Tuesday, October 30, 2007

A Simple Summary, Bono's Plan for Action

Barring all criticism and cynicism--a less enthused blog entry is available for viewing upon request--here were tonight's key points, courtesy of Bono, on international human rights:

1) The world is malleable, change it.
2) The political obstacles we must overcome are corruption in foreign government and American trade laws.
3) The largest and most difficult hurdle we must jump is indifference in the individual.
4) Be innovative--be a capitalist--commerce breeds civilization.

And, my favorite,

5) "Make ze money, zen develop ze conscience."


Although point five should not necessarily hold for human rights activists--atleast not in that order. However I do encourage you all to encourage your friends and family to, vell, develop ze conscience. Hope everyone enjoyed, or was educated in some way, by Bono.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Documentary Film --- Women's Rights in Afghanistan

On Behalf Of Claire Bridge Scripps College Humanities Institute Fall 2007 Documentary Film Series presents:

ENEMIES OF HAPPINESS

Denmark, 2006, 58 min

Thursday, NOVEMBER 1 at Garrison Theater, 7:30 p.m

FILM SYNOPSIS: It centers on Malalai Joya, who became one of Afghanistan's most famous and infamous women in 2003 when she challenged the power of warlords in the country's new government. Two years later, the 28-year-old ran in the first democratic parliamentary election in over 30 years. A survivor of repeated assassination attempts, she campaigned surrounded by armed guards. Joya is a controversial voice for a nation ruined by war, still ruled by fear, but desperate for a change for the better.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

For more information please call the Scripps College Humanities Institute (909) 621-8326, or visit the website http://www.scrippscollege.edu/campus/humanities-institute/index.php

One strike, Iran could be out

From LATimes.com
October 22, 2007
by Niall Ferguson

Of all the columns I've written for this newspaper over the last couple of years, none has elicited a more heated response than the one published in January 2006 about the Great War of 2007. Indeed, it still gets quoted back at me more than a year and a half later.

The column was written in the style of a future historian looking back on a war that I imagined breaking out this year. My point was that if a major war were to break out in 2007, future historians would not have far to look to find its origins.

My imaginary war began in the Middle East and lasted four years. With the benefit of hindsight, the historian of the future would be able to list its causes as (a) competition for the region's abundant reserves of fossil fuels, (b) demographic pressures arising from the region's high birthrates, (c) the growth of radical Islamism and (d) the determination of Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

My nightmare scenario involved a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel in August. You may have noticed that this didn't happen. However, the point of the column was not to make a prophecy. No one has the power to predict the future because (as I frequently remind my history students) there is no such thing as the future, singular -- only futures, plural.

My aim in writing the column was not to soothsay but to alert readers to the seriousness of the threat posed by Iran's nuclear program -- and to persuade them that the United States should do something to stop it. True, after all that has gone wrong in Iraq, Americans are scarcely eager for another preventive war to stop another rogue regime from owning yet more weapons of mass destruction that don't currently exist. It's easy to imagine the international uproar that would ensue in the event of U.S. air strikes. It's also easy to imagine the havoc that might be wreaked by Iranian-sponsored terrorists in Iraq by way of retaliation. So it's very tempting to hope for a purely diplomatic solution.

Yet the reality is that the chances of such an outcome are dwindling fast, precisely because other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are ruling out the use of force -- and without the threat of force, diplomacy seldom works. Six days ago, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin went to Iran for an amicable meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Putin says he sees "no evidence" that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. On his return to Moscow, he explicitly repudiated what he called "a policy of threats, various sanctions or power politics."

The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, also seems less likely to support American preemption than his predecessor was in the case of Iraq. That leaves China, which remains an enigma on the Iranian question, and France, whose hawkish new president finds himself distracted by the worst kind of domestic crisis: a divorce.

By contrast, Washington's most reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel, recently demonstrated the ease with which a modern air force can destroy a suspected nuclear facility. Not only was last month's attack on a site in northeastern Syria carried out without Israeli losses, there was no retaliation on the part of Damascus. Memo from Ehud Olmert to George W. Bush: You can do this, and do it with impunity.

The big question of 2007 therefore remains: Will he do it?

With every passing day, the president attracts less media coverage, while the contenders to succeed him attract more. Yet Bush made news last week with his observation at a White House news conference that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them [the Iranians] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." That would seem to suggest that he is ready to use military force against Iran if he sees the alternative as mere appeasement. One eminent expert on nuclear warfare told me last week that he still puts the probability of air strikes on Iran as high as 30%.

In domestic politics, it's always a good idea to follow the money. When it comes to grand strategy, however, you need to follow the navy -- to be precise, the aircraft carriers that would be the launching platforms for any major air offensive against Iran's nuclear facilities. To do this, you don't need to be very skilled at espionage. The U.S. Navy makes the information freely available at http://www.gonavy.jp/CVLocation.htmlor in the "Around the Navy" column published each week in the Navy Times.

The U.S. has 11 active aircraft carriers. Of these, the Kitty Hawk is in port in Japan. The Nimitz and Reagan are in San Diego. The Washington is in Norfolk, Va. The Lincoln and Stennis are in Washington state. And the Eisenhower, Vinson, Roosevelt and Truman are undergoing various sorts of refitting and maintenance checks in the vicinity of "WestLant" (Navy-speak for the western Atlantic). Only one -- the Enterprise -- is in the Persian Gulf.

At present, then, talk of World War III seems to be mere saber-rattling, not serious strategy. U.S. aircraft carriers can move fast, it's true. The Lincoln's top speed is in excess of 30 knots (30 nautical miles per hour). And it, along with the Truman, Eisenhower and Nimitz, are said to be "surge ready." But take a look at the map. It's a very long way from San Diego to the Strait of Hormuz. Even from Norfolk, it takes 17.5 days for an aircraft carrier group to reach Bahrain. If you were Ahmadinejad, how worried would you be?

As for me, I am jumping ship. This is my last weekly column on these pages. But remember when the Great Gulf War does finally come: You read about it here first. nferguson@latimescolumnists.com
Claremont McKenna College
Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights

Academic Travel to Israel: May 19-June 1, 2008 (tentative)
Application due November 9, 2007 by 5 PM


The Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at CMC will host a fourteen-day academic travel program to Israel this summer, tentatively beginning on Monday, May 19, 2008. The trip will be led by Professors Gary Gilbert and Jonathan Petropoulos. It will incorporate all three aspects of the Center’s identity. We will be studying the Holocaust from an Israeli perspective, how it shapes Israeli identity and culture, as well as issues of collective memory. We will also explore the impact of the Armenian genocide in an area with a large Armenian community. Finally, we will engage in issues of human rights in Israel today by visiting with various representatives of the government and NGOs.

The trip’s itinerary will incorporate politics, history, philosophy, religious studies, and many other academic disciplines into its curriculum. All majors are encouraged to apply, although we must, unfortunately, limit the experience to non-graduated CMC students only. Seniors are not eligible. Note that preference will be given to students who have a compelling academic interest in the Holocaust, genocide, and/or human rights issues. Students are asked to pay a participation fee of $300 and to obtain their own passports and visas. All other expenses (including airfare) will be covered by the Center.

Selected students must be willing to participate in a series of group meetings over the course of the spring semester in preparation for the trip. There will various reading assignments for these meetings. If the student happens to be abroad spring 2008, he or she is exempt from these meetings, but still must complete the readings and may be asked to write short response papers.

Personal Information

Name:

Permanent Address:


City: State: Zip:

CMC Phone: Email:

CMC Story House Box: Major:

GPA at CMC: Class year:



What courses have you taken relating to the Holocaust, genocide, human rights, and/or the Middle East?



What is your previous experience in Israel or the Middle East?


How would this program contribute to your current or future academic work?




What is your citizenship or legal residency?

Have you lived or traveled abroad? If so, where?



List two faculty members who may be contacted for references:


Why would you like to participate in this program?







Thank you for applying! All applications MUST be submitted by 5 PM November 9th either via email to Norine Zapata (nzapata@cmc.edu) or in person at the Center (528 N. Mills Avenue). If you have any questions, email Jonathan Petropoulos (jpetropoulos@cmc.edu) or Gary Gilbert (ggilbert@cmc.edu).

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Darfur Day of Action -- Today!

Darfur Day of Action

Sponsored by the Students for Peace and Justice, today is the Darfur Day of Action!

Events and activities include:
-Movie sceening from the Committee on Conscience at the National Holocaust Museum at 8 PM at Balch auditorium (Scripps)
-Post-movie commentary from Pitzer Professor Lako Tongun
-"Stop Genocide in Sudan" t-shirt sale outside of the movie
-Letter writing, also outside of the movie
-Challah for Hunger will be selling CHALLAH FRENCH TOAST from 8-11 PM with all of the proceeds going directly to provide aid to refugees in Darfur

There are definitely enough opportunities and enough time for everyone to stop by and give back through awareness, finance, or political coercion!

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

What to Do in Burma

Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is a hotbed for human rights violations in Asia. Situated between India and China, the country has been ruled by a military junta since 1962. The junta has been known to meet peaceful resistance with violent force. In recent months, the military government has stepped up violence against protesters. Disappearances are quite common throughout the country, and, in the prisons, torture is a common tool.
In September of 1988, there was a large pro-democracy movement in the capital city of Rangoon. The protesters were met with Burmese bullets, as the military swept through the streets shooting. Among those targeted were: Buddhist monks, students, nonviolent demonstrators, and medical personnel. Altogether, around 3,000 people were killed in September alone. The number of deaths from March to September of that year sits at a shocking 10,000.

Amongst those killed by the junta was Mr. Kenji Nagai, a Japanese photographer. Mr. Nagai found himself caught in the middle of a protest that turned violent when the military began marching on protesters. What makes the death of Mr. Nagai even more disturbing, though, is that the military responsible for his death might have bought the gun that shot him with money from his very own Japanese government.

When the junta first took power, they relied most heavily on aid from Japan. Democratic Japan continued to support and trade with Burma, turning a blind eye to the gross human rights abuses and the totalitarian regime. Following the murder of Mr. Nagai, the Japanese government largely decreased their investments and trade with Burma, but the fact that it took the murder of a Japanese citizen to provoke this change has raised questions.
However, don’t be too hasty to point a finger at Japan as the sole reason the junta has been able to function for 55 years; they aren’t alone in their support of the junta. The truth is that Myanmar has other high-profile friends, like Singapore and China, to mention a few. Myanmar, only having a GDP of $85.2 billion, can obviously use friends with GDP’s of $10.21 trillion (China) and $141.2 billion (Singapore).

While on the surface, ties between Burma and Singapore might not be too obvious, it is undeniable that the junta considers the city-nation a good friend. Singapore Inc. is a prominent company run by the Lee family, who has had power in Singapore for close to five decades. The company has an estimated 3 billion dollars invested in Burma and has dealt with the junta for around two decades. In addition to this monetary support of the junta is Singapore’s healthcare support of its military officers. When Burma’s generals get sick, they receive help from the governmental hospital systems in Singapore and are allowed to recover in wards there like Than Shwe, a strongmen of the junta, who is currently receiving treatment for intestinal cancer.

This support is counterproductive to the heavy sanctions that have been placed on Myanmar by the United States and the United Nations. It matters very little if the junta isn’t able to get its hands on U.S. made weapons when Singaporean companies are supplying them with all of the military equipment they need.

Also counterproductive to ending the oppressive junta rule in Myanmar is Singapore’s willingness to be an access point for drug lords from Myanmar, such as Lo Hsing Han. Han and his company, Asia World, have been known to use Singapore as a location to export drugs. Though Asia World is not a drug company upfront, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency claims that the company acts as a face for Han’s extensive drug business.

While Myanmar hasn’t received nearly as much direct help from China, the junta acts without a thought to action from China. With the 2008 Beijing Olympics coming up, the international community has called upon China to condemn their oppressive neighbors to the west. Not much has come of it. As Sophie Richardson, the Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch says, “Chinese officials have publicly called for ‘cooperation’ and ‘dialogue’ between the Burmese generals and their critics, but said nothing when these critics were arrested, ‘disappeared’ or killed. Even worse, the Chinese government has blocked most of the international efforts to effectively address the crisis.” As permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China is in a great position to apply pressure to the government in Burma, if only it is willing to do so.

While severe human rights violations occurring in Myanmar are horrible, the country shows how the world can unite against a common evil. The country is under severe sanctions from many nations, including the U.S., and the United Nations is considering an arms embargo. However, with the help of even a few other nations, like Singapore and China, a government as corrupt as the junta is capable of holding onto power. If every country in the world were to withdraw all support of the government in Myanmar, how long could the junta survive? While Myanmar is obviously very much in the wrong, it is just as important to look behind the curtain at who is actively supporting Burma to find a solution to the terrible situation unfolding there currently. Burma is not the only country at fault and supporting countries must be held accountable for the human rights violations that are occurring with their help.

For video footage of recent violence, follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UqQaizM15Q

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

United Nations I-Place Lecture

Thursday, October 25
Celebrating United Nations Day
At the McKenna Auditorium (CMC)

"Suppose There Were No United Nations: Would It Matter?"

Dean McHenry, Professor of Political Science at the Claremont Graduate University, will be speaking about the United Nations and its contribution to international affairs and, self-evidently, human rights on the international level.

International lunch served from 11:45 a.m.
Lecture from 12:15 - 1:00 p.m.

If you are a student on the meal plan, meal cards are appreciated toward the cost of lunch but not required. Phone x73910 or visit http://iplace.claremont.edu/ for further information.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Professor Petropoulos Featured in Documentary About Nazi Art Thefts



From http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/news/pressreleases/article.asp?article_id=904

Date Issued: 10/18/2007

Jonathan Petropoulos, the John V. Croul Professor of European History and director of The Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, is among a handful of experts appearing in a two-hour documentary, The Rape of Europa.

The film, which recently played at the Laemmle Claremont 5 and is still in nationwide release, is described by its makers as a story of the “systematic theft, deliberate destruction, and miraculous survival of Europe’s art treasures during the Third Reich and the Second World War,” juxtaposed with the story of artist Gustav Klimt’s famed Gold Portrait, also known as the Golden Adele––the gold-flecked portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. The painting was stolen from Viennese Jews in 1938 and is now, according to Europa’s filmmakers, the most expensive painting ever sold.

Petropoulos says his involvement in The Rape of Europa dated from 1998, when he was serving as Research Director for Art and Cultural Property for a presidential commission that examined the assets of Holocaust victims in the United States.

(Read more about Petropoulos’ work on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets: http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/news/cmcmagazine/summer2002/petropoulos/).

Europa’s filmmakers asked the CMC professor his advice about hot-button issues. “We got along well and I starting helping them as a consultant,” Petropoulos says, “suggesting to them other people to interview, putting photographs in my archives at their disposal, and even traveling with them in Europe as they filmed.” Narrated by Joan Allen, The Rape of Europa brings viewers back to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich during World War II––the height of his power in the early 1940s when he and his Nazi henchman pulled off perhaps the greatest heist in history. During that cataclysmic period in which millions died, high-ranking Nazi officials like Hermann Goering looted thousands of works of art from the homes of private citizens (many of them Jews who were forced to flee or who died in the Holocaust) and from national museums in the countries they conquered in Eastern Europe.

More than six decades after the fall of fascism in Germany, the effects of the state-sponsored program of Nazi theft continues, with thousands of art works still missing or sought by their original owners.

According to Petropoulos, perhaps hundreds of looted but never restituted Old Masters currently hang on the walls of North American and European museums.

“And there are thousands of less valuable works entering the art market, not to mention a great deal of so-called ‘trophy art’ still in Russian hands,” he says. “Then there are the Swiss bank vaults. Because one can never have good title to stolen property according to U.S. law, heirs can continue to make claims in the years to come. In short, I expect to continue my work helping Holocaust victims and their families recover artworks for the rest of my career. And at the moment, I am busier than ever.”

One of those whom Petropoulos assisted––a Jewish woman born in Vienna who was forced to flee Austria after Hitler’s Anchluss of the country in 1938––is Maria Altmann, now a 91-year-old resident of Cheviot Hills. She and other family members laid claim to six paintings by Gustav Klimt, including the iconic picture of her aunt (Adele Bloch-Bauer I) valued at over $300 million. Petropoulos wrote an expert report for the plaintiffs, which was submited to an Austrian arbitration panel. The panel ruled that five of the six paintings should be returned.

(Petropoulos’ role in the recovery of the Golden Adele is recounted in the fall 2006 CMC magazine: http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/news/cmcmagazine/2006fall/).

“The Altmanns' attorney, Randy Schoenberg, called me in 2001 and asked me to be an expert witness,” Petropoulos recalls. “I confess that I never thought the case would go forward, that Maria Altmann and the family would be able to sue a sovereign country, Austria, in an American court. But after the Supreme Court ruling went their way, I spent about four months of a sabbatical I took at Cambridge University working on my report.”

The paintings eventually were repatriated to Altmann, including the Adele Bloch-Bauer I portrait that she subsequently sold for $135 million to Ronald Lauder for his Neue Galerie in New York, making it at that time the most expensive painting ever sold.

Petropoulos currently is working on a new book that he characterizes as a kind of hybrid “part memoir, part archival-based monograph, part philosophical reflection.” He added, “It concerns my 25 years tracking Nazi looted artworks, and more specifically, my experiences interviewing former Nazis. I would go to Bavaria and Austria most every summer and track down the hands-on plunderers.”

The main subject of the book is Dr. Bruno Lohse, Hermann Goering's art agent in Paris during the war and the de-facto head of the main Nazi plundering agency in France (the ERR).

“Lohse was imprisoned by the Americans and French after the war for five years, but then resumed his career as an art dealer,” Petropoulos says.

“He's a very problematic figure who trafficked in looted artworks and stashed some of them in Switzerland. I got to know him well, and this book is about my efforts to understand him and untangle his web of lies.”

For more information about screenings of The Rape of Europa, visit the Laemmle Theaters Web site, which also includes information about the film: http://www.laemmle.com/viewmovie.php?mid=3098.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Social Entrepreneurship Panel Discussion

Below is information about the upcoming social entrepreneurship panel. While not explicitly human-rights oriented, social entrepreneurship has brought about amazing advancements in theory and practice of social work and humanitarianism (think microfinance!)

Social Entrepreneurship Panel Discussion From: Faye Andriejanssen
The Claremont Entrepreneurial Society (CES) is organizing a social entrepreneurship panel discussion bringing leaders to Claremont discussing their journey as a social entrepreneur. We hope to promote student understanding of social entrepreneurship, provide a forum where new and original ideas can be discussed, as well as create networking opportunities for students to interact with leaders in social entrepreneurship. The panel is moderated by CMC Professor Ananda Ganguly, along with Rob Best (Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship - SAGE), and Andrew Horowitz (Social Enterprise Institute).
Lunch will be provided from 11.45-12.30, and the panel discussion will be from 12.35-1.30, with Q&A afterwards. To RSVP: fandriejanssen09@cmc.edu or visit http://claremont.facebook.com/event.php?eid=21207741240&ref=mf
FMI: fandriejanssen09@cmc.edu

More information is listed on the Facebook event, as well as college e-memos.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk at the Ath Tonight

Claremont McKenna College will host a rare public appearance by Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Laureate for literature in 2006 and a controversial figure in Turkey’s human rights movement, on Thursday, Oct. 18.

Arranged by The Family of Benjamin Z. Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, and its director, Robert Faggen, the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature, Pamuk’s visit is a significant demonstration of the Center’s efforts to bring authors to campus whose careers demonstrate the crucial intersection between art and politics, Faggen says. “Here is an opportunity for our students to understand what it means when an artist has a profound political outlook.”

Pamuk’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, begins at 6:45 p.m. on campus at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, 385 East Eighth St., with overflow seating available in McKenna Auditorium. (The dinner portion of the event, at 6 p.m., is restricted to CMC persons and invited guests.)

Currently a Fellow with Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought, Pamuk was the first writer from a predominantly Muslim country to win the Nobel Prize since Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz in 1988. Along with the Nobel, he has been the recipient of many other awards including the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (for the novel My Name is Red), the 2005 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, 2005 Prix Medicis Etranger (for the novel Snow) and, in 2006, Washington University’s Distinguished Humanist Award.

Throughout his career, Pamuk has not typically given many public appearances, preferring to let his works speak for themselves. But he accepted an invitation from the Gould Center through his American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, which will publish Pamuk’s new book, Other Colors: Essays and a Story this month in the United States.

During his visit to CMC, Pamuk will be available for interviews with members of the media.

In his fiction, Pamuk travels his country's history, describing its Ottoman past (My Name is Red) and the absurdities and violence of the present as the country struggles to embrace modernity (The Black Book, Snow). He has been a harsh critic of his country’s past practices, mercilessly pointing out the darkness in its history, and he has been an ardent supporter of the country’s secularization. In his work, one hears frequent calls for a rapprochement between East and West, and that includes the West’s ability to hear “the anger of the damned” throughout the world.

In an interview with a Swedish newspaper in 2005, Pamuk’s comments about historical atrocities committed by Turkey against Armenians and Kurds led to a trial—and potential imprisonment—for Pamuk for violating a section of the Turkish penal code that punished anyone for committing the crime of denigrating Turkish national identity.

Although the charges were ultimately dropped on a technicality, the incident highlighted the challenges facing artists in Turkey. It also thrust Pamuk—whose activism previously included speaking out in defense of Salman Rushdie after the fatwa was issued in 1989 in response to his novel, The Satanic Verses—to the front of the human rights movement in Turkey, a role which has grown for him over the years.

“What is the logic behind a state that complains that its enemies spread false reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe,” he wrote at the time of his trial, “while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer after another, thus propagating the image of the Terrible Turk worldwide?”

The political dimension of Pamuk’s art, however, threatens to overshadow another considerable aspect of his work: his aesthetic craftsmanship. Firmly rooted in modernity, Pamuk is a writer of a bewildering, beautiful number of narrative strategies and techniques. A bestselling author in his homeland, Pamuk has taken the stylistic devices of Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges and others and created experimental, Western-style novels. Though they differ in plots, characters and styles, his novels all center on questions of identity and the role of art as they engage Turkey’s complex relationship with the West.

While, for instance, The Black Book (1990) takes a plodding lawyer on a search through the streets of Istanbul for his restless wife—and, by extension, deep into the city’s history—My Name is Red (1998), winner of the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, transports readers to the Ottoman world of the 16th century and into the lives of artists walking a knife-edge between personal expression and adhering to the methods of past Islamic masters. To stray too far into creative self-expression, a murderous character explains, is pure sacrilege:

On the Day of Judgment, the idol-makers will be asked to bring the images they created to life. Since they will be unable to bring anything to life, their lot will be to suffer the torments of Hell. Let it not be forgotten that in the Glorious Koran, 'creator' is one of the attributes of God. It is Allah who is creative, who brings that which is not into existence, who gives life to the lifeless. No one ought to compete with Him. The greatest of sins is committed by painters who presume to do as He does, who claim to be as creative as He.

In reading such passages, it is impossible not to think of Pamuk’s own clashes over self-expression. Taken together, his works including his most recent novel, Snow—which describes the clash between secular officials and Islamic fundamentalists on the eve of a municipal election—give us a comprehensive view of the changing nature of public and private life in Turkey. And the fact that the creation of art can have life-and-death consequences is a lesson which Faggen hopes students will appreciate after listening to Pamuk’s lecture.

“There are risks to being an artist in countries other than the United States,” he says, “and no one better illustrates this for students than a figure with the global importance of Pamuk.”

Also as part of the Gould Center’s plans this year, CMC has several other visits and programs established in addition to Pamuk’s visit. This fall the College welcomed political satirist Mort Sahl into the classroom to teach the course The Revolutionary’s Handbook. In spring 2008, the “Voices from China” series will feature several dissident artists—including Bei Dao, Kang Zhengghuo, Er Tai Gao (and, in 2009, Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian).

Also in spring, a symposium on China and Human Rights will include Harvard historian Roderick MacFarquhar, a leading expert on post-Mao China.

“In the West, art, especially literature, is seen by many as a commercial practice, a form of entertainment only,” Faggen says. “But Pamuk’s appearance and the Gould Center’s other plans should hopefully remind people that this just isn’t the case.”

Monday, October 15, 2007

Labeling Genocide Won't Halt It


Armenians were murdered, but the current Turkish regime shouldn't be faulted for what happened more than 90 years ago.
October 15, 2007

Last Wednesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee condemned mass murder in the Middle East. Quite right, you may say -- except that this mass murder took place more than 90 years ago.

The committee approved a resolution, which could go to the House floor this week, calling on the president "to ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing and genocide . . . relating to the Armenian genocide."

Now, let's be clear about three things: First, what genocide means; second, whether or not the Armenians suffered one; third, whether or not it was smart for a U.S. congressional panel to say so.

The term "genocide" is a neologism dating back to 1944, coined by Raphael Lemkin to describe what the Nazis had done to the Jews of Europe. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide sets out a clear definition: Genocide covers "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such":

* Killing members of the group;

* Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

* Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

* Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

* Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

On this basis, did the Armenians suffer a genocide? For my latest book, "The War of the World," I reviewed the available evidence, including not just the reports of Western diplomats and missionaries but also, crucially, those of representatives of Turkey's ally, Austria-Hungary. It's damning.

For example, according to Joseph Pomiankowski, the Austrian military plenipotentiary in Constantinople, the Turks had undertaken the "eradication of the Armenian nation in Asia Minor" (he used the terms Ausrottung and Vernichtung, which will be familiar to students of the Holocaust). There is also contemporary Turkish testimony that corroborates such reports.

Armenian males of military age were rounded up and shot. Women and children were herded onto trains, driven into the desert and left to die. The number of Armenians who were killed or died prematurely may have exceeded 1 million, a huge proportion of a prewar population that numbered, at the very most, 2.4 million, but was probably closer to 1.8 million. With good reason, the American consul in Izmir declared that the fate of the Armenians "surpasse[d] in deliberate . . . horror and in extent anything that has hitherto happened in the history of the world."

It is absurd, then, that Turkish politicians and some academics (not all of them Turks) insist that the issue is somehow open to debate, though there is certainly room for more research to be done in the Turkish archives. And it is deplorable that writers in Turkey can still be prosecuted for describing the fate of the Armenians as genocide.

Yet I remain far from convinced that anything has been gained by last week's resolution. Indeed, something may well have been lost.

Relations between the U.S. and Turkey were once good. The heirs of Kemal Ataturk were staunch allies during the Cold War. Today, Turkey allows essential supplies to Iraq -- around 70% of all the air cargo that goes to U.S. forces -- to pass through Turkish airspace. Moreover, the regime in Ankara currently offers the best available evidence that Islam and democracy can coexist.

Now consider this: For years, a campaign of terrorism has been waged against Turkey by separatists from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. The Turks are currently preparing to launch cross-border strikes on PKK bases in the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. To say the least, this will not be helpful at a time when Iraq teeters on the brink of bloody fragmentation.

Does gratuitously bringing up the Armenian genocide increase or decrease our leverage in Ankara? The angry responses of Turkey's president and prime minister provide the answer. On Thursday, President Abdullah Gul called the resolution an "attempt to sacrifice big issues for minor domestic political games" -- an allusion to the far-from-negligible Armenian American lobby, which has long pressed for a resolution like this.

The absurdity is that the genocide of 1915 was not perpetrated by today's Turkish Republic, established in 1923, but by the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed at the end of World War I. You might as well blame the United States for the deportation of Acadians from Nova Scotia during the French and Indian Wars.

"If we hope to stop future genocides, we need to admit to those horrific acts of the past," argued Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat and a sponsor of the resolution. Really? My sense is that all the resolutions in the world about past genocides will do precisely nothing to stop the next one.

And if -- let's just suppose -- the next genocide happens in Iraq, and the United States finds itself impotent to prevent it, the blame will lie as much with this posturing and irresponsible Congress as with anyone.

nferguson@latimescolumnists.com

Iran imprisons human rights activist

From LAtimes.com
By Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim, Special to The Times
October 15, 2007
TEHRAN -- Iranian authorities imprisoned one of their nation's most prominent human rights activists Sunday after he appeared at a court appointment, said his lawyer.

Emadeddin Baghi, a writer who has campaigned vigorously against the death penalty in Iran, was taken during a hearing in Tehran's Revolutionary Court, which tries those charged with political crimes.

Baghi's relatives said the court imposed a previously suspended one-year sentence on state security charges and denied bail. His lawyers said they were barred from the courtroom.

"We were not allowed today to be present during the investigation," said Saleh Nikbakht, one of Baghi's two attorneys.

Nikbakht said Baghi had told him he'd been accused of revealing classified information. It was not immediately clear where the dissident was being held.

Authorities were angered recently by his outspoken opposition to death sentences for Iranians of Arab descent convicted in a series of bombings in the southwestern province of Khuzestan.

Baghi opposes capital punishment in all cases.

He's also being accused of insulting Iran's leaders, according to the Iranian Students News Agency.

Baghi was born to a religious family in the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala in 1962. A former Islamic seminary student, he supported Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution.

But he turned against the regime in the 1980s, writing books critical of the clerical establishment. He has written more than 20 works, most of them banned in his homeland.

He was convicted on charges of apostasy and endangering state security in 2000 and spent nearly three years in prison.

As soon as he got out, he founded a prisoners rights group that advocates abolishing the death penalty.

Several years ago, authorities handed him the one-year suspended sentence, which has been hanging over his head since.

In 2004, he was granted the $50,000 Civil Courage Prize, an international award inspired by Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. However, Iranian authorities barred Baghi from leaving the country to collect the award.

His wife, activist and writer Fatemeh Kamali, tried to post bail for him Sunday, but the bid was refused by the court, Nikbakht said.

daragahi@latimes.com

Daragahi is a Times staff writer and Mostaghim a special correspondent.

White House, Turkey Fight Armenian Genocide Bill

From www.npr.org
by Brian Naylor

Weekend Edition Sunday, October 14, 2007 · A House committee has voted to call on President Bush to declare that the slaughter of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks 90 years ago was genocide. The bill is awaiting a vote by the full House.

The modern-day Turkish government — successors to the Ottomans — is fuming. Turkey and the Bush administration worked unsuccessfully to defeat the resolution, but the battle is not over.

Q & A: But Was It Genocide?

by Corey Flintoff

What Is Genocide?

The term — from Greek and Latin roots meaning "the massacre of a family, tribe or race" —was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish legal scholar from Poland. In the 1930s, Lemkin sought unsuccessfully to get the League of Nations to recognize such killings as an international crime. As examples, he cited the massacre of Armenians during World War I and the slaughter of Assyrians in Iraq in 1933.

After World War II, Lemkin's idea of genocide as an international crime became one of the legal bases for the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.

In 1948, the United Nations adopted the modern definition of genocide, listing "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Those acts included:

• killing or causing serious physical or mental harm to members of the group,

• forcing the group to live in conditions calculated to bring about its physical destruction

• Forcibly preventing births among the group, or forcibly sending its children to be reared by members of another group.

The U.N. convention on genocide didn't become law until 1951, after 20 U.N. members had signed it. The United States was the last of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to sign it – in 1988 – and it didn't begin to be enforced until the 1990s, with prosecutions for genocide in Kosovo and Rwanda.


Political Figures Speak About Genocide

"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact..."
— Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in a 1919 memoir.

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
— Adolph Hitler in 1939, before the invasion of Poland. He was defending his order to massacre Poles.

"The United States has a compelling historical and moral reason to recognize the Armenian Genocide, which cost a million and a half people their lives, but we also have a powerful contemporary reason as well: How can we take effective action against the genocide in Darfur if we lack the will to condemn genocide whenever and wherever it occurs?"
— Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), during the 2007 debate on the Armenian genocide resolution.


NPR.org, October 11, 2007 · Some say it was the first genocide of the 20th century — tens of thousands of Armenian men, women and children killed by Turkish troops, and hundreds of thousands more dead of starvation or exposure to the weather on forced marches and in concentration camps.

Turkey and its supporters say the Armenians were killed in battle or by harsh conditions that both sides suffered equally.

The controversy revived as the House Foreign Relations Committee approved a measure that would officially declare the deaths to be genocide. Here are some of the key questions on the issue:

How many people died?

No one denies that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in the Ottoman Turkish Empire from 1914 to 1917. The modern Turkish government says about 300,000 Armenians died – mostly, it says, in fighting that was part of World War I. Armenians says the number reached as high as 1.5 million, as part of a deliberate, systematic effort to destroy the Armenian population.

How did it start?

Animosity between Turks and Armenians stretches back over centuries. A key factor is religion: Armenians are mostly Christian, Turks mostly Muslim. During the Ottoman Empire, Christians were treated as second-class citizens, and when the empire began to crumble in the 19th century, an Armenian resistance movement took hold in what is now eastern Turkey. Armenian nationalists sided with Christian Russia during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 and later formed separatist groups.

Turkish accounts of the situation sound eerily like U.S. military accounts of the insurgency in Iraq. They say the resistance was incited by outsiders, Armenians from the Russian side of the border who wanted to undermine the Ottomans by stirring up unrest.

When Turkey and Russia faced off again during World War I, many Turks saw the Armenians as terrorists and traitors. Turkish accounts of the run-up to the war claim that Armenian guerrillas, armed by Russia, attacked Muslim villages and massacred their inhabitants.

In 1915, the Turkish government passed a law allowing it to deport Armenians from eastern Turkey as a national security risk. Turkish troops killed resisters and herded tens of thousands of Armenians on forced marches to camps in northern Syria and Iraq. Accounts by U.S. and British diplomats of the time say the Turkish troops and paramilitaries robbed, raped and murdered deportees along the way, leaving the survivors to die without food or shelter in the desert. Turks counter that these allegations were wartime propaganda by the countries arrayed against Turkey and its World War I allies, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria.

What determines whether an act can be called genocide?

In the eyes of some scholars, the question of genocide comes down not to how many Armenians died, but whether the Turkish government actually set out to annihilate them because of their ethnicity. Bernard Lewis, an emeritus professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, says it may well be likely that a million Armenians died, but he asserts that there's no evidence that the Turkish government made a "deliberate preconceived decision" to carry out massacres. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, Lewis instead called the deaths a "brutal byproduct of war."

A French court later found Lewis guilty of denying the Armenian genocide and fined him a symbolic one franc.

Turks and others who deny that genocide occurred have also used the courts to make symbolic gestures. In 2005, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was charged with "insulting Turkishness" for complaining in an interview that "a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody dares to talk about it." The case against the Nobel Prize winner provoked an international outcry from free-speech advocates, and the charges were eventually dropped.

Why is Congress taking this issue up now?

Congressional committees have voted repeatedly on similar resolutions in the past (the last time, in 2005, the vote was 40-to-7 in favor). The reason it's gotten so much attention this time is that the new Democratic leadership in the House promised to bring it to a floor vote if it passed in committee. That's something the former speaker, Republican Dennis Hastert, had refused to do, in order to spare the Bush administration from the awkward position of having to oppose it for the sake of maintaining good relations with Turkey.

What's next?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will determine whether the Foreign Affairs Committee resolution comes to a vote on the House floor. She comes from California, a state with a large Armenian population, and she's on record as favoring the resolution.

President Bush is strongly opposed to the idea of the U.S. proclaiming that there was an Armenian genocide, saying it would hurt U.S. relations with Turkey, and possibly reduce Turkey's cooperation in the war in Iraq. More than 20 countries have officially declared that genocide was practiced against the Armenians, including France, Greece and Russia, which have significant ethnic Armenian populations.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

The 'Good Germans' Among Us

www.nytimes.com

October 14, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us

By FRANK RICH
“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.

There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story of apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.

As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal.

The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in North Carolina. This is a plot out of “Syriana” by way of “Chinatown.” There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened. A new bill passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will have little effect, even if it becomes law in its current form.

We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.

We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of the war’s failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors. Contractors remain a bellwether of the war’s progress today. When Blackwater was briefly suspended after the Nisour Square catastrophe, American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the fortified Green Zone. So much for the surge’s great “success” in bringing security to Baghdad.

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.”

This potential scenario is just one example of why it’s in our national self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.

Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after “Mission Accomplished,” for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public pressure to acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the war. Even now, despite his repeated declaration that “America will not abandon the Iraqi people,” he has yet to address or intervene decisively in the tragedy of four million-plus Iraqi refugees, a disproportionate number of them children. He feels no pressure from the American public to do so, but hey, he pays lip service to Darfur.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work

By WALTER GIBBS and SARAH LYALL
Published: October 13, 2007
From www.nytimes.com

OSLO, Oct. 12 — Former Vice President Al Gore, who emerged from the 2000 presidential election debacle to devote himself to his passion as an environmental crusader, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists.


The prize is a vindication for Mr. Gore, whose frightening, cautionary film about the consequences of climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary, even as conservatives in the United States denounced it as alarmist and exaggerated.


“I will accept this award on behalf of all the people that have been working so long and so hard to try to get the message out about this planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in a brief appearance on Friday, Alto... standing with his wife, Tipper, and four members of the United Nations climate panel. “I’m going back to work right now,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”

The award was also a validation for the United Nations panel, which in its early days was vilified by those who disputed the scientific case for a human role in climate change. In New Delhi, the Indian climatologist who heads the panel, Rajendra K. Pachauri, said, that science had won out over skepticism. Mr. Gore, a vociferous opponent of the Bush administration on a range of issues, including the Iraq war, is the second Democratic Party politician from the United States to win the peace prize this decade. Former President Jimmy Carter won in 2002.

Mr. Carter, himself a critic of President Bush, was 78 when he won the prize. But Mr. Gore is just 59 and an active presence in American politics, if only as a large thorn in Mr. Bush’s side — and in the side of Democrats worried that he might challenge them for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 election to Mr. Bush after a bitter electoral dispute that had to be resolved by the Supreme Court, has regularly said that he will not run for president again. But Friday’s announcement touched off renewed interest in his plans.

Upon hearing the news, Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, did not go overboard in his praise. “Of course we’re happy for Vice President Gore and the I.P.C.C. for receiving this recognition,” he said.

In Oslo, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the peace committee, was asked whether the award could be interpreted as criticism of the Bush administration and the United States, which do not subscribe to the Kyoto treaty to cap greenhouse emissions. He replied that the Nobel was not meant to be a “kick in the leg to anyone” — the Norwegian expression for “kick in the teeth.”

“We would encourage all countries, including the big countries, and challenge them to think again and to say what they can do to conquer global warming,” Dr. Mjoes said in a news conference in Oslo. “The bigger the powers, the better that they come in front of this.”

The four other members of the peace committee generally refuse to comment on the thinking behind the award, which in recent years has moved toward issues at a degree of remove from armed conflict, like social justice, poverty remediation and environmentalism.

But in a telephone interview, Berge Furre, one of the four, said, “I hope this will have an effect on the attitudes of Americans as well as people in other countries.” In its formal citation, the Nobel committee called Mr. Gore “probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.” It praised the United Nations panel, which is made up of 2,000 scientists and is considered the world’s leading authority on climate change, for creating “an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.”

While the world’s major environmental groups all heaped praise on Mr. Gore for his role in raising public awareness, they praised the panel for, in the words of Greenpeace International, “meticulous scientific work.”

The two approaches, however different, both play a part, scientists said Friday. The Nobel Prize “is honoring the science and the publicity, and they’re necessarily different,” said Spencer A. Weart, a historian at the American Institute of Physics and author of “The Discovery of Global Warming,” a recent book.

Mr. Gore, who announced he would give his portion of the $1.5 million prize money to the nonprofit organization he founded last year, the Alliance for Climate Protection, said he was honored to share the prize with the panel, calling it “the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis.”

Mr. Pachauri said, “The message that it sends is that the Nobel Prize committee realized the value of knowledge in tackling the problem of climate change.” He said the award was an acknowledgment of the panel’s “impartial and objective assessment of climate change.”

The climate panel, established in 1988, has issued a series of increasingly grim reports in the last two decades assessing scientific, technological and economic issues surrounding climate change. It is expected to issue another report in the next few months, before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Indonesia on Dec. 3. Some 180 countries are scheduled to begin negotiations there on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the climate adviser to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and a leading contributor to the United Nations panel’s reports, said they were the result of “a painstaking process of self-interrogation.”

The committee acts at “about the highest level of complexity you can manage in such a scientific assessment,” said Dr. Schellnhuber, who is the director of a Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said in a telephone interview from Milan. “We want to be absolutely sure that we have turned over every stone.”

For a scientist, he said, taking part on the I.P.C.C. entails considerable personal and professional sacrifices. “It drives you absolutely crazy,” Dr. Schellnhuber said. “You fly to distant places; you stay up all night negotiating; you listen to hundreds of sometimes silly interventions. You go through so many mundane things to produce the big picture.”

The Nobel prizes are meant to be apolitical, and are, in any case, awarded independently of one another (the peace prize is awarded in Oslo, while the other prizes are awarded by various academies in Sweden). However, a number of recent winners have expressed their opposition to Bush administration policies.

The 2005 literature winner, the British playwright Harold Pinter, turned his Nobel address into a blistering indictment of American foreign policy since the Second World War. The co-winner of the peace prize that year, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made no secret of his opposition to the United States invasion of Iraq and has angered the Bush administration by his measured methods for trying to rein in nuclear proliferation, particularly in Iran.

In its citation today, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said that the United Nations panel and Mr. Gore both have focused “on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby reduce the future threat to the security of mankind.”

It concluded, “Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.”

Walter Gibbs reported from Oslo and Sarah Lyall from London. Jesse McKinley contributed reporting from Palo Alto, Calif., Somini Sengupta from New Delhi, Mark Landler from Frankfurt and David Rampe from Paris.

Turks Angry Over House Armenian Genocide Vote


By SEBNEM ARSU
Published: October 12, 2007
from www.nytimes.com

ISTANBUL, Oct. 11 — Turkey reacted angrily Thursday to a House committee vote in Washington to condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey that began during World War I, recalling its ambassador from Washington and threatening to withdraw its support for the Iraq war.

In uncharacteristically strong language, President Abdullah Gul criticized the vote by the House Foreign Relations Committee in a statement to the semi-official Anatolian News Agency, and warned that the decision could work against the United States.

“Unfortunately, some politicians in the United States have once more dismissed calls for common sense, and made an attempt to sacrifice big issues for minor domestic political games,” President Gul said.

The House vote comes at a particularly inopportune time. Washington has called on Turkey to show restraint as its military mobilizes on the border with Iraq, threatening an incursion against Kurdish insurgents. On Thursday, Turkish warplanes were reported to be flying close to the border, but not crossing it.

The possibility of Turkish military intervention in Iraq against Kurdish separatists has long worried American officials for its potential to ignite a wider war. On Wednesday, the Turkish government began the process of gaining parliamentary approval to conduct cross-border operations.

The committee vote in the House, though nonbinding and largely symbolic, rebuffed an intense campaign by the White House and earlier warnings from Turkey’s government that such a vote would gravely strain relations with the United States.

In Washington, the Bush administration tried to ease the hard feelings between the countries, and vowed to try to defeat the resolution on Capitol Hill.

“One of the reasons we opposed the resolution in the House yesterday is that the president has expressed on behalf of the American people our horror at the tragedy of 1915,” said Dana Perino, President Bush’s chief spokeswoman. “But at the same time, we have national security concerns, and many of our troops and supplies go through Turkey. They are a very important ally in the war on terror, and we are going to continue to try to work with them. And we hope that the House does not put forward a full vote.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House would definitely take up the measure. “I said if it comes out of committee, it will go to the floor,” she told reporters. “Now it has come out of committee, and it will go to the floor.”

In Turkey, there was widespread expectation that the House committee vote and any further steps would damage relations between the countries.

Turkish officials and lawmakers warned that if the resolution were approved by the full House, they would reconsider supporting the American war effort in Iraq, which includes permission to ship essential supplies through Turkey from a major air base at Incirlik, in southern Turkey.

Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, refused to say what effect the resolution might have on American access to the base, but he did not exclude the possibility of a policy change. “This step is contrary to the U.S. interests,” he said on Thursday, “and is an unfortunate decision taken by those who cannot acknowledge Turkey’s position.”

Already the top Turkish naval commander, Adm. Metin Atac, canceled a trip to the United States for a conference after Wednesday’s vote, an American Embassy official confirmed. Admiral Atac’s office did not specify any reasons for the cancellation.

For his part, Ross Wilson, the United States ambassador to Turkey, also tried to calm relations, issuing a statement on Thursday saying that the partnership between Turkey and the United States was strong and would remain so. He added that he, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice regretted the committee decision.

He was nonetheless later summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara, the capital, to be briefed on Turkey’s disappointment.

“We had a meeting with Mr. Wilson during which we expressed our concerns about the developments,” said a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry. “We drew attention to bad reflections on our bilateral relations and kindly requested his assistance in preventing the passage of the bill.”

The House decision prompted reaction on the streets of Ankara and Istanbul. The youth branch of the extreme-leftist Workers’ Party laid a black wreath at the United States Embassy and spray-painted the Turkish flag onto an embassy wall.


A total of 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the Armenian genocide, which began in 1915 as part of a systematic campaign by the fraying Ottoman Empire to drive Armenians out of eastern Turkey. Turks have vehemently denied the genocide designation, while acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died. They contend that the deaths resulted from the war that ended with the creation of modern Turkey in 1923.

Identifying Armenian killings as genocide is considered an insult against Turkish identity, a crime under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code.

In an Istanbul court on Thursday, Sarkis Seropyan and Arat Dink, the brother of Hrant Dink, the newspaper editor who was killed by a 17-year-old gunman in January, received suspended jail sentences for one year for violating that law. They reprinted other newspaper accounts of Hrant Dink’s statement saying that Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Army in the 1910s, their lawyer, Fethiye Cetin, said.

Not only writers of Armenian origin, but also the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk have been charged under the same law, although his case was dropped under heavy international pressure.

A State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said that United States diplomats were reaching out to their Turkish counterparts to express not only their opposition to the resolution but “our commitment with Congress on this to see that the full House, in fact, votes to defeat this resolution.”

Mr. Casey said that State Department and White House officials would try to persuade “various members” of the House on how to vote.

Ms. Pelosi said that she did not have a date in mind for bringing the issue to the floor, but that it would be brought up this session, which is to end around Nov. 16. Whatever happens, she insisted, relations between the United States and Turkey will remain strong.

David Stout contributed reporting from Washington.

Monday, October 8, 2007

International Weakness for Myanmar

Shouting across the barbed wire

Oct 4th 2007 | BANGKOK
From The Economist print edition

Myanmar's neighbours are talking tough but doing little to show their disapproval of the killings in Myanmar

EPA

IBRAHIM GAMBARI, the United Nations' special envoy to Myanmar, kept everyone guessing after his four-day visit to seek an end to its military regime's harsh crackdown on protesters. On October 2nd he flew out, having met the regime's leaders in their remote new capital, Naypyidaw, and also Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader in detention in the main city, Yangon. The envoy was due to report to the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, on his return to New York. Mr Ban had already deflated hopes for an immediate breakthrough by saying of the envoy's mission: “You cannot call it a success.”

He did, however, confirm that Mr Gambari will pay another visit to Myanmar in November. And state television had reported that General Than Shwe, who heads the junta, had told him he would talk to Miss Suu Kyi, on certain conditions: that she stopped being “obstructive” and backing sanctions. So there is a faint hope that international pressure might indeed make the regime open a dialogue with the pro-democracy movement, leading ultimately to a peaceful settlement. That, however, still seems a long way off, even were Miss Suu Kyi to agree to general's terms for talks. During Mr Gambari's visit, the regime continued making large-scale arrests of suspected pro-democracy campaigners; and the regime defiantly blamed meddling foreigners for instigating the protests. It hardly seemed ready to compromise. In the past, talks with Miss Suu Kyi have been used as a sop to placate international opinion.

As tens of thousands of Buddhist monks took to the streets late last month, it was hoped that the government would hesitate to crack down too hard on them, because of the reverence that the clergy command from ordinary Burmese. However, the troops and riot police sent into the streets on September 24th quickly demonstrated their ruthlessness. Monks were beaten, arrested and in some cases shot or bludgeoned to death. By the weekend, with the last signs of resistance quashed and the country's internet connections cut off, the flood of news and pictures coming out of the country had become a trickle. But one image seen around the globe, of the battered body of a young monk, face down in a ditch, said it all.

Large numbers of monks have been carted off to unknown places of detention. Perhaps thousands are being held at the Government Technical Institute, north of Yangon, though some were freed on October 3rd. State-controlled media have admitted to only ten deaths since the protests began, claiming they were handled “with care, using the least possible force”. Diplomats believe there may have been hundreds of deaths. But, as with the crackdown on the student-led protests of 1988, the toll may never be known.

By the middle of this week, Yangon's streets were quiet. Fewer troops were patrolling, a night-time curfew had been reduced by two hours and access to the golden Shwedagon Pagoda—the country's holiest shrine and the rallying-point of the monks' protests—was restored. The junta seemed confident it had beaten the life out of the protests, for now at least.

Less is known about the situation in other towns that had big, monk-led protests. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) said that army chiefs in Mandalay briefly restricted its much-needed food supplies (see article). By midweek, the restrictions had been lifted, though the WFP said it was running out of money and was thus unable to reach more than a fraction of the 1.6m Burmese it is trying to feed.

The worldwide dissemination of graphic images of the violence has forced many of Myanmar's Asian neighbours to go beyond their usual stance of non-interference in other countries' affairs. Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of China—Myanmar's largest supplier of imports and its third-largest export market—expressed deep concern about the situation and urged efforts to “promote domestic reconciliation and achieve democracy and development.” Japan said it might cut aid to Myanmar after the shooting of a Japanese journalist by a soldier during the Yangon protests. The feeblest response among those countries engaged with Myanmar came from India. Its ministers' vague talk about the need for peaceful dialogue was undercut by the new army chief, who said India wanted to maintain its close relationship with the regime.

George Yeo, Singapore's foreign minister, claimed this week that the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has “very little leverage” over Myanmar's regime, which was admitted to the regional body in 1997 in the hope that constructive engagement might achieve what Western sanctions had not. “We can't do what the big powers can do in terms of trade embargo or freezing bank accounts,” said Mr Yeo. For “can't”, read “won't”. There is plenty that ASEAN could do. Some regime leaders are thought to have bank accounts in Singapore, which could indeed be frozen. Thailand is by far the largest buyer of Burmese exports (principally gas). Thailand and Singapore are second and third behind China in supplying the country.

So, some well-chosen sanctions, or even a credible threat to consider them, might have an impact. The West's sanctions on Myanmar have failed in part because the East has enthusiastically filled the breach. At the very least, suggested Mr Gambari's predecessor, Razali Ismail, ASEAN could start by insisting on sending its own envoy to Myanmar. ASEAN has paid a high price for admitting the country and this seems the least it could do.

Article can be found on the Economist's website at http://economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=348951&story_id=9905481