Avuncular American

End of Mubarak, End of Maalesh

The old joke about Egyptian society ruled by the IBM ethic - Inshallah, Boukra, Maalesh (God willing, mañana, It doesn't matter) - needs a bit of revision after the resignation under popular pressure of Hosni Mubarak.

God willing, democracy will come to take root.  Note the word democracy, not elections, though credible electoral processes are certainly welcome. Inshallah.

Tomorrow - boukra or mañana - in a more democratic Egypt may bring stability and prosperity, but the danger for now is a letdown after the euphoria.

But maalesh, that fatalistic default position where today's woes are regrettable but will certainly be there tomorrow, has suffered a serious blow.  Despairing Egyptians, faced with the stultifyingly corrupt practices of a civil service that could turn the simplest of administrative procedures into a lifelong quest, used to jump off the roof of the infamous Mogamaa Building off Tahrir Square.

Maybe that was urban legend, but the truth is that they summoned up the courage not only to block access to the all-powerful Mogamaa, but also to block a President-for-life, and his hereditary plans for a "republic" in name only.

Mubarak and his sons, no doubt, counted on the famous Egyptian quality of contentment or qanaa, a tranquility of the spirit that put up with three decades of impunity.  But every good quality, when abused, has its limits.  Maalesh - no more.

Saints Preserve Us From "Doctor" Terry Jones

Tangier, Morocco, September 11, 2010

Yesterday, September 10, was the Aid al-Fitr, or the feast day after the Muslim month of fasting and prayer, Ramadan.  The RFI correspondent in Tangier gave a nice image of the place on this festive day, which, according to one interviewee, consisted of "eating all day." Sounds like American Thanksgiving day.

Cut to September 11 in the US, where apparently all the world's media have camped out in front of a 50-person church in Florida, waiting to see if the Bible Koran burner will carry out his act, or not, as he has said of late.  Keep us in suspense, Terry, while you've already done your damage.

You see, there's been enough coverage worldwide - especially in the Muslim world, on its special feast day - to have done more damage to the American image.  The country founded on religious freedom, unable to come to grips with the establishment of a Muslim center in downtown New York.  Tolerance for the Terry Joneses, who already burned his bridges in Germany before he thought about burning holy books, but not for the "Imans" (as he calls imams).  Maybe he was going to see Iman.

So here's the point of this post.  Should the "Reverend" Jones renege on his latest promise and in fact carry out his act, I want to put it in print that I will resent being immolated in return by a mob looking for an easy American target.  It's no secret: the American Legation in Tangier is in the middle of the medina, a labyrinth of alleys that the police rarely frequent.  We are on our own.

And I thought our days of fear-inducing September 11 memorials were over.  Where for years, it would be a chance to ramp the "fear up" campaign to further war plans.  This time, the fear is not emanating from the White House or from Cheney's bunker, but from a small church in Florida.

So Terry, stay away from those matches.  Go back to running your business-cum-"church," in the time honored tradition of American hucksters.  And let the press cover something important, like how it is that the country that has room for the Dove World Outreach Center cannot accomodate the Cordoba Faith Initiative, named after a Spanish city whose reputation under centuries of Muslim rule was as a light of religious tolerance.

As my mother used to say, a souvenir from her old Ireland, "Saints preserve us."  From this man of "religion."

Image: Morocco Board News Service

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...

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.

In Memoriam

This year we are not making our usual pilgrimage to an American military cemetery for Memorial Day (the photo at left is from Flanders Field a couple of years ago).  But I did get to see the next best thing, the PBS documentary Hallowed Grounds, which shows again on PBS stations in the US next Monday May 31, the official Memorial Day holiday.  The film shows every American overseas cemetery, and provides context to the battles that led to the soldiers' final resting places.

Last weekend we were in Luxembourg, and if any country honors US war dead as much as their own, it is Luxembourg.  Its American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) cemetery outside the capital is home to General George Patton, buried with his troops, many of whom fell during the Battle of the Bulge.  Whether it's Luxembourg, France, Belgium or elsewhere, count on local citizens to adorn each American grave with the Stars and Stripes and their own national flag.

This particular Memorial Day comes at a time when Europe is remembering that 70 years ago, in May and June 1940, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France were reeling under the onslaught of the German blitzkrieg that ended the Phony War.  The Maginot Line, Dunkirk, and all that.

Today, another reminder of wars past and veterans present.  The highest French judicial body, the Cour Constitutionnelle, held that "colonial" veterans from places as far afield as Algeria, Morocco, and Senegal cannot be given second class status in terms of pensions.  Veterans groups hailed the move as a victory for equal treatment.

To the veterans, wherever they are from, and to the fallen, wherever they lie.

Ageless, Boundless Energy

Vicarious thrills, courtesy of friend Liam, pictured here with a dozen friends atop Machu Picchu (who got there hiking the 4 day Inca Trail, not your touristy train/bus ride).  It was, by the way, Liam's 67th birthday.

Yet another piece of evidence, if we needed any, of the increasingly elastic definition of - how can I put it? - "old."  Liam would probably shoot me if I used his name and that adjective in the same sentence.

I'm in Washington this week, attending the first board meeting of the foundation that just hired me - a spring chicken in my late fifties! - to head an institute in Morocco.  I'm thrilled.

In the 8 years since I retired from the US Foreign Service, all of my employment experiences have been with US-based organizations.  I mention this because the matter of retirement age, employment for seniors (or people older than the 35 that is sometimes listed as the outer age limit for EU jobs), and lifetime employment is seen differently in Europe.  85 year old baggers in supermarkets have not yet appeared in Europe.

Nor would I wish that on societies that generally appear to bequeath a right to a decent life to their elderly.

But Europe simply must find ways to emulate what appears to be a matter of course in the US: considering the resource that the recently-retired represent.  If you can schlep up Macchu Pichu, you can probably manage a program for an NGO.

Splits, Belgian Style

This post was almost entitled Les fleurs du mal, but I couldn't associate these beautiful bluebells with anything negative.  The walk in the woods yesterday, in Halle - the "H" in BHV (of which more below) - was as usual devoid of politics, though as expected in this part of suburban territory southwest of Brussels (a.k.a. "B" in BHV), all the trail signs were in Dutch.  We have adopted a formula when encountering fellow hikers, who could either be Flemish or French-speakers (or maybe even other foreigners) - my wife says bonjour, and I say goeiedag, like the Aussi "G'day!"  A perfect example from the foreigners to the locals on how to use their unique linguistic situation to positive effect.

What, you might ask, is all this BHV stuff?  It's shorthand for a federal voting district, the only one remaining in Belgium that crosses linguistic lines.  Brussels, Halle, and Vilvoorde, which in almost any other country would simply be called "Greater ______" and here should be called "Metropolitan Brussels," remain stitched together in a throwback to the days when Belgium saw itself as a unified country.  The goal of most of the Dutch-speaking political class is to "split" (that's also the Dutch word) BHV, leaving the officially bilingual but mostly francophone Brussels even more of an island in Dutch-speaking Flanders.  The French-speakers see that as a dangerous step towards splitting the country (they call it scission, which does conjure up the word secession).  

Belgium does "splits" rather naturally, though the results are never as clean as log-splitting being prepared here in the Hallerbos.  We know a couple from neighboring Luxembourg who studied in the ancient University of Louvain when it was located in Leuven, a lovely Flemish town east of Brussels.

They were there in the Sixties, when Flemish nationalists succeeded in chasing the francophones away, who then proceeded to build Louvain-la-Neuve, a soulless concrete new town dedicated to housing the French half of the university.  Right down to the books.  Just think of Harvard's library, divided along, say, color lines: "green books stay here, red covers off to Cape Cod Community College."  Our friends and many others wept at the mindless sectarianism, which back then even included violence.

These days, the separatists appear to be using nitpicking linguistic laws rather than brute force, and the cumulative effect is probably as efficient.  Some francophones who would brave the linguistic divide in search of better housing or cheaper prices run up against laws that are written with linguistic purity in mind.  Some discriminative practices set up by the Flemish authorities have run afoul of the Council of Europe, the human rights watchdog, notably over the "Wooncode" which makes the needy pass a Dutch test to become eligible for social housing.

But how about the current political crisis, you ask?  Oh yes: last week a report on BHV triggered the resignation of the Prime Minister, which brings us full circle to summer 2007, when elections started a cycle of interim PM, interminable negotiations to form a coalition, Leterme I government, resignation and another governement, followed by Leterme II, followed by his second resignation...  I've actually left out a couple of resignations.

As Julian Stares says in today's London Observer, there's an apocryphal story about how British leaders "give their Belgian counterparts less time than others at EU summits because they know that within a year or two they'll be dealing with someone new."  That would certainly be true in the last three years.  Think of the economic cost to Belgium of this protracted political instability - would you invest here?

Belgian politicians, it would seem, abetted perhaps by a news media that gives inordinate amounts of coverage to the most obscure of quarrels over linguistic-regional issues, blithely ignore the toll their games are taking on the image of Belgium.  If anything, they should be worried about "Brand Brussels," which is the international hook that draws foreign investors and visitors.  But to many Flemish politicians, Brussels is a kind of Gomorrah of immigrants, crime, and French-speakers.  They don't like it, but they don't want it to leave their embrace.

At least we can go for a walk in the Flemish forest.  Goeiedag.

Race, Africa, and Terreblanche

Eugene Terreblanche, "whose very name highlighted the white supremacist's roots," according to the BBC obituary, was murdered this Easter weekend in South Africa.  As Nick Broomfield, who once made a documentary on the Afrikaner insurgent (His Big White Self), told the BBC, Terreblanche was "an unpleasant piece of work."

This is definitely a case of reap what you sow, what goes around comes around, and live by the sword, die by the sword.  The impending end of apartheid saw his AWB unleash terrorist bombings that might have gone the way of the OAS scorched earth campaign in the last days of French Algeria, and later Terreblanche beat a farm worker so badly that the man suffered brain damage and is paralyzed.  For this and other crimes, Terreblanche did prison time in the new South Africa.

What has South Africans of all colors worried is that Terreblanche's death will call attention to the spate of murders of white farmers in rural South Africa, and comes only days after the Supreme Court had to ban the song "Shoot the Boer."  Not good publicity on the eve of the World Cup.

Terreblanche's name and his apartheid cause are synonymous with racism in Africa, but of course whites do not have a monopoly on racism.  Just ask Zimbabwean farmers.  One of the keys to South Africa's continued success has been its relatively peaceful transition from white minority rule, thanks to the inspired leadership of Nelson Mandela.  Nevertheless, some 3,000 white farmers have been killed since apartheid's fall.

In East Africa, tourists can buy Mzungu t-shirts, and charity worker Mzungu Mike explains that the Swahili word means "white person, presumed rich."  It's mostly in good fun - most Kenyans and Ugandans see the presumed rich mzungus as potential contributors to their own livelihood.

In Nigeria, white people are sometimes called oyibo (these guys, among the rare white tourists who have braved Nigeria, took it as a term of affection, as in "what are these crazy oyibos doing here?").  And the Nigerian government has been smart to profit from Mugabe's Pyhrric expulsions of white farmers, offering land to many white Zimbabweans, who plan to stay in the country.

Afrikaner author Marq de Villiers, another Huguenot descendant, wrote in his 1987 book "White Tribe Dreaming" that Terreblanche was a "bittereinder of his day."  Like his bitter ender forebears who refused to buckle to British rule after their defeat in the Boer War, Terreblanche could never adapt to a country where one-man-one-vote was the law of the land.

Live by the sword...

The Church's Celibacy Crisis

A little thought amidst the furor over responsibility for allowing pedophile priests to continue unchecked for years, whether in the US, Ireland, Germany, or any other place that hasn't yet made it to the growing list of Priests Gone Wild.

The thought is this: can an institution - the Catholic Church, especially the Vatican - governed by men whose entire lives have been ruled by the tradition of celibacy, properly gauge the import of these outrages on children?

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd fulminates

Vulnerable children were not protected by the male hierarchy of the church, which treated sexual abuse as a failure of character rather than a crime. The men were so arrogant it never occurred to them that they should be accountable to the secular world. In their warped thinking, it was better to let children suffer than to call the authorities, embarrass the church and risk diminished power.

I submit that the nature of this imposed celibacy, which was not a feature of early Christianity, has come to warp the human reactions of the Church hierarchy as to the "value" of children.  Compared, that is, to the reputation of priests and the institution they represent.

Talk to parents of children, and you'll hear nothing but rage at the thought of their loved ones suffering at the hands of supposedly chaste priests.   And the majority of celibate priests, nuns, and monks who follow the code, however difficult, and are tainted by the shame of their fellow religious.

I cannot imagine the hurt that this has caused good priests and nuns, which is the only kind of priest or nun I've ever known.  Good name and reputation is essential in any calling, but none more than a religious vocation, which is based on a moral code.

While all priests are not predators, nor all pedophiles celibate (just think of the married monsters like Marc Dutroux who abused and murdered other people's children while his own were at home), there is a danger in imposing celibacy as a job requirement.  Future Church, a liberal Catholic group which calls for Optional Celibacy (image above) and a priesthood open to women, has compiled an interesting "Brief History of Celibacy."

From married apostles at the outset, through enslavement of priests' wives and abandonment of their children in the Middle Ages, Church history regarding celibacy has been a downward spiral of demonization of women, with a subset of obsession over sexual matters.  Priests, once permitted to lead lives that included wives and children, were forced to see them as the Forbidden Fruit.  And we know how hard it is to resist temptation.

Making celibacy optional would not rid the Church of pedophiles, just as liberal modern society has not rid itself of a host of sex crimes.  Predators there will always be, just like cheats, thieves, bullies and all manner of baddies.

But a Church where Children"R"Us - instead of just other peoples' kids - might come to regard women and children with an attitude befitting an inclusive, holy institution.