ng “the book of the soul”, the autocratic leader dispenses moral guidance for citizens of the Central Asian nation.
It is mandatory reading for every Turkmen in schools and workplaces.
Convicts must take an oath involving the book upon their release from prison.
Isn’t the Arab Street supposed to be outraged at Western intervention? Not in Beirut, after Gebran Tueni’s assassination:
A young man named Ribal with a goatee and a nose ring in his left nostril was tired of the pan-Arab unity rhetoric coming from some quarters of the Middle East. “Everyone who was with Syria before needs to shut up now. We are Arabs. But we are Lebanese before we are Arabs.”
Another young man named Haig worried about the future. “If this keeps happening more people are going to start planting bombs. The terrorists are playing here. They are free to do whatever they want. Syria must be punished. The international community must put more pressure on them.” As I thanked him and turned to go he said “Oh, and say hello to Mr. George W. Bush for me.”
When asked who he thought murdered Gebran Tueni, Jad was dumbfounded. “Do you really need to ask that question?” he said.
Okay then, what should be done?
“The international community needs to deal with the Syrians. Lebanon is too weak. They need to do to Syria what they did to Saddam Hussein. Regime change. Definitely. Syria has the same regime as Iraq and it behaves the same way.”
At MEMRI, meanwhile, there’s a round-up of Syrian reactions to the UN-commissioned Mehlis report – on the last time a car bomb in Beirut killed a prominent anti-Syrian figure – which points the finger at high-level Syrian involvement. It seems they (or at least the government-controlled media) don’t like it at all. One story doing the rounds: Mehlis’s mother was a Jewess killed by Syrians, and Mehlis is after revenge. That’s why he was chosen to chair the investigation.
“Mehlis takes us to the law of the jungle, and reveals to the world the first shoots of the world government heralded by ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. ‘”
Iraq a disaster? Only compared to some fantasy scenario where there would have been a successful Shia insurrection sometime in the unspecified future. David Aaronovitch apologises for his support of the war…sort of:
Many mornings begin with the Today snort: an almost indefinable simultaneous use of sinus and larynx, it is the audio equivalent of one of Jeremy Paxman’s eyebrows leaping off his head and making a bid for freedom among the studio lights. The snort says: “What you are arguing is ridiculous and everyone knows it.” So it is a snort on behalf of everyone. And, for a long time now, the snort has been deployed against those who argue that the invasion and occupation of Iraq are anything other than a disaster.
A far more elegant version of the snort was used in these pages recently by my colleague, Matthew Parris. “Nobody,” he argued, “seriously now thinks the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a good idea or is going anywhere useful.” The troops should be withdrawn straightaway. […]
In February 2003 Matthew wrote that he would be against a war in Iraq even if there was WMD, even if it was authorised by the UN, even if a liberated Iraq was then stable, and concluded: “I’m against war because it will antagonise moderate Arab opinion.” And the Iraqi people? To be massacred, shredded, gassed, beheaded, suppressed, starved, immiserated, terrorised and tortured because all of that would be less bad than antagonising moderate Arab opinion. An Iraqi democrat stands in front of an armchair anti- interventionist, and is invisible.
I do apologise. For Abu Ghraib and Donald Rumsfeld. For not understanding the insurgents. For the looting. For the dire planning. I apologise to the election workers assassinated, the police trainees blown up, the parents of children caught in crossfire and everyone else that the planners and executors of the invasion that I supported, and still support, may have let down by neglect or stupidity. I recognise their bravery and their determination to succeed despite everything.
But a disaster compared with what? Compared with Saddam and sanctions or Saddam and cyanide. And that — the thing that Matthew presumably preferred — was not a disaster? Snort.
report of the U.N. Secretary General; and the ICC Prosecutor’s briefing. In March the Council referred Darfur to the ICC and the Prosecutor opened an investigation on June 6.
Although the U.N. Security Council established a mechanism in March 2005 to enforce a partial arms embargo and to impose sanctions on individuals committing abuses, not a single person has yet been sanctioned by the U.N.
“Nine months ago the Security Council set up a Sanctions Committee to penalize individuals responsible for abuses in Darfur but it has yet to act against anyone,” said Takirambudde. “If the Security Council wants to see real progress in Darfur it must act now.”
There’s also this:
The African Union is not only providing troops in Darfur; it is negotiating a peace agreement between the Sudanese government and the Darfur rebel groups. Despite the Sudanese government’s involvement in ongoing crimes in Darfur, the A.U. is allowing Sudan to host January’s A.U. summit in the capital, Khartoum. A new A.U. president is also due to be elected, and there are indications that President Bashir might obtain the post.
Update: Eric Reeves writes about this, under the heading “Darfur Betrayed“:
Without public objection from any African leader, the next African Union summit is scheduled to be held in Khartoum, January 23-24, 2006. The countries of the AU have evidently concluded that a regime guilty of massive, ongoing genocidal destruction can serve as an appropriate host for the business of Africa. Such a conclusion is wholly remarkable, since presumably the business of Africa includes the vast human catastrophe in Darfur that has been engineered by this very same regime of genocidaires. […]
It is a profound scandal that not a single African leader has publicly objected to this travesty, even as not a single African country has dared to declare the realities of Darfur to be genocide, despite overwhelming evidence of the ultimate human crime. Tragically, this moral cowardice and political perversity are reflected everywhere in AU policy toward Darfur, a policy that is increasingly defined not merely by inadequacy and incompetence, but by shameful expediency.
In fiction, organ farming is controlled by a shady US conglomerate. In real life, it’s the Chinese government:
Kidney patients who need a transplant in Britain are being targeted by a medical group offering them new organs taken from executed Chinese prisoners.
The horrifying trade in human organs has been revealed by British surgeons who say patients are being tempted abroad, but may not fully understand the dangers or the human suffering behind the transplant operation.
It is thought that as many as 10 British patients may have gone to China this year to receive a new kidney, at a cost of £23,000. One UK patient was believed to be recovering this weekend at a hospital in southern China following such a transplant. […]
Earlier this month, China broke its silence on the issue to admit that organs of executed prisoners were sold to foreigners for transplantation. Huang Jiefu, the deputy prime minister, admitted that the practice is widespread, but said they wanted to tighten the rules.
‘We want to push for regulations on organ transplants to standardise the management of the supply of organs from executed prisoners and tidy up the medical market,’ Mr Huang told Caijing magazine.
Tidy up the medical market – aren’t they adapting well to the demands of a market economy, the Chinese?
If this is genuine it marks a step up in the campaign of North Korean escapees against the regime of Kim Jong-Il (via):
Nine former North Korean special forces soldiers who defected to the South vowed Wednesday to push for regime change in their communist homeland unless it abolishes political prison camps and improves human rights.
The Association of Free North Korean Soldiers made the pledge at a press conference a day before South Korean, U.S. and other officials and activists open a high-profile international conference on human rights abuses in the North…Lim Chun Young, who served 14 years in one of the North Korean military’s special warfare units before defecting to the South in 2000, said that former soldiers are best suited to end leader Kim Jong Il’s regime and improve human rights conditions.
“We will try to bring about regime change unless North Korea abolishes its slaughterhouse-like political prison camps and unleashes the freedom of its people who are chained to the country’s system,” Lim said at the news conference.
“This is not word play, but a last warning ahead of action,” Lim said.
In a press release, the group said it plans to forge links with the North Korean military. Lim said the group planned to carry out “direct activities” in relation to North Korean border guards, though he provided no details.
Clearly these people are not readers of the London Review of Books (see my previous post) or they’d swiftly be disabused of their anti-DPRK prejudices.
igent”.]
What, specifically, does he like about Martin’s book?
Martin has read enough to get beyond the usual assumptions about the draconian nature of the two Kims’ rule. For example, purges were often not fatal or permanent.
See? Take off the orientalist blinkers and it’s really not that bad.
He will admit that there are some problems though:
For the past decade the regime has not been able to feed its people.
Well, it’s been able to feed some of its people:
In a rare insight into his life of privilege and excess, Kim’s former executive chef has described how the “Dear Leader” washes down exotic sushi, Iranian caviar and gourmet shark fin soup with vintage French wines from his 10,000-bottle cellar before treating himself to his favourite tipple, Hennessy XO cognac….
During his 13 years of service in Pyongyang, he travelled the world to purchase mouth-watering treats for Kim and his cronies: caviar from Iran and Uzbekistan, melons and grapes from China, durian fruit from Malaysia, papaya from Singapore, bacon from Denmark and beer from the former Czechoslovakia.
This unfortunate inability of the regime to feed its people would, of course, have nothing to do with its policies. So who could be to blame?
The US long ago put North Korea under siege…
And so it goes. To sum up: things aren’t as bad as all that in the North, and if they are, well, it’s America’s fault. One lesson above all to be learnt from the tragic history of Korea over the last sixty years – a lesson with some contemporary relevance – is that the US should never, ever, intervene in another country to try and impose democracy. If you want to know why, just look at what happened in the South.
Oliver James, in the Observer Magazine, celebrates 150 years since the birth of the great Sigmund:
My father was psychoanalysed by Freud’s daughter, Anna, at the house in Hampstead where Freud died. One day, approaching the house for a session, my dad felt an unaccountable wish to leap over its wall. When he reported this to Ms Freud she asked, ‘And did you have an erection at that moment?’ He did. How strange that she could have known this.
I make no comment.
According to a new book by German historian Sönke Neitzel, senior German officers knew far more about the Holocaust than was previously thought:
During the Second World War, British intelligence secretly bugged the cells occupied by some of the most senior German army, navy and air force commanders who had been captured by the Allies.
The transcripts have only recently been made available to researchers and show that:
• Senior Luftwaffe officers mused together at the end of 1943 that millions of Jews had already been killed.
• General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander who defied Hitler’s orders by not allowing Paris to be destroyed, admitted that he had been involved in killing Jews;
• Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had been fully briefed about the 1944 attempt to kill the Nazi leader, and refused to betray the plotters.
The British bugging operation took place in the then country estate of Trent Park on the north-west outskirts of London, in a building now used by the University of Middlesex.
Senior German officers were lulled into a false sense of security by being allowed to live in relative luxury, even sometimes having their adjutants and batmen to attend to them.
However, all the time the British were bugging their cells in an effort to get the Germans to reveal vital military secrets about chains of commands, tactics and who made the decisions in the Nazi war machine.
The transcripts, which have been published in Germany by Sönke Neitzel, professor of modern history at the University of Mainz, contradict the traditional image of senior German officers as having little or no knowledge of the mass-killings.
This is significant stuff, given the centrality of the issue of who knew what about the fate of the Jews. What amazes me is that it’s taken sixty years for this material to surface. Where’s it been all this time?
te>For outstanding commitment to justice by maintaining constant vigil outside parliament demanding respect for the human rights of those in other countries. For tireless and passionate defence of freedom of speech.