Author: Mick Hartley

ce age,” Professor MacFadden told the BBC News website.

The first sentence of this item on the BBC website, about a small town in Quebec issuing guidelines for prospective Muslim immigrants, could have been phrased better:

Don’t stone women to death, burn them or circumcise them, immigrants wishing to live in the town of Herouxville in Quebec, Canada, have been told.

Developments in the Benghazi Aids case, from Lebanon’s Daily Star:

SOFIA: A Bulgarian prosecutor is to file charges on Wednesday against 11 Libyan police officers for allegedly torturing five Bulgarian nurses who have been sentenced to death in Libya. “After completing the necessary police investigation, we believe there is enough evidence proving a crime,” Sofia Prosecutor Nikolay Kokinov told AFP on Tuesday.

He said he would be bringing charges in Bulgaria against the 11 officers, opening the way to a judicial investigation which itself could lead to a trial.

“They will be accused of extracting confessions under duress,” Kokinov said.

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death by firing squad in December 2006 after a court in Tripoli found them guilty of deliberately infecting over 400 children with HIV at a hospital in the northeastern Libyan town of Benghazi. The verdicts against the six foreigners, who have already spent eight years in a Libyan prison, were handed down on the basis of confessions by two of the nurses.

But the nurses recanted their confessions during the trial, saying they had been made under force. They also pressed charges against 10 police officers for “torturing” them. A Libyan court acquitted the police officers last year. The six medics maintain their innocence on the basis of testimony by international health experts. The latter argue that the AIDS virus spread because of poor hygiene in the hospital and that this took place before the nurses arrived there.

The nurses’ Libyan lawyer, Othman al-Bizanti, told AFP on Monday his clients have also been accused of slandering police and face questioning on February 11. Bizanti, who met the medics on Monday, said they were “in a bad psychological state” after being told of the slander accusation.

Libya has proposed a plan to release the nurses in exchange for compensation, the son of Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi, Seif al-Islam, told a Bulgarian newspaper on Monday. Reacting to the interview, Bizanti said that “justice was independent of politics.”

Gadhafi’s son told the daily 24 Hours that “we have proposed a road map with solutions [satisfying] all parties: the parents, the Libyan government, the Bulgarian side, the EU.” He added that he had also discussed the plan with the foreign ministers of Germany and France.

Islam also promised that Libya would not carry out the death sentences against the six medics.

The Bulgarians have already rejected Libyan demands for payments to secure the release of the nurses, on the grounds that to pay any money would be to accept the women’s guilt. That was before the latest death sentences were handed down, and before it was shown by analysis of the HIV strain that the nurses, along with their Palestinian co-defendant, couldn’t possibly be guilty. It looks like they haven’t changed their minds – and this latest move is their answer to Gadhafi’s son’s “roadmap”.

A little disappointing that the Times, in an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has to come up with this kind of stuff:

The girl at the other end of a long room says she is cold. Shy and nervous too, I note. She’s going to get some socks, and disappears. She’s slender, understated, almost childlike in her physical uncertainty. When she returns she is wearing well-worn slippers beneath her jeans and she curls her feet under her on a sofa.

This is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the world-famous human rights campaigner, or preposterous critic of Islam, depending on your point of view….

Subsequent publicity has painted Hirsi Ali as a formidably strong woman, fearless, uncompromising and almost one-dimensional: a designer-clad cipher who repeats her mantra ad infinitum without apparent emotion. She is against injustice done in the name of Islam, whether it is honour killings or circumcision and other forms of brutalisation to women. She is intolerant of Muslim fundamentalism. So it is curious to meet her and see that there is vulnerability beneath the public persona, or to use her language, to find that the reality does not entirely match the image. […]

Most questions she answers with polemic, but I know what she believes so I try to disarm her by saying that she doesn’t look 37. It is true, she wears no make-up and she looks more like 17; the strain of the past few years has not taken its toll on her face. “Yes, but it does take it on the mind,” she replies. “I find it easier to let go, not make a fuss about small things. Every time we are put in a position to think about life and death it becomes relative to make a fuss about not getting your coffee right.”

Does she ever do anything frivolous, I ask. “Yes!” she says with a little snuffly giggle. “A very good social life.” Thank goodness for that.

So what’s the secret of her fresh complexion? Does she use creams, facial scrubs? We’re simply not told.

Still, she’s used to being patronised. [And here]

Fouad Ajami in the WSJ, on the American Iraq:

There is a “balance of terror” today between the Sunni and Shia protagonists. More and more Sunni Arabs know that their old dominion is lost, and that they had better take the offer on the table–a share of the oil revenues, the promise that the constitution could be amended and reviewed, access to political power and spoils in return for reining in the violence and banishing the Arab jihadists. The Shia, too, may have to come to a time of reckoning. Their old tormentor was sent to the gallows, and a kinsman of theirs did the deed with the seal of the state. From the poor Shia slums of Baghdad, young avengers answered the Sunni campaign of terror with brutal terror of their own. The old notion–once dear to the Sunnis, and to the Shia a nagging source of fear and shame–that the Sunnis of Iraq were a martial race while the Shia were marked for lamentations and political quiescence has been broken for good.

The country has been fought over, and a verdict can already be discerned–rough balance between its erstwhile Sunni rulers and its Shia inheritors, and a special, autonomous life for the Kurds. Against all dire expectations, the all-important question of the distribution of oil wealth appears close to a resolution. The design for sharing the bounty is a “federal” one that strikes a balance between central government and regional claimants. The nightmare of the Sunni Arabs that they would be left stranded in regions of sand and gravel has been averted.

This is the country midwifed by American power. We were never meant to stay there long. Iraq will never approximate the expectations we projected onto it in more innocent times. But we should be able to grant it the gift of acceptance, and yet another dose of patience as it works its way out of its current torments. It is said that much of the war’s nobility has drained out of it, and that we now fight not to lose, and to keep intact our larger position in the oil lands of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. This may not be the stuff of glory, but it has power and legitimacy all its own.

It’s worth reading the whole article.

Among the many Wikipedia entries in this Metafilter post on unusual articles, I particularly liked the List of songs whose title constitutes the entire lyrics – including:

“Egg Sandwich” by Nancy Vandal
“Fuck Off” by Lawnmower Deth
“Hail Fucking Satan!” by Bob and ROb’s Corpse-Eating Service
“Hey! Woo! Yeah!” by Forces of Evil
“I Got Athlete’s Foot Showering at Mike’s” by Anal Cunt
“The Joy of Pickled Ocra” by Da Vinci’s Notebook
“Now, Stand Back For Your Own Safety!” by The Aquabats
“Semen In The Eysocket of Thomas Lentz” by Man Is The Bastard A.K.A. Charred Remains
“Stomp” by Wumpscut
“Ugg” by Kevin Roach & the Long Shore Drifters

A worthwhile use of someone’s time, I’d say.

udan’s President Omar al-Bashir has again been bypassed in his bid to become chairman of the African Union because of the conflict in Darfur.
Mr Bashir had been due to take on the role but it has instead been given to Ghana’s President John Kufuor.

en that is not enjoyable. It’s like sitting on a porch that sways.

But then came the chance to visit Burma – now Myanmar – to see some of the world’s greatest ancient sights and experience what it’s like to be lost in time. Eleven years ago, the regime ended 40 years’ isolation and opened the country to tourism. Road to Mandalay was a chance to visit a place that has changed little since Kipling rhapsodised about it. There was only one problem: the road to Mandalay isn’t a road; it’s a river. And the trip on offer was a cruise. Cruise people are like dog people, I’d always thought. Fanatical. They travel in packs. I called Orient-Express to discuss.

The journey takes place on a beautifully refurbished river boat that steams at a slow pace up the legendary Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) river, docking daily. There are many opportunities to get off and explore, and the river banks can be seen at all times. I found all this immensely reassuring. So I was off.

Someone from Orient-Express meets me at the airport. The first two nights are to be spent at the Governor’s Residence hotel in Yangon (Rangoon), a magnificent teak mansion with a lotus garden and outdoor pool. At the Kipling Bar, sipping fresh lemonade, I’m anxious about the boat, but there are things that distract me, like the exquisite hotel food. A part of me would be very happy to stay put. It’s so serene.

The next day, I explore the city – the tree-lined streets, the Victorian colonial buildings and the vast golden Shwedagon Pagoda, where eight hairs, said to be Buddha’s, are enshrined. Hundreds of pavilions are encircled by Buddhists offering prayers. No Starbucks, no billboards or celebrity magazines.

Clearly Kim Jong-Il, Mugabe, or indeed Omar al-Bashir, are missing a trick or two here:

The desert rolls on endlessly beneath a sky of a translucent pure blue. Time dissolves in the heat of the sun and the steady rhythm of the camels’ hooves. Is this the 21st Century, or a thousand years ago? It matters not. This is a way of life that goes back, unchanged, for millennia. Here there are no crowds, no deadlines, no newspapers filled with news of man’s inhumanity to man, only the stark beauty of a landscape that looks the same now as it would have looked to the ancient tribes of Kush, on the southern reaches of Tutankhamen’s Egypt.

Our guides, independent tribesmen with a noble spirit that we in the soft West may foolishly mistake for barbarity, fire their rifles in the air in a thrillingly reckless display of high spirits as they lead us into the village where we shall spend the night. The village is almost deserted, save for a few women who welcome us in an emotional display of tears that puts our Western conception of hospitality to shame. Their menfolk, we are informed, have gone on their annual journey across the border to Chad where they trade and indulge their passion for camel racing and pchout, the local beer brewed from the roots of the acacia tree. The women, I feel, are perhaps not unhappy to be rid of them for a while! And do I sense, unspoken, via covert sidelong glances, a certain shy regard for the handsome and dashing Janjaweed with their flashing eyes and uncompromising masculinity? – an easy unselfconscious masculinity of which we in the over-civilised West are now simply incapable.

As I stare up at the stars – so close I feel I could reach out and touch them – and hear the night sounds of the desert mingled with cries that suggest that my hunches about the village women and their secret passions were not so far from the truth, I reflect that these people, though poor by Western standards, lead lives that in many ways are far richer than ours….

[Mick Hartley travelled to Darfur with the Western Sudan National Tourist Board]

Aid workers are increasingly being targeted by Sudanese oficials in Darfur:

Aid workers have described how they watched helplessly as Sudanese police officers dragged a female United Nations worker from an aid agency compound in Darfur and subjected her to a vicious sexual attack.

Staff say they feared for their lives when armed police raided their compound in Nyala, dragging one European woman out into the street by her hair and savagely beating several other international staff before arresting a total of 20 UN, aid agency and African Union staff.

The attack, the latest in a series of assaults on international aid workers, has forced relief agencies to consider pulling out of the troubled region. […]

The attack comes amid growing concern over the level of violence directed at aid workers.

In December, an international staff member working for a French aid agency was raped, others were beaten and one was subjected to a mock execution in the town of Gereida in south Darfur. Another international worker suffered a serious sexual assault in September.

Sudanese government-backed militias have used rape as a weapon against women in Darfur since the start of their campaign of ethnic cleansing in 2003. In December, The Sunday Telegraph revealed how a doctor had been gang-raped for protesting about the rape of more than 40 schoolgirls.

Now aid agencies say the deteriorating security situation for the remaining international relief workers could force their withdrawal.

t of Ottoman and now Turkish society.