Uncle Warren was renowned in our family for his intelligence, his knowledge, his argumentativeness, his intellect. He was the uncle most likely to be caught reading the ancient Greeks and like Socrates, he loved to probe and challenge people’s assertions.
His brain was impressive, there’s no doubt. But what really impressed us kids was his handiwork. Uncle Harold played a mean game of tennis and Unkie Bud planted pachysandra on the bluff and Uncle Paul could transplant a new kidney in you and my dad, well, he couldn’t screw in a light bulb. But Uncle Warren could do just about anything, it seemed, with his hands.
He had a well-stocked and well-organized workshop in the Meadow House, and a real toolshed outside, and axes and awls and electric saws and wooden measuring sticks that folded back and forth on themselves and all manner of fascinating and faintly dangerous tools and gadgets. He designed the Meadow House himself.
He was a woodsman. He wore an olive drab woodsman’s suit and strode out into the forests to cut down trees, which he chopped into pieces and split into logs for the fireplace with a gigantic and terrifying sledgehammer and an adze. For most of my childhood, I thought Warren’s Woods over in Three Oaks was his. He was a man of the woods.
Most important, Uncle Warren built the tree house.
It was tucked among four sassafras and oak trees that grew alongside the road to the Big House, and consisted of two triangular platforms connected by a half-dozen open steps. The lower platform was sort of like an open-air deck, but the upper platform was a proper house, with a flat roof, and half-walls up to our waists, and two open doorways, front and back.
Two magnificent things about that tree house. First, it had no right angles. The floor plan and the dimensions and the way it all fit together were totally idiosyncratic. For a very simple structure, it encompassed great variety. The division into upper and lower halves facilitated that most basic of childhood games, Us Against Them. The front ladder and back ladder meant that as you chased someone into the tree house, they could be escaping out the other way. Chris, Nat, Jared, Nina, Paul, and I, along with sometimes Laird Koldyke or the Pinc brothers or John Purdy the younger and even that little weenie Peter Russell or the heralded and exciting Boston Russells found and explored every permutation of play that that unusual construction allowed us.
The second excellent thing about the tree house is that it was basically dangerous. Even if someone in the family had the talents of Uncle Warren today, we wouldn’t build a tree house that way. The world has grown more cautious in the last forty years. And anyway, our insurance company probably wouldn’t let us, because we have renters nowadays, and if someone fell off it they could of course sue us.
I’m pretty sure one of us did fall off it, at some point or another, but I can’t remember who. There were no guard rails or restraining netting or anything. The whole thing was solidly built, but a ladder is a ladder. And if Nat is standing over you threatening to step on your fingertips, it is indeed quite conceivable that you will fall off and hurt yourself. That was the thrill, of course. Yet somehow, here we all are, survivors into adulthood.
The message your uncle sends when he builds you a tree house is that he loves you. When he builds you a dangerous tree house, it’s that he trusts you. Summers at Lakeside were three long months in those days, and we spent them spinning in and out of each other’s houses, sustained by and largely oblivious to our aunts and uncles. We scrambled in and out of the tree house nearly every day, ran running through the woods pelting each other with acorns, shouting and hooting and forgetting our tennis rackets on the lawn. We dug in the sand and swam and turned the metal canoe upside down in the lake. We floated in a warm and imperceptible bath of love and trust. We never questioned our luck or even thought about it. We knew Uncle Warren built the tree house but we certainly never thanked him.
Uncle Warren invented the wagon train, too. He tied the red wagon – and if there were enough cousins, TWO wagons – to the back of the lawn mower and drove it around the property with all the cousins in the back, emitting loud monotones through our open mouths to enjoy how the pitch varied as we jounced over rocks and potholes. It was one of our most beloved pastimes. Uncle Warren sat ahead of us on the mower, and behind his benign and undemanding back we were alone together in the wagon, in our children’s world.
He was a man with a good handle on what makes childhood fun. A slightly dangerous tree house, a wagon ride, a lake. That’s really about all you need. On the beach, Uncle Warren didn’t throw a ball with us or engage much in our games. He lay back on the sand, put his white tennis hat over his face, and napped. He loved us, and trusted us, and left us alone to be the happy children we were.
In loving memory, September 12, 2009.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
The trouble with Mexico's army
Drug-related violence has taken the lives of more than 7,000 people in Mexico in the last eighteen months. The crisis in public security has put serious pressure on Mexican President Felipe Calderón, who cannot fail to respond to violent turf battles among powerful drug cartels, an influx of sophisticated weapons into the hands of criminals, and a large number of kidnappings and executions in several states. Under the $1.4 billion Merida Initiative, the US government has pledged to help.
The crisis is one of law enforcement. But with Mexico’s police evidently incapable of combating the drug violence, Calderon has turned to the country’s armed forces instead. Their scorched-earth tactics have included enforced disappearances, killings, torture, rapes, and arbitrary detentions – themselves horrific crimes. The result is an erosion of public trust that undermines rather than furthering efforts to curb drug-related violence and improve public security.
At the core of the issue: the military has grabbed the task of investigating itself. Out of 17 cases that Human Rights Watch examined from 2007 and 2008, not one military investigation of army abuse led to a single criminal conviction of even one soldier on human rights violations. (The only civilian investigation into any of these cases led to convictions of four soldiers.)
Civilians prosecutors tend back off when the military claims jurisdiction. But does that comport with Mexican law? The Mexican constitution allows for military jurisdiction only for “crimes and faults against military discipline.” The Code of Military Justice says that military courts hold sway when military officers commit common crimes while “in service” – that’s hardly rape and killing. A recent Supreme Court decision defined military service as “performing the inherent activities of the position that [he or she] is carrying out.” The court did not explicitly state that all military abuses against civilians should be sent to civilian prosecutors and courts, but serious abuses such as enforced disappearances and torture clearly cannot be considered “inherent activities” of the military.
The problem is that the secretary of defense wields both executive and judicial power over the armed forces. Military judges have little job security and may reasonably fear that they will be removed if they adopt decisions that the secretary dislikes. Meanwhile, civilian review of military court decisions is very limited, and there is virtually no public scrutiny of military investigations and trials. At its heart, the issue is political. Back to you, President Calderón.
The crisis is one of law enforcement. But with Mexico’s police evidently incapable of combating the drug violence, Calderon has turned to the country’s armed forces instead. Their scorched-earth tactics have included enforced disappearances, killings, torture, rapes, and arbitrary detentions – themselves horrific crimes. The result is an erosion of public trust that undermines rather than furthering efforts to curb drug-related violence and improve public security.
At the core of the issue: the military has grabbed the task of investigating itself. Out of 17 cases that Human Rights Watch examined from 2007 and 2008, not one military investigation of army abuse led to a single criminal conviction of even one soldier on human rights violations. (The only civilian investigation into any of these cases led to convictions of four soldiers.)
Civilians prosecutors tend back off when the military claims jurisdiction. But does that comport with Mexican law? The Mexican constitution allows for military jurisdiction only for “crimes and faults against military discipline.” The Code of Military Justice says that military courts hold sway when military officers commit common crimes while “in service” – that’s hardly rape and killing. A recent Supreme Court decision defined military service as “performing the inherent activities of the position that [he or she] is carrying out.” The court did not explicitly state that all military abuses against civilians should be sent to civilian prosecutors and courts, but serious abuses such as enforced disappearances and torture clearly cannot be considered “inherent activities” of the military.
The problem is that the secretary of defense wields both executive and judicial power over the armed forces. Military judges have little job security and may reasonably fear that they will be removed if they adopt decisions that the secretary dislikes. Meanwhile, civilian review of military court decisions is very limited, and there is virtually no public scrutiny of military investigations and trials. At its heart, the issue is political. Back to you, President Calderón.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Tiananmen Could Happen Again
What we too often forget about Tiananmen Square is the joy. It seems almost unseemly to mention it, in light of how many people died and how many lives were ruined by the crackdown that came later. But in those heady, early days when Mikhail Gorbachev’s historic visit made the students bolder than ever, this was the fizziest, most exuberant story I’d ever covered in China.
I had been a correspondent in Beijing for two years in the mid-80’s and landed in Moscow just as Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were getting really interesting. My Newsweek editors, in their infinite wisdom, were evidently reckoning that I’d covered one big, nasty, Communist country and could be trusted to cover another. In fact, the two were mirror images of each other: China’s economic reforms were vibrant and its politics dull, while Russia’s economy was gasping for breath and its political class couldn’t stop babbling.
Now Chinese politics had come alive. The weather was great and the square was thronged. The students sang The Internationale and really meant it (“Masses, slaves, arise, arise”); they erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty without a trace of irony. We cynical old hacks scratched our heads and pinched ourselves. Or as the correspondent for the London Observer put it on a brilliantly sunny day in May, turning his beaming face to me as we strolled through the square, “We’re getting paid to do this!”
The demonstrations felt especially meaningful to those of us who had listened, over the years, to countless endless lectures about how happy and satisfied the Chinese people really were. They didn’t want political freedom. They were satisfied with economic progress. Chinese officials were intent on purveying this explanation for their country’s political quiescence compared to, say, the Soviet Union at the time. And, absent any real manifestation of political engagement from the Chinese people, some of us had begun to believe it.
The size of the demonstrations grew and grew. The elite students were joined by office workers, factory workers, and even government bureaucrats. Together they put the lie to the Chinese government’s Big Lie. Chinese people had quite a few grievances, as it turned out, both economic and political, and they wasted no time in seizing this unprecedented moment to express them. This was a story that we correspondents always knew was percolating quietly below the surface. To put it on the cover of Newsweek magazine, week after week, was to vindicate not only the hopes and desires of the Chinese people, but also our own convictions about the truth about their country.
You have to remember how closed China was then, and how scared most people were. Foreigners were still a jaw-dropping rarity. We correspondents had no freedom of movement around the country – every trip outside of Beijing required special dispensation from the Foreign Ministry. Ordinary Chinese could get in huge trouble just for having unauthorized contact with foreigners. Our ability to know what was really happening in China was pathetically limited.
Tiananmen burst all those strictures. Suddenly, Chinese people were babbling about politics (just like Russians! it seemed to me). Their feelings and opinions were emblazoned on placards for all the world to see. Those few weeks of freedom were heaven for frustrated correspondents who felt they’d never really gotten the full story.
That the story ended in violence surprised no one, even while it shocked us all. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, either, that twenty years later, the Big Lie has taken hold again. Chinese people just aren’t interested in politics. Economic progress has left them satisfied.
Don’t believe it for a minute. Yes, personal freedoms are much more extensive and yes, people are pleased with the country’s economic success. They are also prouder of their country now than they were then, I think. But still, not far below the surface, China simmers with political discontent. The issues that sparked Tiananmen -- corruption, labor exploitation, the lack of free speech – still plague China today. It wouldn’t take much to bring about some kind of mass protest again. I’ve seen it happen before, and seeing it once made me surer than ever that it could happen again.
I had been a correspondent in Beijing for two years in the mid-80’s and landed in Moscow just as Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were getting really interesting. My Newsweek editors, in their infinite wisdom, were evidently reckoning that I’d covered one big, nasty, Communist country and could be trusted to cover another. In fact, the two were mirror images of each other: China’s economic reforms were vibrant and its politics dull, while Russia’s economy was gasping for breath and its political class couldn’t stop babbling.
Now Chinese politics had come alive. The weather was great and the square was thronged. The students sang The Internationale and really meant it (“Masses, slaves, arise, arise”); they erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty without a trace of irony. We cynical old hacks scratched our heads and pinched ourselves. Or as the correspondent for the London Observer put it on a brilliantly sunny day in May, turning his beaming face to me as we strolled through the square, “We’re getting paid to do this!”
The demonstrations felt especially meaningful to those of us who had listened, over the years, to countless endless lectures about how happy and satisfied the Chinese people really were. They didn’t want political freedom. They were satisfied with economic progress. Chinese officials were intent on purveying this explanation for their country’s political quiescence compared to, say, the Soviet Union at the time. And, absent any real manifestation of political engagement from the Chinese people, some of us had begun to believe it.
The size of the demonstrations grew and grew. The elite students were joined by office workers, factory workers, and even government bureaucrats. Together they put the lie to the Chinese government’s Big Lie. Chinese people had quite a few grievances, as it turned out, both economic and political, and they wasted no time in seizing this unprecedented moment to express them. This was a story that we correspondents always knew was percolating quietly below the surface. To put it on the cover of Newsweek magazine, week after week, was to vindicate not only the hopes and desires of the Chinese people, but also our own convictions about the truth about their country.
You have to remember how closed China was then, and how scared most people were. Foreigners were still a jaw-dropping rarity. We correspondents had no freedom of movement around the country – every trip outside of Beijing required special dispensation from the Foreign Ministry. Ordinary Chinese could get in huge trouble just for having unauthorized contact with foreigners. Our ability to know what was really happening in China was pathetically limited.
Tiananmen burst all those strictures. Suddenly, Chinese people were babbling about politics (just like Russians! it seemed to me). Their feelings and opinions were emblazoned on placards for all the world to see. Those few weeks of freedom were heaven for frustrated correspondents who felt they’d never really gotten the full story.
That the story ended in violence surprised no one, even while it shocked us all. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, either, that twenty years later, the Big Lie has taken hold again. Chinese people just aren’t interested in politics. Economic progress has left them satisfied.
Don’t believe it for a minute. Yes, personal freedoms are much more extensive and yes, people are pleased with the country’s economic success. They are also prouder of their country now than they were then, I think. But still, not far below the surface, China simmers with political discontent. The issues that sparked Tiananmen -- corruption, labor exploitation, the lack of free speech – still plague China today. It wouldn’t take much to bring about some kind of mass protest again. I’ve seen it happen before, and seeing it once made me surer than ever that it could happen again.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Torture and the world out there
What motivated many Americans to turn against George Bush’s counter-terrorism policies was, in part, a realization that the rest of the world had turned against them already. President Barack Obama’s decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and renounce the use of torture have proved enormously popular with America’s closest allies, and even some not-so-close. By the same token, his unwillingness to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of torture has important international implications that have not so far been part of the debate.
US policy on torture directly affects criminal culpability in other countries. Take the case of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Karachi in 2002 and spent seven years in detention in Morocco, Afghanistan, and ultimately Guantanamo Bay. He claims to have been beaten, repeatedly cut on his genitals and threatened with rape, electrocution and death by Moroccan interrogators who were acting at the behest of the CIA, and being fed questions by British intelligence.
Washington’s much more direct responsibility for the unlawful rendering and torturing of Mohamed has hardly created a ripple in the United States. But Britain’s more tangential complicity has generated a fierce outcry in the UK and resulted in an official criminal investigation. How strange that the mere fallout from US torture policy has done more abroad than the actual genesis and execution of the policy has done here in Washington. That fact will not be lost on Obama’s international constituency.
The unwillingness to prosecute Americans for torture will have a deleterious effect on efforts to prosecute dictators around the world for their crimes. Along with European governments, Washington is currently engaged in a fierce battle for international public opinion over the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and other grave offenses against the people of Darfur. Governments in Africa and the Middle East are trying to portray the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court as a tool of imperialist powers who are targeting Third World countries in a phony campaign for “justice.”
Unfortunately, this specious argument is gaining adherents. It will gain even more if the United States refuses to bring its own perpetrators of major crimes to account; the alleged double standard will be proven. At risk is a steadily developing system of international justice that has ended impunity for tyrants from Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to Charles Taylor of Liberia.
And international justice will, in the end, catch up with America’s own alleged criminals. Efforts to indict Bush administration officials such as Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet have gotten underway in German and Spanish courts only because they haven’t gotten any traction in American courts. Foreign prosecutors are much more likely to claim universal jurisdiction if American prosecutors are believed not to have done their job.
Unless European authorities obtain custody of the accused, torture prosecutions in Europe will not deliver real justice (though it might affect some of their travel plans). They could also deepen an isolationist strain in the United States that fails to understand international justice as founded on respect for the same human rights principles that Americans themselves profess.
In the debate over torture, Human Rights Watch’s position in favor of prosecution, and of the release of an additional tranche of photos, has been described as criticism from “the left.” That’s true only if being “left” in the United States today means having a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, which possibly it does. President Obama came to power promising to close the gap between America and its international partners on the neuralgic issues of fighting terrorism. His latest decisions will widen them.
US policy on torture directly affects criminal culpability in other countries. Take the case of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Karachi in 2002 and spent seven years in detention in Morocco, Afghanistan, and ultimately Guantanamo Bay. He claims to have been beaten, repeatedly cut on his genitals and threatened with rape, electrocution and death by Moroccan interrogators who were acting at the behest of the CIA, and being fed questions by British intelligence.
Washington’s much more direct responsibility for the unlawful rendering and torturing of Mohamed has hardly created a ripple in the United States. But Britain’s more tangential complicity has generated a fierce outcry in the UK and resulted in an official criminal investigation. How strange that the mere fallout from US torture policy has done more abroad than the actual genesis and execution of the policy has done here in Washington. That fact will not be lost on Obama’s international constituency.
The unwillingness to prosecute Americans for torture will have a deleterious effect on efforts to prosecute dictators around the world for their crimes. Along with European governments, Washington is currently engaged in a fierce battle for international public opinion over the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and other grave offenses against the people of Darfur. Governments in Africa and the Middle East are trying to portray the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court as a tool of imperialist powers who are targeting Third World countries in a phony campaign for “justice.”
Unfortunately, this specious argument is gaining adherents. It will gain even more if the United States refuses to bring its own perpetrators of major crimes to account; the alleged double standard will be proven. At risk is a steadily developing system of international justice that has ended impunity for tyrants from Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to Charles Taylor of Liberia.
And international justice will, in the end, catch up with America’s own alleged criminals. Efforts to indict Bush administration officials such as Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet have gotten underway in German and Spanish courts only because they haven’t gotten any traction in American courts. Foreign prosecutors are much more likely to claim universal jurisdiction if American prosecutors are believed not to have done their job.
Unless European authorities obtain custody of the accused, torture prosecutions in Europe will not deliver real justice (though it might affect some of their travel plans). They could also deepen an isolationist strain in the United States that fails to understand international justice as founded on respect for the same human rights principles that Americans themselves profess.
In the debate over torture, Human Rights Watch’s position in favor of prosecution, and of the release of an additional tranche of photos, has been described as criticism from “the left.” That’s true only if being “left” in the United States today means having a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, which possibly it does. President Obama came to power promising to close the gap between America and its international partners on the neuralgic issues of fighting terrorism. His latest decisions will widen them.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Ahmedinejad's rant and what it means
The footage of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad haranguing a Geneva assembly hall is already becoming the iconic image of the latest international conference on racism. His speech sent Western diplomats scurrying for the exits in an effort to disassociate themselves from denials of the Holocaust. The immediate question is how far the United States overreacts to this unfortunate, but isolated, incident. The larger issue for Washington is how to navigate the terrain of international human rights that the Obama Administration says it wants to reclaim.
A lot of hard diplomatic work went into making sure that this week’s Geneva conference on racism did not go off the rails. More than seven years ago, the genuine accomplishments of a previous UN conference on racism, held in Durban, South Africa, sank into obscurity after some non-governmental organizations made anti-Semitic statements, and the international media could seemingly focus on nothing else. Early negotiations on this round did not look promising, either, and the Bush Administration effectively dropped out months ago in protest.
But wonder of wonders, the document that has been agreed in Geneva isn’t half bad. It contains no reference to Israel or the Middle East and rejects the dangerous concept that religions, as opposed to individuals, can be defamed or have their rights violated (a provision that many Islamic countries were backing). The document also reaffirms the tragedy of the Holocaust and condemns anti-Semitism.
So, now that it has won virtually all the concessions that it was seeking, what should the US do? Having refused on the basis of concrete objections to participate, Washington can hardly keep refusing to participate once those objections are met. Or can it?
Enter Mr. Ahmedinejad, a Midas with a radioactive touch. His anti-Israel comments actually received precious little support in the hall, and did not succeed in changing a single comma in the conference’s final document. The Norwegian Foreign Minister got it right when he urged conference participants to “not accept that the odd man out hijacks the collective efforts of the many.” And yet White House spokesman Robert Gibbs insisted that Ahmedinejad’s speech has showed that the Administration “made the right decision to not go forward with attendance.”
Right-wing bloggers are eagerly linking this latest dust-up to US participation at the United Nations Human Rights Council, where repressive governments are trying to keep a focus on Israel, not least in order to keep the focus off themselves. A deplorable development indeed. But is it an argument for the United States to disengage, or to re-engage? Diplomats from countries with very poor human rights records grow bolder in direct proportion to the waning of diplomatic energy from governments who are serious about human rights protection.
Barack Obama has vowed to break that cycle and become full participants at the United Nations. Renouncing torture and vowing to close Guantanamo Bay within a year were critical first steps toward engagement, and they have made it likely that the US will win a seat on the Human Rights Council again next month. If Obama is serious (and intellectually consistent) the US government should endorse the conference’s final document. Twenty-two of the countries who walked out of the Iranian president’s speech have already done so. That would demonstrate that the Obama Administration is making human rights policy on the merits -- and not letting Mahmoud Ahmedinejad do it for them.
A lot of hard diplomatic work went into making sure that this week’s Geneva conference on racism did not go off the rails. More than seven years ago, the genuine accomplishments of a previous UN conference on racism, held in Durban, South Africa, sank into obscurity after some non-governmental organizations made anti-Semitic statements, and the international media could seemingly focus on nothing else. Early negotiations on this round did not look promising, either, and the Bush Administration effectively dropped out months ago in protest.
But wonder of wonders, the document that has been agreed in Geneva isn’t half bad. It contains no reference to Israel or the Middle East and rejects the dangerous concept that religions, as opposed to individuals, can be defamed or have their rights violated (a provision that many Islamic countries were backing). The document also reaffirms the tragedy of the Holocaust and condemns anti-Semitism.
So, now that it has won virtually all the concessions that it was seeking, what should the US do? Having refused on the basis of concrete objections to participate, Washington can hardly keep refusing to participate once those objections are met. Or can it?
Enter Mr. Ahmedinejad, a Midas with a radioactive touch. His anti-Israel comments actually received precious little support in the hall, and did not succeed in changing a single comma in the conference’s final document. The Norwegian Foreign Minister got it right when he urged conference participants to “not accept that the odd man out hijacks the collective efforts of the many.” And yet White House spokesman Robert Gibbs insisted that Ahmedinejad’s speech has showed that the Administration “made the right decision to not go forward with attendance.”
Right-wing bloggers are eagerly linking this latest dust-up to US participation at the United Nations Human Rights Council, where repressive governments are trying to keep a focus on Israel, not least in order to keep the focus off themselves. A deplorable development indeed. But is it an argument for the United States to disengage, or to re-engage? Diplomats from countries with very poor human rights records grow bolder in direct proportion to the waning of diplomatic energy from governments who are serious about human rights protection.
Barack Obama has vowed to break that cycle and become full participants at the United Nations. Renouncing torture and vowing to close Guantanamo Bay within a year were critical first steps toward engagement, and they have made it likely that the US will win a seat on the Human Rights Council again next month. If Obama is serious (and intellectually consistent) the US government should endorse the conference’s final document. Twenty-two of the countries who walked out of the Iranian president’s speech have already done so. That would demonstrate that the Obama Administration is making human rights policy on the merits -- and not letting Mahmoud Ahmedinejad do it for them.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Prosecuting for Torture: A Little Help from the NYTimes
Hosannas to the New York Times today for giving American policy-makers a huge shove in the direction of a Torture Commission. The Sunday op-ed page devotes a giant piece of real estate to journalist Mark Danner for a recapitulation, with pointed commentary, of the heretofore-secret interviews that Red Cross officials conducted with “high-value detainees” at Guantanamo. The information soberly recounted in these memos leaves no doubt that US government officials committed multiple and grievous acts of torture.
This piece testifies bracingly to the enduring relevance of the American newspaper – and of the New York Times in particular.
We read a lot about the demise of newspapers today – including, poignantly, in the New York Times itself this week. But where else but a newspaper could this information come to light? Let’s examine the options.
Radio couldn’t break this story – there’s no “actuality,” no-one to interview. The Red Cross has strict rules about confidentiality and wouldn’t go on the record for a piece like this (God knows how Danner squeezed the documents out of them); the detainees themselves are inaccessible; and the government officials responsible for the torture are not, I’m guessing, giving interviews.
Ditto TV. No pictures. Television has struggled with this for some time; waterboarding is too creepy, and too staged, to be broadcast. Even Brian Ross of ABC, the TV reporter who has most consistently followed the torture issue (including, not helpfully, to argue that waterboarding works), had trouble illustrating his pieces on the subject.
The internet can help Danner’s piece achieve some prominence, and I hope it does. But how viral is torture? The social media sites are too busy trafficking in cute videos of dogs singing “I love you” (my 13-year-old loved it). If Danner’s piece were originally published in a blog or an online magazine, it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact. With all due respect to bloggers, nobody out there is pulling in the right audience -- neither in terms of seniority in policy-making, nor in concentratedness, by which I mean that everyone who's anyone on the torture issue will see this piece.
So we’re left with newspapers. And how many of them are there, with any heft or reach? Aside from the NYT, only the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have real national exposure. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page would not run such a piece for ideological reasons. I’d like to think Don Graham would use his newspaper to crusade against torture, and certainly the Washington Post editorialized early and well against its use. But the entire Post op-ed page also came out strongly in favor of the war in Iraq and the paper has never really expiated that error, or the general sense that it is wrapped a little too tightly around the decaying corpse of Bush’s “war on terror.”
The NYTimes supported the war in Iraq too, of course, but it also issued a major mea culpa for the real deficiencies in its reporting on the issue. And in recent years, its editorials have been among the strongest calls in the country for accountability for the Bush Adminsitration’s crimes. One senses a real quest to make up for earlier credulity (like burying its first Abu Ghraib story on page A15).
Lord knows, there's still plenty to criticize in the Times' coverage on a variety of subjects. But if you want to see senior Bush Administration officials investigated and prosecuted for torture, then you've got to be thankful, today, that the NYTimes still has clout.
This piece testifies bracingly to the enduring relevance of the American newspaper – and of the New York Times in particular.
We read a lot about the demise of newspapers today – including, poignantly, in the New York Times itself this week. But where else but a newspaper could this information come to light? Let’s examine the options.
Radio couldn’t break this story – there’s no “actuality,” no-one to interview. The Red Cross has strict rules about confidentiality and wouldn’t go on the record for a piece like this (God knows how Danner squeezed the documents out of them); the detainees themselves are inaccessible; and the government officials responsible for the torture are not, I’m guessing, giving interviews.
Ditto TV. No pictures. Television has struggled with this for some time; waterboarding is too creepy, and too staged, to be broadcast. Even Brian Ross of ABC, the TV reporter who has most consistently followed the torture issue (including, not helpfully, to argue that waterboarding works), had trouble illustrating his pieces on the subject.
The internet can help Danner’s piece achieve some prominence, and I hope it does. But how viral is torture? The social media sites are too busy trafficking in cute videos of dogs singing “I love you” (my 13-year-old loved it). If Danner’s piece were originally published in a blog or an online magazine, it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact. With all due respect to bloggers, nobody out there is pulling in the right audience -- neither in terms of seniority in policy-making, nor in concentratedness, by which I mean that everyone who's anyone on the torture issue will see this piece.
So we’re left with newspapers. And how many of them are there, with any heft or reach? Aside from the NYT, only the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have real national exposure. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page would not run such a piece for ideological reasons. I’d like to think Don Graham would use his newspaper to crusade against torture, and certainly the Washington Post editorialized early and well against its use. But the entire Post op-ed page also came out strongly in favor of the war in Iraq and the paper has never really expiated that error, or the general sense that it is wrapped a little too tightly around the decaying corpse of Bush’s “war on terror.”
The NYTimes supported the war in Iraq too, of course, but it also issued a major mea culpa for the real deficiencies in its reporting on the issue. And in recent years, its editorials have been among the strongest calls in the country for accountability for the Bush Adminsitration’s crimes. One senses a real quest to make up for earlier credulity (like burying its first Abu Ghraib story on page A15).
Lord knows, there's still plenty to criticize in the Times' coverage on a variety of subjects. But if you want to see senior Bush Administration officials investigated and prosecuted for torture, then you've got to be thankful, today, that the NYTimes still has clout.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Old Hands, New Voice
This piece was written for the Columbia Journalism Review, as though from the perspective of 2014: looking back and describing How Journalism Got Saved.
NEW YORK, 2014—Back in 2009, the future of international reporting looked bleak indeed. Several big U.S. newspapers had shut down their foreign bureaus altogether. The Ameri¬can TV networks had basically shrunk their international presence to London. Covering the Iraq war had nearly bank¬rupted foreign-news budgets, and by then, the American public had lost interest in the Iraq war. Or indeed in foreign news at all, a lot of the time. It was tough being the most expensive and least read story in the queue. Like a faded diva in a ratty mink stole (“Oh, this old thing? I bought it on assignment covering Brezhnev”), foreign correspondents slunk from the stage, costly and unwanted.
Yet even then you could have spied a few positive trends. First, the basic cost of international fact-gathering and dis¬tribution had fallen precipitously. Cameras and recorders were absurdly cheap and the means of transmission cheaper still. (Marx might have called it a revolution in the means of production.) Then, too, it was finally dawning on everyone that the United States was rapidly growing more interna¬tional by almost every measure: the percentage of American businesses with interests overseas (and what was “American” business anymore anyway?), the percentage of the Ameri¬can population born in another country, the percentage of Starbucks customers buying the “World Music” CD at the cash register. You still couldn’t sell People magazine at the newsstand with Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni on the cover, maybe, but international news was locating an audience. Why were the bbc and The Economist moving into a market here if one didn’t exist?
A disproportionate number of media executives back in 2009 had been foreign correspondents in their glory days, of course, but even they had to admit that those days hadn’t nec¬essarily been all that glorious. No one could quite remember Walter Cronkite’s last story about Burundi, back in the days when the American media were supposedly doing such a boffo job covering the world. And everyone had to admit that it was a lot easier finding out something about Burundi in 2009 than it had been back in, say, 1963. A lot of world news went uncovered, and unread, even in the glory days.
Fortunately, foreign correspondents were not alone. Alongside them on beats from Chechnya to Congo to the mountains of Nepal, an army of human-rights investigators, academic researchers, aid workers, and country experts of various kinds were also out there gathering facts. They didn’t get interviews with the prime minister very often, and they didn’t always feel it necessary to quote the bri¬gade commander insisting his men had nothing to do with that massacre in that village. But sometimes they had more expertise than the journalists who stole their insights, lifted their research, and quoted them in paragraph seventeen. The Internet, meanwhile, changed the game.
For thirty years, Human Rights Watch had been sending its researchers on missions around the world to investigate and report on issues of serious human-rights abuse. Those researchers had been churning out worthy reports couched in dense legalese—more like case files, intended for a special¬ist audience (the National Security Council expert on Central Asia, say, or the UN peacekeeping staff ) than reportage meant for the general public. But hrw started giving the press a run for its money in 2009, hiring experienced journalists for a new multimedia unit whose job it was, essentially, to report on the work of hrw. By early 2009, some sixty thousand pages were being viewed on the organization’s Web site every day. That traffic compelled hrw to speak in terms the public could understand. If the journalists weren’t going to cover those stories, then hrw, like other nongovernmental organizations, would have to do so itself. The organization had dozens of investigators covering more than seventy countries—more than the foreign correspondent corps of either The New York Times or The Washington Post. It lacked the journalistic muscle to turn its research into digestible information prod¬ucts—until grants from private donors gave it the means to attract experienced professionals from an industry that no longer valued them.
Now war photographers who could no longer snag an assignment from Time or Newsweek went on mission with hrw researchers. They shot video as well, and handed it over to a team of editors back at the Empire State Building in New York. Staff researchers were issued high-quality audio recorders to use when interviewing survivors of human-rights abuse, and former radio reporters assembled the audio files into powerful testimonials. The new hrw Web site (hrw.org) modeled itself on the bbc, with four prominent multimedia stories on the homepage and a clickable list, organized by geography and topic, with the latest information on human rights from dozens of countries. The day after the presidential inauguration saw homepage news on Obama’s decision to halt the military commission hearings at Guantánamo Bay (where hrw had two staffers at the proceedings); an Israel-Gaza pack¬age including a q&a on the complex issues of civilian casual¬ties and international humanitarian law, an audio interview with hrw’s researcher on the ground, and a lengthy briefing paper on the humanitarian situation in Gaza; and a piece on the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s lawyer. The audience for this material went beyond hrw’s own Web site. Because the mainstream media wouldn’t pick up whole stories edited and distributed by an advocacy group, hrw also made it available in disaggregated form. Radio reporters could pull a quote off the site and stitch it into their own stories. TV producers could use video shot by hrw in the field, mix it with a little stock footage or some wire shots, and create a for-eign-news piece from the field without ever leaving midtown Manhattan. And media companies were getting less choosy about where they got their stories from, anyway. For sure, the price was right: hrw gave its content away for free.
But it isn’t journalism! cried the stalwart defenders of the sacred flame. And they were right. But it wasn’t exactly a video news release sneaked onto local TV news by the Bush White House, either. The origins of Human Rights Watch’s material were clearly marked, not least because it wanted the publicity.
The idea caught fire. Within several months, other nonprofit research groups saw the value in producing their own digestible information products—dare not call it journalism!—and before long, they banded together to create economies of scale. Rather than replicating multimedia capability across a number of ngos, they formed a consortium to report on the work of them all. This news service leveraged the expertise within the nonprofit sphere to feed the mainstream media with high-quality international content, to inform the public about what was happening in the world, and to cycle multimedia content back to the ngos themselves, for use on their own sites or with their own donors. A board of overseers watched over the journalistic integrity of the product. And an open forum on the service’s Web site meant that no ngo could purvey a false or inflated storyline without the possibility of public challenge.
In 2014, just as in 2009, the public continues to hold the media in low esteem, right down there with businessmen and politicians. The nongovernmental sector, meanwhile, still enjoys higher approval ratings than any of them. What we learned is that readers don’t trust the information less because it doesn’t come from the mainstream media. They trust it more.
NEW YORK, 2014—Back in 2009, the future of international reporting looked bleak indeed. Several big U.S. newspapers had shut down their foreign bureaus altogether. The Ameri¬can TV networks had basically shrunk their international presence to London. Covering the Iraq war had nearly bank¬rupted foreign-news budgets, and by then, the American public had lost interest in the Iraq war. Or indeed in foreign news at all, a lot of the time. It was tough being the most expensive and least read story in the queue. Like a faded diva in a ratty mink stole (“Oh, this old thing? I bought it on assignment covering Brezhnev”), foreign correspondents slunk from the stage, costly and unwanted.
Yet even then you could have spied a few positive trends. First, the basic cost of international fact-gathering and dis¬tribution had fallen precipitously. Cameras and recorders were absurdly cheap and the means of transmission cheaper still. (Marx might have called it a revolution in the means of production.) Then, too, it was finally dawning on everyone that the United States was rapidly growing more interna¬tional by almost every measure: the percentage of American businesses with interests overseas (and what was “American” business anymore anyway?), the percentage of the Ameri¬can population born in another country, the percentage of Starbucks customers buying the “World Music” CD at the cash register. You still couldn’t sell People magazine at the newsstand with Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni on the cover, maybe, but international news was locating an audience. Why were the bbc and The Economist moving into a market here if one didn’t exist?
A disproportionate number of media executives back in 2009 had been foreign correspondents in their glory days, of course, but even they had to admit that those days hadn’t nec¬essarily been all that glorious. No one could quite remember Walter Cronkite’s last story about Burundi, back in the days when the American media were supposedly doing such a boffo job covering the world. And everyone had to admit that it was a lot easier finding out something about Burundi in 2009 than it had been back in, say, 1963. A lot of world news went uncovered, and unread, even in the glory days.
Fortunately, foreign correspondents were not alone. Alongside them on beats from Chechnya to Congo to the mountains of Nepal, an army of human-rights investigators, academic researchers, aid workers, and country experts of various kinds were also out there gathering facts. They didn’t get interviews with the prime minister very often, and they didn’t always feel it necessary to quote the bri¬gade commander insisting his men had nothing to do with that massacre in that village. But sometimes they had more expertise than the journalists who stole their insights, lifted their research, and quoted them in paragraph seventeen. The Internet, meanwhile, changed the game.
For thirty years, Human Rights Watch had been sending its researchers on missions around the world to investigate and report on issues of serious human-rights abuse. Those researchers had been churning out worthy reports couched in dense legalese—more like case files, intended for a special¬ist audience (the National Security Council expert on Central Asia, say, or the UN peacekeeping staff ) than reportage meant for the general public. But hrw started giving the press a run for its money in 2009, hiring experienced journalists for a new multimedia unit whose job it was, essentially, to report on the work of hrw. By early 2009, some sixty thousand pages were being viewed on the organization’s Web site every day. That traffic compelled hrw to speak in terms the public could understand. If the journalists weren’t going to cover those stories, then hrw, like other nongovernmental organizations, would have to do so itself. The organization had dozens of investigators covering more than seventy countries—more than the foreign correspondent corps of either The New York Times or The Washington Post. It lacked the journalistic muscle to turn its research into digestible information prod¬ucts—until grants from private donors gave it the means to attract experienced professionals from an industry that no longer valued them.
Now war photographers who could no longer snag an assignment from Time or Newsweek went on mission with hrw researchers. They shot video as well, and handed it over to a team of editors back at the Empire State Building in New York. Staff researchers were issued high-quality audio recorders to use when interviewing survivors of human-rights abuse, and former radio reporters assembled the audio files into powerful testimonials. The new hrw Web site (hrw.org) modeled itself on the bbc, with four prominent multimedia stories on the homepage and a clickable list, organized by geography and topic, with the latest information on human rights from dozens of countries. The day after the presidential inauguration saw homepage news on Obama’s decision to halt the military commission hearings at Guantánamo Bay (where hrw had two staffers at the proceedings); an Israel-Gaza pack¬age including a q&a on the complex issues of civilian casual¬ties and international humanitarian law, an audio interview with hrw’s researcher on the ground, and a lengthy briefing paper on the humanitarian situation in Gaza; and a piece on the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s lawyer. The audience for this material went beyond hrw’s own Web site. Because the mainstream media wouldn’t pick up whole stories edited and distributed by an advocacy group, hrw also made it available in disaggregated form. Radio reporters could pull a quote off the site and stitch it into their own stories. TV producers could use video shot by hrw in the field, mix it with a little stock footage or some wire shots, and create a for-eign-news piece from the field without ever leaving midtown Manhattan. And media companies were getting less choosy about where they got their stories from, anyway. For sure, the price was right: hrw gave its content away for free.
But it isn’t journalism! cried the stalwart defenders of the sacred flame. And they were right. But it wasn’t exactly a video news release sneaked onto local TV news by the Bush White House, either. The origins of Human Rights Watch’s material were clearly marked, not least because it wanted the publicity.
The idea caught fire. Within several months, other nonprofit research groups saw the value in producing their own digestible information products—dare not call it journalism!—and before long, they banded together to create economies of scale. Rather than replicating multimedia capability across a number of ngos, they formed a consortium to report on the work of them all. This news service leveraged the expertise within the nonprofit sphere to feed the mainstream media with high-quality international content, to inform the public about what was happening in the world, and to cycle multimedia content back to the ngos themselves, for use on their own sites or with their own donors. A board of overseers watched over the journalistic integrity of the product. And an open forum on the service’s Web site meant that no ngo could purvey a false or inflated storyline without the possibility of public challenge.
In 2014, just as in 2009, the public continues to hold the media in low esteem, right down there with businessmen and politicians. The nongovernmental sector, meanwhile, still enjoys higher approval ratings than any of them. What we learned is that readers don’t trust the information less because it doesn’t come from the mainstream media. They trust it more.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Remembering Alison Des Forges
No one else in the world combined the credibility of having written a definitive, 800-page history of the Rwandan genocide with the willingness to challenge the current Rwandan government for its abuses. Researching and writing about the genocide was far from easy, of course. But this work made Alison a hero to many people (as the tribute pages at www.hrw.org attest). By contrast, her work on the abuses being committed by the Rwandan government today made her something of a skunk at a global garden party. Rwandan president Paul Kagame remains personally popular in the West and many thoughtful people , perhaps motivated by their horror at the genocide, have helped to airbrush his ugly human rights record. On the very day she died, Alison was quoted extensively in the Washington Post, casting doubt on the Rwandan government’s thin rationale for invading eastern Congo yet again. Who will have the authority, the bravery, and the store of unimpeachable knowledge, to hold Kigali to account in quite the way that Alison did?
What made her famous, what made her beloved, was her tireless work on the genocide. What made her a model human rights activist was her insistence that basic standards of human decency are immutable and apply to everyone. At the time she died, the Rwandan government had banned her from the country. That’s so sad. But it also contains, in some way, the really inspirational message of her work.
What made her famous, what made her beloved, was her tireless work on the genocide. What made her a model human rights activist was her insistence that basic standards of human decency are immutable and apply to everyone. At the time she died, the Rwandan government had banned her from the country. That’s so sad. But it also contains, in some way, the really inspirational message of her work.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Speaking A Thousand Words
At Human Rights Watch, where I work, we see a lot of difficult pictures and read a lot of tragic reports, every day. But this image really sticks with me; I can’t shake it. I think it’s the proximity of the boot and the face. The boot recalls for me every Communist dictator, every rebel warlord, every brutal cop – every injustice that drove me into this business in the first place. And the face – the face is what keeps me here, the rictus of fear in his expression.
I remember working with the Congo researcher for Human Rights Watch, interviewing witnesses who could provide information about warlords getting rich off the international sale of gold from eastern Congo. One witness was so nervous, he could hardly speak above a whisper, although we were well-hidden in an anonymous hotel room with a lookout outside the door. Finally, after a long silence, he croaked out, “J’ai peur,” – a simple phrase that nearly broke my heart. He might be murdered for telling what he knew.
Thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people had died already from the result of war in Congo. But here was one man. We provided him what protection we could; we wrote the report on gold mining in eastern Congo; we stopped two international companies from buying gold from abusive warlords. We do what we can. In this picture, a supporter of Jean-Pierre Bemba is being rounded up by cops on the day after Congo’s first democratic election in 46 years. He is just one man, one of so many. We do what we can.
I remember working with the Congo researcher for Human Rights Watch, interviewing witnesses who could provide information about warlords getting rich off the international sale of gold from eastern Congo. One witness was so nervous, he could hardly speak above a whisper, although we were well-hidden in an anonymous hotel room with a lookout outside the door. Finally, after a long silence, he croaked out, “J’ai peur,” – a simple phrase that nearly broke my heart. He might be murdered for telling what he knew.
Thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people had died already from the result of war in Congo. But here was one man. We provided him what protection we could; we wrote the report on gold mining in eastern Congo; we stopped two international companies from buying gold from abusive warlords. We do what we can. In this picture, a supporter of Jean-Pierre Bemba is being rounded up by cops on the day after Congo’s first democratic election in 46 years. He is just one man, one of so many. We do what we can.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Plucky Little Georgia
Foreign correspondents, a cynical tribe, call them “plucky little” stories: plucky little Denmark, saving all those Jews; plucky little Sarajevo, surviving the siege of the Serbs; plucky little Hong Kong, being eaten by the Communist monster. A big bad neighbor, a small population, a steely will.
The latest installment in the “plucky little” series is Georgia, a Caucasus nation of 5 million people which fought a war with Russia in August 2008 and survived, sort of, to tell the tale.
Western audiences mostly hear the tale as the Georgian government tells it. Staffed by young, smart, Anglophone advisors, the administration of President Mikheil Saakashvili has excellent connections to the international media, the global community of non-government organizations, and the highest political circles in Washington and Europe. As these plucky kids tell it, the Russians resent Saakashvili because he’s democratic, uncorrupt, and eager to join NATO, and they have long harbored a desire to unseat him. Last August they provoked Georgia into war with South Ossetia, and then seized the moment to roll over an internationally recognized border, supposedly to “protect” the South Ossetians but really to overthrow the Georgian government.
Saakashvili is still in power and the Russians stopped short of Tbilisi. But not very short. In conversation, government ministers are likely to mention more than once that Russian troops are just a half an hour from the Georgian capital (if your presidential motorcade drives awfully fast). The threat is palpable.
Geographical realities support this version of the narrative. The territory of South Ossetia, where the war was fought, remains largely closed to outsiders because the Russians control it, and don’t want international monitors messing around in it. That makes it hard to assess the damage caused by Georgian forces during the war. But Georgia is wide open, so it’s easy to see the pitiable results of Russia’s incursion. Along the road to South Ossetia stand rows and rows of newly-built houses, sad little Georgian Levittowns, where thousands of people displaced by the war have been resettled. This is no tent city of refugees. These people are here to stay.
They are ethnic Georgians who were burned out of their homes by marauding South Ossetian militias in mid-August last year. Most of them lost everything they owned, and some of them lost friends and family members who were executed by the South Ossetians while Russian soldiers looked on. These are war crimes. Because they were part of a widespread and systematic effort to chase ethnic Georgians from their homes, a tribunal might rule them crimes against humanity. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is said to be examining the case, although he’s launched no formal investigation. Russia, as the de facto occupying power in South Ossetia at the time, had a responsibility to maintain order and prevent such crimes from taking place. Instead, in many cases Human Rights Watch found, they abetted them.
After war comes accounting. The Georgian government used indiscriminate and disproportionate force in its attacks on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, firing Soviet-era GRAD rockets in districts where civilians were still cowering in basements. It also used cluster munitions, a weapon that 96 nations have signed a treaty to ban. The Georgian media have no access to victims of Georgian bombing, and television does not report news unfavorable to the Georgian government anyway. Local non-governmental organizations evince more independence, but the population who suffered under Georgian bombardment are locked behind a new, de facto border that Russian troops patrol.
That makes it the responsibility of Georgia’s international partners, particularly the governments of Europe and the United States, to insist that Georgia provide a full accounting for how it fought the war. Who gave the command to attack Tskhinvali with GRAD rockets, and what did they know about the presence of civilians in the city at the time? Failing to take appropriate care to protect civilians in war is a serious violation of international humanitarian law. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime that requires prosecution.
Such an accounting will be difficult for President Sakaashvili to undertake because the fact is, he lost the war. His enthusiastic and hawkish backers in Washington may have made him feel stronger than he really was. He told me he was on the phone with his military commanders ten times a day during those tense days in August, which is understandable. But if he was ordering them to rain death down on the South Ossetian capital, then it will be awkward for any investigation to follow the trail all the way to the commander who’s most responsible.
Investigating war crimes in Georgia runs counter to the “plucky little” narrative that has so dominated international coverage of the war. But the willingness to openly examine its own record will do more to secure Georgia’s future than NATO membership. The United States and the Europeans are unlikely to go to war with Russia over Georgia. But they must continue to defend, for audiences in Georgia and Russia as well as at home, what democratic values really stand for, and for the basic principle that serious crimes cannot go unaddressed.
The latest installment in the “plucky little” series is Georgia, a Caucasus nation of 5 million people which fought a war with Russia in August 2008 and survived, sort of, to tell the tale.
Western audiences mostly hear the tale as the Georgian government tells it. Staffed by young, smart, Anglophone advisors, the administration of President Mikheil Saakashvili has excellent connections to the international media, the global community of non-government organizations, and the highest political circles in Washington and Europe. As these plucky kids tell it, the Russians resent Saakashvili because he’s democratic, uncorrupt, and eager to join NATO, and they have long harbored a desire to unseat him. Last August they provoked Georgia into war with South Ossetia, and then seized the moment to roll over an internationally recognized border, supposedly to “protect” the South Ossetians but really to overthrow the Georgian government.
Saakashvili is still in power and the Russians stopped short of Tbilisi. But not very short. In conversation, government ministers are likely to mention more than once that Russian troops are just a half an hour from the Georgian capital (if your presidential motorcade drives awfully fast). The threat is palpable.
Geographical realities support this version of the narrative. The territory of South Ossetia, where the war was fought, remains largely closed to outsiders because the Russians control it, and don’t want international monitors messing around in it. That makes it hard to assess the damage caused by Georgian forces during the war. But Georgia is wide open, so it’s easy to see the pitiable results of Russia’s incursion. Along the road to South Ossetia stand rows and rows of newly-built houses, sad little Georgian Levittowns, where thousands of people displaced by the war have been resettled. This is no tent city of refugees. These people are here to stay.
They are ethnic Georgians who were burned out of their homes by marauding South Ossetian militias in mid-August last year. Most of them lost everything they owned, and some of them lost friends and family members who were executed by the South Ossetians while Russian soldiers looked on. These are war crimes. Because they were part of a widespread and systematic effort to chase ethnic Georgians from their homes, a tribunal might rule them crimes against humanity. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is said to be examining the case, although he’s launched no formal investigation. Russia, as the de facto occupying power in South Ossetia at the time, had a responsibility to maintain order and prevent such crimes from taking place. Instead, in many cases Human Rights Watch found, they abetted them.
After war comes accounting. The Georgian government used indiscriminate and disproportionate force in its attacks on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, firing Soviet-era GRAD rockets in districts where civilians were still cowering in basements. It also used cluster munitions, a weapon that 96 nations have signed a treaty to ban. The Georgian media have no access to victims of Georgian bombing, and television does not report news unfavorable to the Georgian government anyway. Local non-governmental organizations evince more independence, but the population who suffered under Georgian bombardment are locked behind a new, de facto border that Russian troops patrol.
That makes it the responsibility of Georgia’s international partners, particularly the governments of Europe and the United States, to insist that Georgia provide a full accounting for how it fought the war. Who gave the command to attack Tskhinvali with GRAD rockets, and what did they know about the presence of civilians in the city at the time? Failing to take appropriate care to protect civilians in war is a serious violation of international humanitarian law. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime that requires prosecution.
Such an accounting will be difficult for President Sakaashvili to undertake because the fact is, he lost the war. His enthusiastic and hawkish backers in Washington may have made him feel stronger than he really was. He told me he was on the phone with his military commanders ten times a day during those tense days in August, which is understandable. But if he was ordering them to rain death down on the South Ossetian capital, then it will be awkward for any investigation to follow the trail all the way to the commander who’s most responsible.
Investigating war crimes in Georgia runs counter to the “plucky little” narrative that has so dominated international coverage of the war. But the willingness to openly examine its own record will do more to secure Georgia’s future than NATO membership. The United States and the Europeans are unlikely to go to war with Russia over Georgia. But they must continue to defend, for audiences in Georgia and Russia as well as at home, what democratic values really stand for, and for the basic principle that serious crimes cannot go unaddressed.
Laura Bush on Human Rights? Oh, please
On Wednesday, December 10, Laura Bush will address the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sigh. Mrs. Bush may have made occasional, anodyne comments about human rights, but she has certainly demonstrated no significant leadership in this domain over the course of her husband's eight years in office -- eight of the most damaging years to American human rights policy in the postwar period. What was CFR thinking? Since one First Lady helped draft the UDHR, let's invite another one to talk about it? But Laura Bush ain't no Eleanor Roosevelt.
The lack of a serious speaker on this important topic, and on this important day, suggests a real flaw in the Council's own analysis of the role human rights plays in international affairs today. Why not organize an event about how non-governmental organizations just helped bring into being the most significant arms control treaty in a decade -- the ban on cluster munitions being signed in Oslo this week? Several foreign ministers and senior ambassadors have publicly credited the human rights movement for generating the critical momentum, the expertise, and the intellectual leadership behind this new piece of international law. That's one of the most interesting transformations in US foreign policy in the last 60 years, thanks in part to the vibrancy of the ideas enunciated in the Universal Declaration itself -- foreign policy is no longer the exclusive preserve of men in governments. Or their wives, for chrissakes.
The lack of a serious speaker on this important topic, and on this important day, suggests a real flaw in the Council's own analysis of the role human rights plays in international affairs today. Why not organize an event about how non-governmental organizations just helped bring into being the most significant arms control treaty in a decade -- the ban on cluster munitions being signed in Oslo this week? Several foreign ministers and senior ambassadors have publicly credited the human rights movement for generating the critical momentum, the expertise, and the intellectual leadership behind this new piece of international law. That's one of the most interesting transformations in US foreign policy in the last 60 years, thanks in part to the vibrancy of the ideas enunciated in the Universal Declaration itself -- foreign policy is no longer the exclusive preserve of men in governments. Or their wives, for chrissakes.
Why Eleanor Roosevelt Still Matters
When I was a kid, Eleanor Roosevelt was a figure of fun. She had big buck teeth and that goofy falsetto voice. Growing up in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, I wasn’t given books about Eleanor Roosevelt or told to follow in her footsteps to greatness (though my parents were Democrats). She died in 1962, beloved but still easily satirized, the kind of celebrity Jon Stewart would have had a field day with. Even back when her husband was president, people had joked about his nightly prayer, “Dear God, please make Eleanor tired.”
Today, Eleanor Roosevelt is viewed as a figure of near-saintliness and great prescience. My daughter dressed as Eleanor Roosevelt one year for Halloween. She’s a weird kid, I’ll admit, but it still indicates a trend. Pick up a copy of “Olivia Saves the Circus” (or borrow one from nearly any 5-year-old girl) and note that the piggy heroine has a huge poster of Mrs. Roosevelt on her bedroom wall. The author, Ian Falconer, admits that he used the image in part for absurdist effect, but also because Eleanor Roosevelt “is a great role model.”
The sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be celebrated today, and no doubt Eleanor Roosevelt will be celebrated along with it. And indeed, the role she played in producing the declaration explains, more than any other achievement, the latterly rise in her reputation. For the two and a half years that she chaired the United Nations committee to draft the declaration, and for many years thereafter, human rights was a spindly, if noble, idea. Thirty-five million people had just been slaughtered in World War Two, and the wife of the now-dead American president was working with some leading intellectuals from the global wreckage to draw up a document saying such things shouldn’t happen. Hmmm.
Most of the people who supported the idea from inside the U.S. government did so only because they thought a declaration might be a good club to whack the Soviets with.There were no Amnesty Internationals or Human Rights Watches. There were no Assistant Secretaries of State for Human Rights, or university majors in human rights, or international conferences devoted to human rights. The term “human rights” didn’t appear much in the newspaper or on the radio. The field of human rights, quite crowded today, was hardly peopled.
When Human Rights Watch was founded thirty years later, its first achievement was to help publicize the names of Soviet dissidents who were white, mostly male, and not just educated but among the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century. It was a fairly narrow, if impressive, slice of the global population. Today the universe of people laying claim to the human rights idea has grown to encompass women, children, gay people, refugees, prisoners, people living with HIV/AIDS, people living with disabilities. The beauty of the Universal Declaration is that it has grown along with them. Like the US constitution, it’s a document that is flexible enough, and basic enough, to remain relevant while the world around it gets way more complicated. Eleanor Roosevelt and the drafters did a good job.
Mrs. Roosevelt did a lot for human rights, and human rights returned the favor. The embrace of any Big Idea entails lonely work at the beginning, of course (it makes a better story for Hollywood that way, too), but if the Big Idea catches on, it sends a lot of luster back through time to its earliest proponents. Nietzsche wrote that “truth has the fewest defenders not when it is dangerous to speak the truth but when it is boring.” People used to think Eleanor Roosevelt was kind of boring. Not anymore.
Today, Eleanor Roosevelt is viewed as a figure of near-saintliness and great prescience. My daughter dressed as Eleanor Roosevelt one year for Halloween. She’s a weird kid, I’ll admit, but it still indicates a trend. Pick up a copy of “Olivia Saves the Circus” (or borrow one from nearly any 5-year-old girl) and note that the piggy heroine has a huge poster of Mrs. Roosevelt on her bedroom wall. The author, Ian Falconer, admits that he used the image in part for absurdist effect, but also because Eleanor Roosevelt “is a great role model.”
The sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be celebrated today, and no doubt Eleanor Roosevelt will be celebrated along with it. And indeed, the role she played in producing the declaration explains, more than any other achievement, the latterly rise in her reputation. For the two and a half years that she chaired the United Nations committee to draft the declaration, and for many years thereafter, human rights was a spindly, if noble, idea. Thirty-five million people had just been slaughtered in World War Two, and the wife of the now-dead American president was working with some leading intellectuals from the global wreckage to draw up a document saying such things shouldn’t happen. Hmmm.
Most of the people who supported the idea from inside the U.S. government did so only because they thought a declaration might be a good club to whack the Soviets with.There were no Amnesty Internationals or Human Rights Watches. There were no Assistant Secretaries of State for Human Rights, or university majors in human rights, or international conferences devoted to human rights. The term “human rights” didn’t appear much in the newspaper or on the radio. The field of human rights, quite crowded today, was hardly peopled.
When Human Rights Watch was founded thirty years later, its first achievement was to help publicize the names of Soviet dissidents who were white, mostly male, and not just educated but among the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century. It was a fairly narrow, if impressive, slice of the global population. Today the universe of people laying claim to the human rights idea has grown to encompass women, children, gay people, refugees, prisoners, people living with HIV/AIDS, people living with disabilities. The beauty of the Universal Declaration is that it has grown along with them. Like the US constitution, it’s a document that is flexible enough, and basic enough, to remain relevant while the world around it gets way more complicated. Eleanor Roosevelt and the drafters did a good job.
Mrs. Roosevelt did a lot for human rights, and human rights returned the favor. The embrace of any Big Idea entails lonely work at the beginning, of course (it makes a better story for Hollywood that way, too), but if the Big Idea catches on, it sends a lot of luster back through time to its earliest proponents. Nietzsche wrote that “truth has the fewest defenders not when it is dangerous to speak the truth but when it is boring.” People used to think Eleanor Roosevelt was kind of boring. Not anymore.
No Dancing on Journalism's Grave
In general I think we fret too much over the changes roiling the journalism business these days. Many good people are losing their jobs and they need help – I’d love to know HOW to help them – but we can’t bemoan the changes in technology that are driving the trend. They just ARE. It’s like the weather. No sense railing; just adapt. Find another way to deliver the social good that newspapers have traditionally delivered, with admittedly uneven success: an informed citizenry. It’s a mistake to want to save newspapers out of sentimentality, or fondness for the ways of our youth, or insistence that it’s more “natural” to read the news on paper. Since journalists, er, tend to write a lot, we tend to read a lot of commentary about the future of journalism that goes, “We must save the newspaper industry because AIEEEEEEEEeeee….” (sound of author falling off cliff). One news consumer on the San Antonio Express-News website put it bitingly, “A good reason to read a newspaper is to keep them in business because, if we don't read they don't print and they then go out of business.” But while we’re all busily trying to find that magical other way to deliver that social good of the informed citizenry, we have to note with alarm who’s dancing on journalism’s grave. Part of what makes the decline of newspapers really alarming is the relish that the American far right is taking in their demise. If the drooling pack of know-nothings that has been howling away in the Uinted States over the last decade is welcoming the end of newspapers, then there must really be something to mourn in their passing. Take a look at some of the other comments on the San Antonio Express-News website, responding to the sensible and even-handed column of Bob Rivard, “2 Reasons You Should Read the Newspaper”: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/Good_and_bad_news_2_reasons_you_should_read_the_newspaper.html?c=y&viewAllComments=yThe comments are no uglier than what we all see on the internet every day. But let not familiarity mellow our revulsion: that’s pretty ugly. These people have been shouting loudly and rudely in the national political conversation for quite a few years now. The presidential election makes clear that they’re in a minority in the United States, thank god. But they may garner an even more disproportionate audience thanks to the collapse of newspapers, which have traditionally helped orchestrate and filter the political debate. Where journalists ebb, these morons flow. We live in an incredibly information-rich society, much richer than ever before. But we haven’t figured out how to fund news-gathering (as opposed to news-commenting). Just as important, we haven’t figured out how to ensure that news commentary is reasonably civil. The commercial viability of the media and the civility of American debate are connected, and their solutions are likely to be connected as well -- hopefully soon. History is littered with examples of dangeorus political movements gaining momentum as public discourse grows more shrill, and more chauvinist. Very recent American history, in fact. And maybe some history that’s yet to be made.
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