Helping Afghanistan

Weekend, weinig tijd. Maar dit is te erg om niet te melden:


"We didn't recognise any of the dead when we arrived," said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. "It was like a chemical bomb had gone off, everything was burned. The bodies were like this," he brought his two hands together, his fingers curling like claws. "There were like burned tree logs, like charcoal.

"The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone."

So the elders stepped in. They collected all the bodies they could and asked the people to tell them how many relatives each family had lost.

A queue formed. One by one the bereaved gave the names of missing brothers, cousins, sons and nephews, and each in turn received their quota of corpses. It didn't matter who was who, everyone was mangled beyond recognition anyway. All that mattered was that they had a body to bury and perform prayers upon.

"A man comes and says, 'I lost my brother and cousin', so we gave him two bodies," said Omar Khan. "Another says I lost five relatives, so we gave him five bodies to take home and bury. When we had run out of bodies we started giving them limbs, legs, arms, torsos." In the end only five families went away without anything. "Their sons are still missing."

Waar rook is zijn luchtafweerraketten

We zullen er aan moeten geloven. De kaping van de Arctic Sea was dus inderdaad geen echte kaping, maar een manoeuvre waar een Israëlische inlichtingendienst (de Mossad?) bij betrokken was. Het schip, officieel geladen met hout, verdween in juli op een reis van Finland naar Algerije en dook veel later, in augustus, weer op bij Kaap Verdië. Time, The Christian Schience Montor, de New York Times, allemaal hebben ze verhalen gebracht dat de kaping in feite een dekmantel was om raketten die vanuit Rusland naar Iran werden verscheept, te onderscheppen. De BBC meldde nu dat dit door Israëlische bronnen was bevestigd.
Maar intussen wordt - ondanks heftige Russische ontkenningen - ook steeds aannemelijker dat de raketten voor Iran niet zomaar raketten waren, maar S-300 mobiele luchtafweerraketten met een grote precisie en een enorm bereik (200 km ver en 27 km hoog). S-300 raketten zouden de bescherming van Iraanse nucleaire installaties aanzienlijk hebben vergroot. Het is begrijpelijk dat de reis die de Israëlische president Shimon Peres halsoverkop naar Rusland maakte, één dag nadat het schip weer was gelokaliseerd, met de Arctic Sea affaire in verband wordt gebracht. Net als de mysterieuze verdwijning van premier Netanyahu, die begin deze week ineens 14 uur lang onvindbaar blijkt te zijn geweest. Hij ontkende overigens naar Moskou te zijn geweest, hij zei een bezoek een aan een geheime militaire installatie te hebben gebracht. Enfin, er zullen mischien nog meer onthullingen volgen.

Hariri kwam, hij ging ... en hij komt straks waarschijnlijk weer terug

En wij altijd maar denken dat Nederlandse kabinetsformaties moeizaam tot stand kwamen. Libanon kan er ook wat van. Saad Hariri, leider van de Mustaqbal (Toekomst)-partij en van de 14 maart coalitie die in juni de Libanese verkiezingen won, heeft na 73 dagen proberen zijn opdracht tot het formeren van een regering teruggegeven aan president Sleiman. Daarmee is een nieuw hoofdstuk toegevoegd aan wat langzamerhand een prachtige soap aan het worden is.
De reden waarom Hariri strandde is de manier waarop hij de 15-10-5 formule uitwerkte die de 14 maart coalitie met de oppositie, de 8 maart groep, overeengekomen was. Deze formule hield in dat er een kabinet van nationale eenheid zou komen, waarin de meerderheid 15 ministersposten zou krijgen en de oppositie tien, terwijl president Sleiman nog eens vijf ministers zou benoemen. Hariri kreeg echter een conflict met generaal Aoun (Vrije Patriottische Beweging FPM) van de 8 maart beweging, die wilde dat zijn schoonzoon Jebran Bassil, die bij de verkiezingen was verslagen, desalniettemin minister van communicatie zou blijven. Hariri gaf de voorkeur aan een volgeling van de Druze Walid Jumblatt, diende zijn definitieve voorstel in bij de president en werd er vervolgens door de oppositie (onder wie Nasrallah van Hezbollah) van beticht dat hij zijn zin doordrukte en niet democratisch te werk ging.
Wat daarvan gezegd kan worden is dat hij in iedere geval buitengewoon onhandig, om niet te zeggen klunzig, heeft gemanoeuvreerd. Maar als we eerlijk zijn, moeten we zeggen dat het ook niet allemaal alleen zíjn schuld was. Ook de Druze Walid Jumblatt gooide roet in het eten. Hij stapte vorige maand ineens over van de 14 maart naar de 8 maart coalitie en sloeg daarmee een bres in de meerderheid van Hariri's meerderheid. (Niemand weet wat het ongeleide projectiel Jumblatt bewoog. Misschien voelde hij zich after all tòch lekkerder in het pro-Syrische kamp).
Impasse dus in Beiroet. Maar vast niet voor lang. Alle waarnemers zijn het erover eens dat alleen de leider van de grootste fractie (Mustaqbal) als formateur in aanmerking komt. En dat is Saad Hariri. Hij zal dus wel weer opnieuw worden gevraagd.

Farouk Hosni is no anti-semite, neither is he the right man for Unesco

This is Farouk Hosni (71), Egypt's minister of Culture since 1987 and a candidate for the post of secretary-general of Unesco, the UN-organization for Education and Culture. His personal website - from which the picture has been taken - tells us that he is in Paris as from 3 september to attend the election procedure, which is exspected to last till the end of the month.
Hosni is one of the nine candidates. Not long ago he seemed to be the one who was going to win. But that changed after it was discovered that, one year ago, he remarked in the Egyptian parliament that he was against having Israeli books in Egyptian libraries and would personally burn them if he found that in fact there were some. He was instantly diagnosed as being anti-semitic and Israel started a campaign against his candidature. Lateron the Israeli's backed down, but some of it's strongest supporters continued the struggle, in print or in person, like Bernard Henri Levy, Claude Lanzman and Eli Wiesel who will also be at be at the Unesco meetings.
Hosni himself tried to defuse the tension in the meantime. Suddenly he discovered that Cairo had an ancient synagogue that urgently needed restoration. Also he remembered that one year ago he ordered to translate some Hebrew books - a project that coincidentally also started this summer.
Synagogue of Rambam (Maimonides) in ancient Cairo. Restoration works started this summer.

Personally I think it is ridiculous to call Hosni an antisemite. For what I know he is much too much of a cosmopolitan, too much man of the artistic world (he's a painter). Of course it was a stupid remark, but it is good to remember that most of the Egyptian intelligentsia (and Hosni is no exception) is strongly against any normalisation with Israel as long as there is no Palestinian state and therefor does not give a damn about Hebrew books, or Hebrew culture for that matter. Campaigning against the Egyptian minister for this reason is simply wrong, in that case anyone Egyptian would be unfit for the post.

Spy
But this does not mean that Hosni is the right man for Unesco. Far from it. Also in Egypt itself there is opposition, because of his spineless faithfullness towards the Mubarak-coterie, his lack of cultural vision and his strange talent for giving thoughtless statements that time and again raise controversies. A number of Egyptian artists and public persons rose in protest against his candidacy and wrote an open letter in which they recalled how the minister, as a young artist living in Paris, used to spy on his fellow Egyptians for the Sadat-regime.
That is one reason. Another is what I witnessed myself. In the spring of 1988 - I had just started my work as a Middle East correspondent in Cairo and Hosni started his job as a minister only a year before - there was, out of the blue, some panic in the world of Egyptology and tourism: the world famous Sfinx in Gizah appeared to be falling apart. The story went the world over, with pictures of slabs that had fallen off and of minister Hosni who announced that he personally had tken matters in hand and had ordered an investigation by the Getty Museum over the head of the Egyptian Antiquities Authority.
The reality of what had happend was somewhat different. Some months earlier Cairo had suffered some really very heavy rains. As a consequence some parts of the Sfinx came down. The head of the Antiquities Authority, one Ahmed Qadri, did not panic however. A restoration of the Sfinx was already some time under way, and so he ordered the slabs to be taken to a storehouse, to be reinstalled in due time, when the restoration process had reached the affected places.
But one day at nine o'clock in the morning, when Ahmed Qadri came to work, he was informed that the slabs had been ordered to be replaced under the Sfinx on orders of minister Hosni, who himself, in the presence of lots of camera's and a small army of reporters was giving a press conference about the extremely bad shape the sfinx was in, and about his plans to save the Sfinx from the imcompetence of the Antiquities Authority. This was, of course, the end of mr Qadri's career (and of his life, the man poor man died shortly afterwards of a heart attack). Unfortunately for him the truth emerged only in one or two Egytian opposition papers and the Volkskrant of the Netherlands (the staff of which, by the way, was not too happy that the story they got was different from everyone else's).
Why did Hosni act like this? One reason may have been that he and Ahmed Qadri had been quarrelling in the press about removing a giant statue of Ramses II in front of the railway station in Cairo. Qadri was against, out of fear that the statue might not survive, Hosni was in favour. Another reason might have been that Hosni wanted the publicity. And he may have also wanted to strip the Antiquities department, that used to behave as a quite autonomous entity, of some of it's autonomy. He got what what he wanted. Qadri was suceeded by his assistant, the flamboyant Zahi Hawass, who, after 20 years is still at the helm and has alsways been a loyal servant of his ministerial boss.

Concrete
Another matter is, how restoration activities in Cairo are being executed. Hosni will, if elected, be responsible for the conservation of many of the world's cultural heritage. It's questionable if he will meet the standards in that respect. A walk through Cairo's antique muslim district, along Muizz liDin Allah Street for example, goes along many centuries old islamic monuments, of which many - with the aid of various countries - have been restored under the supervision of this minister. I am not an expert in this matter, but I suspect that in the 13th or 14th century concrete was not really used as building material. Yet, under Hosni's supervision, it has been used in the rconstruction of parts like stairs in some cases.

Sonallah
An then there is the affair around Sonallah Ibrahim, one of Egypot's best writers, an teernl rbel and a vry humorous an nice man. Sonallah got in 2003 the new, prestigious literary Mahfouz-prize (100.000 Egyptian pounds, or 15.000 euro) for his oeuvre, but stirred an uproar by refusing it. In which was supposed to be his word of thanks he called the prize a honor which he was not going to accept, because the government was unworthy, collaborating with Israel and not representative of the Egyptian people. The government was embarassed, many intellectuals applauded. This year, in june, Sonallah was invited at a literary festival in Toulouse (France), where Egyptian literature was rewarded with a special place. Apart from Sonallah were invited actor Omar Sharif (who was going to recite some pages by Mahfouz), Kamal Ghitany (who for personal reasons had to decline) and .. minister Hosni. But, as Sonallah's collegue Ala'a al-Aswani revealed in the newspaper As Shorouq, Hosni refused. Only if the invitation for Sonallah would be revoked, he was prepared to come.

Censorship
Last, but not least: to be in the government of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt for 21 years hardly fits the job description of a director-general of Unesco, whose job it is to promote culture and freedom of speech. The Mubarak-government is far from democratic, it is repressive (with thousands of people in prison on arbitrary grounds) and it censores books, films, and theater. Apart from that there is hardly any real freedom of the press, as is described here on the site of Reporters sans frontières. And who after all was - 21 years - in charge of the censors? And of the press....?

Lachen om Abu Mazen, Dahlan en het Fatah-congres

Memri (Middle East Media Research Institute), geleid door Yigal Carmon, een oud-kolonel van de Israëlische militaire inlichtingendienst) is niet één van mijn favoriete bronnen. Het is een soort vertaalservice die is opgericht om Arabieren zwart te maken en het is allesbehalve objectief of afgewogen, het pikt er alleen uit wat dat straatje te pas komt. Ik heb er al eerder over geschreven, op deze blog staat het hier (gek genoeg in het Duits).
Vaak zal het niet gebeuren dat ik verwijs naar Memri of Memri-tv. Ditmaal echter een uitzondering: Memri-tv heeft een satirische uitzending van de Palestijnse tv vertaald, waarin op sublieme wijze het recente Fatah-congres belachelijk wordt gemaakt: hier. Wat de Palestijnse tv ervan maakt komt aardig overeen met wat ik er zelf van dacht. Mijn stuk staat hier op mijn blog.

UNCTAD: Meerderheid Palestijnen leeft in armoede - Oslo heeft economisch gefaald

Muur en checkpoint.

Een rapport van UNCTAD, de VN-organisatie voor Handel en Ontwikkeling, dat dinsdag 8 september uitkwam, schetst een dramatisch beeld van de Palestijnse economie; 57% van de gezinnen leeft onder de armoedegrens. Voor Gaza is de situatie zelfs nog erger: daar leeft 90% in armoede.
Volgens het rapport is de Westbank-economie voor het negende jaar op rij achteruitgegaan. Weliswaar was er een groei van 2% in 2008, maar dat komt overeen met een afname van een derde van het Bruto Nationaal Product per hoofd van de bevolking - en dat ondanks ingrijpende hervormingen van de PA en bijdragen van donoren ter waarde van 1,9 miljard dollar. De teruggang ligt volgens UNCTAD aan de Israëlische politiek van afsluitingen en andere hindernissen die inherent zijn aan de bezetting, plus een sterke teruggang in de Palestijnse productiesector en het verlies van vruchtbare landbouwgronden door de nederzettingen en het traject van de 'Afscheidingsmuur'. Door de beperkingen die de bezetting opwerpt is de werkeloosheid sinds 1999 met 10% gestegen tot 32% in 2008. Van de huisgezinnen leeft 57% onder de armoedegrens (was 20% in 1998). Het tekort op de handelsbalans bedraagt een ongekende 79%. Het handelstekort met Israël alleen al is 140% van de totale steun van de donoren aan de PA en maakt 70% uit van het totaal.

De universiteit van Gaza, of beter: wat ervan over is.

Wat Gaza betreft meldt UNCTAD dat de schade van de inval van december-januari op zo'n 4 miljard dollar wordt geschat, bijna drie keer de waarde van de hele economie van Gaza. Het herstel moet nog beginnen, maar de total afsluiting door Israël maakt dat onmogelijk. De economie is nagenoeg non-existent. Alleen de overheidssector verschaft nog enig inkomen. De levensomstandigheden zijn erbarmelijk. Zo'n 90% van de bevolking leeft onder de armoedegrens. De situatie is de slechtste sinds 1967.

In het algemeen merkt UNCTAD op dat de politiek die sinds de Oslo-akkoorden van 1993 gericht was op het creëren van een 'levensvatbare Palestijnse staat', heeft gefaald. In de laatste drie decennia is het levenstandaard van de Israëli's die eerst zeven maal die van de Palestijnse bedroeg, gestegen tot 14x die van de Palestijnen, terwijl de Palestijnse economie lijdt onder toename van nederzettingen en controles, afnemende ruimte voor Palestijnse economische planning, en afnemende toegang tot grond en natuurlijke hulpbronnen, aldus UNCTAD.

Fayyadism? Or isn't this Dahlanism?

...American-style attempts to impose order on the Middle East have not generally turned out well. Yet for once, something seems to be making sense in the Palestinian territories, thanks largely to Fayyad. Crime and lawlessness have been cut significantly in hot zones like Nablus and Jenin, and Hamas has become nearly invisible in the West Bank.

Salam Fayyad, the non-elected prime minister of the Westbank revealed his plan for a state in two years. And see, the West likes it. EU-representative Tony Blair lately called him 'absolutely first class'. The all-knowing Tom 'yes-I-got-the-Pullitzer Prize-for-it' Friedman of the New York Times*) praised his style of government in a column and suggested that 'Fayyadism' might be an example for other potentats in the Middle East. The IMF was happy and projected a 7% growth for the Westbank if it is continuing on this track. And Fayyad got his interview in Newsweek, but ...

...He is not, after all, a democratically elected prime minister. The last time Palestinians went to the polls, in January 2006, Fayyad's constituents gave his party a dismal 2.4 percent of the vote.......It was only in the midst of a national crisis, after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007, that President Mahmoud Abbas elevated him to power in the West Bank by emergency fiat. "There was no way it was going to be democratic," Fayyad explained.

No, there wasn't. So...
...The prime minister has imposed the order he so values by helping to engineer a series of brutal crackdowns. In the past two years, PA troops have arrested some 8,000 Palestinians in the West Bank; nearly 700 are still in prison. Former inmates tell of beatings and torture. If prisoners see the inside of a courtroom, it is often presided over by a military judge. Critics contend that the arrests are largely political, aimed at West Bank Islamists. "The pendulum has swung from a state of lawlessness to a police state," said one Palestinian-rights advocate, who didn't want to be identified in order to stay on Fayyad's good side. The security sweeps also threaten to undermine any potential reconciliation between the West Bank and Hamas-controlled Gaza, which many observers believe is a prerequisite to any peace deal.
Another of the things that does not exactly increase his popularity, is that he is perceived as America's man on the spot, but
..."We're not a police state, with all due respect," he said. "I understand the substance [of the criticism]—that the pendulum has swung too far. But it had to happen. This country was going to go down the tubes unless something decisive happened."

No police state, but sometimes the police does get a free hand, however..
...Fayyad's men had pursued the Hamas militants to their safe house, where they had barricaded themselves inside. "One of two outcomes is acceptable," the prime minister remembers telling his national-security chief. "Either these guys leave with their hands over their heads, or what has to happen has to happen." At 6:15 a.m. an officer called Fayyad and reported: "It's almost done." As the sun was rising, PA troops stormed the house, killing all the militants inside. Security experts I spoke with after the raid, including a senior intelligence officer loyal to Fayyad, were uniformly critical. They insisted that the PA forces should have given the militants more time to surrender before storming the house. When I asked Fayyad about it, he shrugged and said that he thought the operation sent a clear message. "This is for real," he said quietly. "No apologies."

What has to happen, has to happen. Is this Fayyadism? It certainly is something that must make general Dayton and Mohamed Dahlan quite happy.

*) In the fall of 1982, after Israels invasion of Lebanon of that year, I met Tom Friedman in Beirut, where he was the Beirut bureau chief for the NYT at the time and whom I had met before in Iraq. I complimented him with his coverage of the war and called it 'good stuff'. 'Oh, yes, thanks,' he said, 'I got the Pullitzer Prize for it. Didn't you know?'