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on to literature. Since American bombing campaigns altered the political and social landscape of Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been a steady progression of books from a previously ignored region. Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul was a surprise international bestseller; Jon Lee Anderson’s The Lion’s Grave was a wonderfully scripted account of a voyage into a strange and dark world.

It’s a perfect insight into the worldview of certain sections of our liberal intelligentsia. If any good at all has come out of George W. Bush’s messianic War on Terror, it is a contribution to literature. This is particularly grotesque given the subject of her interviewee’s book:

Hiner Saleem’s My Father’s Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan begins with a vision of idyllic rural life. The names are changed, but it is Saleem’s story. It opens with the author as a child, eating pomegranates under a leafy mulberry tree at the feet of his mother. He feels secure within his extended family. We meet his father, his brother — a rebel fighter — and his cousins. We are drawn into an intimate, lost world.

Then things grow dark. We slowly begin to wake up to life under Saddam Hussein. A cousin is brutally murdered by Saddam’s forces, tied and dragged behind a car until he is bloody and unrecognisable. There are whispered conversations of armed struggle, resistance, punishment. The narrator’s father, a Morse code operator for the Kurdish rebels, takes his family to live temporarily in a cave.

The idyllic world is shattered. Instead, there are refugees, anxiety, fear, escape. And the realisation that there is no real home for the Kurds, no friends, as the Kurdish expression goes, except the mountains.

Saleem brings us into this very intimate world of a country that had been forgotten and was persecuted relentlessly by Saddam. It is a portrait of a people who have been hunted down, gassed, beaten and still do not have their real freedom. The narrator tearfully describes being forced to attend classes in Arabic, rather than his mother tongue, Kurdish; of leaving his home and coming back to find it occupied by another family. He describes the sound of warplanes razing his country as he’s sitting in school.

Hmm. Whatever happened to that nasty Saddam?

Given that Hiner Saleem is a deeply political man who dreams of a free Kurdistan, it would have been good to hear his thoughts on the current situation in Iraq, but Janine isn’t interested. Instead she wonders if he shares her views on the “soulnessness of Hollywood”, but he fails to rise to the anti-American bait. And nowhere is there a hint that, thanks to Bush’s “messianic War on Terror”, for the first time in decades these are hopeful times for Iraqi Kurds.

ase, the ultimate High Court ruling contained a sharp reprimand to the Egyptian investigative authorities for having fabricated the case. It went even further, and certainly beyond the call of judicial duty, to criticize the political arrangements that give inordinate power to the presidency.

Why does the Mubarak regime continue to resort to these heavy-handed tactics against its peaceful opposition? Here is an attempted answer. Over nearly a quarter of a century, it has perfected the art of scare politics, at home and abroad. Those in Mubarak’s regime argue that if he allowed democratization to proceed unchecked, with fair and honest elections, Islamists would undoubtedly take over.

None of his Western listeners ever answer this argument with some very pertinent questions: What, Mr. Mubarak, have you done to preserve the popularity of non-Islamist forces in the country? What has your regime done with more than $100 billion in foreign aid and remittances from Egyptians working abroad? Why has Egypt’s ranking during your rule steadily worsened on every development index — from that of the U.N. Development Program to the World Bank to Freedom House? And why does Egypt now rank with Russia, Syria and Nigeria among the most corrupt countries in the world?

Isn’t it these dismal failings that feed popular discontent and contribute to the Islamists’ growing numbers? And isn’t it Mubarak’s repression of secular civil forces that has kept the field empty for the Islamists in Egypt, where there are now more than 100,000 mosques where they can freely preach their message — but only a handful of registered political parties and human rights groups?

&programmeId=25190676&jspLocation=/jsp/prog_details.jsp”>Nathan Barley“, and he’s surpassed himself. What it is, he’s made a show which is complete and utter shite from beginning to end . It’s total garbage. Then, he sits back and watches all the idiot media types fall over themselves, saying how it’s amazing, how it’s really heavy satire and all that. Just because of his reputation. Hilarious! Like I said, the man’s a genius.

loped by artists exposed to Cuban music in the Forties and Fifties, brought to some sort of perfection by musicians like Le Grand Kalle, Dr Nico, Tabu Ley (aka Rochereau before Mobutu’s Authenticity programme encouraged African names) and ultimately Franco and TPOK (Tout Puissant OK) Jazz. Later, in the Eighties and Nineties, the music speeded up, and in the hands of smart Parisian-Kinshasa sapeurs like Papa Wemba and Zaiko Langa Langa turned into Soukous.

In the early days the songs were short, but by the time of the band’s maturity, OK Jazz songs could last 20 or 30 minutes. “Like a well-oiled machine” is the inevitable phrase: they plugged in and just got into a groove you felt could have gone on forever.

This is a cheap introduction to Franco’s music. As the man said, “On entre OK, on sort KO”.

e Bush administration to the situation in Darfur:

Ten years ago, I asked Bosnian civilians under siege in Sarajevo where they would go if they could escape. Most chose one of the sand or pebble beaches along the Adriatic. Last summer, when I traveled through the Sudanese province of Darfur, I asked the same question of Sudanese who’d seen their homes torched, their cattle stolen and their children butchered. The surprisingly common answer, whether from refugees wandering the Sahara, or from farmers who had never had electricity or running water, was this: “The Hague.” They had heard there was an international court there, and they wanted to go testify.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them that their attackers couldn’t be tried at the International Criminal Court because Sudan was not a party to it and because the United States, even though it was Khartoum’s fiercest critic, was likely to block an investigation by the court.

In late January, a United Nations commission issued its findings on Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have been killed. Much has been made about the commission’s refusal to describe the atrocities by government-backed militias as genocide. But more striking was the commission’s authoritative documentation of some of the worst horrors of the last half-century: violations “without any military justification” that “no doubt constitute large-scale war crimes.” In addition, the team delivered a sealed list with the names of 51 Sudanese suspected of war crimes and recommended just what the Darfurians had been urging all along: investigation and prosecution in The Hague.

The Bush administration has been more forthright than any of the United Nations’ 191 member states in denouncing the atrocities in Sudan – a fact that should shame European nations that pride themselves on their human rights pedigrees. The United States was the first to characterize the violence as genocide and the first, way back in June, to name potential perpetrators and call for punishment. It has also dismissed offers by the Sudanese government to conduct the trials at home, rightly recognizing that Khartoum is unlikely to prosecute crimes that it has ordered and committed.

But the Bush administration can’t decide what it dislikes more: genocide or the International Criminal Court, which aims to punish it. Administration officials have missed no opportunity to undermine the court. During President Bush’s first term, the United States suspended military aid to more than 20 countries that refused to shield Americans from potential prosecution, including Mali (a fledging democracy), Ecuador (a partner in drug interdiction efforts), and Croatia (a fragile government trying to stem a nationalist tide).

to remove the Kim regime, probably the best way into North Korean society is to welcome and encourage people coming out. That offers a chance for North Korean defectors to speak up, broadcast honest news back into the country, organize dissident groups and seek ways best known to former insiders to communicate with those still trapped under Kim’s rule.

Except the number of North Koreans welcomed by the rest of the world has been tragically small–amounting to about 6,300 all told, most of them arriving in South Korea over the past three years. That’s about zip compared to the number who would flee given even a whisper of a decent chance. At risk of their lives, an estimated 300,000 have in any case fled across the border into China.

You might think that once they reached Chinese turf, an outfit such as the United Nations, keeper of the 1951 convention on refugees, would offer help. Hardly. Since famine in North Korea and growing mobility inside China brought the first serious refugee influx in the early 1990s, the U.N. has engaged in what it calls “quiet diplomacy,” meant to persuade China’s regime to honor its international obligations and at least allow safe passage to these asylum-seekers, who have a fear of persecution deeply grounded in the likelihood that they may be executed, or sent to murderous labor camps, if returned. But so quiet is this diplomacy, so as not to offend China–which sits on the governing body of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and holds a veto-wielding seat on the UN Security Council–that nothing much has emerged from all the hush. There are no refugee centers for North Koreans in China; instead, there is a bilateral treaty with North Korea under which asylum-seekers are labeled illegal economic migrants. If caught, they are sent back.

The result, as South Korea-based private American relief worker Tim Peters reports in a recent bulletin, is that even with help for North Korean refugees signed into law in the U.S. last year, the outlook for them “is indeed grim for 2005.” China has beefed up efforts to keep them out or catch them, posting more soldiers along the border, and adding roadblocks to detect private aid workers trying at risk of prison themselves to reach the border areas. From inside North Korea, reports Mr. Peters, he has been receiving accounts that “authorities have stepped up the monitoring and interrogation of families in which family members are unaccounted for.” That is awful news, because in North Korea, the regime imposes collective punishment on entire families.

How the end might come for the despotic regime of North Korea, we do not yet know. It would be foolish to expect it will in any sense be easy. But it would be cruelty and madness, not to mention plain dumb foreign policy, to assume that 23 million human beings would not, like the Iraqis, welcome the chance to start the long labor of assembling a government of, by and for the people. If they do, the world will be safer for it.

Now, with North Korea withdrawing from further talks, and as good as admitting that they possess nuclear weapons, pressure may start to build:

Only last week, US envoys were in Beijing to show the Chinese evidence of a North Korean sale of a uranium compound to Libya, and to deliver a letter, from George W. Bush to President Hu Jintao, speaking of “the greatly heightened urgency” of tackling the problem. Now…Pyongyang itself has made that case.

lvement – the use of Canadian taxes – to subsidize such a vicious portrayal is a deep insult to the millions who suffer and die in North Korea.

I posted about some other useful idiots here.

-censorship.

Problems within and between religions need to be freely discussed, not suppressed, and that is the reason why this proposed law is so extremely dangerous.

From the Times:

Had the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles consulted a Chinese astrologer before naming the day — and who is to say that they didn’t? — they would have been greatly encouraged: he is a rat and she is a pig, and this means that they are compatible.

than it was before January 31. Immediate steps should be taken by the interim government, with the assistance of the international community, to arrange an urgent conference for Iraqi national reconciliation. […]

Many political groups that boycotted the elections are now softening their tone and are sheepishly asking for a role in the political process, trying as much as they can to save face at the same time. The Association of Muslim Scholars, the Pan-Arab, Nasseri, and Socialist movements, the Khalisi group and the Sadrists are among the first groups to call for such a role. Had there been no elections, this could not have been possible.

There is already a consensus among the different political powers that drafting the permanent constitution should not be done solely by the elected National Assembly. This in order to safeguard the interests of the part of the population that did not participate in the elections and to reassure Iraqis that everyone has a say in their future. No longer will one group, no matter how large its support base, dominate over others.

I truly hope that Iraqi politicians realise this and can work to achieve it, leaving aside their personal interests and differences for one moment, putting the prejudices of the past behind them, and listening to what Iraqis have to say. For it is Iraqis, and Iraqis alone, that are the key to solving this whole mess.

Apart from a minority that would rather burn down the country than see someone else in power, I am confident that most Iraqis are weary of all the violence, chaos and bloodshed. It is therefore the utmost duty of Iraqi politicians, the occupation authority and the international community to seize upon the moment and to quit beating around bushes.

It is time to involve the Iraqis themselves, to give them the final word. Iraqis do not wish for their country to be a “frontline on the war of terror”, as Bush recently stated. Iraqis do not wish for their country to be a battleground for reactionary bearded cavemen waging their holy wars. Iraqis do not wish to be fuel for the wars of neighbouring countries. Iraqis want to live and let live. Iraqis want what you have.