http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7270179.stm
This is good news to hear. Although it leaves me with more questions than answers, a question on the possibility of improved human rights is better than certainty of their denial.
As would be expected, the Cuban government denies this is a shift and asserts this is merely a formality. Of course no government, especially a totalitarian one, is going to admit guilt for a half century of human rights abuses while the same people are in power. So, we can write the denial of shift off as what is actually a mere formality.
So the question has become, was the signing of the agreement a mere PR scheme, or was it the sign that some people in the Cuban administration are actually seeking a change of direction? The release of prisoners might be one test to see if a real shift is in the works. However, perhaps the Cuban government will hold on to these prisoners to save face and be more lax on future dissidents. Let me elaborate: if those in prison are released, it would signify a shift that is being denied. Thus, to "prove" that they were not denied their rights, the Cuban government keep them in jail, with Raul and company claiming to carry out justice. However, they may become more lax on future political dissidents.
All this is mere speculation. Obviously, I would like to see a major shift including the release of all political prisoners. I see this as unlikely, as the shift in power didn't seem to be a very meaningful one. Yet, this article surprised me and caught my attention. These were just some some thoughts on a possible scenario off the top of my head. What do you think? Leave a comment.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Australia Says ‘Sorry’ to Aborigines for Mistreatment
By TIM JOHNSTON
Published: February 13, 2008
SYDNEY, Australia — Prime Minister Kevin Rudd opened a new chapter in Australia’s tortured relations with its indigenous peoples on Wednesday with a comprehensive and moving apology for past wrongs and a call for bipartisan action to improve the lives of Australia’s Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.
A crowd outside Parliament listened to the apology read by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to the Aborgines of Australia.
“The Parliament is today here assembled to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul, and in a true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia,” Mr. Rudd told Parliament.
This was “Government business, motion No. 1,” the first act of Mr. Rudd’s Labor government, which was sworn in Tuesday after a convincing electoral win over the 11-year administration of John Howard, who had for years refused to apologize for the misdeeds of past governments.
Mr. Rudd’s apology was particularly addressed to the so-called Stolen Generations, the tens of thousands of indigenous children who were removed, sometimes forcibly, from their families in a policy of assimilation that only ended in the 1970s.
In some states it was part of a policy to “breed out the color,” in the words of Cecil Cook, who held the title of chief protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in the 1930s.
“We apologize especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country,” Mr. Rudd said as hundreds of members of the Stolen Generations listened in the gallery, some with tears in their eyes. “For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.
“To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.”
The 4-minute apology, and the 20-minute speech that followed, received a standing ovation both inside the chamber and from the hundreds gathered on the grounds of Parliament House in the capital, Canberra.
“I thought it was fantastic,” said Kirstie Parker, the managing editor of the influential Aboriginal newspaper The Koori Mail.
She said that it was not just the apology that was important: Mr. Rudd recounted stories of the victims, Ms. Parker noted, bringing the reality of the misdeeds to light and publicly confronting those who deny what happened.
But for some people, Mr. Rudd’s apology will not have gone far enough because he has ruled out setting up a government fund to compensate the victims of the policies that led to the Stolen Generations.
“There are many people who are saying that they must back this up with compensation,” Ms. Parker said. “I get a distinct feeling among Aboriginal people that they feel that compensation is an absolute possibility, notwithstanding the prime minister’s very vehement statement about not considering it.”
The Howard government had refused to apologize, partially because it did not feel responsible for the misdeeds of past administrations, but also because it feared that the move could lead to sizable compensation claims.
Last year, a court in South Australia awarded 525,000 Australian dollars to Bruce Trevorrow, who was taken from his mother when he was a baby, for unlawful treatment and false imprisonment.
Mr. Howard’s government had been criticized for an intervention in the Northern Territory that curtailed the rights of many indigenous communities, including quarantining half of welfare payments to ensure they were spent on food. Mr. Rudd’s government has promised to review the intervention.
Mr. Rudd recognized that the apology itself was symbolic, and he asked the opposition to move beyond partisan politics.
Mr. Rudd suggested a “war cabinet” on indigenous policy led by himself and the opposition leader, Brendan Nelson of the Liberal Party. Mr. Nelson agreed.
And there are deep challenges. Many indigenous Australians live on the margins of society. Aboriginal life expectancy is 17 years shorter than for other Australians, indigenous unemployment runs three times the rate of the country as a whole and the incidence of crime and alcoholism is significantly higher in indigenous communities.
Published: February 13, 2008
SYDNEY, Australia — Prime Minister Kevin Rudd opened a new chapter in Australia’s tortured relations with its indigenous peoples on Wednesday with a comprehensive and moving apology for past wrongs and a call for bipartisan action to improve the lives of Australia’s Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.
A crowd outside Parliament listened to the apology read by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to the Aborgines of Australia.
“The Parliament is today here assembled to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul, and in a true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia,” Mr. Rudd told Parliament.
This was “Government business, motion No. 1,” the first act of Mr. Rudd’s Labor government, which was sworn in Tuesday after a convincing electoral win over the 11-year administration of John Howard, who had for years refused to apologize for the misdeeds of past governments.
Mr. Rudd’s apology was particularly addressed to the so-called Stolen Generations, the tens of thousands of indigenous children who were removed, sometimes forcibly, from their families in a policy of assimilation that only ended in the 1970s.
In some states it was part of a policy to “breed out the color,” in the words of Cecil Cook, who held the title of chief protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in the 1930s.
“We apologize especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country,” Mr. Rudd said as hundreds of members of the Stolen Generations listened in the gallery, some with tears in their eyes. “For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.
“To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.”
The 4-minute apology, and the 20-minute speech that followed, received a standing ovation both inside the chamber and from the hundreds gathered on the grounds of Parliament House in the capital, Canberra.
“I thought it was fantastic,” said Kirstie Parker, the managing editor of the influential Aboriginal newspaper The Koori Mail.
She said that it was not just the apology that was important: Mr. Rudd recounted stories of the victims, Ms. Parker noted, bringing the reality of the misdeeds to light and publicly confronting those who deny what happened.
But for some people, Mr. Rudd’s apology will not have gone far enough because he has ruled out setting up a government fund to compensate the victims of the policies that led to the Stolen Generations.
“There are many people who are saying that they must back this up with compensation,” Ms. Parker said. “I get a distinct feeling among Aboriginal people that they feel that compensation is an absolute possibility, notwithstanding the prime minister’s very vehement statement about not considering it.”
The Howard government had refused to apologize, partially because it did not feel responsible for the misdeeds of past administrations, but also because it feared that the move could lead to sizable compensation claims.
Last year, a court in South Australia awarded 525,000 Australian dollars to Bruce Trevorrow, who was taken from his mother when he was a baby, for unlawful treatment and false imprisonment.
Mr. Howard’s government had been criticized for an intervention in the Northern Territory that curtailed the rights of many indigenous communities, including quarantining half of welfare payments to ensure they were spent on food. Mr. Rudd’s government has promised to review the intervention.
Mr. Rudd recognized that the apology itself was symbolic, and he asked the opposition to move beyond partisan politics.
Mr. Rudd suggested a “war cabinet” on indigenous policy led by himself and the opposition leader, Brendan Nelson of the Liberal Party. Mr. Nelson agreed.
And there are deep challenges. Many indigenous Australians live on the margins of society. Aboriginal life expectancy is 17 years shorter than for other Australians, indigenous unemployment runs three times the rate of the country as a whole and the incidence of crime and alcoholism is significantly higher in indigenous communities.
Monday, February 25, 2008
A $12 Billion History Lesson
A $12 billion history lesson
Monday, February 25, 2008
From the International Herald Tribune
From the International Herald Tribune
Last week, a senior French official flew to Istanbul to discuss Turkey's exclusion of Gaz de France from an $12 billion pipeline project - designed to bring Central Asian oil directly to European markets - because of recent French legislation making it a criminal offense to deny that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915 constituted genocide.
The Turkish government clearly takes history seriously. Just last October, when the United States Congress considered a bill similar to the French genocide legislation - without the punitive dimension - Turkey threatened to restrict airspace vital to the American military efforts in Iraq. Washington backed off.
Turkey objects to the term "genocide" to describe the historical tragedy it calls the "events of 1915." Ankara is resolute in defending this stance and has mirror legislation to that of France making it a criminal offense to use the term "genocide." Turkey does not deny that hundreds of thousands of men, women and children perished in a series of population transfers across a rugged mountain region, but it blames the deaths on the tragic combination of bureaucratic ineptness and particularly harsh climatic conditions.
For Armenians, as well as nearly two dozen other countries ranging from Australia to Venezuela, this was "genocide" plain and simple. This clash of historical narratives has become more than academic, as France and the United States have recently learned.
George Orwell warned us about mixing history and politics, but after nearly a century, it is perhaps time for governments and scholars to cooperate in resolving this dispute by establishing an international historical commission to explore these issues in a sustained, comprehensive and, most important, cooperative matter, as the Czechs and Germans did with their joint historical commission in the 1990s when similar tensions strained their relations.
Unlike the Nazi persecution of the Jews, which was determined to have constituted genocide by an international tribunal in Nuremburg, and subsequent tribunals that made similar determinations for Rwanda and for Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia, the Armenian genocide, or "events of 1915," has never been subjected to similar international historical or legal scrutiny. There have been judgments rendered on the tragedy, including expert opinions by the International Center for Transitional Justice and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. But there has never been a formal independent historical commission that has had access to the complete historical record or involved teams of scholars from Turkey and Armenia, like the Czech-German historical commission established to resolve historical disputes between those two countries or numerous similar commissions.
There have been several attempts in recent years by Turks and Armenians to address the issue collectively. In 2001, a Turkish-Armenian reconciliation commission was launched to great fanfare only to collapse a year later. In 2005, the late Hrant Dink joined 30 Turkish and Armenian scholars and journalists at the Salzburg Global Seminar to explore ways of advancing Turkish-Armenian dialogue. Last April, a group of Nobel laureates led by Elie Wiesel published an appeal for "understanding and reconciliation" that was publicly greeted by Turkish scholars in an open letter.
In a gesture toward dialogue, the Turkish government published full-page advertisements in major newspapers, including this one, calling for a joint Turkish-Armenian historical commission. And just this month, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reiterated this position at an international security conference in Munich.
Perhaps the time has come to take Turkey up on its offer and establish an independent, international historical commission that can explore the historical facts and legal definitions in a neutral and sustained manner and render an independent and informed opinion.
Such a commission would need to have the historical authority and legal expertise to review the historical facts and deliberate on the legal implications. It would need the cooperation of Turkey and Armenia as well as Russia, France, Britain, the United States and other countries to provide access to pertinent archives. And it would benefit from access to private archives that contain relevant documents.
History is best when it is researched and debated before it is lobbied and legislated. It will be a costly undertaking, both in terms of time and resources - there is no question about that - but as France and the United States know, unresolved historic legacies often come with an even higher price tag.
Elazar Barkan and Timothy W. Ryback co-direct the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Rice, in Nairobi, Offers Incentives to End Violence
NY Times
February 19, 2008
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held pointed talks with the leaders of Kenya’s rival political factions on Monday, and said afterward that while their differences were “not unbridgeable,” the two sides must move much faster to accept a power-sharing deal that would lead to a coalition government.
“The time for a political settlement was yesterday,” Ms. Rice said at a news conference at the home of the American ambassador here.
Ms. Rice seemed to be aiming her sharpest comments at the Kenyan government, which has widely been viewed as the obstacle to a genuine power-sharing agreement between the government and the opposition. Kenyan government officials responded by saying that they agreed a solution needed to be found as soon as possible, but sounded increasingly prickly about outside intervention.
“We will not bow down to dictation,” Martha Karua, the minister of justice and constitutional affairs, said in an interview Monday night, after sitting in on a two-hour meeting between Ms. Rice and President Mwai Kibaki. “We can listen to all our friends. We can engage with them. But the decision ultimately will be ours.”
Ms. Karua’s comments underscored the delicate task the Bush administration faces in wading into the crisis in Kenya, which erupted after a disputed presidential election in December and has cost more than 1,000 lives. With Mr. Bush already in Africa on a five-country tour to promote his foreign aid agenda, he had little choice but to make a high-profile show of concern for Kenya and announced before he left Washington that he would send Ms. Rice.
Ms. Rice knew going in that she would have to tread gingerly, and it seemed on Monday that she was bringing carrots, not sticks. As she was flying from Tanzania to Nairobi over the Serengeti, the famous game-studded plains, she insisted that she did not intend to dictate a solution and that she would instead use her meetings to dangle the prospect of additional economic help for Kenya if the rival factions could reach a compromise.
“When Kenya resolves this political conflict,” she said, “they are going to find a very supportive United States in terms of additional work on reconstruction and reconciliation support.”
Power-sharing will have to be genuine, Ms. Rice said. Both sides must have “responsibilities and authorities that matter,” she said. “It can’t be simply the illusion of power sharing. It has to be real.”
Ms. Rice said she did not want to talk about threats, sanctions or provisions that might punish Kenya’s leading politicians, who have been bitterly at odds since the election.
Hundreds of thousands have been displaced in fighting that has followed ethnic lines, segregating many areas of the country into ethnically homogenous zones. Many Kenyans believe that the only solution is for the government and opposition to share power.
Ms. Rice’s promises of more help for Kenya, which already receives more than half a billion dollars of annual American aid, fit in with President Bush’s approach of rewarding countries who embrace democracy and American-approved development programs. Though the president is trying to cement his legacy as a friend of Africa with this week’s trip, he has been criticized for not traveling to Africa’s hot spots, like Congo, Sudan and now Kenya.
Supporters of Mr. Kibaki and the top opposition leader, Raila Odinga, who lost the election amid evidence of widespread vote rigging, have battled across the country. The election dispute has stirred deep grievances over land and economic inequality that have dogged Kenya since independence in 1963.
On Monday, Ms. Rice shuttled back and forth across Nairobi, meeting with Mr. Kibaki, Mr. Odinga and Kenyan business leaders. The country’s economy, until recently one of the strongest in Africa, has been brought to its knees by the turbulence and violence.
Ms. Rice also talked with Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, who has spent the past four weeks in Kenya trying to broker a truce, and told him where she thought there were potential “points of agreement” between the parties.
The opposition has proposed a number of power-sharing possibilities, including having Mr. Kibaki remain the president, head of state and commander-in-chief of the military while Mr. Odinga becomes prime minister and is in charge of domestic affairs.
But members of Mr. Kibaki’s team have forcefully rejected that, saying they will give the opposition some cabinet posts but that the Kenyan Constitution does not allow power to be divided the way the opposition is suggesting. The fear is that unless the government gives the opposition a meaningful role in ruling the country, opposition supporters will revert to violence and Kenya will join the growing club of failed states in Africa.
Mr. Odinga has said the prime minister post is the bare minimum he would accept.
“Beyond that, we will be out of government,” he said in an interview Sunday night. He also said that Mr. Kibaki was not the stumbling block but that the problem was a small clique of “hard-liners” around Mr. Kibaki.
“I’m sure he’s willing for a power-sharing arrangement that would give him a decent way out to get our country out of this mess,” Mr. Odinga said.
Mr. Odinga gave a gloomy prognosis, saying that the negotiations would most likely fail and that Kenya would soon be ungovernable.
“The moment it is announced that the talks collapsed, I am sure there will be an eruption countrywide,” he said. “It will be chaos.”
The government has dismissed those threats and accused opposition leaders, including Mr. Odinga, of inciting their supporters to kill people of Mr. Kibaki’s ethnicity. Mr. Odinga has denied that and blamed the government for failing to protect Kenyans.
On Monday, Ms. Rice said that the back-and-forth had to end and that it was not just the American government that thought this.
“What I hear is the impatience and insistence of Kenyans that this is resolved,” she said. “It is Kenyans who are insisting that its leaders and political class find a solution.”
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting.
February 19, 2008
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held pointed talks with the leaders of Kenya’s rival political factions on Monday, and said afterward that while their differences were “not unbridgeable,” the two sides must move much faster to accept a power-sharing deal that would lead to a coalition government.
“The time for a political settlement was yesterday,” Ms. Rice said at a news conference at the home of the American ambassador here.
Ms. Rice seemed to be aiming her sharpest comments at the Kenyan government, which has widely been viewed as the obstacle to a genuine power-sharing agreement between the government and the opposition. Kenyan government officials responded by saying that they agreed a solution needed to be found as soon as possible, but sounded increasingly prickly about outside intervention.
“We will not bow down to dictation,” Martha Karua, the minister of justice and constitutional affairs, said in an interview Monday night, after sitting in on a two-hour meeting between Ms. Rice and President Mwai Kibaki. “We can listen to all our friends. We can engage with them. But the decision ultimately will be ours.”
Ms. Karua’s comments underscored the delicate task the Bush administration faces in wading into the crisis in Kenya, which erupted after a disputed presidential election in December and has cost more than 1,000 lives. With Mr. Bush already in Africa on a five-country tour to promote his foreign aid agenda, he had little choice but to make a high-profile show of concern for Kenya and announced before he left Washington that he would send Ms. Rice.
Ms. Rice knew going in that she would have to tread gingerly, and it seemed on Monday that she was bringing carrots, not sticks. As she was flying from Tanzania to Nairobi over the Serengeti, the famous game-studded plains, she insisted that she did not intend to dictate a solution and that she would instead use her meetings to dangle the prospect of additional economic help for Kenya if the rival factions could reach a compromise.
“When Kenya resolves this political conflict,” she said, “they are going to find a very supportive United States in terms of additional work on reconstruction and reconciliation support.”
Power-sharing will have to be genuine, Ms. Rice said. Both sides must have “responsibilities and authorities that matter,” she said. “It can’t be simply the illusion of power sharing. It has to be real.”
Ms. Rice said she did not want to talk about threats, sanctions or provisions that might punish Kenya’s leading politicians, who have been bitterly at odds since the election.
Hundreds of thousands have been displaced in fighting that has followed ethnic lines, segregating many areas of the country into ethnically homogenous zones. Many Kenyans believe that the only solution is for the government and opposition to share power.
Ms. Rice’s promises of more help for Kenya, which already receives more than half a billion dollars of annual American aid, fit in with President Bush’s approach of rewarding countries who embrace democracy and American-approved development programs. Though the president is trying to cement his legacy as a friend of Africa with this week’s trip, he has been criticized for not traveling to Africa’s hot spots, like Congo, Sudan and now Kenya.
Supporters of Mr. Kibaki and the top opposition leader, Raila Odinga, who lost the election amid evidence of widespread vote rigging, have battled across the country. The election dispute has stirred deep grievances over land and economic inequality that have dogged Kenya since independence in 1963.
On Monday, Ms. Rice shuttled back and forth across Nairobi, meeting with Mr. Kibaki, Mr. Odinga and Kenyan business leaders. The country’s economy, until recently one of the strongest in Africa, has been brought to its knees by the turbulence and violence.
Ms. Rice also talked with Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, who has spent the past four weeks in Kenya trying to broker a truce, and told him where she thought there were potential “points of agreement” between the parties.
The opposition has proposed a number of power-sharing possibilities, including having Mr. Kibaki remain the president, head of state and commander-in-chief of the military while Mr. Odinga becomes prime minister and is in charge of domestic affairs.
But members of Mr. Kibaki’s team have forcefully rejected that, saying they will give the opposition some cabinet posts but that the Kenyan Constitution does not allow power to be divided the way the opposition is suggesting. The fear is that unless the government gives the opposition a meaningful role in ruling the country, opposition supporters will revert to violence and Kenya will join the growing club of failed states in Africa.
Mr. Odinga has said the prime minister post is the bare minimum he would accept.
“Beyond that, we will be out of government,” he said in an interview Sunday night. He also said that Mr. Kibaki was not the stumbling block but that the problem was a small clique of “hard-liners” around Mr. Kibaki.
“I’m sure he’s willing for a power-sharing arrangement that would give him a decent way out to get our country out of this mess,” Mr. Odinga said.
Mr. Odinga gave a gloomy prognosis, saying that the negotiations would most likely fail and that Kenya would soon be ungovernable.
“The moment it is announced that the talks collapsed, I am sure there will be an eruption countrywide,” he said. “It will be chaos.”
The government has dismissed those threats and accused opposition leaders, including Mr. Odinga, of inciting their supporters to kill people of Mr. Kibaki’s ethnicity. Mr. Odinga has denied that and blamed the government for failing to protect Kenyans.
On Monday, Ms. Rice said that the back-and-forth had to end and that it was not just the American government that thought this.
“What I hear is the impatience and insistence of Kenyans that this is resolved,” she said. “It is Kenyans who are insisting that its leaders and political class find a solution.”
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting.
Kosovo Declares Its Independence From Serbia
NY Times
February 18, 2008
By DAN BILEFSKY
PRISTINA, Kosovo — The province of Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Sunday, sending tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians streaming through the streets to celebrate what they hoped was the end of a long and bloody struggle for national self-determination.
Kosovo’s bid to be recognized as Europe’s newest country — after a civil war that killed 10,000 people a decade ago and then years of limbo under United Nations rule — was the latest episode in the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia, 17 years after its dissolution began.
It brings to a climax a showdown between the West, which argues that Serbia’s brutal subjugation of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority cost it any right to rule the territory, and the Serbian government and its allies in the Kremlin. They counter that Kosovo’s independence is a reckless breach of international law that will spur other secessionist movements across the world.
As Albanians danced in the streets and fired guns in the air in the capital, Pristina, international reaction was sharply divided, suggesting that the clash between the principles of sovereignty and self-determination was far from resolved.
Britain, France and Germany were expected to be the first to recognize the new nation as early as Monday, while other nations, fearing separatist movements within their own borders, have said they will refuse. Russia demanded an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to proclaim the declaration “null and void,” but the meeting produced no resolution.
The United States and additional European Union member states were expected to recognize Kosovo’s independence in the coming days.
President Bush, speaking in Tanzania, said the United States would continue to work to prevent violence in Kosovo, while reaching out to Serbia. He said that resolving the conflict in Kosovo was essential to stability in the Balkans and that “the Serbian people can know that they have a friend in America.”
In declaring independence, Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci, a former leader of the guerrilla force that just over 10 years ago began an armed rebellion against Serbian domination, struck a note of reconciliation. Addressing Parliament in both Albanian and Serbian, he pledged to protect the rights of Kosovo’s Serbian minority. “I feel the heartbeat of our ancestors,” he said. “We, the leaders of our people, democratically elected, through this declaration proclaim Kosovo an independent and sovereign state.”
Kosovo, a desperately poor, predominantly Muslim landlocked territory of two million, has been a United Nations protectorate since 1999, policed by 16,000 NATO troops. Its unemployment rate is about 60 percent and average monthly wage is $250.
Electricity is so undependable that lights go out in the capital several times a day. Corruption is rife and human trafficking threatens to entrench a lawless state on Europe’s doorstep.
Ethnic Albanians from as far away as the United States poured into Pristina over the weekend, braving freezing temperatures and heavy snow to dance in frenzied jubilation. Beating drums, waving Albanian flags and throwing firecrackers, they chanted: “Independence! Independence! We are free at last!”
A 100-foot-long birthday cake was installed on Pristina’s main boulevard.
In an outpouring of adulation for the United States, the architect of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Serbian forces under President Slobodan Milosevic, revelers unfurled giant American flags, carried posters of former President Bill Clinton and chanted, “Thank you, U.S.A.” and “God bless America.”
Hundreds of people, many waving Albanian flags, celebrated in Times Square. Revelers in cars drove in circles around the area, leading chants whenever they passed the crowds gathered on the sidewalks.
That spirit of exaltation contrasted sharply with the despair, anger and disbelief that gripped Serbia and the Serbian enclaves of northern Kosovo. In Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, as many as 2,000 angry Serbs converged on the United States Embassy, hurling stones and smashing windows.
In the Kosovo Serb stronghold of Mitrovica, a grenade was thrown at a United Nations building, the police said. No one was injured.
Vojislav Kostunica, the prime minister of Serbia, which has regarded Kosovo as its heartland since medieval times, vowed that Serbia would never recognize the “false state.”
In an address on national television on Sunday, he said Kosovo was propped up unlawfully by the United States and called the declaration a “humiliation” for the European Union. The Serbian government has ruled out using military force in response, but was expected to downgrade diplomatic ties with any government that recognized Kosovo.
Demonstrations were planned for Monday in Serbian enclaves across Kosovo. Serbs said they were under orders from Belgrade to ignore the independence declaration and remain in Kosovo to keep the northern part of the territory under de facto Serbian control, raising questions about Serbia’s long-term aims.
At the Security Council, Russia argued that the proclamation violated the 1999 resolution that established the United Nations mission in Kosovo. “Our position is that the declaration should be disregarded by the international community and declared null and void,” said Vitaly I. Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations.
But Alejandro D. Wolff, the deputy American ambassador, said, “In our view, this declaration is logical and consistent and completely in line with” the 1999 measure.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pleaded with all parties “to refrain from any actions or statements that could endanger peace, incite violence or jeopardize security in Kosovo or the region.”
The Security Council agreed to a request by Russia and Serbia to hold an open meeting on Monday that will be addressed by the Serbian president, Boris Tadic.
Kosovo’s declaration followed nearly two years of United Nations-sponsored negotiations between it and Serbia. Those talks failed, as did a Security Council effort in December to resolve Kosovo’s future.
The European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, appealed for calm, while NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said the alliance would respond “swiftly and firmly against anyone who might resort to violence.”
Kosovo’s sovereignty remains severely circumscribed, making it reliant on the international community. NATO still provides international security, while the European Union has agreed to send an 1,800-strong police and judicial mission to help run the territory after the United Nations leaves.
Ulrich Wilhelm, the spokesman for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Germany would decide what to do on Monday.
Kosovo played a central role in the collapse of the Yugoslav federation built by the Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito, who died in 1980. Albanian nationalism erupted in Kosovo in 1981, leading to bloody clashes.
In the 1980s, Mr. Milosevic used Serbs’ enormous sense of grievance that their ancestral heartland was now dominated by Muslim Albanians to come to power in Serbia. By 1989, he had abolished Kosovo’s autonomy, fired tens of thousands of Albanians from their jobs, suppressed Albanian language education and controlled the territory with a heavy police presence.
Ten years ago, Mr. Milosevic’s forces moved against the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, killing a guerrilla leader and his family at their compound. As violence escalated, NATO intervened in a 1999 bombing campaign, causing hundreds of thousands of Albanians and Serbs to flee.
An estimated 10,000 civilians were killed in the 1998-99 conflict, many of them Albanians, while 1,500 Serbs died in revenge killings that followed.
For the ethnic Albanians who make up 95 percent of Kosovo’s population, independence marks a new beginning.
“Independence is a catharsis,” said Antoneta Kastrati, 26, an Albanian from Peja, who said her mother and older sister were killed by their Serbian neighbors in 1999. “Things won’t change overnight and we cannot forget the past, but maybe I will feel safe now and my nightmares will finally go away.”
In Mitrovica, a 70-year-old Serbian engineer who would give only his first name, Svetozar, said: “I will stay here forever. This will always be Serbia.”
Kosovo’s declaration created immediate ripples in the former Soviet Union, where small, Russian-backed separatist areas — one in Moldova and two in the republic of Georgia — have existed since the early 1990s. Two of them — Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia — announced their intention to seek recognition as independent states.
Conversely, several of the European Union’s 27 member states — including Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Romania — oppose recognizing Kosovo because they fear encouraging secessionist movements within their own borders.
In Brussels, officials were drafting a statement for a foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday. Senior European Union officials said they expected it to acknowledge Kosovo’s independence declaration without explicitly endorsing it.
The declaration of independence raises the prospects of a new constitution and emblems of nationhood, including a new flag bearing a map of Kosovo topped by six stars.
But in a sign of how hard it will be to forge the kind of multiethnic, secular identity that foreign powers have urged, the distinctive two-headed eagle of the red and black Albanian flag, reviled by Serbs, was everywhere Sunday, held by revelers, draped on horses, flapping out of car windows and hanging outside homes and storefronts across the territory.
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations, C. J. Chivers from Moscow and Nicholas Kulish from Berlin.
February 18, 2008
By DAN BILEFSKY
PRISTINA, Kosovo — The province of Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Sunday, sending tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians streaming through the streets to celebrate what they hoped was the end of a long and bloody struggle for national self-determination.
Kosovo’s bid to be recognized as Europe’s newest country — after a civil war that killed 10,000 people a decade ago and then years of limbo under United Nations rule — was the latest episode in the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia, 17 years after its dissolution began.
It brings to a climax a showdown between the West, which argues that Serbia’s brutal subjugation of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority cost it any right to rule the territory, and the Serbian government and its allies in the Kremlin. They counter that Kosovo’s independence is a reckless breach of international law that will spur other secessionist movements across the world.
As Albanians danced in the streets and fired guns in the air in the capital, Pristina, international reaction was sharply divided, suggesting that the clash between the principles of sovereignty and self-determination was far from resolved.
Britain, France and Germany were expected to be the first to recognize the new nation as early as Monday, while other nations, fearing separatist movements within their own borders, have said they will refuse. Russia demanded an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to proclaim the declaration “null and void,” but the meeting produced no resolution.
The United States and additional European Union member states were expected to recognize Kosovo’s independence in the coming days.
President Bush, speaking in Tanzania, said the United States would continue to work to prevent violence in Kosovo, while reaching out to Serbia. He said that resolving the conflict in Kosovo was essential to stability in the Balkans and that “the Serbian people can know that they have a friend in America.”
In declaring independence, Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci, a former leader of the guerrilla force that just over 10 years ago began an armed rebellion against Serbian domination, struck a note of reconciliation. Addressing Parliament in both Albanian and Serbian, he pledged to protect the rights of Kosovo’s Serbian minority. “I feel the heartbeat of our ancestors,” he said. “We, the leaders of our people, democratically elected, through this declaration proclaim Kosovo an independent and sovereign state.”
Kosovo, a desperately poor, predominantly Muslim landlocked territory of two million, has been a United Nations protectorate since 1999, policed by 16,000 NATO troops. Its unemployment rate is about 60 percent and average monthly wage is $250.
Electricity is so undependable that lights go out in the capital several times a day. Corruption is rife and human trafficking threatens to entrench a lawless state on Europe’s doorstep.
Ethnic Albanians from as far away as the United States poured into Pristina over the weekend, braving freezing temperatures and heavy snow to dance in frenzied jubilation. Beating drums, waving Albanian flags and throwing firecrackers, they chanted: “Independence! Independence! We are free at last!”
A 100-foot-long birthday cake was installed on Pristina’s main boulevard.
In an outpouring of adulation for the United States, the architect of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Serbian forces under President Slobodan Milosevic, revelers unfurled giant American flags, carried posters of former President Bill Clinton and chanted, “Thank you, U.S.A.” and “God bless America.”
Hundreds of people, many waving Albanian flags, celebrated in Times Square. Revelers in cars drove in circles around the area, leading chants whenever they passed the crowds gathered on the sidewalks.
That spirit of exaltation contrasted sharply with the despair, anger and disbelief that gripped Serbia and the Serbian enclaves of northern Kosovo. In Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, as many as 2,000 angry Serbs converged on the United States Embassy, hurling stones and smashing windows.
In the Kosovo Serb stronghold of Mitrovica, a grenade was thrown at a United Nations building, the police said. No one was injured.
Vojislav Kostunica, the prime minister of Serbia, which has regarded Kosovo as its heartland since medieval times, vowed that Serbia would never recognize the “false state.”
In an address on national television on Sunday, he said Kosovo was propped up unlawfully by the United States and called the declaration a “humiliation” for the European Union. The Serbian government has ruled out using military force in response, but was expected to downgrade diplomatic ties with any government that recognized Kosovo.
Demonstrations were planned for Monday in Serbian enclaves across Kosovo. Serbs said they were under orders from Belgrade to ignore the independence declaration and remain in Kosovo to keep the northern part of the territory under de facto Serbian control, raising questions about Serbia’s long-term aims.
At the Security Council, Russia argued that the proclamation violated the 1999 resolution that established the United Nations mission in Kosovo. “Our position is that the declaration should be disregarded by the international community and declared null and void,” said Vitaly I. Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations.
But Alejandro D. Wolff, the deputy American ambassador, said, “In our view, this declaration is logical and consistent and completely in line with” the 1999 measure.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pleaded with all parties “to refrain from any actions or statements that could endanger peace, incite violence or jeopardize security in Kosovo or the region.”
The Security Council agreed to a request by Russia and Serbia to hold an open meeting on Monday that will be addressed by the Serbian president, Boris Tadic.
Kosovo’s declaration followed nearly two years of United Nations-sponsored negotiations between it and Serbia. Those talks failed, as did a Security Council effort in December to resolve Kosovo’s future.
The European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, appealed for calm, while NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said the alliance would respond “swiftly and firmly against anyone who might resort to violence.”
Kosovo’s sovereignty remains severely circumscribed, making it reliant on the international community. NATO still provides international security, while the European Union has agreed to send an 1,800-strong police and judicial mission to help run the territory after the United Nations leaves.
Ulrich Wilhelm, the spokesman for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Germany would decide what to do on Monday.
Kosovo played a central role in the collapse of the Yugoslav federation built by the Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito, who died in 1980. Albanian nationalism erupted in Kosovo in 1981, leading to bloody clashes.
In the 1980s, Mr. Milosevic used Serbs’ enormous sense of grievance that their ancestral heartland was now dominated by Muslim Albanians to come to power in Serbia. By 1989, he had abolished Kosovo’s autonomy, fired tens of thousands of Albanians from their jobs, suppressed Albanian language education and controlled the territory with a heavy police presence.
Ten years ago, Mr. Milosevic’s forces moved against the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, killing a guerrilla leader and his family at their compound. As violence escalated, NATO intervened in a 1999 bombing campaign, causing hundreds of thousands of Albanians and Serbs to flee.
An estimated 10,000 civilians were killed in the 1998-99 conflict, many of them Albanians, while 1,500 Serbs died in revenge killings that followed.
For the ethnic Albanians who make up 95 percent of Kosovo’s population, independence marks a new beginning.
“Independence is a catharsis,” said Antoneta Kastrati, 26, an Albanian from Peja, who said her mother and older sister were killed by their Serbian neighbors in 1999. “Things won’t change overnight and we cannot forget the past, but maybe I will feel safe now and my nightmares will finally go away.”
In Mitrovica, a 70-year-old Serbian engineer who would give only his first name, Svetozar, said: “I will stay here forever. This will always be Serbia.”
Kosovo’s declaration created immediate ripples in the former Soviet Union, where small, Russian-backed separatist areas — one in Moldova and two in the republic of Georgia — have existed since the early 1990s. Two of them — Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia — announced their intention to seek recognition as independent states.
Conversely, several of the European Union’s 27 member states — including Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Romania — oppose recognizing Kosovo because they fear encouraging secessionist movements within their own borders.
In Brussels, officials were drafting a statement for a foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday. Senior European Union officials said they expected it to acknowledge Kosovo’s independence declaration without explicitly endorsing it.
The declaration of independence raises the prospects of a new constitution and emblems of nationhood, including a new flag bearing a map of Kosovo topped by six stars.
But in a sign of how hard it will be to forge the kind of multiethnic, secular identity that foreign powers have urged, the distinctive two-headed eagle of the red and black Albanian flag, reviled by Serbs, was everywhere Sunday, held by revelers, draped on horses, flapping out of car windows and hanging outside homes and storefronts across the territory.
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations, C. J. Chivers from Moscow and Nicholas Kulish from Berlin.
Monday, February 18, 2008
By Making Holocaust Personal to Pupils, Sarkozy Stirs Anger
February 16, 2008
From the NY Times
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.
“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”
Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”
Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to “create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed.”
The Holocaust is already taught in French schools, but some psychiatrists and educators predicted that requiring students to identify with a specific victim would traumatize them.
Secularists accused Mr. Sarkozy, who is already under fire for his frequent praise of God and religion, of subverting both the country’s iron-clad separation of church and state and the national ideal of a single, nonreligious identity for all.
Political opponents dismissed the plan as his latest misguided idea, unveiled without reflection or consultation. Some historians argued that the focus on victims could steer attention away from the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis. Still others warned that the plan could backfire, creating resentment among France’s ethnic Arab and African populations if they felt their own histories were getting short shrift.
“Every day the president throws out a new unhappy idea with no coherence,” said Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher. “But this last one is truly obscene, the very opposite of spirituality. Let’s judge it for what it is: a crazy proposal of the president, not the word of the Gospel.”
The initiative has also pitted some Jews against one another. “It is unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and above all, unjust,” Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust, told the Web site of the magazine L’Express. “You cannot inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to bear.”
Ms. Veil was in the audience when Mr. Sarkozy spoke, and said that when she heard his words, “My blood turned to ice.”
But Serge Klarsfeld, a Jewish historian who has devoted his life to recording the list and biographies of France’s Holocaust victims, praised the president for his “courage.”
“This is the crowning glory of long and arduous work,” he said. “To those who say it’s too difficult for young children — that’s not true. What they see on television or in a horror film is much worse. This is not a morbid mission.”
Mr. Klarsfeld likened the plan to a practice by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which gives visitors small booklets describing the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors.
On one level, Mr. Sarkozy’s plan is a logical extension of his sometimes sentimental and pedagogical approach to governing. Last year, he enraged politicians on the left, the biggest union for high school teachers and some historians and teachers when he ordered all high schools in France to read a handwritten letter of a 17-year-old student who was executed by the Nazis for his resistance activities.
On another level, it reflects his oft-stated declaration that as president, he is also a “friend” as he calls himself, of Israel. By extension, he is also a friend of France’s Jews. He is, for example, the first French president to address the annual dinner of France’s Jewish community.
But there is something else. Mr. Sarkozy is shattering another barrier in French intellectual life: religion. His public statements on the subject seem to reflect a deeply held belief that religious values have an important place in everyday French society — an iconoclastic position for a French politician.
When Mr. Sarkozy was made an Honorary Canon of the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome last December, he proposed a “positive secularism” that “does not consider religions a danger, but an asset.” He was even more provocative in declaring that “the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor” in teaching the difference between good and evil.
In Saudi Arabia last month, he infused his speech with more than a dozen references to God, who, he said, “liberates” man. He also said last month that it was a mistake to delete the reference to “Europe’s Christian roots” from the European Constitution.
In France, a country where one’s religion is typically kept private, Mr. Sarkozy heralds his religious identity, referring publicly to his Jewish grandfather and wearing his Roman Catholicism on his sleeve.
“I am of Catholic culture, Catholic tradition, Catholic belief, even if my religious practice is episodic,” he wrote in a book of essays in 2004. “I consider myself as a member of the Catholic Church.”
Still, Mr. Sarkozy’s conduct in his personal life seems to contradict the image of Catholic spirituality. Twice divorced, three times married, he has alienated the country to the point that there is widespread disapproval of his behavior in his personal life.
That level of disapproval seems to have made Mr. Sarkozy vulnerable in almost anything he does these days, including his Holocaust initiative.
Teachers defended the current approach to the Holocaust in French schools. Since 2002, fifth-graders have studied the Nazis’ systematic destruction of six million Jews as a crime against humanity.
Older children watch films on the Holocaust, visit Holocaust museums and memorials and take field trips to concentration camps. Schools where students were taken away for deportation hang plaques in their memory.
“The Holocaust has to be put in the context of the rise of the Nazis and the war, not just emotion and dramatic spectacle,” said Gilles Moindrot, secretary-general of the largest union for primary school teachers. “If you do this with the memory of individual Jews, you’d have to do it with the victims of slavery or the wars of religion. We can’t have this approach.”
Some of Mr. Sarkozy’s other political foes accuse him of trying to put his personal stamp everywhere. “One day he is giving us sermons about God,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a Socialist senator on LCI television on Friday, adding, “Now he has suddenly turned himself into a teacher.”
Other analysts blamed the confessional approach of the United States for infecting Mr. Sarkozy’s thinking. “Listen, it’s in the air of the times,” said Régis Debray, the philosopher and author, on France Inter radio Friday. “There is a religious sentimentality, a pretty vague religiousness, let’s say, in the world of show business, in the world of business, that comes from America. It’s the neoconservative wave of the born-agains.”
MRAP, an organization that campaigns against racism, accused Mr. Sarkozy of chauvinism by singling out French victims of the Holocaust for study and excluding other groups, like the Gypsies.
Mr. Sarkozy’s advisers acknowledged that he came up with his Holocaust plan for schoolchildren without any formal consultation. In the face of the criticism, however, Mr. Sarkozy vowed to proceed.
“It is ignorance — not knowledge — that leads to the repetition of abominable situations,” he said during a visit to Périgueux in central France on Friday, adding, “You do not traumatize children by giving them the gift of the memory of a country.”
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Spielberg in Darfur snub to China
US film director Steven Spielberg has withdrawn as an artistic adviser for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
In a statement, he accused China of not doing enough to pressure Sudan to end the "continuing human suffering" in the troubled western Darfur region.
At least 200,000 people have been killed and two million forced from their homes in the five-year conflict.
Beijing has not yet responded to the move, which correspondents say is its first big setback in staging the Games.
This is a noble move by Spielberg - he will certainly go down in history as someone who gave human lives precedence over fame and money
Abdul Wahid Mohammad Ahmed al-Nur
Sudanese rebel leader
A source in the Beijing Olympic Committee said a response was being discussed at the highest levels but had not yet been made public.
But the BBC's James Reynolds in Beijing says the decision will anger and worry the authorities there.
Since Beijing won the right to host the Games it has always tried to keep China's politics and China's Olympics separate, he says, and it has attacked anyone who has tried to link the two.
Boycott call
Mr Spielberg, who had been brought in as artistic adviser for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games, said the cause of Darfur was more important than his role.
"I find that my conscience will not allow me to continue business as usual," he said in a statement.
"At this point, my time and energy must be spent not on Olympic ceremonies, but on doing all I can to help bring an end to the unspeakable crimes against humanity that continue to be committed in Darfur."
OLYMPICS ROW
Famous names involved in advising the Olympics include director Zhang Yimou and Kung Fu star Jackie Chan
Hollywood stars Mia Farrow and George Clooney have criticised China over Darfur
Architect Ai Weiwei, who designed the main Olympic stadium, says the Games are a "public relations sham"
He added: "Sudan's government bears the bulk of the responsibility for these on-going crimes, but the international community, and particularly China, should be doing more."
Rebel groups in Darfur said this was exactly the kind of pressure that was needed to get Beijing to change its policy towards the Sudanese government.
"This is a noble move by Spielberg," Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) leader Abdul Wahid Mohammad Ahmed al-Nur told the Sudan Tribune newspaper.
"He will certainly go down in history as someone who gave human lives precedence over fame and money."
Ahmed Abdel Shafi, who leads an SLM splinter group, told the BBC: "I commend him for his strong position. This is a lesson to the rest of the world that people should distance themselves from China."
HAVE YOUR SAY The real question is why the Olympics were awarded to China in the first place Vladi, California
Another group, the Justice and Equality Movement, has appealed to countries sending teams to boycott the games.
The International Olympic Committee said the decision was a personal one made by Mr Spielberg.
"The IOC recognise Darfur is a highly complex issue, with tragic circumstances, but is a matter for the UN to resolve," the committee said in a statement.
'Desperate time'
Sudan, with its vast oil reserves, sells some two-thirds of its oil to Beijing.
In turn, Beijing sells weapons to the Sudanese government and has defended Khartoum in the UN Security Council.
As a result, China has been criticised for its links with a government ostracised by many for its role in the ongoing crisis in Darfur.
Earlier on Tuesday, as part of a "Global Day of Action" focusing on Darfur, an open letter signed by Nobel Peace Prize laureates and former Olympians was sent to China's president.
Actress Mia Farrow, who signed the letter and had pressed Mr Spielberg to end his involvement, said his decision sent out the right signal to the Chinese government.
She said: "I'm delighted by his decision and it's a desperate time for Darfur, so this is a shred of good news in a very bleak week."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7242016.stm
Published: 2008/02/13 11:47:52 GMT
Monday, February 11, 2008
US Rep Tom Lantos Dies
From The New York Times
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Rep. Tom Lantos, who as a teenager twice escaped from a Nazi-run forced labor camp in Hungary and became the only Holocaust survivor to win a seat in Congress, has died. He was 80.
Spokeswoman Lynne Weil said Lantos, a Californian, died early Monday at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in suburban Maryland. He was surrounded by his wife, Annette, two daughters, and many of his 17 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Annette Lantos said in a statement that her husband's life was ''defined by courage, optimism, and unwavering dedication to his principles and to his family.''
Lantos, a Democrat who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, disclosed last month that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. He said at the time that he would serve out his 14th term but would not seek re-election in his Northern California district, which takes in the southwest portion of San Francisco and suburbs to the south including Lantos' home of San Mateo.
President Bush praised Lantos in a statement as ''a man of character and a champion of human rights.''
''After immigrating to America more than six decades ago, he worked to help oppressed people around the world have the opportunity to live in freedom,'' Bush said. ''As the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, Tom was a living reminder that we must never turn a blind eye to the suffering of the innocent at the hands of evil men.''
Flags were lowered to half-staff at the White House and U.S. Capitol.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, ''Tom Lantos was a true American hero. He was the embodiment of what it meant to have one's freedom denied and then to find it and to insist that America stand for spreading freedom and prosperity to others.''
Speaking to reporters at the State Department, she said, ''He was also a dear, dear friend and I am personally quite devastated by his loss.''
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that Lantos ''used his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee to empower the powerless and give voice to the voiceless throughout the world.''
The timing of Lantos' diagnosis was a particular blow because he had assumed his committee chairmanship just a year earlier, when Democrats retook control of Congress. He said then that in a sense his whole life had been a preparation for the job -- and it was.
Lantos, who referred to himself as ''an American by choice,'' was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping from the labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing powers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Lantos' mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust.
That background gave Lantos a moral authority unique in Congress and he used it repeatedly to speak out on foreign policy issues, sometimes courting controversy. Lantos was outspoken on human rights in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere, and in 2006 was one of five members of Congress arrested in a protest outside the Sudanese Embassy over the genocide in Darfur.
He joined the Bush administration in strong support of Israel and was a lead advocate for the 2002 congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion, though he would become a strong critic of President Bush's handling of the war.
Lantos was a frequent visitor to Hungary, meeting with political leaders and holding recurrent news conferences which were widely covered in the Hungarian press. He was widely recognized there for his calls for the respect of the human rights of the millions of ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries, especially Romania and Slovakia, whose cultural identity was a common target of those countries' communist regimes.
''Tom Lantos deserves that the millions of people in Central-Eastern Europe think about him for a moment and guard his memory,'' Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said in parliament.
Lantos, who was elected to the House in 1980, founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983. In early 2004 he led the first congressional delegation to Libya in more than 30 years, meeting personally with Moammar Gadhafi and urging the Bush administration to show ''good faith'' to the North African leader in his pledge to abandon his nuclear weapons programs. Later that year, President Bush lifted sanctions against Libya.
In October 2007, as Foreign Affairs chairman, Lantos defied administration opposition by moving through his committee a measure that would have recognized the World War I-era killings of Armenians as a genocide, something strongly opposed by Turkey. The bill has not passed the House.
Tall and dignified, Lantos never lost the accent of his native Hungary, but his courtly demeanor belied the cutting comments he would make in committee if the testimony he heard was not to his liking.
''Morally, you are pygmies,'' he berated top executives of Yahoo Inc. at a hearing he called in November 2007 as they defended their company's involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist.
''This is about as believable as Elvis being seen in a Kmart,'' was his retort to a witness testifying before a subcommittee he headed in 1989 that led a congressional investigation of Reagan-era scandals at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Lantos was elected to Congress after spending three decades teaching economics at San Francisco State University, working as a business consultant and serving as a foreign policy commentator on television. He challenged GOP incumbent Rep. Bill Royer in 1980 and won narrowly, subsequently winning re-election by comfortable margins.
''It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress,'' Lantos said upon announcing his retirement last month. ''I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.''
Lantos came to the United States in 1947 after being awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1950 he married Annette, his childhood sweetheart, with whom he'd managed to reunite after the war. The couple moved to the San Francisco Bay area so Lantos could pursue a doctorate in economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
The first major bill Lantos passed in Congress was to give honorary American citizenship to Wallenberg, whom he called ''the central figure in my life.'' But Lantos sometimes shied away from talking about his experiences in the war. When he joined a lawsuit in 1984 to seek Wallenberg's release from the Soviet Union -- Wallenberg was captured and imprisoned by Soviet troops after World War II -- Lantos told The Associated Press that he ''didn't want to dwell on the details'' of the dangers he faced from the Nazis.
Lantos joined the Hungarian Underground after the Nazi occupation but was captured and sent to a forced labor camp 40 miles north of Budapest, according to the biography on his congressional Web site. He was beaten severely when he tried to escape, but feeling he had nothing to lose he made another attempt. This time he made it back to Budapest and to one of the safehouses that Wallenberg had established.
Lantos credited Wallenberg's protection, his own Aryan appearance -- blond hair, blue eyes -- and a good measure of luck with helping him survive the war. But he said that at the time he didn't think he had much of a chance of staying alive.
''I was sixteen, but I was very old,'' he said in an interview for ''The Last Days,'' the 1999 book accompanying the Steven Spielberg documentary of the same name that focused on the experience of Hungarian-American survivors.
''The bloodbath, the cruelty, the death that I saw, so many times around me during those few months between March of 1944 and January of 1945 made me a very old young man.''
Lantos and his wife had two daughters, Annette and Katrina, who between them produced 18 grandchildren, one of whom died young. According to Lantos, his daughters were following through on a promise to produce a very large family because his and his wife's families had perished in the Holocaust.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Europeans are From Venus
James Sheehan will be speaking at the Athenaeum on Monday on why the EU will not become a global superpower.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft (author of The Controversy of Zion) wrote this wonderful review of Sheehan's latest book. I recommend reading the review and signing up for the dinner. It should be a great talk!
Geoffrey Wheatcroft (author of The Controversy of Zion) wrote this wonderful review of Sheehan's latest book. I recommend reading the review and signing up for the dinner. It should be a great talk!
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Chad Rebellion Appears to Falter
February 6, 2008
By LYDIA POLGREEN
NDJAMENA, Chad — A rebellion aimed at toppling Chad’s president appeared to falter Tuesday as France declared that it would intervene to protect the Chadian government if called upon, and a Darfur rebel group with close ties to the Chadian government said it had sent troops to help bolster the president, Idriss Déby.
French military officials in Chad said the rebels were now far from the capital, and the streets of Ndjamena were quiet. For the first time since the weekend the sound of automatic gunfire disappeared. But the streets were virtually empty — many thousands have fled into neighboring Cameroon, and most people who remained stayed indoors, according to French soldiers who patrolled the city in armored vehicles.
The streets were littered with bodies putrefying in the hot sun and the blackened husks of pickup trucks used by government and rebel fighters, according to footage broadcast by Al Jazeera, the Arabic television network.
French support, along with assistance from rebel fighters from a Sudanese rebel group with ties to Mr. Déby’s family, strengthened the government’s position markedly.
Responding to questions from journalists in France as to whether French soldiers would intervene to help Mr. Déby’s government, the French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, said: “If France must do its duty, it will do so. Let no one doubt it.”
A commander from the Justice and Equality Movement, a Darfur rebel group that has been fighting Sudan’s government and its allied militias in the war-ravaged region for the past five years, said that some of the rebellion’s troops had left their base in eastern Chad, along the border with Sudan, to reinforce government troops.
The addition of Darfur rebels to the fray adds new confusion to a tangle of conflict that has enmeshed Chad and Sudan, two of the most violent and fragile countries in Africa. The two countries have accused one another of fostering rebellions against each other, and events in recent days point to evidence that both sides are probably right.
The Chadian rebels aimed at Ndjamena have sheltered in Sudan, something that would certainly require Sudanese government approval, analysts and diplomats say. The Darfur rebels operate openly in eastern Chad, though this is the first time they have publicly admitted to helping Mr. Déby militarily.
Despite what apparently is the retreat of the rebels, the situation remained tense. Government television and radio remained off the air, and mobile telephone networks that were taken offline to hamper rebel communication were still off Tuesday.
At least four leading opposition figures have been arrested in the past few days, including Ngarlejy Yorongar, a member of Parliament who ran against Mr. Déby once for president but lost. Reed Brody, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch, said government soldiers had burst into his house, shot and wounded Mr. Yorongar’s driver and hauled off the politician, who is one the government’s most strident critics. Three other opposition leaders were also arrested, and none have been heard from since Sunday, human rights workers said.
“These opposition leaders are at grave risk of being tortured or forcibly disappeared,” said Tawanda Hondora, director of the Africa program for Amnesty International in a statement. “The Chadian government seems to be using the current conflict with the armed opposition as a cover for arresting people peacefully opposed to government policy.”
Up to 20,000 people have fled across the river to the town of Kousseri in Cameroon, according to staff of the United Nations refugee agency who reached it Monday and are preparing for the arrival of more fugitives from the conflict. Some had found shelter with relatives, others at schools, but some 6,000 to 7,000 had reached a former transit camp near the river and were the most vulnerable, most of them spending the night in the open, the refugee agency said.
Despite the lull in the fighting Tuesday, agency staff members said civilians were still moving toward Cameroon and to the south of the city, while others were out searching for food and other supplies that have become increasingly scarce and expensive.
The agency said it was about to airlift 90 tons of supplies, enough to support 14,000 people, from Dubai to Cameroon and was preparing to move people to a better site capable of holding up to 100,000 people.
By LYDIA POLGREEN
NDJAMENA, Chad — A rebellion aimed at toppling Chad’s president appeared to falter Tuesday as France declared that it would intervene to protect the Chadian government if called upon, and a Darfur rebel group with close ties to the Chadian government said it had sent troops to help bolster the president, Idriss Déby.
French military officials in Chad said the rebels were now far from the capital, and the streets of Ndjamena were quiet. For the first time since the weekend the sound of automatic gunfire disappeared. But the streets were virtually empty — many thousands have fled into neighboring Cameroon, and most people who remained stayed indoors, according to French soldiers who patrolled the city in armored vehicles.
The streets were littered with bodies putrefying in the hot sun and the blackened husks of pickup trucks used by government and rebel fighters, according to footage broadcast by Al Jazeera, the Arabic television network.
French support, along with assistance from rebel fighters from a Sudanese rebel group with ties to Mr. Déby’s family, strengthened the government’s position markedly.
Responding to questions from journalists in France as to whether French soldiers would intervene to help Mr. Déby’s government, the French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, said: “If France must do its duty, it will do so. Let no one doubt it.”
A commander from the Justice and Equality Movement, a Darfur rebel group that has been fighting Sudan’s government and its allied militias in the war-ravaged region for the past five years, said that some of the rebellion’s troops had left their base in eastern Chad, along the border with Sudan, to reinforce government troops.
The addition of Darfur rebels to the fray adds new confusion to a tangle of conflict that has enmeshed Chad and Sudan, two of the most violent and fragile countries in Africa. The two countries have accused one another of fostering rebellions against each other, and events in recent days point to evidence that both sides are probably right.
The Chadian rebels aimed at Ndjamena have sheltered in Sudan, something that would certainly require Sudanese government approval, analysts and diplomats say. The Darfur rebels operate openly in eastern Chad, though this is the first time they have publicly admitted to helping Mr. Déby militarily.
Despite what apparently is the retreat of the rebels, the situation remained tense. Government television and radio remained off the air, and mobile telephone networks that were taken offline to hamper rebel communication were still off Tuesday.
At least four leading opposition figures have been arrested in the past few days, including Ngarlejy Yorongar, a member of Parliament who ran against Mr. Déby once for president but lost. Reed Brody, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch, said government soldiers had burst into his house, shot and wounded Mr. Yorongar’s driver and hauled off the politician, who is one the government’s most strident critics. Three other opposition leaders were also arrested, and none have been heard from since Sunday, human rights workers said.
“These opposition leaders are at grave risk of being tortured or forcibly disappeared,” said Tawanda Hondora, director of the Africa program for Amnesty International in a statement. “The Chadian government seems to be using the current conflict with the armed opposition as a cover for arresting people peacefully opposed to government policy.”
Up to 20,000 people have fled across the river to the town of Kousseri in Cameroon, according to staff of the United Nations refugee agency who reached it Monday and are preparing for the arrival of more fugitives from the conflict. Some had found shelter with relatives, others at schools, but some 6,000 to 7,000 had reached a former transit camp near the river and were the most vulnerable, most of them spending the night in the open, the refugee agency said.
Despite the lull in the fighting Tuesday, agency staff members said civilians were still moving toward Cameroon and to the south of the city, while others were out searching for food and other supplies that have become increasingly scarce and expensive.
The agency said it was about to airlift 90 tons of supplies, enough to support 14,000 people, from Dubai to Cameroon and was preparing to move people to a better site capable of holding up to 100,000 people.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Chad Shuts Down Capital as 1,000 Rebels March In
February 3, 2008
By LYDIA POLGREEN
DAKAR, Senegal — A rebel army swarmed the capital of Chad on Saturday, and gun battles erupted around the presidential palace, according to Chadian and Western officials, in an attack that raised the specter of deeper chaos in one the most war-scarred and fragile regions of the world.
A coalition of three rebel groups that have taken shelter in Sudan for the past few years entered the capital early Saturday, after days of battle dozens of miles outside the city, Chadian officials said. The suddenness and stealth of their arrival appeared to take the military by surprise.
A spokesman for the three rebel groups, Abderamane Koullamalah, said in a statement posted on a rebel Web site that they were in the capital and were “ready to facilitate, with the guarantee of the African Union, the negotiated departure of President Idriss Déby and avoid a pointless blood bath.”
But Chad’s ambassador in Washington, Mahamoud Adam Bechir, said in a telephone interview that the rebels who reached the capital were a small group that had split from the main column of rebels headed toward the city. The group had circumvented counterattacks by the Chadian military and stolen into the capital, Mr. Bechir said, but was being chased by Presidential Guard forces.
“They were able to infiltrate the capital, panic the population, fire at the presidency and give the impression there is fighting going on at the presidency,” Mr. Bechir said. “But everything is under control. President Idriss Deby is in the palace. The Chadian military forces are chasing the insurgents.”
He said that the airport had been closed to civilian flights and that cellphone networks had been shut down to hamper rebel communication lines. As a result, his account of the fighting could not be verified.
The timing of the attack appeared to be linked to the planned arrival of a European Union force that was to begin deploying on the border in an effort to protect refugees from Darfur and eastern Chad and to prevent Chad from sliding into bloodshed, said Reed Brody, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch who has studying Chad for many years.
A vast, arid, landlocked nation in the heart of Africa, Chad has suffered through years of civil war, military coups and tyrannical rule. But with the crisis on its eastern border with Darfur and conflict over a booming oil business in the south, the country has become increasingly unstable.
Ndjamena was plunged into confusion Saturday, with gunfire echoing through the streets while residents hunkered down in their homes, waiting for news. The United States, France and the United Nations made preparations to evacuate expatriates.
Gabriel Stauring, an American antigenocide activist, was among about 50 people pinned down in a luxury hotel in the capital that came under heavy fire. In an e-mail message, Mr. Stauring said that French military personnel had exchanged heavy fire with rebels outside the hotel.
“Bullets flew over our heads and parts of the walls and objects around us came raining down on us,” he wrote.
The fighting in Ndjamena will surely further destabilize what is already one of the most volatile regions of Africa. Chad and Sudan are locked in a tangle of conflict and have traded accusations and bombs in the past four years as the conflagration in the Sudanese region of Darfur has increasingly consumed Chad as well.
Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees from Darfur are living in Chad, and militia attacks from across the Sudanese border in 2006 forced tens of thousands of Chadians to flee their homes as well. Ethnic violence in Chad between Arab and non-Arab ethnic groups, echoes of the conflagration in Darfur, has forced still more to flee.
Chad’s president, Mr. Déby, shares clan links to some of the leaders of the Darfur rebellion, and the rebels operate from bases in Chad with near-total impunity, which has angered the Sudanese government and raised tensions between the countries.
Chad meanwhile accuses Sudan of sponsoring rebellions against Mr. Déby. The three groups that are currently attacking the capital all had bases in Sudan, according to analysts and diplomats, something that would be impossible without the tacit approval of the Sudanese government.
Many advocates and analysts have worried that if the Chadian rebels take power, they would take a pro-Sudan stance and block a planned European Union peacekeeping force for Chad and Central African Republic.
Mr. Brody said that many Chadians feared a violent takeover by a shadowy group of rebels, many of whom have ties to repressive past regimes. “Nobody is going to miss Déby, but these guys aren’t exactly fighting for freedom and democracy,” Mr. Brody said.
In the past, France, the former colonial power in Chad, has used its military forces in Chad to bolster Mr. Déby.But on Saturday, French troops were focused on protecting expatriates, said Capt. Christophe Prazuck, a spokesman for the French military.
“At the present time, the French military forces are not involved in the fighting,” he said.
France maintains more than 1,200 troops in Chad, and in the past two days added 350 more to help protect its citizens, according to French officials. The United States State Department posted a message on its Web site urging Americans to seek safety at the embassy if they wished to be evacuated.
The current fighting has forced the European Union to delay its deployment of a 3,700-troop peacekeeping force to protect refugees living on borders of Chad and Central African Republic.
The delay of that force is a blow to France’s ambitions to use European military power more forcefully, and senior French officials worked to keep other contributors on board.
“Politically it could be a little blow for our European operation in the eastern part of Chad,” a senior French official said. “The others are totally terrified.”
Elaine Sciolino contributed reporting from Paris.
By LYDIA POLGREEN
DAKAR, Senegal — A rebel army swarmed the capital of Chad on Saturday, and gun battles erupted around the presidential palace, according to Chadian and Western officials, in an attack that raised the specter of deeper chaos in one the most war-scarred and fragile regions of the world.
A coalition of three rebel groups that have taken shelter in Sudan for the past few years entered the capital early Saturday, after days of battle dozens of miles outside the city, Chadian officials said. The suddenness and stealth of their arrival appeared to take the military by surprise.
A spokesman for the three rebel groups, Abderamane Koullamalah, said in a statement posted on a rebel Web site that they were in the capital and were “ready to facilitate, with the guarantee of the African Union, the negotiated departure of President Idriss Déby and avoid a pointless blood bath.”
But Chad’s ambassador in Washington, Mahamoud Adam Bechir, said in a telephone interview that the rebels who reached the capital were a small group that had split from the main column of rebels headed toward the city. The group had circumvented counterattacks by the Chadian military and stolen into the capital, Mr. Bechir said, but was being chased by Presidential Guard forces.
“They were able to infiltrate the capital, panic the population, fire at the presidency and give the impression there is fighting going on at the presidency,” Mr. Bechir said. “But everything is under control. President Idriss Deby is in the palace. The Chadian military forces are chasing the insurgents.”
He said that the airport had been closed to civilian flights and that cellphone networks had been shut down to hamper rebel communication lines. As a result, his account of the fighting could not be verified.
The timing of the attack appeared to be linked to the planned arrival of a European Union force that was to begin deploying on the border in an effort to protect refugees from Darfur and eastern Chad and to prevent Chad from sliding into bloodshed, said Reed Brody, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch who has studying Chad for many years.
A vast, arid, landlocked nation in the heart of Africa, Chad has suffered through years of civil war, military coups and tyrannical rule. But with the crisis on its eastern border with Darfur and conflict over a booming oil business in the south, the country has become increasingly unstable.
Ndjamena was plunged into confusion Saturday, with gunfire echoing through the streets while residents hunkered down in their homes, waiting for news. The United States, France and the United Nations made preparations to evacuate expatriates.
Gabriel Stauring, an American antigenocide activist, was among about 50 people pinned down in a luxury hotel in the capital that came under heavy fire. In an e-mail message, Mr. Stauring said that French military personnel had exchanged heavy fire with rebels outside the hotel.
“Bullets flew over our heads and parts of the walls and objects around us came raining down on us,” he wrote.
The fighting in Ndjamena will surely further destabilize what is already one of the most volatile regions of Africa. Chad and Sudan are locked in a tangle of conflict and have traded accusations and bombs in the past four years as the conflagration in the Sudanese region of Darfur has increasingly consumed Chad as well.
Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees from Darfur are living in Chad, and militia attacks from across the Sudanese border in 2006 forced tens of thousands of Chadians to flee their homes as well. Ethnic violence in Chad between Arab and non-Arab ethnic groups, echoes of the conflagration in Darfur, has forced still more to flee.
Chad’s president, Mr. Déby, shares clan links to some of the leaders of the Darfur rebellion, and the rebels operate from bases in Chad with near-total impunity, which has angered the Sudanese government and raised tensions between the countries.
Chad meanwhile accuses Sudan of sponsoring rebellions against Mr. Déby. The three groups that are currently attacking the capital all had bases in Sudan, according to analysts and diplomats, something that would be impossible without the tacit approval of the Sudanese government.
Many advocates and analysts have worried that if the Chadian rebels take power, they would take a pro-Sudan stance and block a planned European Union peacekeeping force for Chad and Central African Republic.
Mr. Brody said that many Chadians feared a violent takeover by a shadowy group of rebels, many of whom have ties to repressive past regimes. “Nobody is going to miss Déby, but these guys aren’t exactly fighting for freedom and democracy,” Mr. Brody said.
In the past, France, the former colonial power in Chad, has used its military forces in Chad to bolster Mr. Déby.But on Saturday, French troops were focused on protecting expatriates, said Capt. Christophe Prazuck, a spokesman for the French military.
“At the present time, the French military forces are not involved in the fighting,” he said.
France maintains more than 1,200 troops in Chad, and in the past two days added 350 more to help protect its citizens, according to French officials. The United States State Department posted a message on its Web site urging Americans to seek safety at the embassy if they wished to be evacuated.
The current fighting has forced the European Union to delay its deployment of a 3,700-troop peacekeeping force to protect refugees living on borders of Chad and Central African Republic.
The delay of that force is a blow to France’s ambitions to use European military power more forcefully, and senior French officials worked to keep other contributors on board.
“Politically it could be a little blow for our European operation in the eastern part of Chad,” a senior French official said. “The others are totally terrified.”
Elaine Sciolino contributed reporting from Paris.
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