We have to speak when others cannot speak...

He is currently serving his eleven-year sentence in Jinzhou, Liaoning province, 500 kilometers north of Beijing.
The prisoner now shares a thirty square meter cell with five other detainees, after having spent the first six months of his detention in solitary confinement.
Though compelled to wear the customary white prison garb, he does not have to work, unlike most other prisoners.
As such, Liu Xiaobo, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient spends his days learning English with a dictionary and reading works of history and novels, including, befittingly, those of Franz Kafka, overt political works being forbidden.
The material he has written while in detention will most likely never be published and the authorities destroyed the poems composed during his various stints in prison.
His wife, Liu Xia is only authorized to visit him once a month, for sixty minutes. In order to do so, she must undertake a six-hour long journey from their home in Beijing to Jinzhou.
Nominated for the prize by Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu, among others, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to grant him the Nobel Peace Prize of 2010 in honor of his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.
Indeed, the citation continued, China is in breach of several international agreements to which it is a signatory, as well as of its own provisions concerning political rights…
Liu has become the foremost symbol of this wide-ranging struggle for human rights in China.
It was a bold and brave act on the part of the Nobel Committee, for the West has refrained from taking Beijing to task over its abuse of human rights, so as not to jeopardize its lucrative and now vital economic ties with China.
Liu Xiaobo is only the third recipient to win the prize while in detention. The German pacifist Carl von Ossietsky in 1935, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the Burmese opposition, in 1991 (who is currently still under house arrest) were honored in similar circumstances.
Liu Xiaobo has been a human rights

activist since 1989 and the pro-democracy campaign that led to the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4.
A visiting scholar at Columbia University at the time, Liu Xiaobo returned home in late May shortly before the bloody crackdown.
As the situation was becoming ever more tense and dangerous in the first days of June 1989, Liu and three other fellow intellectuals went on a hunger strike in order to demonstrate their support for the students.
When the army stormed the Square on June 4, Liu and his colleagues negotiated with the military to allow the students to evacuate the area peacefully..
If not for the work of Liu and the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square, Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4, Gao Yu, a dissident arrested on that day told the NYT.
Nevertheless, although the exact figure remains a state secret, it is believed that several thousands of people were killed and wounded during what the authorities call the political turmoil of that spring.
Liu was himself arrested after the June Massacre and spent the following two years in prison.
It was the traumatic events of Tiananmen that transformed Liu Xiaobo from a successful scholar into a proscribed human rights activist.
Twenty years have passed, but the ghosts of June Fourth have not yet been laid to rest. Upon release from Qincheng Prison in 1991, I, who had been led onto the path of political dissent by the psychological chains of June Fourth, lost the right to speak publicly in my own country and could only speak through the foreign media. Because of this, I was subjected to year-round monitoring, kept under residential surveillance (May 1995 to January 1996) and sent to Reeducation-Through-Labor (October 1996 to October 1999), he later wrote.
In 2008, Liu Xiaobo was arrested following his role in the writing and dissemination of Charter 08 on the internet. Modeled after Charter 77, written by Vaclav Havel and other Czech dissidents, the document called for the establishment of a democratic China and the respect of fundamental human rights.
Over 10,000 Chinese citizens eventually signed the document before it was banished form the internet by the authorities.
On Christmas day 2009, Liu was sentenced to an eleven years in prison for incitement to subvert state power (please refer to this previous BWR post for detailed coverage of that event).
While others were researching the same problems from a theoretical or policy standpoint, he was actively protesting and actually doing things, Zhang Zuhua, who also collaborated in drafting Charter 08, told the NYT.
He is a person who wants to live in truth, Jean-Philippe Béja, of the Center for International Studies and Research in Paris and a friend of the dissident, told The Guardian.
After 1989, Liu could no longer countenance the regime’s systematic human rights violations. Remaining silent and passive entailed implicitly collaborating with the repressive regime and condoning its unjust policies and practices.
The official Chinese reaction to the news that Liu Xiaobo had won the Nobel Peace Prize was swift and predictable. Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law, the foreign ministry declared in a statement. Giving Liu the award runs completely counter to the principle of the prize and is also a blasphemy to the peace prize, a foreign ministry spokesman said.
Chinese websites avoided the subject altogether. Liu’s name was deleted from internet chat rooms, and all text messages containing the three Chinese characters of Liu’s name were blocked.
CNN and BBC coverage of the event was censored in China.
The Chinese authorities had been putting pressure on the Norwegians for some time, explicitly warning the latter that honoring Liu would undermine bilateral relations.
Yet, the Norwegian Nobel Committee refused to be intimidated (the pressure may have had the opposite effect), and attempts by the Norwegian government to explain to the Chinese that the Committee was an independent body that made its own decisions, and not a governmental one seem to have been unsuccessful, the very notion of independence being a concept foreign to the Chinese oligarchs…
We have to speak when others cannot speak. As China is rising, we should have the right to criticize, Thorbjoern Jagland, the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told Reuters.
Shortly after the Committee’s announcement, plain clothed police officers compelled Mrs. Liu to leave her home. About one hundred people had gathered in front of her building, as well as dozens of journalists. All were prevented from seeing Mrs. Liu by scores of police officers.
They are forcing me to leave Beijing. They want me to go to Liaoning to see Xiaobo. They want to distance me from the media, she told Reuters.
Mrs. Liu saw her husband in Jinzhou on Sunday. Prison officials had already notified him that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize…This is for the lost souls of June 4th, he told his wife, referring to the prize, according to the NYT.
Mrs. Liu was then taken back to Beijing, where she was placed under house arrest, and deprived of all phone and internet connections.
Over fifty police officers arrested some twenty human rights activists who were attempting to celebrate Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize on Friday.
Some ten to twenty supporters gathered in central Beijing, shouting Long Live Freedom of Speech, Long Live Democracy. They were promptly arrested also and taken away by the police.
The objectives of the authorities were clear: ensure that the Chinese population remains unaware, if possible, that an imprisoned Chinese citizen had just been awarded one of the world’s most prestigious prizes.
The (national security) officers say that the police have rigid orders from higher authorities that they must work resolutely to thwart celebratory activities to mark this event. They are keeping a strict eye on the most active people, in order to reduce its impact to the smallest degree possible, Teng Biao, a civil rights lawyer, told the NYT.
This may prove very difficult however. They've worked very hard to marginalize dissident voices and keep them outside of the mainstream… But there's nothing more mainstream than the Nobel Peace prize, Larry Siems, international programs director in New York for PEN, a literary and human rights organization, told McClatchy Newspapers.
It must be said however, that not all Chinese dissidents approved the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s choice.
A group of fourteen exiled Chinese activists wrote a letter to the Committee in order to dissuade it from granting the prize to Liu Xiaobo.
His open praise in the last 20 years for the Chinese Communist Party, which has never stopped trampling on human rights, has been extremely misleading and influential, they wrote.
Some, including Wei Jingsheng, believe his approach is too accommodating and conciliatory. In 1979, Wei posted a letter on Beijing’s Democracy Wall demanding, a Fifth Modernization, democracy.
People should have democracy. When they ask for democracy, they are only demanding what is rightfully theirs. Anyone refusing to give it to them is a shameless bandit no better than a capitalist who robs workers of their money earned with their sweat and blood. Do the people have democracy now? No. Do they want to be masters of their own destiny? Definitely yes, he wrote.
The four official modernizations that were to be the focus of official Chinese policies included agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology.
Wei was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in jail on espionage charges.
He was released in 1993, arrested yet again shortly after and finally deported to the US in 1997.
Raising the reputation of moderate reformists would increase people’s desire to cooperate with the government, thus helping stabilize the political situation in China and delaying the time when people overthrow the dictatorial government, he told AFP in Washington DC.
It is undeniable that Liu Xiaobo’ approach has been non-confrontational. What is more surprising, given his circumstances, is the fact that he has evinced remarkable tolerance, some would say naïveté (or is he being cleverly deceitful so as not to antagonize his oppressors) vis-à-vis those who sustain the regime’s repressive apparatus.
His approach is straightforward, and not typical of a politician or militant.
What I demanded of myself was this: whether as a person or as a writer, I would lead a life of honesty, responsibility, and dignity, he wrote in a statement released December 23, 2009, two days before he was sentenced to eleven years in prison.
In essence, he refuses to do anything that would compromise his, ideals and ethics. This became a personal imperative.
Yet, since an authoritarian state demands absolute political loyalty from its citizens, confrontation with the authorities was inevitable.
For, loyalty to the regime entails that one recognize its legitimacy, and the moral authority of its rulers to lead the country.
What legitimacy does China’s oligarchy possess?
None.
It has never been elected.
It remains in power only because it firmly controls the security apparatus and the nation’s armed forces. Chiefly however, it has succeeded in purchasing the people’s complicity and thus passivity with double-digit economic growth for over a generation…
That is the Chinese social contact: submission in exchange for relative prosperity and material wellbeing.
Those who perceive the corruptive nature of such a pact (for it demands of the citizen that he should ignore his conscience and sense of morality, and willingly renounce his rights as a citizen) and repudiate it incur the wrath of the regime, particularly if the act of defiance is a public one…
Liu Xiaobo openly rejected the regime’s Faustian bargain and has been persecuted ever since.
The regime’s greatest fear is that others should follow suit, and, like Liu, cease to be afraid, and thus no longer obey.
An authoritarian regime that is no longer capable of instilling fear in those it rules is doomed. Hence, the regime’s aggressive, vindictive response to any public calls for greater freedom and democracy.
Yet, Mr. Liu’s approach is not an aggressive one. He does not confront the regime; it is the regime that confronts him because it cannot allow defiance to go unpunished.
Paradoxically, Liu’s reaction to persecution is conciliatory, as if this is a necessary stage on the long road to democracy.
I have no enemies and no hatred, he affirms, downplaying the violence of the struggle being waged between the oligarchy and the dissident.
Moreover, he goes even further. Although there is no way I can accept your monitoring, arrests, indictments, and verdicts, I respect your professions and your integrity, including those of the two prosecutors, Zhang Rongge and Pan Xueqing, who are now bringing charges against me on behalf of the prosecution. During interrogation on December 3, I could sense your respect and your good faith, he wrote.
Not only does he not vilify the oligarchy’s henchmen, he pays them tribute…
Can the willing servants of a repressive system truly retain their integrity and good faith?
Hardly…They serve their masters and execute their despicable orders because it is worth their while or because they lack the courage to refrain from doing so…
If they respect the persecuted individual, then why are they victimizing him? They surely have no respect for his cause!
Perhaps Liu hopes that a little flattery will induce his tormentors to be lenient.
If so, he is deluding himself.
Leniency is out of the question for the regime believes that this would be construed as a sign of weakness. Painstaking and unmitigated repression is the regime’s modus operandi in such cases. The regime’s viability and longevity depend on it.
As such, it deals ruthlessly with all those brazen enough to question its authority publicly.
Leniency would spell the beginning of the end for it would suggest the regime no longer has the necessary determination to assert itself, and that the offender may have had attenuating circumstances when committing the sacrilegious act of defiance.
To show mercy could inspire others to imitate Liu Xiaobo, and that cannot be tolerated by the Chinese oligarchy.
Furthermore, Liu hopes to dispel hatred with love (his mission clearly has a religious, missionary dimension), after he has conceded that the regime’s repressive nature is the result of the enemy mentality that it cultivated for so long.
Yet, he believes that it is slowly weakening.
The regime did gradually loosen its stranglehold on the economy, allowing the development of a private sector. The ensuing economic growth benefited everyone, and thus the regime (there are now some 64 billionaires in China. It ranks third in the world, behind the US and India.).
Liu Xiaobo also seemingly takes the regime's intentions seriously, even if they are but that, and have no practical consequences.
The current regime puts forth the ideas of “putting people first” and “creating a harmonious society,” signaling progress in the CPC’s concept of rule, he writes.
Is he simply naïve, or inviting his readers to evaluate the regime’s success in implementing policies to fulfill objectives it has itself defined?
In addition, he extols the humane management of the new Beikan prison, based on respect for the rights and integrity of detainees, instilling in the latter a sense of dignity and warmth, and providing a humane living environment.
It is reassuring to note that prison conditions are improving in China…
But, by imprisoning on bogus charges those bold enough to take the Chinese Constitution seriously (Article 35 states the following: Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration), has not the repressive Chinese oligarchy stripped the persecuted of their rights and thus their dignity and integrity?
One can try to retain both while in detention if one has uncommon resilience and fortitude.
Nevertheless, does a regime interested in preserving and cherishing the integrity and dignity of its citizens throw them in jail on artificial pretexts such as incitement to subvert state power?
Were the Chinese prosecutors, who displayed such goodwill and integrity, to quote Mr. Liu, able to explain how adhering to the Chinese Constitution, particularly Article 35, was tantamount to subverting state power?
Yet, Liu Xiaobo refuses to make such arguments, and prefers instead to praise his correctional officer, Liu Zheng.
It was perhaps my good fortune to have gotten to know this sincere, honest, conscientious, and kind correctional officer during my time at Beikan, he stated.
Is it truly possible that someone possessing the qualities Liu Xiaobo descried in the correctional officer could be an active participant in the regime’s repressive apparatus?
In today’s China, with its booming economy, employment opportunities are varied and numerous, presumably, particularly for someone with Liu Zheng’s attributes.
In short, no one is compelled to be the repressive regime’s accomplice in persecuting political prisoners unless one is so inclined…
Liu Xiaobo knows the system too well to be naïve.
He clearly does not want to antagonize the regime in the hope of being able to, one day, negotiate with it, and at last come to some modus vivendi with the powers that be.
The philosopher Xu Youyu aptly summarized the dissident’s approach:
His activities in 1989 can be seen as formative in the entirety of his following writings and other works, characterized by an unwavering bravery and refusal to back down in the face of danger and suppression, by the pursuit and defense of human rights, humanism, peace and other universal values and, finally, adherence to the practice of rational dialogue, compromise and non-violence, he wrote in an article quoted by The Guardian.
The idea is to reach the coveted goal-democracy- through rational dialogue and compromise with the current regime, and not violent revolution.
Liu is convinced that his cause will inevitably prevail. For there is no force that can put an end to the human quest for freedom, and China will in the end become a nation ruled by law, where human rights reign supreme, he wrote.
Some in the exiled Chinese community clearly condemn Liu’s willingness to establish a dialogue with a regime they loathe and believe should be overthrown.
Yet, unlike his critics, Liu has chosen to remain in China.
The stakes are therefore not the same. Liu Xiaobo is an important Chinese intellectual because he does two things — he criticizes the government and he lives in China. And in order to do that and not be dead, you have to make compromises. He’s a democrat, he’s a human rights activist — that’s what he’s after. But he’s willing to make tactical adjustments in order to be effective and the most important one has been remaining inside China. Yes, he hasn’t been as emphatic or hasn’t addressed topics we have addressed internationally. But we don’t live in China and we don’t have the police coming around the corner, Timothy Cheek, a China expert at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, told AFP.
What effect will Liu’s Nobel Prize have on the Chinese human rights movement?
The following seems clear: in spite of the regime’s strenuous efforts to crush the pro-democracy movement in China, it has failed to do so.
Similarly, not everyone in the West can be cowed into ignoring its appalling human rights record and vile persecution of those whose sole crime is to demand that the regime respect its own laws, and the international covenants that it has signed. The Norwegian Nobel Committe should be commended for its courageous choice.
This award will no doubt infuriate the Chinese government by putting its human rights record squarely back into the international debate. But this Nobel Prize honors not only Liu’s unflinching advocacy; it honors all those in China who struggle daily to make the government more accountable, Sarah Richardson, of Human Rights Watch, told the CSM.
Like everything that happens in China today, the democracy movement here exists in a global context. So this will be a lesson to China: it can’t bottle up the democracy movement forever, Cui Weiping, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy, told the NYT.
Liao Yiwu, a writer and friend of the Nobel recipient, also believes the award will have beneficial effects. This is a big moment in Chinese history. It will greatly promote democratic developments in China and it is a huge encouragement to us and our friends, he told The Guardian.
It's a huge boost to those who are basically isolated. The government of China had done everything in the past to deny their voices, Bao Pu, a Hong Kong publisher who in the past has printed texts banned in mainland China, told McClatchy.
The pedestrian view, however, was quite different.
If the person who won got it because he opposed the government, then I don't think it's good. People who defy the Chinese government should not get this prize and if they do, it's because people overseas are trying to split China, a migrant worker who had never heard of Liu Xiaobo told AP.
On Twitter, one Chinese denounced Mr. Liu as an elite traitor.
The average person in China doesn’t know who Liu Xiaobo is and the responses will be based in large part on what people’s political perspective is. Nationalists will interpret this as an attempt to undermine China’s national strength while many liberals will probably be saddened by the fact their country has been embarrassed in this way, David Zweig, director of the Centre for China’s Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told the Financial Times.
And what of China’s youth?
What will they make of it?
I worry about the effect of this prize on China’s younger generation. It will be seen as new evidence about how the West is unfriendly to China, Zhu Feng, a professor of International Relations at Beijing University, told the WP.
In any case and initially at least, the regime is likely to respond harshly as has been its wont in the recent past.
But controls on us are tougher than even a few years ago. Things I could once read on the internet are no longer accessible. The restrictions on the flow of information means that some activists I know had never heard of Liu until yesterday. This does not give me much hope going forward, Xinna, the wife of an ethnic Mongolian activist told Reuters.
The immediate future of the human rights movement is in the Chinese oligarchy’s hands…It cannot be destroyed or defeated, however.
The issue of human rights and democracy will not go away.
The day will come when, their material needs satisfied, the Chinese will demand a voice in the way their nation is being ruled.
When that fundamental right is finally wrested away from the regime, perhaps the Chinese people will then know who Liu Xiaobo is…
We have no regrets. All of this has been of our choosing. It will always be so. We’ll bear the consequences together, Liu Xia said last week.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee justly rewarded Liu’s courage and determination. Liu Xiaobo is exactly the kind of committed citizen who deserves such an award and that is the reason why I, together with my friends, nominated him, Vaclav Havel told AP.
May Liu’s Nobel Peace Prize protect him and lead to his early release.
May it also inspire his fellow citizens to follow his example and simply demand what is rightfully theirs, justice and democracy…
(the photograph of activists in Hong Kong demanding Liu Xiaobo’s release is by Reuters).
　
　
　
　

Sarkozy should leave the Roma alone and tackle the real issues...

Last week, Eric Besson, France’s Immigration minister presented a bill before the National Assembly entitled Immigration, Integration and Nationality.
This is the fifth bill on the issue that the ruling UMP majority has brought before Parliament in the last seven years…
The bill was originally designed to ensure that French law on the free circulation of individuals belonging to the European Union complied with European directives on the matter.
Two high profile and violent incidents that occurred last July however led Mr. Besson ,at President’s Sarkozy’s behest, to toughen the bill.
On July 15, Karim Boudouda, 27, and an accomplice robbed a casino in Uriage-les-Bains, near Grenoble, in south eastern France.
During the car chase that ensued, the alleged thieves fired live rounds at the police with automatic weapons. Uzis were later found in an arms cache during a search of a local bar. Mr. Boudouda, who had previously been convicted of armed robbery, was killed when the police returned fire.
The following evening, violence wracked la Villeneuve, a working class neighborhood of Grenoble where Mr. Boudouda grew up, as youths protested the alleged robber’s death at the hands of the police.
Bus stops were vandalized, and fifty to sixty cars torched.
Violence flared anew the following evening, July 17.
Youths shot live rounds at police officers patrolling the neighborhood.
Those officers involved in the shooting of Mr. Boudouda were threatened and their names tagged on the walls of the projects in Villeneuve.
Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux visited the troubled area a few days later and vowed to restore order there.
On July 16, near Saint Aignan, in central France, Luigi Duquenet, 22, was shot dead when the vehicle driven by his cousin refused to stop at a police checkpoint. It appears that the young men, belonging to the Gypsy community, did not comply with the police demand that they pull over because the driver did not possess a valid driver’s license. In addition, it seemed that Luigi Duquenet feared he would be accused of having committed a robbery that had taken place recently in the vicinity. Finally, his lawyer Benoît Chabert told the press that Mr. Duquenet was in breach of the terms of his parole at the time of the incident, which may also explain why he did not want to encounter the police.
Last Friday, the gendarme who fired the shot that killed the young man was charged with manslaughter. The officer claimed that he fired only in self defense…
The day after the tragic incident, some fifty individuals armed with metal rods and axes attacked the local Gendarmerie at St. Aignan. Several cars were also torched and a local bakery robbed. It took two squadrons of Gendarmes to restore a semblance of order.
What shocked the nation and clearly rattled President Sarkozy, a former Interior minister himself between 2002 and 2007, who rose to prominence largely due to his past success in lowering the crime rate in France, was the initial local reaction to the incidents, namely violence and mayhem directed at the police and authorities.
In both cases, family, friends and supporters of the alleged law breakers went on a rampage. The rule of law was simply dismissed and ignored by throngs of thugs, undermining the contention touted by President Sarkozy and his UMP supporters that they had restored the authority of the Republic in every neighborhood in France.
Yet, the incidents clearly demonstrated that this was not the case, and that many people in France had absolutely no qualms about resorting to violence, and brazenly at that, when they considered that one of their own had been victimized by the police, the very symbols of the state and its authority in the streets and projects, no matter what the actual context was.
The President himself had to concede that certain values were vanishing…
Values such as respect, justice and democracy are simply alien to many, too many, as is the French Republic‘s motto of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité…
The President came to Grenoble in late July, where he delivered a major speech on the issue of law and order, and imparted the conclusions he had drawn from the violent incidents of the preceding weeks.
President Sarkozy fired the Prefect of Isère (the highest official representing the state in the départements) where Grenoble is located, and assigned a clear mission to his replacement, Eric Le Douaron, restore the state’s authority, without weakness, wherever it is undermined.
For the President, the violence cannot be explained by social and economic factors, the conventional excuse. On the contrary, the initial violence was unleashed against the state, and its representatives by individuals who simply espouse no values at all.
Violence is not caused by inequality or injustice, as the left invariably claims, but is engendered by a permissive environment in which no one has the courage to confront it. Criminals and delinquents are not the victims of an unjust social and economic order which compels them to resort to crime in order to survive.
These people behave the way they do because they have nothing but contempt for the core values of our society, the President explained.
They are not victims, but the bane, of society…
How should society protect itself from these forms of nihilistic violence?
Firstly, the President argues, we must face the facts and admit that the integration of immigrants in France has failed. Formerly, French society did succeed in assimilating foreigners who settled in France, but that is no longer the case.
How can it be that young people of the second if not the third generation feel less French than their parents or even grandparents, the original immigrants, the President wondered? It is a pertinent question, which the President failed to answer.
Since the French integration model, assimilation, has failed, immigration must be curtailed if not stopped altogether.
Many of the President’s critics, and they are innumerable, concluded form this section of the speech that Mr. Sarkozy established a direct link between crime and delinquency on the one hand and immigration on the other, a thesis the Front National of Mr. Le Pen has propounded for decades…
The President did not explicitly make that claim here, or anywhere else for that matter, but others, who do not belong to the far right, already have.
A French sociologist, Hugues Lagrange, a research director at France’s CNRS (the National Center for Scientific Research) studied trends in juvenile delinquency in twenty-five of the toughest inner cities around Paris.
He concluded that social and economic conditions were insufficient to explain and account for crimes and felonies committed by juveniles.
Cultural factors simply could not be ignored, as they often tend to be, to avoid any potentially disturbing conclusions concerning the behavior of youths of certain ethnic backgrounds …
Adolescents brought up in families originating from the Sahel (i.e., Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Muslim, African nations) are three to four times more likely to commit acts of juvenile delinquency then are youths of French origin and two times more likely than youths of North African extraction, he concluded after studying 4,000 youths between 1999 and 2006.
Youths from the Sahel are steeped in Muslim culture, live in large families with many brothers and sisters which are dominated by the father. Polygamy is often the rule (30% of male heads of households have more than one wife), and brides are often young, uneducated, without resources of their own and thus submissive.
According to estimates cited by Le Point, there are between 16,000 and 20,000 polygamous families in France, affecting some 200,000 people…
Tensions within the household abound, due to the bickering among the several wives, and to overcrowded living conditions, leading many of the children to spend most of their time outside in the streets.
As a result, more and more black youths are becoming juvenile delinquents.
Hence, during the 2005 suburban riots, most of the rioters were black. Unlike the riots at the Val-Fourré (a poor section of Mantes-La-Jolie, a city west of Paris, where many immigrants reside) fifteen years earlier, where we were confronting youths of North African descent, we found ourselves pitted against blacks, a policeman told Le Point.
For Lagrange, a youth will have a much better chance of succeeding in school, and later finding his place in society, if his mother is respected in the home, is herself educated, and holds a job of her own.
It seems therefore, that the mother’s role and status is fundamental and instrumental in the successful integration of her children.
It must be said that Mr. Lagrange’s thesis is highly controversial in France. No self respecting liberal or leftist is about to countenance it.
Most, including on the right as well, are much more comfortable with the politically correct approach to the issue: it is social and economic deprivation that engenders delinquency. One's cultural background is irrelevant. The refusal to even seriously examine Mr. Lagrange’s perspective may explain why, as Mr. Sarkozy conceded, France’s policy of assimilation has failed…
In any case, the Saint-Aignan incident led President Sarkozy to launch a highly public campaign against illegal Roma encampments, though Roma do not appear to have been involved…
He did emphasize however, that the Roma who settled in designated campgrounds would be welcome to stay.
As such, Mr. Besson’s bill clearly reflects the President’s thinking on these issues, as expressed in the Grenoble Speech.
If the bill becomes law, it will then be possible to strip a naturalized citizen (who has been French for less than ten years) of his nationality should he or she murder a policeman or gendarme.
The authorities will also be authorized to hold those without valid visas or papers for up to 45 days. The limit is currently set at 32.….
Finally, those Roma who benefit from a 300 Euros allowance if they accept to go home will be closely monitored to ensure that they do not return to France to try and benefit anew from this program.
Mr. Besson’s goal, he told Le Parisien newspaper, is to create good little Frenchman. You may find it shocking that foreigners should become good little Frenchmen, but I think that’s great news. Being a good Frenchman does not entail that one should repudiate one’s history, origin or French culture. If my department can become one that manufactures good Frenchmen, I shall be very happy, he concluded.
Needles to say, reactions in France and elsewhere were mixed, if not outright hostile.
Martine Aubry, head of the Socialist party condemned Sarkozy’s policy of expelling the Roma as abominable. It is a policy that damages France, she added.
Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper, accused Sarkozy of implementing a policy of discrimination aimed at one specific segment of the population.
The Swiss paper Le Temps wrote that to transform an ethnic minority into a scapegoat for electoral purposes is a poor way to tackle the issue.
The Telegraph of London dismissed Sarkozy’s policy as a means to co-opt the far right electorate at a time when the Front National, under the leadership of Marine Le Pen (the daughter of the party’s founder Jean Marie Le Pen) is moving towards the center.
The European Commission was also highly critical.
Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for justice and fundamental rights, characterized Sarkozy’s policy of expelling the Roma as shameful.
Let me be perfectly clear. In Europe, there is no place for ethnic or racial discrimination, she added.
Yet, she did not stop there, but also said the following: the gruesome memories of deportations during World War II are still vivid; to repeat such practices would mean the end of Europe. As a custodian of European treaties, I reject this and will not allow it.
This direct allusion to Vichy France and the deportation of the Jews incensed the French government.
At an EU summit held Thursday September 15, President Sarkozy vilified Reding’s statement as outrageous.
The summit, originally intended to discuss economic reform and Europe’s difficulties in crafting a common foreign policy, was dominated by the Roma question.
The European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, and Sarkozy discussed the matter robustly. «There was a big argument — I could also say a scandal — between the president of the European Commission and the French president,» the Bulgarian prime minister, Boyko Borisov, said, according to the Bulgarian daily Dnevnik.
Asked about the hour-long exchange, the German chancellor Angela Merkel said «the lunch was good — but only regarding the food.»
One European diplomat, not authorized to speak publicly, described the debate as «heated.» Another said: «Voices could be heard through the door.», wrote the NYT.
Another EU official said: "Sarkozy was caught with his pants down. So he tried to create a distraction. It was a very strong exchange…Many people questioned Reding's choice of words, but not a single person except Sarkozy questioned the substance," said a Barroso spokesman.
"There was a huge row over lunch with President Barroso insisting that he had a job to do of upholding EU laws on the free movement of its citizens and he would continue to do it.
"We will continue to consider whether to take legal action against France. That work is going on.", wrote The Guardian.
Is France’s policy discriminatory and racist?
Of course we are not aiming at a given ethnic population," said Sarkozy. More than 500 "illegal settlements" had been demolished in France in August, he said, with 80% of the people affected being French, added The Guardian.
Yet, on August 5, a French government directive written by Michel Bart, the Interior minister’s chief of staff, contained the following:
300 illegal camps must be evacuated in the next three months, first and foremost those of the Roma. In each département, the Prefect must undertake a policy the aim of which is the dismantling of all illegal camps, first and foremost, those of the Roma.
Clearly, the policy did target a specific ethnic group which is illegal under both French and European law. The Socialist party quickly denounced the document as a symbol of a xenophobic policy.
It was hastily rewritten as soon as it became public in mid-September.
Unfortunately, the Roma are not treated much better elsewhere.
There are some twelve million, mostly in Central Europe and in the Balkans, of what The Guardian called Europe’s pariah people.
The fall of communism failed to lead to any improvement in their lot, on the contrary.
Bulgaria and Romania had pledged to help the underprivileged Roma when they applied for EU membership, but then failed to do so once they joined the Union. What you see here these days is terrible conditions. They have no hope of getting jobs. If they get 20 euros a month from collecting scrap metal, that’s a lot. How can we tell them not to go to France and beg on the streets? , Nicolae Stoica, head of Roma Access, an organization that defends the rights of Roma in Romania, told the NYT.
Now that Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are all in the EU, the Roma are free to go where they please within the Union.
Unfortunately, the vast majority are uneducated and have no particular job skills.
Most, therefore, must resort to begging, petty thievery or welfare to survive.
According to Brice Hortefeux, the French Interior minister, the number of Romanians (almost all Roma) arrested in Paris last year, chiefly for pick pocketing, increased by 138%.
As such, Italy but also Denmark have been expelling Roma as well.
Eastern Europe’s inability to deal with its Roma minority and provide it with decent, dignified living conditions has now become the EU’s problem as a whole.
Unfortunately, the Roma do not have the means to protect, let alone assert their rights.
The Roma are fair game – politically disorganised and lacking a strong lobby, needing a US civil rights-style movement of the 1950s and 1960s to better their lot, they are an easy target. This dispute has put the issue on Europe's political agenda as never before. Pots of money will be thrown at the problem. Integration and education programmes, conferences, seminars, activism, NGO campaigns will acquire new vigour, wrote Ian Traynor in The Guardian.
Paradoxically, however, Sarkozy’s new obsession with expelling Roma may have unwittingly done them a favor, by exposing their plight for the entire planet to see.
The intractable problems that they pose may now be addressed, and in Brussels no less.
But then, Sarkozy and the EU may choose to quickly move on to something else, less volatile and controversial.
In the mean time, the Roma will keep abandoning their miserable conditions at home and head for Western Europe.
There is not much for us in Romania.. And now that we are in the European Union, we have the right to go to other countries. It is better there, Maria Murariu told Suzanne Daley of the NYT.
Twenty-eight Roma residents from Barbulesti were recently expelled from France. Among them was Ionel Costache, 30, who said he would return to France in a week or two. “My son, who had eye problems, he got a 7,000-euro operation there that he would never have gotten here. And when you don’t have work, you can still eat with their social assistance,” he said. “France is a much better place than Romania.”, Suzanne Daley wrote in conclusion…
At his best, Mr. Sarkozy is a thrilling politician; at his worst, a shameless opportunist who bends with the wind, wrote The Economist last month.
Alas, It is the latter Sarkozy we have been seeing of late…
Was the Roma issue so pressing that he should invest so much energy and political capital both at home and abroad to try and confront it?
Conventional wisdom has it that President Sarkozy pounced on the Roma and the law and order issue to try and restore his standing among his traditional electorate, the elderly, rural France and those blue collar workers he had managed to woo away from the Front National in 2007, and which are drifting away…
Perhaps.
Yet, it also seems that Sarkozy feels personally offended whenever violence erupts somewhere in France, thereby highlighting the fact that the authority of the state is still in a parlous condition, if not totally inexistent, in too many corners of the land.
Restoring that authority and the values of the Republic had been one of his fundamental commitments, and forms the very basis of what some call Sarkozysme.
If the French and Sarkozy himself conclude that he has failed to live up this commitment, then he has no business being in the Elysée palace, let alone running for a second term.
He has thus reached a critical juncture in his presidency.
He must make headway on the law and order front, and impose his highly unpopular pension reform. His effectiveness and credibility as a leader depend on it.
Nevertheless, it must be said that the Roma deserved better. Sarkozy should not have succumbed to the temptation of exploiting the plight of a hapless people in order to try and improve his poll numbers.
Such practices are not worthy of a statesman, of someone who aspires to be a good one and recognized as such. There is a huge contradiction between Nicolas Sarkozy’s goal to reinvent himself on the international scene as a G-20 president and his goal to reinvent himself at home by playing to far-right voters. He should have realized that he can’t do both at the same time, Dominique Moïsi, of the French Institute for International Relations, told the NYT.
France confronts a wide array of serious and vexing issues.
Here are but three:
The Social Security deficit will reach 23.2 billion Euros this year, seriously undermining the nations health system, among the finest in the world.
Its income tax system is in dire need of reform.
France’s debt has reached such heights (100% of GDP by 2013) that next year, more funds will be allocated to paying the interests on it then devoted to education, previously the state’s largest expenditure, and defense....
Hence, France desperately needs major structural reforms.
As such, President Sarkozy should have no time to waste on peripheral issues, no offense to the Roma intended.
Mr. Sarkozy’s term ends in some eighteen months.
The Presidential campaign will begin in earnest one year from now.
That leaves Sarkozy with less than twelve months to grapple with these serious issues.
What has he left to lose?
The next presidential election?
Perhaps.
But it is one he will not win if he does not change course…
(all translations from the French are mine. The photograph of the burning cars in Villeneuve is by Lisa Marcelja/MAXPP and appeared in lepoint.fr)
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　

Release Omar Khadr now...

Last Monday, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson asked the US Supreme Court to halt the upcoming trial of Omar Khadr, a twenty-three-year old Canadian who has been held in Guantanamo for eight years.
Accused of war crimes, he is to be tried before a Military Commission on August 10.
Omar Khadr was captured in July 2002 in Afghanistan after having been grievously wounded, and has been charged with murder in violation of the laws of war, and providing material support to the enemy.
Omar’s father was an Islamic militant who moved his family to Pakistan. He was later accused of providing financial assistance to Islamic extremists.
Specifically, Omar Khadr was accused of having thrown a hand grenade during a firefight that killed Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer.
He has also been charged with planting landmines on behalf of al-Qaeda.
Khadr’s military lawyer claims that the young man is being denied his rights to a fair trial because, unlike US citizens accused of terrorism-related crimes, he is not being judged by a US Federal Court, but by a Military Commission.
Separate is always unequal. If you are a noncitizen, you are tried by a military commission. The military commissions provide young Omar, a Canadian citizen, only second-class justice. This kind of discrimination is something we cannot stand for as a country, Jackson told the Montreal Gazette.
Concomitantly, defense lawyers have asked the military judge presiding over the trial, Col. Patrick Parish to dismiss statements made by Khadr shortly after his capture, when his wounded condition rendered him particularly vulnerable to pressure and coercion. Omar Khadr was fifteen at the time of his capture…
Apart from Khadr’s confession obtained under duress, there is little evidence incriminating the youth.
No eyewitnesses were present when the alleged crimes were committed.
In fact, there are conflicting reports concerning the events that led to Sgt. Speer’s death. The commander leading the operation at the time of the incident initially declared that the individual who had thrown the grenade was himself killed in the clash.
It was only some time later that the officer changed his version of events and incriminated Omar Khadr.
Furthermore, according to documents and photographs obtained by The Toronto Star and published in October 2009, Khadr was already wounded and covered with rubble when Sgt. Speer was killed.
Omar is actually innocent of the allegation. Omar suffered blinding shrapnel wounds and severe injuries to the legs during the course of a U.S. bombardment that crippled him before the attack, his military lawyers told The Star.
After just two weeks in a hospital, he was taken to Bagram prison.
He would be interrogated more than forty times, and up to eight hours a day during the next three months, until his transfer to Guantanamo.
Omar Khadr claims that interrogators took advantage of his wounded condition to obtain a confession concerning his role in the death of Sgt. Speer.
During the first three days I was conscious in the tent hospital, the first soldier would come and sit next to my stretcher and ask me questions. He had paper and took notes. [ ]. Due to my injuries, this caused me great pain. At least two of the interrogations during these first three days occurred when I was [ ]. I was unable to even stand at this time, so I was not a threat, and I could tell that this treatment was for punishment and to make me answer questions and give them the answers they wanted, he declared in an affidavit submitted in February 2008 (the blank sections are the parts redacted by the Pentagon).
During this interrogation, the more I answered the questions, and the more I gave him the answers he wanted, the less [ ] on me. I figured out right away that I would simply tell them what I thought they wanted to hear in order to keep them from causing me [ ], he added.
An army medic confirmed that detainees were harshly treated at Bagram.
Identified only as M, he testified that he saw Khadr in a five-foot by five-foot cage chained to the door by the arms.
Omar Khadr’s lawyers considered this testimony as a validation of Omar’s affidavit.
Had this been an American soldier in North Korea, people would be outraged. Here we have a 15-year-old individual who was nearly killed with bullets in his back who was left up there to hang as punishment, Kobie Flowers, one of Khadr’s former lawyers told the Miami Herald.

Joshua Claus, then a Sergeant in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion was Khadr’s principal interrogator, and the very first to question him.
Khadr has accused Claus of torturing him.
He did admit threatening the young Canadian. If he did not cooperate, this is what would happen to him. And this one time, a “poor little 20-year-old kid” sent from Afghanistan ended up in an American prison for lying to an American. “A bunch of big black guys and big Nazis noticed the little Afghan didn’t speak their language, and prayed five times a day — he’s Muslim,” Interrogator #1 said. Although the fictitious inmates were criminals, “they’re still patriotic,” and the guards “can’t be everywhere at once.”
“So this one unfortunate time, he’s in the shower by himself, and these four big black guys show up — and it’s terrible something would happen — but they caught him in the shower and raped him. And it’s terrible that these things happen, the kid got hurt and ended up dying, he told Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent.
It appears that Khadr then decided that it was in his best interest to tell his interrogators whatever it is they wanted to hear. His subsequent interrogators confirmed that Khadr was cooperative in their dealings with him.
Claus was later court-martialled and pleaded guilty to abusing a prisoner in Bagram.
He served a five-month prison sentence.
Shortly after Omar Khadr was transferred to Guantanamo, at least two detainees, Dilawar, a taxi driver and Mullah Habibullah died during interrogation at Bagram.
Joshua Claus was reportedly present at what would be the former’s last interrogation.
The post 9/11 context and the fear that the US would sustain further attacks made violence against detainees the norm.
The pressure to get information from prisoners at Bagram was intense, Damien Corsetti, a former interrogator at Bagram and Abu Ghraib declared.
Due to a lack of experienced interrogators possessing top security clearance, military intelligence soldiers were recruited to handle prisoner interrogations.
Corsetti, then 22, received a one five-hour training course before he began interrogating suspects…
Conditions at Bagram were brutal. Each prisoner has in his cell a carpet measuring 1.2 m by 2.5 m. And they spend 23 hours a day sitting on it, in silence. If they speak, they are chained to the ceiling for 20 minutes and black visors are put on them so they can’t see and protectors are put on their ears so they can’t hear. They are taken down to the basement once a week, in groups of five or six, to shower them. It’s done to drive them crazy. I almost went crazy, he told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in 2007.
In Abu-Ghraib and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them. They would punish them for being terrorists. They tortured them and didn’t ask them anything, he added
Psychological torture was also rampant. They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them, he told the newspaper.
Sleep deprivation was also a favorite tactic to induce cooperation.
You’re in a cell where they let you sleep only a quarter of an hour every now and then. With no contact with the outside world. Without seeing sunlight. Like that, a days seems like a week. Your mental capacity is destroyed, he added.
This particularly harsh treatment was also inflicted on Khadr for three weeks, what the Canadian Supreme Court later referred to as the frequent flyer program.
Omar Khadr remains the only citizen of a Western nation still held in Guantanamo.
All the others, be they French, British or Danish were sent back to their home countries.
Will Omar Khadr become the first child (he was fifteen at the time the alleged crimes were committed) ever convicted of war crimes?
The odds are not in his favor.
In spite of the lack of evidence, and the tainted nature of his confession, a conviction appears likely, because that is the vocation of the Military Commission.
There is a substantial likelihood of conviction based on the evidence, Navy Capt. John Murphy, Guantanamo’s chief prosecutor, told the Star.
Last month, Khadr fired his lawyers and decided to boycott the trial because he knew the verdict had already been determined.
It is going to be the same thing, with or without lawyers. It’s going to be a life sentence, he wrote the court.
The judge rejected Khadr’s move to dismiss his attorneys.
Prof. David Frakt, a law professor at Western State University, and former lawyer to a Guantanamo detainee, believes that the likelihood of aconviction is a clear sign that military commissions have nothing to do with justice.
It is appalling that the Obama administration is allowing charges to go forward in the military commissions against Omar Khadr. Clearly, Omar Khadr, as a juvenile of 15 at the time of his alleged offences, could not be tried as an adult in federal court, so they are allowing him to be tried as an adult in the military commissions, potentially making him the first child soldier to be tried and convicted as a war criminal in world history, he told IPS.
The Bush and Obama administrations have never recognized the juvenile status of Omar Khadr.
To do so would render any trial not only morally indefensible but also illegal, thus precluding any possibility of obtaining a conviction.
As such, is the upcoming trial legal?
According to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), children can only be detained as a last resort, and on a temporary basis.
Khadr was not charged until 2006, more than three years after being captured in Afghanistan. Yet, his case was dismissed after the US Supreme Court declared military commissions illegal in Hamdan v Rumsfeld in June 2006.
Furthermore, according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), children in detention are entitled to expeditious legal assistance. Khadr did not have access to a lawyer until November 2004, more than two years after his transfer to Guantanamo.
Contrary to the provisions of the UN Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty, Khadr was denied all educational and recreational opportunities, even though they were offered to other children.
In 2003, three minors detained at Guantanamo (thirteen to fifteen) were released and bestowed to the care of UNICEF.
Why was not Omar Khadr one of them?
The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice (Beijing Rules) stress the need for the rehabilitation and social integration of young offenders.
The US government never considered it necessary to provide Khadr with either…
As a signatory to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, the US is bound by the following provisions: all appropriate measures to promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration must be taken.
Khadr never benefited form any of these provisions.
Why not?
Would Mr. Obama be as phlegmatic if a fifteen-year old American had been captured at the age of fifteen, detained for eight years in a maximum security prison and was about to be judged by a court that flouts the rights of the defense?
The US has thus been violating a host of its obligations under international law for years, notably since 2001.
Many firmly held the belief that once elected, President Obama would impose new practices based on the rule of law. They have clearly been deceived
Furthermore, are the charges themselves legal, according to international standards?
The US Congress recently established a new crime called murder in violation of the laws of war.
According to this new law, and the prosecution in the Khadr case, if it is not a crime to kill a soldier on the battlefield, it becomes a war crime if an unlawful enemy combatant commits the deed. Hence, and by definition, all acts of war committed by unlawful enemy combatants are war crimes.
What is an unlawful enemy combatant? One that has been designated as such by a tribunal established by the President or the Secretary of Defense.
One does not have to be on the battlefield to become an unlawful enemy combatant.
Providing material support to a charity that may have links, however tenuous, to an organization that the US government considers to be a terrorist entity will suffice.
According to Human Rights Watch, these definitions have essentially been invented by the administration and Congress. They have no basis in international law and undermine one of the most fundamental pillars of the Geneva Conventions – the distinction between combatants, who engage in hostilities and are subject to attack, and non-combatants.
The defense argues that killing a soldier is tantamount to a war crime only if the victim had a protected status (i.e. wounded, in detention, religious or medical personnel), or if illegal weapons were used, such as poison gas.
Sgt. Speer died during a military operation. He had no protected status, and was not killed by an illegal weapon.
This therefore, cannot be construed as a war crime or murder in violation of the laws of war. As a result, Omar Khadr should appear before a US Federal Court, not a military commission. The Obama administration seems ready to do everything in its power to prevent that from happening.
Why?
Moreover, even if he is responsible for Speer’s death, the fact that he was a juvenile at the time should spare him his current ordeal.
At this juncture, an interesting question comes to mind.
If actions that lead to the killing of a combatant may be characterized as murder in violation of the laws of war, how should we describe US drone attacks that target suspected terrorists throughout the Afghanistan/Pakistan region and beyond (including Yemen and Somalia), and that kill both suspects and innocent bystanders?
The drones, furthermore, are operated not by combatants, military personnel, but by civilians not even in the battle zone, but in the US.
Are these operators war criminals?
If not, why not?
Furthermore, what if the intended target happens to be a US citizen?
Anwar al-Awlaki, a militant Islamic cleric and American citizen currently living in Yemen, has been accused by the US government of inspiring and supporting acts of terrorism in the US and abroad.
He exchanged emails with Major Nidal Hasan, who has been charged with killing thirteen fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas last year.
There are also reports that he was involved in the attempted bombing by Umar Abdulmutallab of the Detroit-bound jet on Christmas Day 2009.
Currently on the list of targets for assassination, he is in imminent danger of being killed in a drone attack.
US presidents have never hesitated to eliminate enemies of the nation.
President Obama has apparently no qualms about targeting a US citizen as well for what he may have done, even though no court has ever reviewed the evidence that the administration claims to possess and that justifies his presence on the hit list.
As such, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights are seeking a federal court order to prevent the Obama administration from assassinating Mr. al-Awlaki thus depriving him of any opportunity to defend himself in court.
President Obama is claiming the power to act as judge, jury and executioner while suspending any semblance of due process. Yemen is nearly 2000 miles from Afghanistan or Iraq. The U.S. government is going outside the law to create an ever-larger global war zone and turn the whole world into a battlefield. Would we tolerate it if China or France secretly decided to execute their enemies inside the U.S., wondered Vince Warren, the executive director of CCR.
The Canadian Supreme Court, in Canada v Khadr confirmed in a ruling last January that Omar Khadr’s rights had been denied under section seven of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and declared the following: The deprivation of K’s right to liberty and security of the person is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. The interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel, to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.
Canadian intelligence agents had interrogated the youth in 2003, who had then shared their findings with their US counterparts. The court also enjoined the government to find a remedy to Khadr‘s predicament.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has always adamantly refused to do so…
Yet, last month, the Federal Court of Canada ruled that the Canadian government had one week to seek ways to preserve Omar Khadr’s constitutional rights.
Mr. Harper decided to appeal the court decision so as not to be compelled to take what is the inevitable next step: demand the release and repatriation of Omar Khadr.
Mr. Harper obviously does not want to have anything to do with Omar Khadr.
The Canadian Prime Minister’s conduct throughout this case has been nothing short of disgraceful. At no time has the Canadian government assisted Omar Khadr.
Unlike other nations, Canada has never requested the release and repatriation of its citizen, apparently quite satisfied with his current situation.
No other country has treated its citizens detained at Guantanamo with such open contempt.
Let us hope that Canada’s Supreme Court will compel him to do what he never had the decency to demand himself, urge the Americans to immediately release Omar Khadr.
The Obama administration’s resurrection of the military commissions (Obama had suspended them as soon as he entered the White House) was both misguided and unethical.
Who would have thought that Obama, a former constitutional law professor, would be the one to pursue the Bush administration’s vendetta against Khadr and try him as an adult before a military commission…
Was that the change those who elected him had in mind?
President Obama’s stance on a number of fundamental constitutional rights issues, including military commissions has been greatly disappointing.
He still has a few days left to put a stop to this travesty of justice.
All those who believe in justice and the rule of law will be watching Mr. Obama closely and hoping that, at least this time, he will not once again, betray himself and his supporters…
(The photographs of Omar Khadr can be found here)
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　

Who murdered Natalia Estemirova?

Last month, just a few days before the first anniversary of the murder of journalist and human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov accused members of Memorial, one of Russia’s most important human rights organizations, of being enemies of the state.
They are getting big salaries from the west and in order to report on their activities they write all kinds of nonsense and filth on the Internet. That is why they are not my opponents. They are the enemies of the people, enemies of the law, enemies of the state, he declared in a television interview.
The Russian human rights community denounced the President’s loathsome accusations. They were but an element however, of a broader campaign to discredit the human rights movement in Chechnya and an inauspicious sign just a few days before July 15, date of Natalia Estemirova’s murder in 2009.
A human rights activist, Kheda Saratova, sought clarification, called President Kadyrov’s office, and spoke to his press officer.
I asked him what the president's words meant and if, as a human rights activist in Chechnya, I was now considered a criminal by the government. And he answered me, 'You should cut down your activity’, she told RFE/RL.
The warning was thus clear…
Oleg Orlov, the chairman of Memorial accused President Kadyrov last year of being responsible for Natalia Estemirova’s murder. The latter sued him for slander and Orlov was compelled by a Russian court to pay $2,200 in damages.
Last month, Orlov was charged with libel in the same case, prompting many observers to accuse Kadyrov of judicial harassment against Memorial.
Natalia Estemirova, 51, was kidnapped in front of her home in Grozny, Chechnya on July 15, 2009.
Her body was found the next day in the neighboring province of Ingushetia. She had been shot to the head and chest.
A researcher for the human rights organization Memorial, she had been investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya since 1999, abuses that she linked directly to President Kadyrov and Vladimir Putin, President of Russia between 2000 and 2008, and currently Prime Minister.
One year later, no progress has been made in the murder investigation.
Russian and foreign human rights organization recently denounced what the International Federation of Human Rights called the lack of transparency and seriousness in the examination into the case.
Last February, the authorities claimed they had discovered the identity of the culprits. A prosecutor, Igor Sobol, stated that the murder weapon had been found and that there were now objective grounds to identify a group of people responsible for the murder, he told the NYT.
Yet, no arrests were ever made.
The authorities however have suggested that Chechen militant Alkhazur Bashayev, killed by the security forces in November 2009, was responsible for the murder.
Natalia Estemirova’s friends and colleagues are skeptical however, since it does not appear that she ever wrote about Mr. Bashayev in any of her reports for Memorial.
Mr. Bashayev, nevertheless, is the perfect suspect, as far as the authorities are concerned. The man, now dead, was an anti-Kadyrov rebel, thus exonerating the Chechen President and his security forces from all potential responsibility in the murder, and by extension, in all other egregious human rights abuses in Chechnya.
The main version put forward is very convenient. The killer is a militant, so he is an opponent of the Russian Federation. The killer is dead, so he will not be brought before a court and will not be able to challenge the accusations. This also means the case can be closed. We believe all this has little to do with justice, Aleksandr Cherkasov, of Memorial, told RFE/RL.
In 2009, the number of kidnappings and murders in Chechnya doubled.
According to Memorial, 93 kidnappings were registered.
Natalia Estemirova’s murder, shortly followed by those of Zarena Sadulayeva and her husband, Alik Dzhabrailov, of the charity organization Save the Generations, in August 2009, was a clear signal that human rights activism will not be tolerated in Chechnya and Russia.
They first killed Natasha, and now they are trying to kill our activity. Chechen authorities declared an open war against us, Yekatena Sokirianskaia, a friend of Natalia who works at Memorial, told Anna Nemtsova of foreignpolicy.com.
It is now virtually impossible for Memorial to continue its investigative work in Chechnya. Activists are routinely followed, harassed and intimidated. Many have had to flee the republic and seek refuge in Norway, France and the US.
Furthermore, potential witnesses are more reluctant to come forward and assist those activists still investigating on the ground.
We often hear from people: You could not protect your Natasha (Natalia Estemirova), so how can you help me? People choked by fear for their beloved ones feel reluctant to tell us about their troubles, Sokirianskaia added.
Those journalists striving to remain independent are also under threat.
Reporters in the North Caucasus fear for their lives, the Russian journalist Fatima Tlisova told RFE/RL.
Even in Russia itself, those journalists brazen enough to investigate official wrongdoing and corruption do so at great risk.
Mikhail Beketov was one those brave reporters investigating suspicious land deals, particularly one involving the building of a highway between St. Petersburg and Moscow, in Khimki forest, a venture potentially highly profitable for local officials.
In November 2008, he was attacked just outside his home. Previously, his car had been blown up…
He has not spoken a word since the assault, having suffered brain damage, and is now confined to a wheelchair…
Yuri Grachev, a 73-year-old newspaper editor was also assaulted and hospitalized after running a series on the attempts of local politicians to remain in office without standing for reelection. The police’s initial investigation of the incident concluded that, in a drunken stupor, he had fallen and injured himself. Prosecutors then accused him of committing libel in his newspaper, no doubt, in order to close it.
The system will stop at nothing to break you, he told the NYT.
Pyotr Lipatov, editor of an opposition newspaper called Consensus and Truth, was beaten up by three individuals at a protest rally. Witnesses filmed the assault, and the assailants were later identified as police officers…
No charges were ever brought against them, however.
Instead, prosecutors charged the editor with attempting to disseminate negative stereotypes and negative images of members of the security forces, according to the NYT.
The editor of a newspaper dedicated to pursuing Mr. Beketov’s campaigns, Igor Belousov, was arrested and charged with drug dealing…
We used to have so many journalists here, but they have all suffered and have all given up. Only I remained, and now I am giving up, he told the NYT.
In today’s Russia, being a journalist worthy of the name takes true heroism …
President Medvedev has in the past denounced what he himself has called Russia’s legal nihilism.
Yet what has he, and his Prime Minister, Mr. Putin done about it?
Last May, the Russian President stated that he would support the efforts of human rights activists.
Following President Kadyrov’s wicked accusations against them, Russian human rights organizations have again appealed to Mr. Medvedev to take action at last.
If you think that there’s something I don’t know, that is not the case. I know more than everyone present here, he told a gathering of human rights activists that he had invited to the Kremlin last May.
If that is the case, then why is Kadyrov still President of Chechnya?
Mr. Medvedev has repeatedly stated his intention of enforcing the rule of law in Russia.
What is he waiting for?
Also last May, just before a meeting in Russia on human rights issues between Michael McFaul, special assistant to the President on National Security Affairs and Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff, President Obama wrote in his National Security Strategy: America's commitment to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are essential sources of our strength and influence in the world...
Why is he not more forcefully urging the Russians to enforce their own laws?
What has the EU done to support Russia’s beleaguered human rights and democracy activists?
What has France (the French are wont to consider their country as la patrie des droits de l’homme, the homeland of human rights) done to goad MM. Medvedev and Putin into finally doing away with this legal nihilism, and at last conduct serious investigations into the murders of journalists and human rights activists?
Is it not time for our leaders to explain to Russia that it cannot hope to become a leading and respected member of the international community (a status that it craves) if it persists in abetting the crimes of thugs the likes of Kadyrov?
Though she knew her life was in danger, Natalia Estemirova refused to flee abroad and always returned to Grozny to continue her work, tirelessly.
I can’t do things any differently, she told her friend Tatiana Lokshina.
Her friends and admirers were well aware of that, and counted on her determination to seek justice for all Chechens.
She had very strict views about what had to be done, and about what she had to do herself. For our part, we of course tried to persuade her to stop, to leave Grozny, to live for herself. But to be completely honest, we didn’t persuade her enough. Because we needed her very much to be there, in Grozny. Because there was no one who could do this work better than her. Because to whom we would otherwise have come, with whom would we have consulted, whom would we have asked to finish whatever could not be fitted into a week-long trip to the region? wrote Tatiana Lokshina.
Who killed Natalia Estemirova?
MM. Medvedev and Putin are not interested in the answer to that question.
No doubt they know the answer too well such that we shall never know.
Justice is the least of their concerns.
As a result, we should have no more regard for them then we have for Kadyrov, their kinglet in Chechnya…
(the photograph above can be found here)
　
　

a fool's errand...

General David Petraeus arrived in Kabul last Friday to become Commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and of US forces in Afghanistan.
Confirmed by the Senate 99 to 0, he replaced General Stanley McChrystal, who was fired by President Obama after having criticized members of the administration in a reckless Rolling Stone magazine interview.
During a ceremony at NATO headquarters in Kabul on Sunday, the new commander declared, we are engaged in a tough fight. After years of war, we have arrived at a critical moment. We must demonstrate to the people and to the Taliban that Afghan and I.S.A.F. forces are here to safeguard the Afghan people, and that we are in this to win. That is our clear objective, according to the NYT.
The war is now in its ninth year, the General is commanding close to 150,000 troops (there are currently 93,000 US forces, there will be 105,000 by late Summer, and 50,000 troops from NATO and other countries); the US alone has spent over $281 billion to date, 1903 allied troops have been killed (including 1157 US soldiers), along with thousands of Afghans, and we are now being told by the US Commander that we must demonstrate to the Afghan people that we have their welfare at heart?
What have been doing these last eight years that the General felt the need to reiterate this commitment?
The admission that we have failed after eight years to make our intentions clear to the Afghans is an obvious sign that not only have we made no progress at all in Afghanistan, but are clearly failing in our mission to stabilize the country, if that is indeed our mission.
After his policy review last year, the President initially declared that he would send additional troops, and then begin a gradual withdrawal in July 2011.
That gave the Petraeus/McChrystal COIN strategy eighteen months to show results, which entailed pacifying the country significantly in order to allow the Afghan population to benefit from effective government, and entice the Taliban to lay down their weapons and negotiate a power sharing agreement with the Karzai administration.
How are we doing?
Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, implicitly recognized that the Taliban currently had no reason to cease fighting, on the contrary. We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation, where they would surrender their arms, where they would denounce al Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society. We’ve seen no evidence of that and very frankly, my view is that with regards to reconciliation, unless they’re convinced that the United States is going to win and that they’re going to be defeated, I think it’s very difficult to proceed with a reconciliation that’s going to be meaningful, he told ABC.
Things are not looking good. There’s not much sign of the turnaround that people were hoping for, Bruce Riedel, of the Brookings Institution, told the NYT.
The first offensive launched against the Taliban following the adoption of the Petraeus/McChrystal COIN strategy began in Marjah last February.
Alas, five months later, US troops still do not control the area.
In fact, the Taliban have become a more effective and efficient fighting force.
Their attacks are now more frequent and sophisticated wrote Jason Motlagh reporting from Marjah for TIME. Complex ambushes are on the rise, he added.
Furthermore, the IEDs being planted by the Taliban are bigger and bigger, according to Gunnery Sergeant Mathew Small quoted in TIME.
McChrystal himself referred to the situation in Marjah as a bleeding ulcer.
It’s harder, it’s slower than I think anyone anticipated, Leon Panetta told ABC.
That US officials should be reaching such conclusions after nearly nine years of war is dismaying. It evinces crass ignorance of the conditions in Afghanistan, the nature of the enemy we are facing and of the lessons of history.
As a result, the military campaign against a much more daunting target, Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold and the historical capital of their movement, has been postponed indefinitely. If anybody thinks Kandahar will be solved this year, they are kidding themselves, a senior military official told the NYT.
Not unsurprisingly, June was the deadliest month since the war began in late 2001.
One hundred and two NATO troops were killed, three times more than in May.
Some 322 troops have been killed since January 1st.
In 2009, 520 were killed.
This increase in violence has also affected ordinary Afghans. In the first four months of 2010, 90 civilians were killed by ISAF troops, a 250% increase over 2009.
Shootings at checkpoints and at convoys have increased significantly as well, and account for 42% of all civilian deaths and injuries.
For ordinary Afghans, such violence reveals the contempt foreign forces have for civilians. It is also telling them that foreigners believe themselves to be above the law, convinced that they can behave as they please in a land that is not theirs…
Moreover, it undermines NATO’s counterinsurgency strategy, conditioned on winning the hearts and minds of the local population.
The US and NATO’s lack of success on the battlefield coupled with their intention of initiating the withdrawal of troops starting next July has induced Afghan President Karzai to chart his own course in order to attempt to resolve the conflict.
As a result, he has begun secret negotiations with the Taliban, and been openly courting Pakistan.
The president has lost his confidence in the capability of either the coalition or his own government to protect this country. President Karzai has never announced that NATO will lose, but the way that he does not proudly own the campaign shows that he doesn’t trust it is working, Amrullah Saleh, the director of the Afghan intelligence service, told the NYT.
Mr. Saleh is a former aide to Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was known as the Lion of Panjsher. The leader of the resistance against the Soviets then the Taliban, Massoud was assassinated by agents of al Qaeda on September 9, 2001, two days before 9/11.
Like all Tajiks, Mr. Saleh does not trust either the Taliban or their Pakistani patrons, and therefore views suspiciously any negotiations with such partners. He resigned his position last month.
Hanif Atmar, interior minister, did likewise, considering that the President no longer trusted him.
In addition, the President also fired Bismullah Khan, chief of staff of the Afghan army, and also a Tajik, and a former leader of Massoud’s Northern Alliance.
President Karzai seems intent on eliminating all those who, like the Tajiks, may hinder his new policy of rapprochement with the Taliban and Pakistan.
Karzai has begun the ethnic war. The future is very dark, Mohammed Mohaqeq, a Hazara leader, told the NYT.
President Karzai seems to have concluded that since the US and NATO will eventually withdraw their forces, it is in his interest to seek support elsewhere.
Karzai told me that he can’t trust the Americans to fix the situation here… He believes they stole his legitimacy during the elections last year. And then they said publicly that they were going to leave, a Western diplomat told the NYT.
Yet, President Karzai’s new strategy is making other Afghans, those who unlike the President and the Taliban are not Pashtun, particularly nervous.
The Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities have not forgotten the exactions and persecutions perpetrated by the Taliban when they were in power, and have no intention of allowing President Karzai to negotiate a deal that would allow them to share power with the current government.
They have even vowed to fight if necessary to prevent the return of the Taliban.
Karzai is giving Afghanistan back to the Taliban, and he is opening up the old schisms. If he wants to bring in the Taliban, and they begin to use force, then we will go back to civil war and Afghanistan will be split, Rehman Oghly, an Uzbek member of Parliament, told the NYT.
The Tajiks, led by Massoud, refused to submit to Taliban rule and fought the Taliban government during its years in power. Their military organization, the Northern Alliance, helped the US overthrow the Taliban in the fall of 2001.
The success of President Obama’s COIN policy is conditioned on the ability of US and NATO forces to weaken the Taliban, militarily hold the areas from which the Taliban have been expulsed, then maintain law and order there so that a local civil society and economy can flourish, for the benefit of the entire local population…
A competent and dependable police force is thus crucial to allow sound local government and prevent the Taliban from returning.
The US and Germany in particular have been trying to establish a credible police force for the last eight years.
In fact, the US has already spent $6 billion on the program.
Currently, Afghanistan has some 90,000 police officers. Of those, not even 25% have received any formal training.
Western instructors are putting into place a new program designed to add an additional 30,000 by 2012.
The old system was broken. It just didn't work. Police couldn't shoot, or if they shoot, they can't hit…And then there are the reports of corruption, Marine Col. Gregory Breazile, a NATO spokesman for the training mission, told the WP.
The training course lasts eight weeks and attracts mostly rural Afghans with no education. 90% are illiterate, and 20% fail the mandatory drug test…
For the first time, the new program will include literacy classes…
The officers can't read, so when they ask for your papers, they can't read them. If you can't read an ID card, how are you capable of taking on a drug lord, an Afghan MP told the WP.
Police officers are paid about $240 a month, much less than what the Taliban offers its recruits. Since that is often insufficient to support a family, many officers extort bribes at checkpoints.
On average, 25% of the graduates of the program either quit or are killed within the first twelve months…1,600 have been killed in the past two years…
The establishment of rule of law in Afghanistan is an illusion, concluded one
German instructor.
Afghanistan’s police academy can only train 3,600 officers per year. Yet, NATO and Afghan officials estimate that the country needs 134,000 police officers trained by next July, when foreign forces should slowly start withdrawing.
We don't recognize the Afghan reality, and that's why we will fail there, one inspector told Spiegel.
Yet, before the police can move in, the Taliban must be driven out.
US and NATO forces however, have failed to make any significant headway on the battlefield against the Taliban.
In addition, the Afghan government, an essential component of the counterinsurgency strategy of which it is designed to be the principle beneficiary, is exploring other political options…
What happens to your COIN strategy when the government it is designed to buttress and reinforce no longer supports it, and has lost faith in you andyour ability to pacify the country?
Furthermore, even if the COIN strategy were to succeed, and the Taliban could be forced to negotiate on our terms, it could potentially lead to civil war, since the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras, or close to 50% of the Afghan population reject any significant involvement of the Taliban and the Pakistanis in Afghan affairs.
In any case, the Taliban have absolutely no intention, at least for the foreseeable future, of negotiating with NATO and the US.
For, not only are they not losing the war, but they may actually prevail as time is on their side.
Should the US and NATO fail to make any significant progress on the ground in the next few months as casualties keep mounting, public pressure to withdraw the troops may prove overwhelming.
Nor are they interested, so they claim, in talking with President Karzai, as long as foreign troops remain on Afghan soil.
We do not want to talk to anyone - not to [President Hamid] Karzai, nor to any foreigners - till the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan.
We are certain that we are winning. Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies, Zabiullah Mujahedd, a Taliban spokesman, told the BBC.
Where does that leave our mission?
Even if General Petraeus succeeds in stabilizing the military situation on the ground, how do we intend to prod Afghanistan’s various fractious ethnic groups to reach some kind of political modus vivendi in order to prevent the return of civil war that ravaged the country in the 1990s? First and foremost, how can we regain President Karzai’s support?
As far as I can tell, they have no plan what to do about this. They tried tough love; that didn’t work. They tried love bombing, and that didn’t work. The thinking now is, we’ll just muddle through. But that’s not a strategy, a senior Democratic Congressional aide told the NYT.
Have we not been muddling through for the better part of the last eight years, which accounts for our current predicament?
In the end, is it not probably the best we can do and hope for?
If so, why are we still in Afghanistan?
Our COIN strategy is in the process of disintegrating because it was an overweening project from the outset.
Was it wise to envisage that we could resurrect Afghanistan, and build a modern, stable and democratic state able to fend for itself?
Should we not have had narrower, more modest ambitions?
The only way in which we could move beyond the counter-insurgency theory, or the hundred other theories which buttress and justify the Afghan war, is by rejecting their most basic underlying premises and objectives. Instead of trying to produce an alternative theory (on how to defeat the Taliban, create an effective, legitimate and stable Afghan state, stabilize Pakistan and ensure that al-Qaida could never again threaten the United States) we need to understand that however desirable such things might be, they are not things that we -- as foreigners -- can do, wrote Rory Stewart, an Afghan expert and British Conservative MP, in Spiegel.
Were our initial objectives the byproduct of excessive idealism, or ignorance and arrogance?
In the end, it matters little.
The damage is already done.
The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people. The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense, Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel who attended West Point with McChrystal, told Rolling Stone.
As a result of these developments, opposition to the war is growing, including within the US Congress.
Last week, the $33 billion bill presented by the Obama administration to finance the troop increase passed by the smallest of margins, 215 to 210. Had not a host of domestic spending projects been added to the bill, it might never have been approved.
Obviously, a lot of people are understandably anxious. The sustainability of this war is in some doubt, Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Independent.
It’s a fool’s errand. Every dollar we spend in Afghanistan, every life we waste there, is a waste. … What makes us think, what arrogance gives us the right to assume that we can succeed where the Moguls, the British, the Soviets, failed, asked Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) at a press conference last week.
Rep. Tim Johnson (R-Ill.) also condemned the bill and the project it intends to finance.
We cannot force a culture to accept our values, and we cannot impose Western democracy on a people who don’t understand or accept it and whose leadership is corrupt and antidemocratic beyond repair. And we cannot continue to spend the billions and, arguably, trillions of dollars of the hardworking men and women in this country in a venture that has no objective, no end game, and no proximate connection to the well-being of our Nation, he told the House...
We have obviously lost our way in Afghanistan.
What is our mission?
The fundamental purpose, the mission that the president has laid out is that we have to go after Al Qaeda. We’ve got to disrupt and dismantle Al Qaeda and their militant allies so they never attack this country again, CIA Director Leon Panetta reminded us last month.
Does that necessarily entail occupying a fractious, third world, Muslim country with 150,000 troops at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars a year?
We have been in Afghanistan for nearly nine years, and as Petraeus himself implicitly conceded, have accomplished next to nothing there.
Why should we suddenly find the key to stabilizing a country we have been unable to pacify for the last eight years?
Afghanistan is not in our vital interest-there’s nothing for us there, concluded Marc Sageman, formerly of the CIA.
Why are we still there?
(the photograph above can be found here)