Avuncular American

Belgium's Lost Year: Politics Cancels Governance

(Image source: Brussels Export)

This has happened more than once in the past 12 months: Belgium decides to have an existential crisis when we happen to be away.  But existential political crises are the norm in a country where there are seven parliaments, three languages, and borders that include a wonderful geopolitical construct sometimes called the donut.*

The current kerfuffle is, again, essentially over the future outlines of the "linguistic frontier," both on maps and in how decentralization is pushed to its limits, before the "country" is no more than a shell for the all important regions and communities (Dutch speaking Flemish in Flanders, French speaking Walloons in the south, Germanophones along the eastern border, and a mix of all of the above, plus lots of internationals, in Brussels).  Things came to a head on July 15, the deadline for an "institutional reform" (Belgian for separatism) package.  See Le Soir cartoonist and author of "Dessine-moi la Belgique" Pierre Kroll for his take on the impact of the deadline on the daily life of Belgians.

The recent proffered resignation of Prime Minister Yves Leterme is simply the latest manifestation of the seemingly limitless capacity of Belgian politicians to conduct themselves as if the only thing elected officials should do is play politics.  Things like economic impact, national image, care for the national brand - those are for sissies.  Brinkmanship is the name of the game, and Leterme's resignation (as of this writing, not yet accepted by the head of state, King Albert II) is almost a footnote.  He's still in place, running a caretaker ("affaires courantes") government, and the name most talked about as a replacement in a future (coalition, as always) government is... Yves Leterme ("Leterme II").

Economic, business, and labor leaders throw up their hands in frustration: "A wasted year," sighed Vincent Reuter, head of the Wallonia employers association.  Essentially, the country has had a full year of holdover caretaker governments or short-lived successors since elections in summer 2007.  Months ago Belgian economists hazarded guesses on the cost of the crisis, which has only been compounded since.  The reaction of the politicians?  Hold the economy hostage to the outcome of a redistricting proposal dear to the hearts of Flemish politicians, and anathema to the French speakers.

The redistricting of the Brussels Hal Vilvoorde (BHV) constituency is a vital issue, even though trying to explain it to anyone living outside of Belgium results in understandable yawns.  Vital only because it risks splitting Dutch speakers and Francophones in the only area - the capital and its hinterland - where they live in close proximity.  Francophones (and many interested observers) fear that such a split would only be a precursor to further Flemish moves to bring an end to Belgium as a country.

Rather than splitting BHV, some thoughtful citizens are circulating a petition to unite Brussels and its hinterland, known by its historic name of Brabant (which exists, of course, in Flemish and Walloon versions).   They point out that the greater Brussels represents 2 million people, 1/3 of Belgium's GDP, and "more NGOs, lobbyists, embassies and consulates than Washington DC."  The Greens - probably the only Belgian political grouping that truly coordinates between its French and Dutch speaking sections - had earlier tabled proposals along the same lines, noting the natural synergies that regionalization would bring to the capital area, in terms of transportation and economic development, not to mention the main beneficial side effect of restoring some sense of shared destiny.

But there are other centrifugal forces at play, and not just on the Flemish side.  There has always been a fringe "rattachist" element wanting to find refuge with France, but of late at least one serious politician has come out with a "Belgique française" scenario in case the Flemish carry matters to their logical, separatist, conclusion.  Last month there was brief attention in the international press to the idea of a "Brussels Corridor," floated every few decades when Bruxellois get antsy about being cut off from their French speaking cousins down the road in Waterloo.

*So what about the donut?  It's actually worse than that.  According to Wikipedia (be sure to look at the map):

Baarle-Hertog is noted for its complicated borders with Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands. In total it consists of 24 separate pieces of land. Apart from the main piece (called Zondereigen) located north of the Belgian town of Merksplas, there are twenty Belgian exclaves in the Netherlands and three other pieces on the Dutch-Belgian border. There are also seven Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves. Six of them are located in the largest one and a seventh in the second-largest one. An eighth Dutch exclave lies in Zondereigen.

The border is so complicated that there are some houses that are divided between the two countries. There was a time when according to Dutch laws restaurants had to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border it meant that the clients simply had to change their tables to the Belgian side.

Let's hope that this doesn't become the template for Belgian cartographers.

War - If You Can Afford It

Aid groups say the crisis in Ethiopia was the worst since 1984, when a famine captured the world's attention and killed around one million people. The current drought, in a country where more than 80 per cent of its 79 million people live off the land, has been compounded by global food price rises. The famine comes as Ethiopian troops fight a bloody battle [in] Somalia, backing the government against Islamic insurgents.

The Telegraph (UK) 9 June 2008

On the face of it, there is absolutely no correlation between the Ethiopian famine and its intervention in neighboring Somalia.

Nor is there a link between the events in the Horn of Africa and the American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

Except for this: sustainability, and "affordability."  Just as a thoughtful observer might reflect "What the hell are the Ethiopians doing... occupying a neighboring country when they can't feed their own people?..." so too might that same question be asked of the United States in Iraq.  "What the hell are the Americans still doing in Iraq when _____?"  Here you get to fill in the blank:

• they allow huge swaths of their population to go without health care?
• bridges collapse, cities sink because "it's too expensive" to fix them?
• millions are evicted from their homes, and the financial system teeters?
• they allow the dollar to fall through the floor, and China owns what's left?

War, which leaders assure us they want to avoid at the very time that they are sharpening their swords, is an expensive matter.  In the case of Iraq, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it at 3 trillion dollars.  Ethiopia, which is waging its war in Somalia with the encouragement of the United States, is presumably getting aid from same, but there is an opportunity cost.  Money spent on military hardware is often in place of, not in addition to, spending on helping the Ethiopias of the world grow food.  And where does the money for US military aid really come from?  If the Bush Administration has run budget deficits since it came to office, which it has, then isn't much of government spending like a national credit card?  See reference to China, above.

Which brings me back to Iraq.  This Administration likes to outsource things that used to be the prerogative of governments.  Like the contracting out of security, infrastructure, even intelligence functions, in Iraq.  If you can't win their hearts and minds with your power or principles, you just open up your purse strings.  This is from "Buying Security in Baghdad" by Anna Badhken in last month's Salon.com:

[In a Baghdad neighborhood] ... the U.S. military here pays a monthly salary of approximately $300 to about 300 people, [Sgt. James] Braet says. Some of them work on the neighborhood council, and some of them are members of a pro-government Sunni militia called Sons of Iraq.

"I'd say 80 percent of these people we pay don't do anything," Braet said. "It's just free money"

"So, in other words, you are buying security," I say.  "Pretty much," he responds, and goes back to his steak.

I figure that if the population of Iraq is about 26 million, and if around 7 million of those are adult males (sorry, ladies, but you probably don't have to be paid not to kill), it would cost, at the rate of $300 x 7 million = $2.1 billion a month to buy peace in Iraq.  For some reason, this free-market (of sorts) approach to peace purchasing hasn't gotten sufficient attention.  It might have to do with scruples about noble causes.

$2 billion a month.  The US is currently spending about $12 billion per month in Iraq.  This money is not only "off budget" in the form of funding "supplementals," it's also "off shore."  It's money that the US has to "borrow" from China and Gulf oil investors who currently deign to buy US debt.  So, in one sweeping feat of Bushite outsourcing, I say let's NOT "cut out the middleman" - let's bring him in on the deal: outsource the occupation of Iraq to China.  China has few scruples about dealing with dodgy governments in its quest for raw materials for the Chinese industrial machine.  China might not quibble about human rights, freedom of the press, all those things that the US government spends lots of effort promoting.  China just wants whatever raw materials you possess, thank you.  Maybe they'll even get Iraq's huge oil reserves secured and sell us what they can't use.  With $10 billion saved every month, we might be able to afford some.

Iraq has oil; China needs oil.  The US needs out.  We can't afford Iraq.  They can.

Now, on Ethiopia's famine and Somalia dilemma: do they have anything that China can buy?

Burma's "Deadly Decision" - Aid Ships Steam Away

"Over the past three weeks we have made at least 15 attempts to convince the Burmese  government to allow our ships, helicopters, and landing craft to provide additional disaster relief for the people of Burma, but they have refused us each and every time. It  is time for the USS Essex group to move on to its next mission. However, we will leave several heavy lift aircraft in place in Thailand so as to continue to support international  community efforts to deliver aid," [Commander of U.S. Pacific  Command, Adm. Timothy J.] Keating said.

The Essex ships will now head to the coast of Thailand to backload their remaining  helicopters and personnel on June 11th. "However", said Keating, "should the Burmese  rulers have a change of heart and request our full assistance for their suffering people we are prepared to help."

Press Release, 3 June 2008, US Pacific Command

This has to be one of the most frustrating commands that the good admiral has had to give in his career.   Navy and other US military personnel are used to delivering timely, massive assistance in all corners of the world, whenever natural disasters strike (my first experience in the Foreign Service was helping shepherd Navy and Coast Guard relief to volcano victims on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean).  In the response to Cyclone Nargis and the unprecedented devastation it caused the inhabitants of Burma's Iriwaddy delta, US, French, and British naval ships steamed to Burma's coast.  And waited.  Only to be turned away, repeatedly.

There are lingering glimmers of hope, carrots still dangled out there for the jingoistic junta:

• Admiral Keating's order of June 3 is to take effect June 5, giving two days to reconsider;
• The vessels are to head to the Thai coast, to "backload" helicopters and personnel involved in the relief efforts;
• This operation is to take place June 11, giving the Burmese generals another week to reconsider.

But no one should hold their breath.  Any regime that ignores cyclone warnings and fails to alert its own populace, then deliberately abandons the resulting victims to starvation, disease, and the elements, is not going to be shamed by earnest pleas or strong condemnation.

The only question remaining for the United States is whether it should use the opportunity, awaiting off the Thai coast, to offload further relief supplies on board those ships.  France, whose Mistral contained 15 days' worth of aid for 100,000 people and shelter for a further 60,000, decided to hand over its supplies to the UN's World Food Program after a similar rebuff from the Burmese junta.  The Mistral arrives in Phuket, Thailand today.

As frustrating as that decision must have been for France (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the Burmese attitude "particularly shocking"), offloading its aid was the right decision.  What was it going to do - sail off over the horizon with its holds full of tons of supplies for another rainy day?  What will the Essex Group do next week?

"The Irriwaddy" ("Covering Burma and Southeast Asia), that authoritative Burmese exile publication, has an excellent opinion piece by Aung Zaw, "No Warships Please, We're Burmese," which provides some interesting history to clarify the junta's allergy to warships:

It is safer for an impassive Than Shwe [junta leader] to allow hundreds of thousands of villagers in the Irrawaddy delta region to die rather than permitting a US relief mission to save them—a deadly decision indeed. Than Shwe knows full well that millions of Burmese wait in hope for the arrival of US warships, and not only for the relief supplies they would bring.

At the time of the 1988 democracy uprising, Burma’s military leaders lodged a complaint with the US embassy after sighting a US naval fleet of five warships, including the aircraft carrier Coral Sea, within Burmese territorial waters on the morning of 12 September, six days before the army staged a bloody coup.

The sighting caused “major concern” among Burmese leaders including Ne Win, who in the 1970s had secured US military assistance, including helicopters, in fighting communists and drug warlords.  In those years, Burma sent its officers to the US General Staff College for training and study. Burma’s official policy was, and remains: Americans are welcome, except in times of political crisis.

Applying this policy, the military leaders even refused permission for a US C-130 plane to land in Rangoon in 1988 in order to evacuate US embassy staff during the anti-government uprising.

For paranoid dictators, one person's innocent offer of aid is another's Trojan Horse.  They won't change.  So just offload the cargo in Thailand, turn it over to the UN, and chalk it up to another bad experience with ungrateful dictators.

Women: Don't Do Peacekeeping Without Them

Lieutenant General Karlheinz Viereck is no-nonsense, and he is precise: "Just Do It," he says.  The "it" was the subject of his talk yesterday evening at the Belgian Royal High Institute for Defence (RHID): "Women Building Peace: Adding a gender perspective to enhance conflict management and operational effectiveness."

That might sound a bit "soft" or PC, but the General's message is simple: incorporating gender awareness in peace operations forces improves their effectiveness, and bolsters force protection.  General Viereck knows a thing or two on the subject: he commanded the 2006-2007 EUFOR mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and is Commander of the Bundeswehr Operations Command.

Viereck believes in the top-down approach (he opines that this is already accepted in EU operations, but that NATO still has a way to go); his ideal daily command group meeting clears away many of the uniformed "operators" but retains key advisers in the political, legal, cultural - and gender - fields.  Setting the example at the top, gender awareness is a key element of training in his multinational model, should contributing nations not already include that in their own training program.

In the DRC, Viereck says that including women in patrols was an essential element in "opening up" and helping secure previously no-go slum areas to his troops.  Because Congolese women are often the target of men-with-guns, Viereck notes that it was essential for Europeans-in-uniform to earn their respect and gain the confidence of the women, who also hold the key to access to the community.  Just as intelligence is vital to any mission and its own security, Viereck says it should be a given to include gender advisers and focal points at all levels, in the field as well as headquarters.

Viereck is careful to note that while a gender component is essential in any multinational force, its makeup and activities must be modified according to local conditions.  What works in Congo may not in Afghanistan.  Chatting after his talk, I asked him about the UN's Indian "All Woman" unit (an excellent BBC documentary gave it the non-PC title, "All Girl Squad") in Liberia, which some say is changing the paradigm in peacekeeping operations.  Ever precise, Viereck said that while he had no personal experience with female-only units, the German Navy has found that "women-heavy" ships, where the female-male ratio is heavily weighted towards the former, had a better disciplinary record than simply having a scattering of women in a crew.

In field operations, Viereck would simply be happy to have additional numbers of women.  In Congo, he trained and then rotated women from clerical positions into field patrols, with positive results in intel-gathering and in the "hearts & minds" category.  He indicates that in the Bundeswehr, women constitute roughly 8.7% of the troops, with Germany's goal to double that to 15% (note: the US Army has some 14% active duty women).

General Viereck's "passionate" (as he likes to call it) advocacy for gender awareness makes him a credible proponent for what some might see as a nice-but-optional approach to operations in dangerous missions.  His testimony is a real-world confirmation of the operational effectiveness of the international community's intent.  This focus on gender was enshrined in the 2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325, "a landmark document that addresses the impact of war on women and stresses the importance of women's participation in all aspects of United Nations peacekeeping operations," according to the UN Chronicle.

Women: don't try peacekeeping without them.

(Photo Source: UN Chronicle Online)

Culture Wars, European Style - May '68

I would be remiss in my duty as an observer of the European scene if I let the month of May pass without a comment on May 1968.  Since I was a pimply teenager in Pennsylvania at the time, I cannot speak from personal experience.  But you cannot be alive in Europe in the spring of 2008 without being bombarded with documentaries, books, commemorations - nostalgia of the most maudlin to the intelligently reflective.  At most recent count, 100 books (!) have been published in French alone.

One of the most thoughtful TV programs (now out on DVD), one of the few to put the street protests in France into their international context, is Patrick Rotman's "68."  Francophone readers can listen to an RTL radio interview with Rotman here.  Rotman, as a 19 year old student at the Sorbonne, was a participant and witness.  It was definitely a turbulent year, worldwide.

Anniversaries, especially those ending in round numbers like 40, are fair game for reflection.  Especially when many "soixante-huitards" (in the States, we would say baby boomers) are themselves in their sixties.  In France, there is a particularly contemporary - political - slant to these recollections: President Nicolas Sarkozy is an anti-68, conservative politician, in a country where the dominant intellectual strain grew up in the shadow of the May '68 protests.  Shadows of the US, where "what did you do during the Vietnam War?" continues to fuel political debate, and where the Republican Party would like to program the national DVD player to skip the tracks between Eisenhower and Reagan.

But just like America's boomer hippies have morphed into Wall Street lawyers and Washington politicians, so too have many soixante-huitards joined the establishment.  Probably the best example of a student leader keeping his youthful ideals while succeeding in the political world is "Danny The Red" Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament for Germany's Green Party, though he has as much of a profile in France (born there while his parents fled Nazi persecution, he's perfectly bilingual and bi cultural).  Cohn-Bendit was recently shown chatting with the long-retired chief of the Paris police, who he credits with saving lives (and perhaps French democracy) by holding his fire during the student/labor protests.

"'68" is perhaps most resonant now because of the current existential crisis in the world economic system, with financial, food supply, environmental, and societal (immigration, aging, unemployment) pressures causing many to question the way the Western world organizes itself.  It's another nostalgia "industry," for sure.  But without necessarily offering answers, this season's European retrospectives serve a purpose in forcing introspection of the most useful type.  For the US too, this will be most evident once the Democratic Party finally sorts out its candidate to face John McCain.  Will it be '60s vs. '70s? (age, not decades).  Or will it be McCain national-security-means-guns vs. Obama's more inclusive definition of security through diplomacy, economic strength, and inclusiveness?  The Culture Wars in the United States are not over yet.

It’s My Party – Israel’s Nakba Denial

It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you

Lesley Gore, "It's My Party," 1963

In Europe, some countries outlaw Holocaust Denial, that despicable practice of far right parties (France’s Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has insisted on calling the Holocaust “a detail of history” and has made other outrageous outbursts.  He's had to pay stiff fines).  I know of no law against Nakba Denial, though Israel would like to outlaw talking about the Nakba at the United Nations:

Israel's UN mission is seeking to outlaw use of the term Nakba, after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon telephoned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday night and expressed empathy with the Palestinian people in honor of Nakba Day.  Deputy head of Israel's UN mission, Daniel Carmon, complained that the word Nakba is meant to undermine the legitimacy of Israel's founding and, therefore, use of the term should be should be forbidden.

“Nakba,” or catastrophe, is the term used by Palestinians and other Arabs to describe the loss of their homes and the refugee exodus that accompanied the birth of the state of Israel.  Palestinians, whether they are among the hundreds of thousands who stayed behind in what became post-1948 Israel, or the million-plus who are now living under one sort or another of Israeli control in the Occupied Territories since 1967, or the hundreds of thousands living as refugees (most in camps) outside of historic Palestine – most of these Muslim and Christian Palestinians, whatever their passport (if they even have one) says, must have felt like crying at Israel’s party.

To get some idea of what was lost, just read or listen to the May 15 interview on Democracy Now! with Palestinian doctor and writer Ghada Karmi.  Karmi, who was eight years old when her family “went away for a couple of weeks” from violence in her West Jerusalem neighborhood in 1948, has a unique view of this period, and has written about it in “Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine.”  She explains the unusual title:

The reason it’s called that is that I’ve taken that out of an anecdote... At the end of the nineteenth century, when the Zionists in Europe ... held a very big congress, a conference in Basel in Switzerland, at which they decided ... to create a Jewish state... And they decided that that state was to be in Palestine.

Now, they didn’t know what Palestine was like ... so they sent a couple of rabbis to this place called Palestine, and they said, “Let us know if this is a suitable place.” The rabbis went, they had a look, and they sent back this message to Vienna: they said, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Now, of course, it’s clear what they were saying is, yes, the land is very suitable, it’s wonderful, but it’s full of other people, it’s already taken. And, of course, it was taken by my ancestors. I mean, that’s who it was. That’s who the ‘other man’ was.”

It’s worth letting that anecdote sink in a while.  Those who have read their history books know about the 1917 Balfour Declaration expressing the opinion of His Majesty’s Government that there should be a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, which became operative when Great Britain was given a mandate to govern the former Ottoman province at the end of the First World War.  As James Parkes, in his classic “Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine” wrote, the Balfour Declaration “recognized that there existed already a historic Jewish right, not to but in the country.”  No matter; the Declaration led eventually to the United Nations Partition Plan, and the rest is – history.

Ghada Karmi concludes with devastating logic: “Without Britain, there would be no Israel.”  She takes issue with the notion of Jews In, Arabs Out:

And if you think about it, that has been the basis of the conflict ever since, that the Zionists wanted a territory free of non-Jews in a territory full of non-Jews, and therefore, they had to get rid of the non-Jews in order to make it a territory for Jews. Now, those non-Jews, i.e. the Palestinians, of course didn’t want to be dispossessed, they resisted being dispossessed, and hence, you have a conflict.

... Married to Another Man... had the Zionists said, “This is indeed married to another man. We can’t go here, because the land is already “married.” We can’t be bigamists. We’re going to move on. We’re going to look for somewhere else”—they didn’t. They were determined to do it, and they did it at the most enormous cost to us as Palestinians, because we were dispossessed and displaced in order to make room for the Jewish state, and of course it had a tremendous effect on the whole Arab region.

So, Israel, have your birthday party.  But don’t begrudge the Palestinians their right to commemorate their nation’s tragedy.  In Lesley Gore’s big hit “It's My Party,” she’s crying about Judy taking away her Johnnie.  She lost a boyfriend.  Palestinians lost a country.

You would cry too if it happened to you

Lemon Trees On the Green Line

Once, when we lived in Oman on the Arabian Peninsula, we visited a village perched in the rocky hills of the interior.  We were there to see a falaj, one of the ancient irrigation canals cut into the stony hillsides, carrying precious water to small gardens and orchards.  An Omani farmer took a liking to our small children, and offered us lemons plucked from one of his dozen or so trees.  In hot, arid climates, these bright beautiful yellow fruit, standing out against the dark green leaves, are things of beauty.

And so it is in the West Bank – or more precisely, on the “Green Line” that on paper separates Israel from the Occupied Territories – where Eran Riklis’ Lemon Tree is filmed.  Never has a glass of fresh lemonade looked so inviting.  That’s what visitors to the home of lead character Salma are offered, from her father’s orchard that she has inherited.  From trees that she must protect when politics intrude into her simple life.

Riklis has visited this human terrain before, notably in his 2004 masterpiece, The Syrian Bride.  Watching Lemon Tree, you have to remind yourself that this is an Israeli film, or rather, a film made by an Israeli director.  But, as Riklis said in a Tikkun interview apropos of The Syrian Bride, when asked if it was a “political film”

First and foremost, this is a humane film. It deals with people who are caught inside politics, inside a political world. It’s a pro-people film. On the other hand, of course it contains political elements. In the Middle East in particular, almost everything that you do and refer to is political. Everything has consequences.

The same could be said of Lemon Tree, though it is “political” to a much greater degree.  When you have the “Separation Barrier,” the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, and an Israeli cabinet minister as backdrops or characters in a film, it is political.  Everything is political in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Just as Riklis is sensitive to the nuances of the complex relationship between occupier and occupied, he is a particularly talented observer of the relationships between men and women, in both Israeli and Arab cultures.  Nazareth-born Hiam Abbass, who has already appeared in Riklis’ films, plays Salma with innate grace and intelligence.  Not only does she have to confront Israeli neighbors bent on separating her from her lemon trees, but also has to navigate a male-dominated Palestinian society.  Palestinian officialdom is shown as more troubled over matters of propriety than demonstrating any concern for this defiant widow’s attempts to protect her property.

On the Israeli side of the fence (literally), there is tension in the Minister’s household, where wife Mira (played by revelation Rona Lipaz-Michael) begins to see for herself the human costs of occupation.  Eventually they must face the question: is it better to look out onto a luscious orchard (owned, admittedly by Palestinians of unknown security credentials) or to “enjoy” the security offered by watchtowers and the Separation Barrier?

Today’s “sneak preview” of Lemon Tree was sponsored by the women of Brussels film club “Cinefemme” (whose website has an insightful interview with Riklis), and whose members have been invited by the film’s distributor to provide commentary for a DVD “bonus” segment.  They will have much to discuss.

Pretend Palestinians at Israel’s Party

First I would like to – seriously – extend my best wishes to the Israel of organizations like Peace Now and B’Tselem, and of Israelis like Meron Benvenisti, Uri Avnery, and Eran Riklis.  Peace Now (photo credit) requires no explanation of its work, but here’s a blurb for the others who represent an Israel that can be a good neighbor:

• B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
• Meron Benvenisti, whose West Bank Data Project documented the metastasizing settlements over decades
• Uri Avnery, formerly of the Irgun, now a peace activist
• Eran Riklis, director of “The Syrian Bride,” a film about the human cost of love across borders.

To these and other Israelis of similar sensibilities, happy 60th anniversary, and may your vision of Israel prevail.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Now let’s play Pretend Palestinian ©, where you get to imagine what it’s like when your neighbor/occupier has a 60th birthday party all this month – but you’re not invited!

To make the “game” work, you have to put yourself in the role of resident of a semi-imaginary Washington DC surrounded by, and in some senses occupied by, a hostile Virginia and a domineering Maryland.  Where Washington’s Northwest quadrant – NW – is dotted with settlements of Virginians and Marylanders, a kind of “Area C” – the Oslo Accords term referring to that 60% of West Bank territory that is outside of Palestine Authority control.  In our “game,” it’s the place where non-Virginians or un-Marylanders are regularly evicted from their homes, to fend for themselves in SE.

You, as a resident of SE or NE Washington, have to use a slow two-lane road with traffic lights every 1,000 feet to visit your relatives in suburban Wheaton Maryland – but must make a detour via Baltimore.  The Beltway ring road, you see, is reserved for Maryland and Virginia citizens only, and allows them to bypass those parts of Washington that are run by the “DC Authority.”  The “DC Authority,” which has issued defiant “No Taxation Without Representation” vehicle registration plates, has no Senatorial representation, so its protests are largely ignored.

On the Fourth of July, picnicking Virginians and Marylanders gaze at fireworks on The Mall, but people in SE can only catch a distant glimpse of the “bombs bursting in air” above the Security Barrier that has been erected just east of Capitol Hill...

Okay, you can only go so far with the analogy, but you get the picture.

Palestine could have been celebrating its 60th anniversary this month along with its Israeli twin, but history got in the way.  To convey a sense of what was lost, BBC World TV has been broadcasting a poignant half hour documentary this week called “Jaffa Stories,” by Adam LeBor, author of “City of Oranges.”  Bittersweet, it shows Jewish and Arab residents of what was – and some hope might become again – a picturesque port city where peaceful coexistence ruled.  Jaffa might have remained a major Palestinian city, had the Arab residents not fled Irgun/Stern terrorism in 1948.  One Israeli Arab Jaffa resident on the BBC program hints that his father made the right decision by staying on when most of the family fled.  But that is a judgment only possible in retrospect.

To stay or to leave – that is again the question confronting Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in 2008.  Every day, they face humiliation and frustration that would have long ago overcome other less hardy peoples.  2008: Israel’s 60th anniversary, and the 41st anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza (okay, Gaza is no longer “occupied,” it’s just under siege, and East Jerusalem and much surrounding West Bank land have been annexed into Israel).

Somehow, Palestinians struggle on, still striving for a few crumbs of land in the hope of constituting a rump state, a tiny remnant of what their fathers and grandfathers spurned in 1948.  By expanding settlements in the face of international opposition, by appropriating water resources vital to Palestinian existence, and by myriad daily bureaucratic “deaths of a thousand cuts” (and cutting down thousands of ancient olive trees), Israeli treatment of the people in its Occupied Territories is calculated to discourage and demoralize.  So as Israelis quaff their birthday champagne, here’s one for the persevering Palestinians.

Dr. Said Saadi Diagnoses Algeria’s Democratic Malaise

A delegation of Algerian parliamentarians headed by RCD (Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Democratie) chairman Dr. Said Saadi is heading back home after a lobbying effort in North America and Europe.  Here in Brussels for talks with European institutions, Dr. Saadi took time to speak at the Transatlantic Institute about the situation in Algeria.

The RCD is one of two mainly Berber parties, and though it has one deputy from Ilizzi in the geographic center of Algeria, it is mostly active in the northern Kabylie region and in the capital area, where Saadi represents an Algiers voting district.  Saadi, a psychiatrist by training, has been practicing politics for most of his adult life, and after a brief sojourn in the first Bouteflika government, has returned to the opposition.

Perhaps “loyal opposition” is a more apt term, since on the most important existential question facing Algerian democracy since independence – recognition of the 1991 parliamentary victory by the Islamist FIS party – Saadi and the RCD sided with the Army putsch that overthrew then President Chadli Bendjedid and overturned the elections.  That placed the RCD on the side of the “eradicators” who favored removing the Islamists from the political scene.  So while the RCD contests certain aspects of the Algerian regime, it essentially lends it democratic credibility.  Saadi bristles at the suggestion that he is playing the regime’s game, and sued the newspaper “Le Monde” in a French court in 1998 for suggesting it.

Saadi and his delegation have been lobbying European and American officials, according to his April 1 article in the New York Post, to

seek the help of the United States and other democracies to ensure international supervision of the 2009 presidential and parliamentary elections. We also need their support to prevent a constitutional amendment to let the current president seek re-election despite the two-term limit.

Yesterday Saadi derided 2004 EU observers for certifying Algeria’s 2004 presidential elections, when Saadi accused the Army of stuffing ballot boxes.  That and other electoral fraud is the topic of an RCD brochure, which shows an “Ordre de Mission,” an official-looking laissez-passer issued by “candidate Abdelaziz Bouteflika” (who just happened also to be the President of the Republic) importuning “civil and security authorities” to lend “all necessary assistance” to the bearer of the cards.  Rather hard to refuse.  Saadi told EU election observers that if they can’t send a serious delegation in 2009, they shouldn’t send any.

Dr. Saadi’s analysis – or is it psychoanalysis? – of Algeria’s troubles on the socioeconomic front ring truest: desperate young people taking “suicidal” clandestine boat journeys across the Mediterranean; resurgence of diseases which had been eradicated previously; overcrowding in unsafe housing; and importation of Chinese labor when the unemployment rate is over 30%.  “The domination of the state by an old, corrupt and unpopular minority,” wrote Saadi, “has led to much social misery.”  Describing Bouteflika as a product of the old one-party state under the National Liberation Front (the FLN; road signs in Algiers used to point in the direction of “Le Parti”), Saadi says that the President is trying, by seeking a third term, to set himself up as a “president-for-life.”

Where is the Algerian Army in all this?  Here Saadi’s answer is more nuanced, but indicates that the Army attitude is not monolithic, which may prevent it from responding decisively should the situation further deteriorate.  Translation: in the Algeria of competing “clans,” the security forces are divided over the continuation of Bouteflika’s reign.

Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations has recently written on the behind-the-scenes role of the Algerian military in his book “Ruling Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey.”  In his book, Cook describes the military’s use of “a facade of democratic practices and principles” while continuing to control key institutions.  Therein lies a clue to how the Algerian regime’s management of its nominal democracy may evolve: let the RCD and other “democratic” (meaning non-Islamist) parties play the role of loyal opposition, while ensuring that the real power – over Algeria’s increasingly valuable gas and oil reserves – never leaves the hands of the same “clan” that has been in charge since independence: the military and the “nomenklatura,” those few hundred families that form the nucleus of what Algerians still call “le pouvoir.”

In other words, other than the brief period from early 1990, when the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) won freely contested municipal and regional elections, to late 1991, when they again won nationwide parliamentary elections before they were canceled by the military, Algeria has had an authoritarian regime that tolerates a degree of civilian participation.  Whether or not President Bouteflika succeeds in getting his third term, as long as the movement that won the country’s only free elections is banned, “democracy” in Algeria remains a relative term.

Embedded in the White House: American Journalism Seen From Europe

(Photo source: White House Correspondents' Association)

Mutual self-debasement (though it’s not even necessary)

Last night’s annual celebrity bash presided over by a baton-waving George W. Bush (see the Washington Post’s appropriately chatty listing of who was seen in the audience) was another reminder that all is not quite right in the land of the free press.  Somehow this tradition (which started under Calvin Coolidge, who escaped from the White House just before the Crash of 1929) has evolved (degenerated?) into a yearly chance to live it up and show that “sure, most of us think this guy is the worst president since the office was invented, but we have to ingratiate ourselves with him for another few months, so that he remembers our names at press conferences.”  The President (all fourteen since Coolidge, that is) gets to show his humorous, human side, and agrees to gentle roasting (stress on gentle, ever since Stephen Colbert hit the quick in 2006).

At least the New York Times had the decency to pull the plug on its attendance: "These events can create a false perception that reporters and their sources are pals, and that perception could cloud our credibility," Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty wrote, quoted in Editor & Publisher. "It's not worth it."

Other views on the state of American journalism abound, and they are mostly of the concerned family member variety.  American organizations like the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, and the Newspaper Association of America, among others, have sprung into action to help counter a prevailing view of the Mainstream Media (MSM) as clueless, if not compliant, faced with the onslaught of the Bush Administration.  The concerns are shared abroad, with Reporters Without Borders (RSF in the original French acronym) putting the US way down on its list of country reports on press freedom.

One especially lucid view of America from a concerned friend of the United States is that of Jean-Paul Marthoz, a veteran Belgian journalist, academic, and human rights campaigner.  Marthoz has just published his latest book (Editions GRIP and Enjeux Internationaux) “La Liberté Sinon Rien: Mes Amériques de Bastogne à Bagdad.”  I don’t think there is an English translation yet, but with his long history of connections with the US, Marthoz probably had Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” phrase in mind for his title.  The Bastogne of the subtitle is a reference to Marthoz' Ardennes childhood, when memories were still vivid of the defiant American defense of the town in the Battle of the Bulge against superior German forces.

But the America of Bastogne is far from the Baghdad of the Bush administration.  Marthoz, who places himself squarely in the “liberal” (in the American, somewhat left of center sense, not in the European free market libertarian definition) camp, has no time for either neocons or for extreme leftists.  He knows both North and South America well (“Mes Amériques”), and his book chronicles his years as a correspondent and Human Rights Watch official covering the Western Hemisphere.

The heyday of American journalism, and of democracy

The United States that Marthoz most admires is that of Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, when the White House and Congress pressured Latin American dictatorships and - as survivors of human rights abuses told Marthoz - “saved lives.”  He recalls the kind of investigative journalism that inspired him as a young man, the kind that uncovered the true extent of Watergate, and that disseminated the facts from the Pentagon Papers.  A former Fulbright scholar in the US, he did his masters thesis on press freedom.  He likes to quote Senator J. William Fulbright’s dictum, which guides his life’s work:

To criticize one's country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment. It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences a belief that the country can do better than it is doing. Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism -- a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.

Marthoz told a group of Democrats Abroad Belgium members last week that all was not lost despite the current atmosphere in the States, and the RSF rating of the United States might actually improve for a change, thanks to a Congressional “shield law” to protect journalists from having to reveal their sources.  He notes that the Pulitzer Prizes in 2008 rewarded civic commitment and investigative journalism, both in great need of revival in these times of the “unitary presidency.”

This impressive Belgian journalist – whose goal is “to restore complexity to the world,” the antithesis of the sound-bite oversimplification of “with-us-or-against-us” – deserves a wider audience in the country that welcomed him as a young Fulbrighter.  Perhaps some day a bright Public Affairs Officer at the American Embassy will see that Jean-Paul Marthoz would be an excellent bridge builder between Europe and the United States.  One who believes in a “renewed transatlantic relationship, built on a new foundation,” after the disastrous Bush era.  Maybe under the next president?