Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

World Press Photo of the Year 2006
Spencer Platt, USA, Getty Images. Young Lebanese drive through devastated neighborhood of South Beirut, 15 August, 2006

Munson: The main reason for recording human brutality, in pictures or in words,  should be to induce humans to become more humane. It should obviously never be a form of “voyeurism.” Those who record the agony of others violate their privacy in a way that can only be justified if it induces others to recognize the need to eliminate or at least curb unnecessary violence. Violating people’s privacy simply to take a prize-winning photograph is wrong.  But if a picture portraying human brutality can both induce humans to become more humane and win prizes, that is fine. Indeed, the prize may well increase exposure to the picture and the basic message it is intended to convey.

Mai Ghoussoub, Beirut and contradiction: reading the World Press Photo award, openDemocracy

Four stylish young women, an open-topped car, the rubble of war-torn Beirut … but where is the real power of Spencer Platt’s prize-winning image, asks Mai Ghoussoub.

(This article was first published on 13 February 2007)

I am certain that Spencer Platt’s picture which won the World Press Photo prize for 2006 looked disturbing and even repellent to most viewers at first glance. I admit that it bothered me when I first saw it on my screen. But I also admit that I kept on looking at it. What was it that intrigued me in this picture despite my unexplained revulsion? Why did I feel that I had to write about what I saw in the picture?

…I went to a housewarming party and I overheard two young Lebanese arguing about the same photo. Both were in their 20s and very “cosmopolitan”. One said: I think this is a great photograph, it shows us as we are, not people associated only with war and destruction. The second one was appalled and said: this is the “new orientalism” - instead of the women depicted in Delacroix’s classic orientalist paintings, today we have these modern, model-type Lebanese women against a background of war and poverty….I believe that the photo is stunning in the metaphor it creates about war photography. It tells us about the voyeurism of the photographer, of the act of taking photos in tragic situations: if there is a contradiction, it is in the encounter between art, beauty and tragedy. Covering a disaster in order to create a striking image is what Robert Capa did best, he became an icon for it and we, the viewers are becoming addicted to this art form.

Ned Parker / Los Angeles Times
CHANGING ALLEGIANCE: Abu Abed, far right, with members of his paramilitary group. A former insurgent and officer in Hussein’s army, he helped drive Al Qaeda in Iraq out of Amiriya.

Ned Parker, Ruthless, shadowy — and a U.S. ally - Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2007

BAGHDAD — “Abu Abed, you’re a hero,” the retired Shiite teacher shouted from the home she had fled last winter, when the bodies of Shiites were being dumped daily in the streets of her Amiriya neighborhood.

The fighter, wearing green camouflage and dark wraparound sunglasses, kept walking, his hand swinging a black MP-5 submachine gun.

No more than 5 feet 6, with a roll of baby fat, this Sunni Muslim gunman is an unlikely savior of Amiriya: a former intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein’s army, a suspected onetime insurgent, a man who has photos of his brothers’ mutilated corpses loaded in his cellphone.

To many Iraqis, Abu Abed is a Sunni warlord whose followers have spilled the blood of Shiite Muslim civilians and U.S. troops. But to the people in Amiriya, he is the man who has, with ruthless efficiency, restored order to a neighborhood where the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq held sway.

An Afghan man from the village of Yaka China carrying a child, injured during an Apache helicopter attack, for treatment by American medics. Tim Hetherington

Sebastian Junger, Into the Valley of Death, Vanity Fair, January 2008

By many measures, Afghanistan is falling apart. The Afghan opium crop has flourished in the past two years and now represents 93 percent of the world’s supply, with an estimated street value of $38 billion in 2006. That money helps bankroll an insurgency that is now operating virtually within sight of the capital, Kabul. Suicide bombings have risen eightfold in the past two years, including several devastating attacks in Kabul, and as of October, coalition casualties had surpassed those of any previous year. The situation has gotten so bad, in fact, that ethnic and political factions in the northern part of the country have started stockpiling arms in preparation for when the international community decides to pull out. Afghans—who have seen two foreign powers on their soil in 20 years—are well aware of the limits of empire. They are well aware that everything has an end point, and that in their country end points are bloodier than most.

The Korengal is widely considered to be the most dangerous valley in northeastern Afghanistan, and Second Platoon is considered the tip of the spear for the American forces there. Nearly one-fifth of all combat in Afghanistan occurs in this valley, and nearly three-quarters of all the bombs dropped by nato forces in Afghanistan are dropped in the surrounding area. The fighting is on foot and it is deadly, and the zone of American control moves hilltop by hilltop, ridge by ridge, a hundred yards at a time. There is literally no safe place in the Korengal Valley. Men have been shot while asleep in their barracks tents.

The Year in Images - Photo Essays - TIME

Mourned
A member of the military accompanies Rachel Guy-Latham at a viewing of the body of her husband, Sergeant Thomas Lee Latham, 23, who was killed by an IED in Baghdad, Iraq in March. Anthony Suau for TIME.

Andrew Finkel, The many battles for Turkey’s soul, Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2007

Turkey’s elections this summer have put both presidency and government into the hands of the post-Islamist AKP. The secularist old guard fears this unprecedented concentration of power and the idea that the AKP, which has handled economic difficulties gallantly, has become the natural party of government

By Andrew Finkel

Bill Clinton certainly never said: “It’s the future of the republic, stupid.” He only mentioned the economy. Yet many pundits were convinced that it wasn’t the Turkish economy that concerned voters during this politically hot summer, but the nature of its regime. More than one publication called the 22 July general election “the battle for Turkey’s soul”, although what was at stake, who represented God and who the Devil, was often left vague. Did the contest pit Islamists against secularists, democrats against autocrats, pro-Europeans against old-style nationalists, globalisers against protectionists, a new against an old elite, civil society against the military/bureaucratic guardians of the state, all or none of the above?

On the surface at least, Turks went to the poll a few months ahead of schedule because parliament was unable to carry out its constitutional obligation to elect a new president (1). This failure was all the more unexpected because the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) had more than enough MPs. Up to the actual contest the question was not whether it could choose a president, but what name the party’s inner cabal would put forward. The real suspense had been over whether the prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, would abandon his party for the presidential office or whether he would choose someone who would not irritate the sensitivities of Turkish establishment – someone whose wife did not wear the hijab.

In the end Erdogan went for broke. He stayed on as prime minister but nominated his closest political ally, foreign minister Abdullah Gul (whose wife does wear the hijab). Gul is important not just as the man who brokered the start of Turkish accession negotiations to the EU in 2005, but as the long-term architect of the AKP’s bid for the centre ground of Turkish politics. He helped lead the split from the more openly Islamic movement founded by Necmettin Erbakan, in whose government he had been a minister. And when the AKP swept into power in 2002, he became prime minister. In a rare act of political fealty, he kept the seat warm long enough for the more charismatic Erdogan to surmount his legal ban from politics, enter parliament at a by-election and take the job himself.

The AKP’s strategy since its inception has been simple. The party avoided mention of religion so as not to offend the constitution or Turkey’s secular elite. At the same time, it nodded at the conservative inclinations of its supporters. The body language said “trust us, we’re on your side”. The right to be more open about religion in public life was redefined as part of a more general struggle to make Turkey more fully democratic; and this prompted suspicions that for many AKP supporters, their own rights were more important than human rights in general. Even so, the rhetoric meant the AKP was less prone to Turkish nationalism and generally more tolerant of those who sought other rights, including the right to be Kurdish.

The American military, enlisting local Iraqi help in ending sectarian violence, has formed “Awakening” groups in neighborhoods. A member in the Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad guards a checkpoint.

Photo: Joao Silva for The New York Times

ALISSA J. RUBIN and STEPHEN FARRELL, In a Force for Iraqi Calm, Seeds of Conflict - New York Times, December 23, 2007

BAGHDAD — The thin teenage boy rushed up to the patrol of American soldiers walking through Dora, a shrapnel-scarred neighborhood of the capital, and lifted his shirt to show them a mass of red welts across his back.

He said he was a member of a local Sunni “Awakening” group, paid by the American military to patrol the district, but he said it was another Awakening group that beat him. “They took me while I was working,” he said, “and broke my badge and said, ‘You are from Al Qaeda.’”

The soldiers were unsure of what to do. The Awakening groups in just their area of southern Baghdad could not seem to get along: they fought over turf and, it turned out in this case, one group had warned the other that its members should not pay rent to Shiite “dogs.”

The Awakening movement, a predominantly Sunni Arab force recruited to fight Sunni Islamic extremists like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, has become a great success story after its spread from Sunni tribes in Anbar Province to become an ad-hoc armed force of 65,000 to 80,000 across the country in less than a year. A linchpin of the American strategy to pacify Iraq, the movement has been widely credited with turning around the violence-scarred areas where the Sunni insurgency has been based.

But the beating that day was a stark example of how rivalries and sectarianism are still undermining the Americans’ plans. And in particular, the Awakening’s rapid expansion — the Americans say the force could reach 100,000 — is creating new concerns.

The politics of the local in Iraq, by Charles Tripp, Le Monde diplomatque in English, January 2008

The many regional and sectarian leaders in Iraq now wield a power over ordinary citizens that the new national institutions cannot, and may not want to temper. Iraq may fall into a second violent civil war. Or it may become an imperial protectorate with a privileged military and sharp class divisions.

By Charles Tripp

Now that the first phase of the Iraqi civil war seems to have ended, it is time to consider the political processes it may have left in its bloody wake. It is crucial for Iraqis and others to get a sense of the stability and durability of present arrangements. Are they a mechanism for reconciling the ferocious enmities of the past five years in Iraq, or likely to lead to a more violent second phase of the civil war?

There have been two main patterns during these years of violence and massive population displacement.

One is the localisation of politics, grounded in the insecurities, fears and ambitions of ruthless local leaders across Iraq. This thrives on community feeling, which is sometimes tribal, sometimes ethnic and sectarian; it also springs from rivalry and jostling for power within a provincial arena.

The other pattern is the emergence of a politics at national level under US auspices, which has much in common with the politics of a protectorate. Both are dangerous for the future, but both may contribute to the emergence of a distinctive, likely troubled, Iraqi politics.

As an Iraqi put it, “the United States got rid of one Saddam only to replace him with 50”.

UNICEF: War has taken a toll on Iraq’s children, McClatchy Newspapers, 12/21/2007

BAGHDAD — More than four years after the United States invaded Iraq, the country’s children continue to face a litany of problems from disrupted educations to unsafe drinking water, detentions and violence, UNICEF reported Friday.

Violence and displacement often kept Iraqi children out of school this year. The organization estimates that 2 million educations were interrupted, especially among primary-school students.

The report says that only 28 percent of 17-year-olds in Iraq took final exams this summer, and fewer than half passed. However, UNICEF-supported programs to distribute classroom materials, rebuild schools and provide more learning opportunities benefited 4.7 million children, the agency reported.

Health took a hit, too, as children living in remote areas were faced with poor nutrition and diseases such as cholera. Those living in remote areas were often cut off from health services, although a door-to-door immunization campaign protected 4 million from polio and 3 million from measles, mumps and rubella.

The full report, based on statistics from UNICEF, Iraq’s government and the U.S. military, will be released in early 2008.

MEMRI, December 21, 2007

A polemic has recently erupted between noted Egyptian sociologist and reformer Dr. Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim and Iraqi liberal authors over the war in Iraq. The controversy centered on recent articles by Ibrahim comparing the Iraqi resistance to the Vietnamese fighters at Dien Bien Phu and to the Algerian FLN. In response, a number of Iraqi liberals - Dr. ‘Abd Al-Khaliq Hussein, Kazem Habib, and Iraqi Kurdish author Hosheng Broka - rejected Ibrahim’s historical comparisons, and accused him of supporting Ba’thist and Al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for crimes against the Iraqi people.

The following are excerpts from Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim’s articles and the Iraqi authors’ responses to them:

Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim: “Foreign Occupation Must Inevitably Give Rise to National Resistance”

On October 27, 2007, Dr. Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim published an article titled “Vietnam and the Search for Iraq’s Future” in the Qatari daily Al-Raya and in the Egyptian opposition daily Al-Masri Al-Yawm. The article, written during a visit to Vietnam, was a reflection on U.S. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez’s recent statement that the Iraq war was “a nightmare with no end in sight,” interspersed with reflections on the author’s student days as an anti-Vietnam War activist. [1]

It was Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim’s follow-up article, “From Vietnam to Algeria to Iraq,” that became a source of controversy, as it seemed to express sympathy for the Iraqi “resistance.” Following are excerpts:

“As I was traveling in Vietnam with my wife and son… I called to mind stories from the past. I remembered the biographies of the great historical leaders of this poor Asian country who led a popular resistance against three foreign occupying forces in the 20th century - Japan, France, and the U.S. - and was victorious over them all, despite the heavy sacrifice of its people’s blood.

GRAPHIC: Gene Thorp and Dita Smith - The Washington Post - December 15, 2007

Changing Baghdad - washingtonpost.com

Mike Lanchin and Mona Mahmoud, Iraq government ‘failing Falluja,’ BBC, December 20, 2007

Three years after the massive US assault on Falluja, the city’s mayor has accused Iraq’s central government of starving the city of resources.

Mayor Sa’ad Awad says Shia officials still consider the former insurgent stronghold a haven for Sunni militants.

Support was particularly lacking for the city’s 2,000-strong police force, he added, as it takes on a bigger role.

The head of the US military in Falluja said he shared some of the mayor’s concerns over scarce police resources.

Colonel Richard Simcock told the BBC there were no immediate plans to withdraw the 5,000 US Marines currently stationed in the area.

Some Iraqi refugees, seen here in Syria, are highly educated. (Hannah Allam/MCT)

Hannah Allam, Survey: Many Iraqis in Syria fled during U.S. troop buildup, McClatchy Newspapers, December 14, 2007

CAIRO, Egypt — One in five Iraqi refugees in Syria has been tortured or suffered from other violence, and more than a third fled their homeland between July and October, at the height of the U.S. troop buildup that was intended to quell sectarian violence in Baghdad, preliminary data from a new United Nations study show.

The survey also found that the refugee population is highly educated — nearly a third have university degrees, including master’s and doctorates — and that many refugees are only weeks away from exhausting their savings.

The survey, which the IPSOS market research firm conducted in October and November, is the most comprehensive study to date of the 1.5 million Iraqis who’ve sought safety in Syria from the sectarian violence at home. The results are based on interviews with 754 refugees, who were asked detailed questions that ranged from whether they’d been hit by grenades to how they treat their children’s illnesses. Full results are expected in early January.

Displaced Iraqi children watch U.S. soldiers while waiting at a checkpoint before returning to their home in Fallujah. (Photo by John Moore, AP, April 27, 2004.)

2005 Pulitzer Prizes-BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY, Works

President Bush meets with Lance Cpl. Isaac Gallegos during a visit to the Center for the Intrepid at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, November 8, 2007.

REUTERS/Jim Young

Source: http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?collectionId=1272#a=12

Argentina: Iran behind bombs at Israeli embassy, Jewish center - Haaretz, December 8, 2007

Iran was behind the bombings over a decade ago in Argentina against the Israeli embassy and Jewish community center, according to the country’s chief prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, who served as a special prosecutor investigating the attacks.

“I have no doubt that the most senior Iranian leadership, with the help of Hezbollah, is responsible for the attacks in Buenos Aires against AMIA [the community center in 1994] and the Israeli Embassy [in 1992],” Nisman said Tuesday night at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.

While investigating the two attacks, Nisman found the necessary legal evidence pointing directly to former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani and his chief of intelligence, Ali Falahian, for their role in the decision to target the community center.