speaking Out" column of the June issue of the Foreign Service Journal, "The magazine for foreign affairs professionals" published by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA).  I have wanted to write it ever since visiting Diego Garcia in 1989.

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In the last decades of the previous century, two isolated archipelagos continued to fly the Union Jack thousands of miles from the mother country, outposts for a handful of British citizens.  Located near strategic territory, these repositories for precious resources remained prized possessions even as the sun was setting on the rest of the empire.

In one of the archipelagos, the Falkland Islands, Britain went to war to eject enemy forces that claimed the territory.  In the other, the Chagos Islands, it welcomed friendly foreign troops, but exiled the islands’ inhabitants.

One can take the analogy between Diego Garcia (the principal island in the chain) and the Falklands too far, of course.  The foreign troops in the latter location only became the enemy in 1982, when a dictatorship sent them to grab the Malvinas, as Argentina still calls the Falklands.  And in the case of Diego Garcia, the United Kingdom was a full partner in making its territory available to the forces of its closest ally, the United States.

But the analogy, which has been made in the British press and courts, contains one very disturbing kernel of truth.  In the Falklands, the inhabitants are white, with implicit rights to protection as British citizens -- while the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, descendants of African slaves, were black, and weren’t even told that they were British citizens when they were summarily removed from the islands.  And why were they evicted?  Because the United States wanted all the islands depopulated.

A Lie Comes to Life

We think of Diego Garcia – if we think of this remote mid-Indian Ocean outpost at all – as a reassuring sandy aircraft carrier of an archipelago, ready to launch planes on missions to the Middle East or to Southwest Asia.  That role was conceived in the 1960s, when London agreed to lease Diego Garcia to Washington.  And if both parties are amenable to a renewal of the lease prior to 2016, Diego Garcia might well continue to serve its strategic role for the rest of the 21st century.

But the original agreement was based on a lie that wrecked the lives of the families who had been living on the islands for generations: that the islands were uninhabited.  To make this fiction a reality, the inhabitants of Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Islands – known as Chagossians or Ilois  – within the British Indian Ocean Territory had to go.

Los caminos de la memoria - Digging Up Franco's Spain

Honor thy father and mother.  José-Luis Peñafuerte does this in the most effective way possible in his documentary Los caminos de la memoria (poster, official site).  The son of Spanish exiles, this Brussels-born film maker has been on-topic since his very first documentary, Niños, about the orphans of the Spanish Civil War.

With Los caminos de la memoria, Peñafuerte probes the nature of history, which for the forty years of Franco's rule following his victory in the Civil War, he "owned."  The only official memorials are to the Falangist (fascist) dead, even now, more than three decades after Franco's death.

Quietly, scraping away at the layers of silence, Spaniards of all ages are searching for their version of the truth.  As "Z" screenwriter Jorge Semprun, another Spanish exile has said, the values of the defeated Republic - democracy and social justice - are those of the current democratic monarchy.  But officially, a kind of omerta has reigned, where political justice is forsworn in the interests of keeping the peace.

Octogenarians like Semprun, poet Marcos Ana, and others aren't normally "stars" in feature films, but they shine in this documentary.  People who look like your grandpa or maiden aunt keep a class of teenagers spellbound, and you can see the youngsters doing the mental math: she was my age when she was rounded up; he wasn't much older than me when he was tortured...

Francisco Franco was a friend of Hitler and Mussolini, but after treading a fine line to avoid direct involvement in World War II, he morphed into a Cold War anticommunist ally of the West.  His killing fields are spread like blood spattered on the map of Spain (a particularly effective shot has a researcher pinning red dots at excavation sites across the country).

This is a very topical film: crusading Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon was recently chastised for having wanted to delve too energetically into Spain's murky Civil War and Franco past.

But the guilty need not fear the victims and their families.  Most would just be happy, like the families in Morocco's Nos lieux interdits, for a decent burial for their loved ones.  And once you raze Franco's notorious Carabanchel prison in Madrid - the film shows it in all its sinister glory just before its destruction - you lose another historical marker.  Like bulldozing Auschwitz in the name of reconciliation.

Reconciliation - with whom?  Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini are long gone.  It's their modern day fan club that we need to worry about.  Los caminos de la memoria at last gives a voice to those who resisted.