They did everything right: studied hard, prettified their CVs with internships, and bounced out of university - only to find themselves the recession's first victims
Patrick Barkham and Polly Curtis
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009
The bafflement in the voices of young graduates is like that of someone who is suddenly smacked in the face by a friend. Teachers, parents and most of all politicians told them a university education was the key to getting a good job. Careers advisers chivvied them to get work experience. So undergraduates dutifully studied for decent degrees, prettified their CVs with useful internships and bounced out of university last summer. The world, and the job market, was their oyster. And then: thud. They were floored by the sucker punch of recession.
A generation of young people - Generation Crunch, perhaps - is experiencing unemployment for the first time, a sinking, scarring sensation that completely escaped the generation above them. David Blanchflower, the influential economist and member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee who predicted the recession, believes that 3 million people will be out of work by the end of this year. Of these, more than 1 million are likely to be under 25. The latest labour market survey shows unemployment growing fastest among 18- to 24-year-olds: of the 137,000 rise in unemployment in the three months to October, 55,000, or 40%, were aged 18 to 24. "That scared me and everyone else," says Blanchflower. "A spell of unemployment when you're young has a very different effect than when you're older." Economists such as Blanchflower talk of "permanent scars" against "temporary blemishes": the evidence is that prolonged unemployment permanently damages the young.
Facing a youth unemployment crisis, Gordon Brown has already this week promised £140m to increase the number public and private apprentices by 35,000. It may be harder, however, to help jobless graduates. If the victims of earlier recessions were the millions of skilled manual workers, will bright young graduates bear the brunt of the latest economic crisis?
Last summer Bea Carter, 21, finished her English literature degree and decided to stay in Manchester with her university friends to "live together, like young professionals". She thought it would be fun. "But I'm even struggling to get a job I don't want, let alone one that I do." She settled for a job at a branch of Marks & Spencer's Simply Food. "Working in a supermarket wasn't really what I expected to be doing at all, but since I can't even get admin or office work, I had to take it." A week before M&S announced it was axing 1,200 jobs, Carter's contract came up for renewal. Her managers let it expire. Shocked, she tried registering at temping agencies but was told she couldn't because she didn't have administrative experience. "I always thought my degree would help me in the long-term with a career, but it certainly hasn't helped me with the first step. A lot of agencies don't care if you have a degree, they just want to know that you can type a certain number of words a minute," she says. "Right now, job-hunting for me is about money, not about a career."
Graduates being forced to take non-graduate jobs is not a new trend. The expansion of higher education, driven by the government's target to put 50% of young people into it, has happened too quickly for the labour market. "There are more graduates than ever and there are more graduates now in less vocational subjects from 'less prestigious' universities than there used to be. We have a much higher proportion of social science and arts graduates which is why a third or more of graduates don't get graduate jobs," says Prof Peter Dolton of Royal Holloway, University of London, and the London School of Economics's Centre for the Economics of Education. He says this trend will be exacerbated by the economic downturn. "When you have rising graduate unemployment, the effects are felt worst by graduates of non-vocational subjects and graduates from less prestigious universities. That's going to get even worse in recession."
The crunch on graduates began in earnest in September, according to Mike Hill of Graduate Prospects, the graduate careers service. "In August we were thinking 'things are going well'. By September we were thinking 'oh shit'. Immediate vacancies disappeared," he says. "Graduate recruiters might say they are going to be recruiting but what they mean is very many fewer than last year. Students aren't going to be as cocky."
If things are bad for the class of 2008, they will get worse for the classes of 2009 and 2010, according to Dolton, as traditional big graduate recruiters pull out of the "milk round". According to Graduate Prospects, these recruiters are changing, so while M&S may be laying off workers, Aldi, Asda and Netto are "very actively recruiting". The few openings at conventional recruiters are now desperately competitive: KPMG's 2009 graduate jobs are nearly all taken, months ahead of schedule, as students scramble for the top jobs.
Carl Gilleard, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, suggests that young graduates should keep busy. "It's going to be a shock to the class of 2009. But it's far better to consider a temporary job than to sit at home and feel sorry for yourself. Why not do bar work? It involves skills you need for lots of jobs - working with people and perhaps negotiating tricky situations."
This is greeted with hollow laughter by many graduates and undergraduates, who are struggling to pick up the most menial of jobs, let alone something to burnish their CVs. In recent months, Stephen Greatley, 18, a student from Liverpool, has applied for more than 40 holiday jobs to help fund his Oxford University degree and has not found any work. "There was a job advertised at the Royal Mail. The job description warned it was tedious, repetitive work; I applied and didn't hear anything back," he says.
Oliver Brand, 21, graduated from Birmingham University last summer with a high 2:1 in political science. Since then, he has applied for more than 35 jobs and 75 unpaid work placements in advertising and marketing. "I wasn't cocky at uni but I had high hopes for myself," he says. "I was head boy at school, I thought I had quite a lot going for me. I'd always expected a bit of rejection but after the 100th, I thought 'Oh God, what's going on here?'
"I've even found bar work hard to come by now. They want people who can guarantee to work there for a year and I've been honest and said I hope to get a full-time job." As well as seeking work experience, he's joined local job agencies near his home in Somerset. The rewards for all this endeavour? Two weeks' work experience with a London marketing company and occasional cash-in-hand labouring for a neighbour.
It is "completely demoralising," he says. "My mates have found it exactly the same. We're all pretty down. We meet up regularly. All we are doing is trying to find a job every day."
As Blanchflower warns, this demoralising effect could turn into long-term "scarring" if this new generation of unemployed people are out of work for more than a year. There was a sizeable group among the young unemployed in the 1981 recession who were still out of work in their 40s. Studies show that young long-term unemployed people find it difficult to reconnect with stable career jobs. "It's important to get a foothold in the labour market," says Blanchflower. "If you don't get in, life becomes very hard."
Young graduates are hit by a "double whammy" according to David Willetts, the Conservative higher education spokesman: companies freeze recruitment and then there is the last in, first out principle. Recent graduates lucky enough to get work have found themselves turfed out as the recession bites.
Dirren Patel, 25, got a degree in business management from the University of Leicester and quickly picked up work for a City firm specialising in IT mergers and acquisitions. Since being made redundant in September, he has found it "impossible" to find similar work in the City. Living at home with his parents near Woking, Surrey, Patel has been able to take the long view: he is now looking for a graduate job that will start in September. He has 20 months' experience working in the City and he is competing against new graduates with none. He knows 30-year-olds who are applying for entry-level graduate jobs. He says new graduates have very little chance: "2:1s are not worth anything anymore because everyone's got them."
Blanchflower believes more education and training is vital for the young unemployed. But Richard Reeves, director of thinktank Demos, says the government's instinct seems to be to encourage well-qualified (and often heavily indebted) graduates to take on more study (and more debt). Reeves says a government minister recently told him unemployed graduates will probably end up doing master's degrees. "'Let them do master's degrees' is the modern equivalent of 'let them eat cake'," says Reeves. "You just worsen the problem. Doing an MA should not be an economic policy, it should be a broader social policy."
Reeves is not surprised graduates feel angry and betrayed when they have no job to show for years of study after obeying the urgings of the government. "The sell has always been 'go to higher education and you'll get a better job'. The sell should be higher education is a way to expand your horizons, discover more about the world and yourself and help you get a better life, as well as a job," he says. "This vocational assumption is being destruction-tested by the recession."
Have young people funnelled into the higher education factory been misled? "There is a growing debate about the 'return' of a university degree," says Willetts. "The conventional model has been supply for graduates and the number of graduates has risen in happy tandem. But if that falls out of sync then students will ask themselves whether it's all worthwhile."
According to Dolton, the government's target of getting 50% of adults into higher education was based on influential research looking at adult earnings over an entire career. Much of this studied generations born in 1958, and found each year in education over the age of 16 added 15% to earnings. But this, argues Dolton, was an exception: a uniquely privileged generation who enjoyed an elite education and a smooth labour market. To suggest modern degrees would add a similar value - called "rate of return to education" in academic circles - is "errant nonsense" he says. The government assumed further education would boost earnings by 8-15%. "Parents and kids have been sold a lie in the sense that the rate of return to education is not that," says Dolton.
What should be done? Skills minister John Denham is drawing up an action plan to tackle unemployment among 18- to 24-year-olds, which aims to help thousands of graduates. The government needs to act quickly, says Blanchflower. "We don't want these spells of unemployment to get long. A spell of unemployment is bad when young and the longer it is, the worse it is. We want to do everything to prevent it becoming long-term unemployment."
Reeves warns it may prove harder to assist graduates. Keynesian-style public works - generating jobs through public sector infrastructure projects - are ill-suited to most graduates because skills sets do not match. "Would you want someone with a degree in media studies to lag your loft? I wouldn't," says Reeves. If the government wants to create new graduate jobs, it could invest in cultural and creative industries, suggests Reeves, which should be seen as part of the country's infrastructure and as something which would reap profits and economic growth in the future.
If things are tough for young graduates, however, they will only get tougher for less skilled young people. "So far, it looks as if it's the unskilled who are suffering the most. In the short and long term being unskilled is much worse than being skilled," says Reeves. Paul Gregg, a professor of economics at Bristol University, predicts that the number of unemployed graduates will rise "and the length of time it takes them to connect with the labour market will lengthen but they will get in, although with lower wages than in the past."
In other words, graduates will lower their sights and end up taking the jobs of less skilled workers. "Graduates are very mobile. They are more likely to move around to find work," says Ian Brinkley, associate director of the Work Foundation. "For a while at least it's going to look a lot less attractive to go to university. But a degree will still help you get a job if not a well-paid job - and that takes that job away from someone else."
Additional reporting by Huma Qureshi
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Its time for a Boycott- Noami Klien
It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."
Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.
Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.
The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.
Israel is not South Africa.
Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.
Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.
Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.
This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.
Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.
Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."
Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."
It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.
A version of this column was published in the Nation (thenation.com)
naomiklein.org
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."
Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.
Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.
The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.
Israel is not South Africa.
Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.
Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.
Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.
This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.
Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.
Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."
Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."
It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.
A version of this column was published in the Nation (thenation.com)
naomiklein.org
Monday, 12 January 2009
Shoe thrown at George Bush
Guardian link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/dec/15/bush-shoes-iraq
George Bush's engagement with Iraq appeared to end as it began - in chaos and anger - yesterday when a surprise trip to Baghdad to thank his troops and herald a new security pact was disrupted by an Iraqi man calling the US president a "dog" in Arabic and throwing his shoes at him.
The Bush trip, which will also take in Afghanistan where he arrived this morning, was conducted amid deep secrecy. It was intended to round off on a high note the policy that has most defined his presidency.
During a press conference with the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, he said the conflict had been necessary, adding: "The war is not over."
But his comments were clearly not to the liking of one person. "This is the end!" the man shouted, before hurling first one and then his other shoe at the American leader from a distance of about 12 feet.
Bush ducked as the first shoe flew close above his head, hitting the wall behind him. He ducked again to avoid the second shoe, as Iraqi security men pounced on the assailant - reported to be an Iraqi journalist - and dragged him screaming out of the room.
The US president appeared untroubled by the incident and later quipped: "All I can report is it is a size 10." But the disruption was clearly unwelcome on his fourth and final visit to Iraq.
It was also pregnant with symbolism. In the Arab world, throwing shoes at somebody is considered a serious insult, as is even showing them the soles of one's footwear, as demonstrated by jubilant Iraqis towards the statue of Saddam Hussein as it was toppled in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion.
With less than six weeks to go before the end of Bush's presidency, his surprise visit to Iraq aims to highlight the decline in violence in the country and the so-called status of forces agreement, which comes into force next month.
Speaking before the shoe incident, Bush said of the five-and-a-half year occupation: "The work hasn't been easy, but it has been necessary for American security, Iraqi hope and world peace ... I'm just so grateful I had the chance to come back to Iraq before my presidency ends."
The security pact, approved by the Iraqi parliament three weeks ago, provides for the removal of US troops from Iraqi cities by the middle of next year and a full withdrawal by 2011. But there are already signs that the agreement is running into problems. Most importantly, its timetable will have to be squared with that of the incoming president.
Barack Obama has said consistently that he will pull US forces out of Iraq within the much tighter timeframe of 16 months, security conditions permitting. He is likely to highlight that ambition early on in his term, which begins on 20 January.
The provision to evacuate US personnel from Iraqi cities by mid-2009 has also been drawn into question. Over the weekend the top US commander in the country, General Ray Odierno, said American troops would remain in several cities beyond next summer, acting in a support role as part of "transition teams".
Doubt has also been cast on the legal basis of the new pact, which leaves the US occupation without the cover of a UN mandate.
Bush landed in Baghdad on Air Force One after an 11-hour flight and began the visit with talks with the president, Jalal Talabani, and his aides. "I've known these men for a long time and I've come to admire them for their courage and their determination to succeed," Bush said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/dec/15/bush-shoes-iraq
George Bush's engagement with Iraq appeared to end as it began - in chaos and anger - yesterday when a surprise trip to Baghdad to thank his troops and herald a new security pact was disrupted by an Iraqi man calling the US president a "dog" in Arabic and throwing his shoes at him.
The Bush trip, which will also take in Afghanistan where he arrived this morning, was conducted amid deep secrecy. It was intended to round off on a high note the policy that has most defined his presidency.
During a press conference with the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, he said the conflict had been necessary, adding: "The war is not over."
But his comments were clearly not to the liking of one person. "This is the end!" the man shouted, before hurling first one and then his other shoe at the American leader from a distance of about 12 feet.
Bush ducked as the first shoe flew close above his head, hitting the wall behind him. He ducked again to avoid the second shoe, as Iraqi security men pounced on the assailant - reported to be an Iraqi journalist - and dragged him screaming out of the room.
The US president appeared untroubled by the incident and later quipped: "All I can report is it is a size 10." But the disruption was clearly unwelcome on his fourth and final visit to Iraq.
It was also pregnant with symbolism. In the Arab world, throwing shoes at somebody is considered a serious insult, as is even showing them the soles of one's footwear, as demonstrated by jubilant Iraqis towards the statue of Saddam Hussein as it was toppled in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion.
With less than six weeks to go before the end of Bush's presidency, his surprise visit to Iraq aims to highlight the decline in violence in the country and the so-called status of forces agreement, which comes into force next month.
Speaking before the shoe incident, Bush said of the five-and-a-half year occupation: "The work hasn't been easy, but it has been necessary for American security, Iraqi hope and world peace ... I'm just so grateful I had the chance to come back to Iraq before my presidency ends."
The security pact, approved by the Iraqi parliament three weeks ago, provides for the removal of US troops from Iraqi cities by the middle of next year and a full withdrawal by 2011. But there are already signs that the agreement is running into problems. Most importantly, its timetable will have to be squared with that of the incoming president.
Barack Obama has said consistently that he will pull US forces out of Iraq within the much tighter timeframe of 16 months, security conditions permitting. He is likely to highlight that ambition early on in his term, which begins on 20 January.
The provision to evacuate US personnel from Iraqi cities by mid-2009 has also been drawn into question. Over the weekend the top US commander in the country, General Ray Odierno, said American troops would remain in several cities beyond next summer, acting in a support role as part of "transition teams".
Doubt has also been cast on the legal basis of the new pact, which leaves the US occupation without the cover of a UN mandate.
Bush landed in Baghdad on Air Force One after an 11-hour flight and began the visit with talks with the president, Jalal Talabani, and his aides. "I've known these men for a long time and I've come to admire them for their courage and their determination to succeed," Bush said.
Icelander's struggle to survive after banking collapse
The sign at Keflavik international airport made for an odd greeting. "Welcome to Halfpriceland," it said. "Are you here for the nature or the exchange rate?" It was quickly deemed offensive and removed. But it spoke volumes about Iceland, and its sudden dereliction.
Not so long ago, Iceland was known mainly as an expensive, exotic geological wonder in the North Atlantic. Now it stands for something altogether different: the first sovereign victim of the financial crisis, and a sobering case study in what happens to a country when an economy falls off a cliff.
The collapse of the banking system and the currency, the krona, has been so severe that it has left a surreal economic landscape: a country gone from rich to poor so quickly that it can no longer afford some imports; moribund construction sites dotted with half-finished buildings; an affable people now reduced to pelting parliament with eggs; newspapers so strapped that they are struggling to afford the paper on which to print the news, just at a time when Iceland has become newsworthy.
Anyone with debt is feeling the pain the most. One of the features of the Icelandic crisis is that most loans - to buy a house, or even a car - were taken out in foreign currencies, to avoid high interest rates and inflation-linked loans in the domestic currency.
Klemens Thrastarson, a 33-year-old journalist, and his girlfriend bought a house with loans in an exotic mix of Swiss francs and Japanese yen as well as krona, as recommended by their bank. When the krona collapsed, their debts more than doubled. The couple and their baby had to move and rent the house out.
"If it reaches the point where the monthly instalments from the housing loan will be equal to my pay cheque, I would have no qualms about handing in the keys to my house, declare bankruptcy and perhaps leave the country," Thrastarson says.
He is not alone. Most young Icelanders are either thinking the same thing or know someone who is. "Three of my best friends have lost their jobs recently. Two of them have gone to Norway and one of them is moving to the Faroe Islands," says Gauti Masson, 19, a former worker at a care home. He says he lost his job "because more educated people were applying". Now, he says, "I might go to Norway too, but I don't really want to leave my family."
The most visible evidence of the crisis is the half-built structures that no one has money to finish. Cranes used to fill the skyline, but now most have been shipped abroad. The most spectacular abandoned project is the shell of a new music hall by the harbour.
Three lonely figures clad in orange stand on top of the building, where hundreds previously worked around the clock. It is not clear who will finish the building, and when. The construction company is bankrupt, and the property is owned by the cash-strapped Landsbanki. Next to the incomplete music house is a huge hole in the ground, where a hotel, a mall and the new headquarters of Landsbanki were supposed to rise. Whether these will ever be completed is anyone's guess. Unnar Josepsson, a construction worker in his late 20s, says: "All construction has been stopped in the Reykjavik area and probably in the country as a whole."
His friend, a carpenter called Jon, says: "I had a foreign currency loan to buy a car, and instead of having to pay 30,000 kronur a month, it's gone up to 45,000. Now, there is no way to get rid of the car. I go home at noon every day because there is nothing to do."
On Reykjavik's main shopping street, there are still plenty of products available, but most of the imports came before the collapse of the krona. Goods imported in the past two months are expensive, if available at all, and that goes for everything from food to condoms. Sales of the latter have been rising sharply in some countries as a curious byproduct of the financial crisis. In Iceland, however, they have fallen 25%, most probably because a packet of Durex costs twice as much as it used to.
Perhaps this is just as well for Iceland's future, as it may take many generations to pay off the country's debts.
However, the collapse of the krona may be good for Icelandic music. The weak krona makes it too expensive to import anything but the most surefire sellable albums, says Kiddi Krisjansson in the Bad Taste Music Store. Guns'n'Roses fans were exasperated when, having waited 15 years for the new album, they had to wait even longer for it to appear in Iceland's stores.
Sales have held up, Krisjansson says, but mostly because tourists with hard currency are eagerly snapping up merchandise which has become so much cheaper for them. Icelanders are settling for listening to Björk and other local acts. "Icelanders are buying more local music. The musicians here are happy. It will be an Icelandic Christmas," he adds.
On three shiny floors of a former fish factory is CCP, a company best known in computer gaming for Eve Online, which has 300,000 participants all over the world - as many inhabitants as Iceland itself. However, restrictions on access to foreign currency for individuals and businesses and on foreign investment into Iceland are making life difficult. "To make new games, we need foreign investors," says Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, formerly an assistant professor at the University of Akureyri, who supervises Eve's virtual economy. "The present currency restrictions are putting us in a straitjacket. We are in talks with the government, but if we can't let capital in, we might be compelled to leave Iceland, even though this would be against our wishes."
At least CCP still generates income. For the auto industry, sales have plummeted 93% compared with the same time last year, according to RUV state broadcasting. Icelanders simply can't afford foreign models. But foreigners can. Haukur Baldvinsson, a car salesman, says that his staff have taken to snooping around the streets for foreign imports, contacting the seller and then flipping the vehicles on to foreigners.
"We are no longer selling expensive Jeeps, but rather smaller Hilux cars that are bought secondhand by Norwegians," he said. "Now, when we see someone driving a Hilux, we get a buzz in the stomach and take down the number. Then we call the owner to ask if he wants to sell."
Icelanders are reeling from the shock of having everything they knew virtually disappear overnight. As well as anger at the government and the central bank, a residual distaste lingers for Britain and the punitive measures introduced to ensure that British savers got their money back from teetering Icelandic banks. For those who have already lost their jobs as well as for those who are still clinging on, the beginning of a new year will bring an increasingly uncertain future.
At this, the darkest time of the year, daylight is just a brief glimmer between night and night. This time, it may take a while before it truly starts getting brighter.
Cold financial wind
Iceland was the canary in the coalmine of the global financial crisis, the first economy to collapse under the extreme pressure of the credit crunch. A housing and consumer bubble blew up during the good times, as the banking sector took on huge overseas debts which at one point amounted to as much as 10 times GDP, around $14bn. As the credit crunch froze markets, banks could no longer refinance these debts; the currency began falling, making the debts even more expensive. Iceland's three major banks collapsed and had to be nationalised. Now inflation is 17%, unemployment looks headed for double digits and Iceland has gone from one of the sunniest OECD economies to one of its most indebted.
Not so long ago, Iceland was known mainly as an expensive, exotic geological wonder in the North Atlantic. Now it stands for something altogether different: the first sovereign victim of the financial crisis, and a sobering case study in what happens to a country when an economy falls off a cliff.
The collapse of the banking system and the currency, the krona, has been so severe that it has left a surreal economic landscape: a country gone from rich to poor so quickly that it can no longer afford some imports; moribund construction sites dotted with half-finished buildings; an affable people now reduced to pelting parliament with eggs; newspapers so strapped that they are struggling to afford the paper on which to print the news, just at a time when Iceland has become newsworthy.
Anyone with debt is feeling the pain the most. One of the features of the Icelandic crisis is that most loans - to buy a house, or even a car - were taken out in foreign currencies, to avoid high interest rates and inflation-linked loans in the domestic currency.
Klemens Thrastarson, a 33-year-old journalist, and his girlfriend bought a house with loans in an exotic mix of Swiss francs and Japanese yen as well as krona, as recommended by their bank. When the krona collapsed, their debts more than doubled. The couple and their baby had to move and rent the house out.
"If it reaches the point where the monthly instalments from the housing loan will be equal to my pay cheque, I would have no qualms about handing in the keys to my house, declare bankruptcy and perhaps leave the country," Thrastarson says.
He is not alone. Most young Icelanders are either thinking the same thing or know someone who is. "Three of my best friends have lost their jobs recently. Two of them have gone to Norway and one of them is moving to the Faroe Islands," says Gauti Masson, 19, a former worker at a care home. He says he lost his job "because more educated people were applying". Now, he says, "I might go to Norway too, but I don't really want to leave my family."
The most visible evidence of the crisis is the half-built structures that no one has money to finish. Cranes used to fill the skyline, but now most have been shipped abroad. The most spectacular abandoned project is the shell of a new music hall by the harbour.
Three lonely figures clad in orange stand on top of the building, where hundreds previously worked around the clock. It is not clear who will finish the building, and when. The construction company is bankrupt, and the property is owned by the cash-strapped Landsbanki. Next to the incomplete music house is a huge hole in the ground, where a hotel, a mall and the new headquarters of Landsbanki were supposed to rise. Whether these will ever be completed is anyone's guess. Unnar Josepsson, a construction worker in his late 20s, says: "All construction has been stopped in the Reykjavik area and probably in the country as a whole."
His friend, a carpenter called Jon, says: "I had a foreign currency loan to buy a car, and instead of having to pay 30,000 kronur a month, it's gone up to 45,000. Now, there is no way to get rid of the car. I go home at noon every day because there is nothing to do."
On Reykjavik's main shopping street, there are still plenty of products available, but most of the imports came before the collapse of the krona. Goods imported in the past two months are expensive, if available at all, and that goes for everything from food to condoms. Sales of the latter have been rising sharply in some countries as a curious byproduct of the financial crisis. In Iceland, however, they have fallen 25%, most probably because a packet of Durex costs twice as much as it used to.
Perhaps this is just as well for Iceland's future, as it may take many generations to pay off the country's debts.
However, the collapse of the krona may be good for Icelandic music. The weak krona makes it too expensive to import anything but the most surefire sellable albums, says Kiddi Krisjansson in the Bad Taste Music Store. Guns'n'Roses fans were exasperated when, having waited 15 years for the new album, they had to wait even longer for it to appear in Iceland's stores.
Sales have held up, Krisjansson says, but mostly because tourists with hard currency are eagerly snapping up merchandise which has become so much cheaper for them. Icelanders are settling for listening to Björk and other local acts. "Icelanders are buying more local music. The musicians here are happy. It will be an Icelandic Christmas," he adds.
On three shiny floors of a former fish factory is CCP, a company best known in computer gaming for Eve Online, which has 300,000 participants all over the world - as many inhabitants as Iceland itself. However, restrictions on access to foreign currency for individuals and businesses and on foreign investment into Iceland are making life difficult. "To make new games, we need foreign investors," says Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, formerly an assistant professor at the University of Akureyri, who supervises Eve's virtual economy. "The present currency restrictions are putting us in a straitjacket. We are in talks with the government, but if we can't let capital in, we might be compelled to leave Iceland, even though this would be against our wishes."
At least CCP still generates income. For the auto industry, sales have plummeted 93% compared with the same time last year, according to RUV state broadcasting. Icelanders simply can't afford foreign models. But foreigners can. Haukur Baldvinsson, a car salesman, says that his staff have taken to snooping around the streets for foreign imports, contacting the seller and then flipping the vehicles on to foreigners.
"We are no longer selling expensive Jeeps, but rather smaller Hilux cars that are bought secondhand by Norwegians," he said. "Now, when we see someone driving a Hilux, we get a buzz in the stomach and take down the number. Then we call the owner to ask if he wants to sell."
Icelanders are reeling from the shock of having everything they knew virtually disappear overnight. As well as anger at the government and the central bank, a residual distaste lingers for Britain and the punitive measures introduced to ensure that British savers got their money back from teetering Icelandic banks. For those who have already lost their jobs as well as for those who are still clinging on, the beginning of a new year will bring an increasingly uncertain future.
At this, the darkest time of the year, daylight is just a brief glimmer between night and night. This time, it may take a while before it truly starts getting brighter.
Cold financial wind
Iceland was the canary in the coalmine of the global financial crisis, the first economy to collapse under the extreme pressure of the credit crunch. A housing and consumer bubble blew up during the good times, as the banking sector took on huge overseas debts which at one point amounted to as much as 10 times GDP, around $14bn. As the credit crunch froze markets, banks could no longer refinance these debts; the currency began falling, making the debts even more expensive. Iceland's three major banks collapsed and had to be nationalised. Now inflation is 17%, unemployment looks headed for double digits and Iceland has gone from one of the sunniest OECD economies to one of its most indebted.
hundreds of brazil's eco warriors at risj of assasination
Twenty years after the killing of Chico Mendes, one of the world's most prominent rainforest defenders, hundreds of human rights and environmental activists still face the threat of assassination in Brazil, a new study claims.
The report, compiled by Brazil's Catholic Land Commission (CPT) and due to be released in full early next year, reveals that at least 260 people, among them a Catholic bishop, live under the threat of murder because of their fight against a coalition of loggers, farmers and cattle ranchers.
The list names Frei Henri des Rosiers, a French priest based in the Amazon town of Xinguara, as a particular target. Police are investigating claims he has a £14,000 price on his head because of his fight against slave labour. Also named are Maria José Dias da Costa, a union leader in the remote town of Rondon do Pará, and an Austrian bishop, Dom Erwin Krautler, who has been under 24-hour police guard for two years because of his battle against developers and child prostitution in his Amazonian diocese.
In February this year, Francisco da Silva, a 51-year-old leader of the landless movement in the Amazon, was killed with a single shot to the head. He had been named in a previous CPT report about rural leaders receiving death threats.
On Monday night the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to address the country on television to pay homage to the life of Mendes, a rubber tapper turned environmentalist who was gunned down outside his home on 22 December 1988. Lula's address is part of a wave of tributes across Brazil, from marches on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to celebrations in his hometown of Xapuri. But while his standing as a symbol of protest is not in doubt 20 years on, environmentalists and human rights activists are divided on Mendes's practical legacy.
In September this year government figures showed that deforestation in the Amazon had risen by 64% over the previous 12 months. Earlier this month, members of Ibama, Brazil's environmental taskforce, discovered that nearly 3,000 hectares (7,410 acres) had been deforested, mostly illegally, inside a reserve named after Mendes. "Each year on 22 December I ask myself if he died in vain or not. And today, after all these years, the answer is not yet clear to me," said Alfredo Sirkis, a prominent member of Brazil's Green party and friend of Mendes.
Sirkis said: "I won't say that nothing has improved," but he added that the last 20 years had seen a "continuation of this project of devastation".
Born in the remote Amazon state of Acre on 15 December 1944, Francisco Alves Mendes Filho followed in his parents' footsteps early in life, becoming a rubber tapper at the age of nine.
By the mid-1980s he was spearheading protests against local cattle ranchers and their gunmen, who sought to tear down the forest and drive out the impoverished rubber tappers. Renowned for visionary views on sustainable development, Mendes quickly became a poster-boy for the international green movement, travelling to the US to lobby against infrastructure projects he believed would devastate the Amazon.
"He knew how to talk to the rubber tapper in the middle of the forest in the same way he knew how to talk to a technocrat from the World Bank," said Sirkis. His murder turned him into an eco-martyr both at home and abroad, and catapulted the issue of rainforest destruction further up the international agenda.
"Chico left a great legacy," said Brazil's former environment minister, the senator and former rubber tapper Marina Silva. "Twenty years on, the environmental question has gained strength across the whole world."
She added: "He was a guy that spoke of things which were ahead of his time ... [and he] made me want to be part of that fight."
Bishop Krautler agrees: "It was never in vain. In death he [Mendes] spoke even louder than when he was alive."
Soon after his death, Brazil's government began introducing the "extractivist reserves" of which Mendes had dreamed. The reserves were areas of rainforest where local populations could earn their living while simultaneously protecting the environment. The first, created in 1990, was named after him and now covers 11m hectares of land.
Chico Mendes: Martyr for our times
When I heard, 20 years ago this week, that Chico Mendes, leader of the Brazilian rubber tappers' union, had been murdered, I was sad but not surprised. The last time I saw Chico, five months earlier in the town of Xapuri in the western state of Acre, he told me the ranchers had already tried to kill him six times.
Looking at my notebooks, I now notice that Chico actually named the man later convicted of organising his killing: Darly Alves da Silva, a rancher who has not been seen since escaping from jail where he was serving a sentence for the crime.
Darly already had a murder charge against him in another state, something Chico reported to the police.
It was when Chico's union successfully defended a piece of virgin rainforest sprinkled with rubber trees against the ranchers' attempts to claim it that the struggle became personal. Before the shooting of Mendes only 10 people had ever been brought to court for around 1,000 murders in the Amazon in the 1980s.
But Chico was different and his murder sparked an international furore.
In his speeches he used to say: "Come here and kill me. My chest is open." He knew he might achieve more by his death than he had by his life.
Today the extractive reserves Chico championed are relatively successful in protecting parts of the Amazon, as are reserves run by the rainforest's indigenous people.
Now people talk of using carbon credits to protect similar areas around the world. And I realise that I had met the martyr for our times - the Gandhi, or perhaps the Che Guevara, of our environmental age.
Charles Clover
The report, compiled by Brazil's Catholic Land Commission (CPT) and due to be released in full early next year, reveals that at least 260 people, among them a Catholic bishop, live under the threat of murder because of their fight against a coalition of loggers, farmers and cattle ranchers.
The list names Frei Henri des Rosiers, a French priest based in the Amazon town of Xinguara, as a particular target. Police are investigating claims he has a £14,000 price on his head because of his fight against slave labour. Also named are Maria José Dias da Costa, a union leader in the remote town of Rondon do Pará, and an Austrian bishop, Dom Erwin Krautler, who has been under 24-hour police guard for two years because of his battle against developers and child prostitution in his Amazonian diocese.
In February this year, Francisco da Silva, a 51-year-old leader of the landless movement in the Amazon, was killed with a single shot to the head. He had been named in a previous CPT report about rural leaders receiving death threats.
On Monday night the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to address the country on television to pay homage to the life of Mendes, a rubber tapper turned environmentalist who was gunned down outside his home on 22 December 1988. Lula's address is part of a wave of tributes across Brazil, from marches on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to celebrations in his hometown of Xapuri. But while his standing as a symbol of protest is not in doubt 20 years on, environmentalists and human rights activists are divided on Mendes's practical legacy.
In September this year government figures showed that deforestation in the Amazon had risen by 64% over the previous 12 months. Earlier this month, members of Ibama, Brazil's environmental taskforce, discovered that nearly 3,000 hectares (7,410 acres) had been deforested, mostly illegally, inside a reserve named after Mendes. "Each year on 22 December I ask myself if he died in vain or not. And today, after all these years, the answer is not yet clear to me," said Alfredo Sirkis, a prominent member of Brazil's Green party and friend of Mendes.
Sirkis said: "I won't say that nothing has improved," but he added that the last 20 years had seen a "continuation of this project of devastation".
Born in the remote Amazon state of Acre on 15 December 1944, Francisco Alves Mendes Filho followed in his parents' footsteps early in life, becoming a rubber tapper at the age of nine.
By the mid-1980s he was spearheading protests against local cattle ranchers and their gunmen, who sought to tear down the forest and drive out the impoverished rubber tappers. Renowned for visionary views on sustainable development, Mendes quickly became a poster-boy for the international green movement, travelling to the US to lobby against infrastructure projects he believed would devastate the Amazon.
"He knew how to talk to the rubber tapper in the middle of the forest in the same way he knew how to talk to a technocrat from the World Bank," said Sirkis. His murder turned him into an eco-martyr both at home and abroad, and catapulted the issue of rainforest destruction further up the international agenda.
"Chico left a great legacy," said Brazil's former environment minister, the senator and former rubber tapper Marina Silva. "Twenty years on, the environmental question has gained strength across the whole world."
She added: "He was a guy that spoke of things which were ahead of his time ... [and he] made me want to be part of that fight."
Bishop Krautler agrees: "It was never in vain. In death he [Mendes] spoke even louder than when he was alive."
Soon after his death, Brazil's government began introducing the "extractivist reserves" of which Mendes had dreamed. The reserves were areas of rainforest where local populations could earn their living while simultaneously protecting the environment. The first, created in 1990, was named after him and now covers 11m hectares of land.
Chico Mendes: Martyr for our times
When I heard, 20 years ago this week, that Chico Mendes, leader of the Brazilian rubber tappers' union, had been murdered, I was sad but not surprised. The last time I saw Chico, five months earlier in the town of Xapuri in the western state of Acre, he told me the ranchers had already tried to kill him six times.
Looking at my notebooks, I now notice that Chico actually named the man later convicted of organising his killing: Darly Alves da Silva, a rancher who has not been seen since escaping from jail where he was serving a sentence for the crime.
Darly already had a murder charge against him in another state, something Chico reported to the police.
It was when Chico's union successfully defended a piece of virgin rainforest sprinkled with rubber trees against the ranchers' attempts to claim it that the struggle became personal. Before the shooting of Mendes only 10 people had ever been brought to court for around 1,000 murders in the Amazon in the 1980s.
But Chico was different and his murder sparked an international furore.
In his speeches he used to say: "Come here and kill me. My chest is open." He knew he might achieve more by his death than he had by his life.
Today the extractive reserves Chico championed are relatively successful in protecting parts of the Amazon, as are reserves run by the rainforest's indigenous people.
Now people talk of using carbon credits to protect similar areas around the world. And I realise that I had met the martyr for our times - the Gandhi, or perhaps the Che Guevara, of our environmental age.
Charles Clover
Face to face with the Taliban
Qomendan Hemmet sat cross-legged under a window of the mud-walled room. His shoulder, sunk in an old military jacket, rested against the wall and a radio antenna stuck out of his pocket. Next to him sat his deputy, wrapped in a big blanket, silent and sleepy. Around the room sat his men, their faces contorted by years of fighting and poverty, dressed in shalwar kameez and magazine pouches, eyes dark as the kohl lining them. Radios crackled, phones rang non-stop, and more fighters came, drank tea and left with orders.
"Salar is the new Falluja," declared Qomendan Hemmet emphatically. "The Americans and the Afghan army control the highway, and five metres on each side. The rest is our territory."
Salar district in Wardak province is 80km (50 miles) south of Kabul. The Kandahar-Kabul road that passes through this district is a major supply line for US and Nato troops. The road is reminiscent of the road from Baghdad to Falluja: littered with IED [improvised explosive devices) holes and the carcasses of burnt-out Nato supply trucks and containers.
The frequency of Taliban attacks is higher this year than at any time since 2001. Four British marines were killed last week, three of them when a 13-year-old boy blew himself up in Helmand province. Meanwhile, the area controlled by the Afghan government is shrinking to the fortified islands of the cities.
A day earlier, I stood with a dozen Afghans, watching the Qomendan and his men in action. A man straining his eyes to watch had declared in an authoritative voice "janghi" ("war") and the sky had echoed with thuds and explosions.
A couple of pick-up trucks packed with rocket launchers and Afghan militiamen, hired to provide security to the supply convoys, sped away from the battle leaving a cloud of dust. Down the road three American armoured trucks filled the air with the crackle of heavy machine guns.
It was the end of an hour-long battle and as the sun sank deep into the horizon, the shooting became more intermittent. A low-flying, dark grey F-16 shot past, leaving behind two columns of smoke in the horizon. The Americans moved towards a village on the side of the road, the Afghan men jumped into their buses and taxis, and the traffic moved on over a carpet of bullet casings.
The road to Hemmet's compound is a single dirt track passing between high mud walls and orchards. A young Taliban scout led us to the compound, his Kalashnikov hidden under a blanket. In the distance the fortification of an Afghan army and police post was visible.
"Yesterday I had only 18 fighters," the Qomendan said, his unwavering gaze fixed on a point somewhere in the middle of the low-ceilinged room. "You saw how many mercenaries and Americans were there. With the blessing of Allah, the fighting is changing. When I started in this area, three years ago, I had six fighters, one RPG and two machine guns like these." He pointed at the BKC machine guns that lay idly on the door. "Now I have more than 500 fighters, 30 machine guns and hundreds of RPGs.
"The Americans have installed hundreds of Afghan policemen, they patrol the street all the time, but they can't control it. Last week they came by helicopters, searching the area because they can't drive their vehicles here. They never come with tanks, the whole area is mined."
Sporting a long thick moustache and a neat, well groomed beard, Qomendan Hemmet is a Taliban veteran. He started fighting when he was 17 in the Shomali plains north of Kabul against the Northern Alliance forces in the mid-90s. He went into hiding after the capital fell, and became the commander of the Salar district after the death of the previous commander three years ago.
"When we fought the Northern Alliance we fought face to face. This war is more difficult, the enemy controls the skies and they have lots of weapons. Sometimes I am scared, every human being gets scared. But we yearn for fighting the kafirs [unbelievers]. It's a joyful thing."
Hemmet's lieutenants sat around the room. One of them spoke perfect Arabic with a thick Saudi accent that he had acquired from "fighting alongside the Arab brothers". His Kalashnikov, decorated with green and red tape, was laid on the floor between us. "My brother," he said, "those police and army, they are like the blind, they don't see anything."
Hemmet and other Taliban commanders I met explained the Taliban's sophisticated network of military and civilian leadership. Each province has its own Taliban governor, military leader and shura [consultation] council. Below them are district commanders like Hemmet, who in turn divides his force into smaller units. Many say the civilian apparatus of the Taliban-run districts operates a more effective justice system than the government's, which is corrupt and inefficient. Nominally, all the councils look to Mullah Omar for guidance. In reality each province and district has its own dynamics.
The mullah
Mullah Muhamadi, one of Hemmet's men, arrived later wearing a long leather jacket and a turban bigger than all the others. "This is not just a guerrilla war, and it's not an organised war with fronts," he said. "It's both." He went on to explain the importance the Taliban attached to creating a strong administration in the areas it held: "When we control a province we need to provide service to the people. We want to show the people that we can rule, and that we are ready for the day when we take over Kabul, that we have learned from our mistakes."
Muhamadi said his group aimed to carry out around three attacks a week, but they did not always have enough ammunition. "We get intelligence that Americans or government people are coming and we hit them. Each area has a different strategy, here it's attacking the main road, but everywhere in this province the countryside is in our control."
He opened his dusty black bag and pulled out a laptop. The other fighters gathered around the screen, and watched a short film shot by Muhamadi of one of the attacks. It showed a few fighters, their faces concealed. The mullah pointed at one of them and announced that this was Qomendan. They stood under foliage on the side of the road. As a green police pick-up truck passed, the men opened fire.
Also on the computer they showed pictures of an American soldier. In one he was sitting in a makeshift wooden office in front of a computer screen, two other soldiers behind him all smiling into the camera. In another he was outside with an Afghan interpreter. "We killed him and captured his computer," the mullah told me. "He had served in Iraq."
The new Taliban
The city of Ghazni lies 145km (90 miles) south of Kabul down the same highway. Its only connection to the modern world is a few electricity poles, the police pick-up trucks, and the wreckage of an old Russian tank perched on the edge of the ruins of the 13th-century citadel.
In a hotel overlooking the bazaar square I met a young Taliban fighter. In his early 20s and with three years of fighting experience, he is part of the new generation of the Taliban who joined the movement years after they were toppled by the Americans, a symbol of its resurgence.
Qari Amanullah stretched his legs on one of the beds in the shabby room and rested his torso on his elbow. The smell of grilled meat and the sound of music wafted from the window. Amanullah explained that he came from a family who ran a small farm. When the Taliban were still in power he joined a local madrasa where he spent 12 years studying the Qur'an and religion. After he had memorised the Qur'an and acquired the title qari ("reader'), he abandoned his studies and joined the fighting.
"I joined the fight because I am resisting the kafir occupation," he said. "There are old Taliban, but most of the fighters in my unit are new. We joined after the fall of the Taliban, but the leadership is the same."
Amanullah explained how his village shared the burden of fighting the Americans and the government seen as its proxies. Each family devotes one of its sons to the jihad, while the rest of the men work in the field, "like in the madrasa, one son goes to study religion and the others work, it's the same with jihad: one son fights and the others work".
He dismissed the claim made by the government and US that the Taliban fights for money. "These are all lies. In the last few weeks we captured lots of trucks and government cars – if we were fighting for money why do we burn them?"
A few hours later there was a knock on the door and two men came in. One was wearing a red motorcycle helmet and wrapped in a blue sheet. He removed his helmet and revealed long hair, and a smooth beard that went down to his chest. Apart from his shalwar kameez, or gown, he could have been a 1960s hippie. He explained that he was the commander of a small unit, with around 100 men.
Mawlawi Abdul Halim, a mosque leader, who divides his time between fighting and his job as a preacher, said the insurgency was chaotic at first, with each group fighting on its own. It wasn't until 2005 that the fighters became well organised. "I was in a madrasa when the Taliban were in government and I only joined them after the American occupation. Lots of Talibs in madrasa have joined the fight but that doesn't mean we stopped learning."
Like Qomendan, Mawlawi Abdul Halim talked about the Taliban strategy of controlling the countryside, establishing an alternative administration and squeezing the cities by eroding the government control. "In the areas where there are government or international forces, they only control their posts and 1km around, and we control the rest. If we cut off the countryside then the cities will come under our control — we know that from our experience with the Soviets."
Lunch was spread out on a long plastic sheet. The waiter threw a few flat loaves of bread at us, and brought dishes of qabuli, rice and mutton, and few plates of stew. "The main two problems we deal with in the Taliban courts are bandits and land disputes," Abdul Halim went on. "When we solve these problems we win the hearts of the people. We went from the jihad to the government and now we are in the jihad again. We have learned from the mistakes we committed. Lots of our leaders have experience in the jihad and in the government. The leaders are the same leaders but the fighters are new and they don't want to be like those who ruled and committed mistakes."
He said the failure of a recent voter registration drive in Ghazni showed how effectively the Taliban was cutting off the countryside. "We stood at road intersections and prevented people from registering for the coming elections — even if the planes were flying above our heads that didn't prevent us from manning checkpoints. And some of our men followed the people to the market to make sure they wouldn't register. Now registration has almost stopped in our province." But why were they determined to prevent people from voting? "It's better for them. Most of the people know that this new government won't help them but those who don't know we prevent them."
As the mawlawi talked, Amanullah sat by the window pushing the curtain aside a little and peering out into the square. At the far side of the square sat two police cars.
The urban Taliban
Not all of the Taliban have beards. Inside Kabul University Taliban support is mushrooming. In a small filthy hotel in Kabul, I met a group of Taliban-supporting students. The room had two mattresses on the floor, a TV set on a cardboard box and a strong stench from the lavatories next door. From the window came the din of traffic police sirens and the hum of a generator. Around a breakfast spread of cheese, green tea and bread, the young men told their stories.
Luqman's hair is parted in the middle pulled down on his forehead. He is clean shaven, with a pencil-thin moustache. His beige sharwal qameez is pressed and his chocolate jacket is immaculately clean, almost impossible in the dust and fumes of Kabul. He carried a black computer bag and when started to speak it felt he was delivering a speech on the radio. I had to remind him to lower his voice – after all, he was supposed to be an undercover insurgent. Luqman is a self-declared propagandist for the Taliban in charge of updating the movement's website. He spoke good Arabic and better English. He is member of the cultural shura of the movement.
"We monitor the situation and when we see any issue that can provide propaganda to the Taliban, we raise it and create awareness amongst the people: issues like the occupation and how they terrorise the people, the corruption of the government, anything that can help the cause of the Taliban." He said the website was updated hourly. "We have all the tools we need. Most of us speak English, Arabic, Pashtu and Dari."
He had not been a Taliban supporter when they were in power "but when the occupation came and we saw the atrocities we joined the Taliban. Lots of my university friends are with the Taliban not because they are Taliban but because they are against this government and the occupation. No one expected the Taliban to be back, but when the normal people saw the corruption of the government, when they saw that the warlords are back, people started supporting the resistance."
The Threki Taliban [the current Taliban movement] was not the same as the Taliban which had ruled, he said. And its grip on the country is tightening, he insisted: "The Taliban are squeezing the circle on Kabul, and the signs of the collapse of the government are similar to signs of the collapse of all governments that face an insurrection: they only control the cities, the streets are fed up with them and we have our intelligence even in the streets."
Another of the young men, Abdul Rhaman, explained that he studied in the morning at Kabul University and attended a private school, at night. In basic English he described how he worked as a recruiter for the Taliban among fellow students.
"I convince friends inside and outside the university that the Taliban are coming. We use all the facilities we have, our words and our pens to recruit for the movement, in the university, the bazaar and everywhere in the city."
The irony is that in working the cities to recruit for the Taliban, Abdul Rhaman is using the freedom of speech that is provided by the Afghan government. "There is freedom of speech now in Afghanistan and we are not scared of the government. We work cautiously, we talk to the people as if we are talking about political and daily issues. The government is too weak to follow us or monitor us."
A couple of weeks ago I called Mullah Muhamadi again. I wanted to go down and meet Qomendan Hemmet again. "No," he replied in Arabic over the phone. "The weather is too cold now. We are leaving to a neighbouring country. See you next year."
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
The rights and wrongs of killing civillians New Economist
Gaza: the rights and wrongs
Dec 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Israel was provoked, but as in Lebanon in 2006 it may find this war a hard one to end, or to justify
THE scale and ferocity of the onslaught on Gaza have been shocking, and the television images of civilian suffering wrench the heart. But however deplorable, Israel’s resort to military means to silence the rockets of Hamas should have been no surprise. This war has been a long time in the making.
Since Israel evacuated its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip three years ago, Palestinian groups in Gaza have fired thousands of rudimentary rockets and mortar bombs across the border, killing very few people but disrupting normal life in a swathe of southern Israel. They fired almost 300 between December 19th, when Hamas ignored Egypt’s entreaties and decided not to renew a six-month truce, and December 27th, when Israel started its bombing campaign .To that extent, Israel is right to say it was provoked.
Of provocation and proportion
It is easy to point out from afar that barely a dozen Israelis had been killed by Palestinian rockets since the Gaza withdrawal. But few governments facing an election, as Israel’s is, would let their towns be peppered every day with rockets, no matter how ineffective. As Barack Obama said on a visit to one Israeli town in July, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.” In recent months, moreover, Hamas has smuggled far more lethal rockets into its Gaza enclave, some of which are now landing in Israeli cities that were previously out of range. On its border with Lebanon, Israel already faces one radical non-state actor, Hizbullah, that is formally dedicated to Israel’s destruction and has a powerful arsenal of Iranian-supplied missiles at its disposal. The Israelis are understandably reluctant to let a similar danger grow in Gaza.
And yet Israel should not be surprised by the torrent of indignation it has aroused from around the world. This is not just because people seldom back the side with the F-16s. In general, a war must pass three tests to be justified. A country must first have exhausted all other means of defending itself. The attack should be proportionate to the objective. And it must stand a reasonable chance of achieving its goal. On all three of these tests Israel is on shakier ground than it cares to admit.
It is true that Israel has put up with the rockets from Gaza for a long time. But it may have been able to stop the rockets another way. For it is not quite true that Israel’s only demand in respect of Gaza has been for quiet along the border. Israel has also been trying to undermine Hamas by clamping an economic blockade on Gaza, while boosting the economy of the West Bank, where the Palestinians’ more pliant secular movement, Fatah, holds sway. Even during the now-lapsed truce, Israel prevented all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from entering the strip. So although Israel was provoked, Hamas can claim that it was provoked too. If Israel had ended the blockade, Hamas may have renewed the truce. Indeed, on one reading of its motives, Hamas resumed fire to force Israel into a new truce on terms that would include opening the border.
On proportionality, the numbers speak for themselves—up to a point. After the first three days, some 350 Palestinians had been killed and only four Israelis. Neither common sense nor the laws of war require Israel to deviate from the usual rule, which is to kill as many enemies as you can and avoid casualties on your own side. Hamas was foolish to pick this uneven fight. But of the Palestinian dead, several score were civilians, and many others were policemen rather than combatants. Although both Western armies and their foes have killed far more civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel’s interest should be to minimise the killing. The Palestinians it is bombing today will be its neighbours for ever.
This last point speaks to the test of effectiveness. Israel said at first that, much as it would like to topple Hamas, its present operation has the more limited aim of “changing reality” so that Hamas stops firing across the border. But as Israel learnt in Lebanon in 2006, this is far from easy. As with Hizbullah, Hamas’s “resistance” to Israel has made it popular and delivered it to power. It is most unlikely to bend the knee. Like Hizbullah, it will probably prefer to keep on firing no matter how hard it is hit, daring Israel to send its ground forces into a messy street fight in Gaza’s congested cities and refugee camps.
Now cease fire
Can Israel have forgotten the lesson of Lebanon so soon? Hardly. If anything, its campaign against Hamas now is intended to compensate for its relative failure against Hizbullah then. With Iran’s nuclear threat on the horizon, and Iranian influence growing in both Lebanon and Gaza, Israel is keen to remind its enemies that the Jewish state can still fight and still win. Precisely for that reason, despite its talk of a long campaign, it may be more receptive than it is letting on to an immediate ceasefire. Its aircraft have already pummelled almost every target in Gaza. Further military gains will be harder. A truce now, if Hamas really did stop its fire, could be presented to voters as the successful rehabilitation of Israeli deterrence.
But a ceasefire needs a mediator. Mr Obama is not yet president, and George Bush has so far hung back, just as he did in 2006 while waiting for an Israeli knockout blow that did not come. This time, he and everyone else with influence should pile in at once. To bring Hamas on board, a ceasefire would need to include an end to Israel’s blockade, but that would be a good thing in itself, relieving the suffering in Gaza and removing one of the reasons Hamas gives for fighting.
After that, Mr Obama will have to gather up what is left of diplomacy in the Middle East. It is not all hopeless. Until this week, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, was talking to Israel about how to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But Mr Abbas presides over the West Bank only, and little progress is possible so long as half of Palestine’s people support an organisation that can still not bring itself to renounce armed struggle or recognise Israel’s right to exist. Since Hamas is not going to disappear, some way must be found to change its mind. Bombs alone will never do that.
Proportional to what?
Dec 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The rights and wrongs of killing civilians
IN THE arithmetic of death, the latest fight between Israel and Hamas has been an unequal contest: more than 350 Palestinians killed in Israeli air strikes in the first four days, many of them civilians, against four Israelis killed by Hamas’s rockets. But does such one-sided bloodshed make Israel guilty of using “disproportionate force”, as argued by, among others, Amnesty International and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, just ending his six-month presidency of the European Union?
Proportionality is intimately bound up with notions of the just war, and has been enshrined in treaties regulating warfare’s conduct since the Hague Convention of 1907. But familiar as it is, proportionality is a slippery idea. It has two different meanings in Western theory. On the grounds for going to war, jus ad bellum, the cause must be important enough to justify force; any good that will follow must outweigh the inevitable pain and destruction. In the conduct of war, jus in bello, any action must weigh the military gain against the likely harm to civilians.
Human-rights law has developed mostly in terms of jus in bello. The Geneva Conventions of 1949, dealing mainly with the protection of non-combatants in conflicts between states, were updated in 1977 to include more explicitly wars within states. Israel and the United States have not ratified the later protocols, though they do not really question the principle that armies must avoid “an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.
The arguments are over the nebulous facts of a particular incident. Did Israel do enough to avoid civilian deaths? Do Palestinian policemen count as combatants? For Israel, the use of overwhelming force is both legitimate and, given its desire to restore its “deterrent effect” towards its enemies, sometimes necessary. Israel says that intent is what matters: it says it tries to avoid civilian deaths, whereas Hamas deliberately seeks to kill Israeli civilians with its rockets, relatively ineffective as they may be. Hamas responds with two arguments: as the disproportionately weaker party, Palestinians must use the crude means at their disposal to free their lands from Israeli occupation; more controversially, it often says there are no Israeli civilians since most Israelis serve in the army.
Proportionality in jus ad bellum and jus in bello are hard to separate: indiscriminate killing will colour the view of whether a war is justified; and even proportionate actions in battle will be denounced if the war is deemed unjust. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, arguments about legality fast turn into ones about history. If the tit-for-tat starting point is Hamas’s rocket attacks, then the Israelis have a right to defend themselves; if it is Israel’s occupation of Palestine or the dispossession of Palestinians when Israel was born in 1948, then Palestinians can argue for a right to resist. Proportional or not, the killing of innocents will go on until the dispute is settled.
Dec 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Israel was provoked, but as in Lebanon in 2006 it may find this war a hard one to end, or to justify
THE scale and ferocity of the onslaught on Gaza have been shocking, and the television images of civilian suffering wrench the heart. But however deplorable, Israel’s resort to military means to silence the rockets of Hamas should have been no surprise. This war has been a long time in the making.
Since Israel evacuated its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip three years ago, Palestinian groups in Gaza have fired thousands of rudimentary rockets and mortar bombs across the border, killing very few people but disrupting normal life in a swathe of southern Israel. They fired almost 300 between December 19th, when Hamas ignored Egypt’s entreaties and decided not to renew a six-month truce, and December 27th, when Israel started its bombing campaign .To that extent, Israel is right to say it was provoked.
Of provocation and proportion
It is easy to point out from afar that barely a dozen Israelis had been killed by Palestinian rockets since the Gaza withdrawal. But few governments facing an election, as Israel’s is, would let their towns be peppered every day with rockets, no matter how ineffective. As Barack Obama said on a visit to one Israeli town in July, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.” In recent months, moreover, Hamas has smuggled far more lethal rockets into its Gaza enclave, some of which are now landing in Israeli cities that were previously out of range. On its border with Lebanon, Israel already faces one radical non-state actor, Hizbullah, that is formally dedicated to Israel’s destruction and has a powerful arsenal of Iranian-supplied missiles at its disposal. The Israelis are understandably reluctant to let a similar danger grow in Gaza.
And yet Israel should not be surprised by the torrent of indignation it has aroused from around the world. This is not just because people seldom back the side with the F-16s. In general, a war must pass three tests to be justified. A country must first have exhausted all other means of defending itself. The attack should be proportionate to the objective. And it must stand a reasonable chance of achieving its goal. On all three of these tests Israel is on shakier ground than it cares to admit.
It is true that Israel has put up with the rockets from Gaza for a long time. But it may have been able to stop the rockets another way. For it is not quite true that Israel’s only demand in respect of Gaza has been for quiet along the border. Israel has also been trying to undermine Hamas by clamping an economic blockade on Gaza, while boosting the economy of the West Bank, where the Palestinians’ more pliant secular movement, Fatah, holds sway. Even during the now-lapsed truce, Israel prevented all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from entering the strip. So although Israel was provoked, Hamas can claim that it was provoked too. If Israel had ended the blockade, Hamas may have renewed the truce. Indeed, on one reading of its motives, Hamas resumed fire to force Israel into a new truce on terms that would include opening the border.
On proportionality, the numbers speak for themselves—up to a point. After the first three days, some 350 Palestinians had been killed and only four Israelis. Neither common sense nor the laws of war require Israel to deviate from the usual rule, which is to kill as many enemies as you can and avoid casualties on your own side. Hamas was foolish to pick this uneven fight. But of the Palestinian dead, several score were civilians, and many others were policemen rather than combatants. Although both Western armies and their foes have killed far more civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel’s interest should be to minimise the killing. The Palestinians it is bombing today will be its neighbours for ever.
This last point speaks to the test of effectiveness. Israel said at first that, much as it would like to topple Hamas, its present operation has the more limited aim of “changing reality” so that Hamas stops firing across the border. But as Israel learnt in Lebanon in 2006, this is far from easy. As with Hizbullah, Hamas’s “resistance” to Israel has made it popular and delivered it to power. It is most unlikely to bend the knee. Like Hizbullah, it will probably prefer to keep on firing no matter how hard it is hit, daring Israel to send its ground forces into a messy street fight in Gaza’s congested cities and refugee camps.
Now cease fire
Can Israel have forgotten the lesson of Lebanon so soon? Hardly. If anything, its campaign against Hamas now is intended to compensate for its relative failure against Hizbullah then. With Iran’s nuclear threat on the horizon, and Iranian influence growing in both Lebanon and Gaza, Israel is keen to remind its enemies that the Jewish state can still fight and still win. Precisely for that reason, despite its talk of a long campaign, it may be more receptive than it is letting on to an immediate ceasefire. Its aircraft have already pummelled almost every target in Gaza. Further military gains will be harder. A truce now, if Hamas really did stop its fire, could be presented to voters as the successful rehabilitation of Israeli deterrence.
But a ceasefire needs a mediator. Mr Obama is not yet president, and George Bush has so far hung back, just as he did in 2006 while waiting for an Israeli knockout blow that did not come. This time, he and everyone else with influence should pile in at once. To bring Hamas on board, a ceasefire would need to include an end to Israel’s blockade, but that would be a good thing in itself, relieving the suffering in Gaza and removing one of the reasons Hamas gives for fighting.
After that, Mr Obama will have to gather up what is left of diplomacy in the Middle East. It is not all hopeless. Until this week, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, was talking to Israel about how to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But Mr Abbas presides over the West Bank only, and little progress is possible so long as half of Palestine’s people support an organisation that can still not bring itself to renounce armed struggle or recognise Israel’s right to exist. Since Hamas is not going to disappear, some way must be found to change its mind. Bombs alone will never do that.
Proportional to what?
Dec 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The rights and wrongs of killing civilians
IN THE arithmetic of death, the latest fight between Israel and Hamas has been an unequal contest: more than 350 Palestinians killed in Israeli air strikes in the first four days, many of them civilians, against four Israelis killed by Hamas’s rockets. But does such one-sided bloodshed make Israel guilty of using “disproportionate force”, as argued by, among others, Amnesty International and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, just ending his six-month presidency of the European Union?
Proportionality is intimately bound up with notions of the just war, and has been enshrined in treaties regulating warfare’s conduct since the Hague Convention of 1907. But familiar as it is, proportionality is a slippery idea. It has two different meanings in Western theory. On the grounds for going to war, jus ad bellum, the cause must be important enough to justify force; any good that will follow must outweigh the inevitable pain and destruction. In the conduct of war, jus in bello, any action must weigh the military gain against the likely harm to civilians.
Human-rights law has developed mostly in terms of jus in bello. The Geneva Conventions of 1949, dealing mainly with the protection of non-combatants in conflicts between states, were updated in 1977 to include more explicitly wars within states. Israel and the United States have not ratified the later protocols, though they do not really question the principle that armies must avoid “an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.
The arguments are over the nebulous facts of a particular incident. Did Israel do enough to avoid civilian deaths? Do Palestinian policemen count as combatants? For Israel, the use of overwhelming force is both legitimate and, given its desire to restore its “deterrent effect” towards its enemies, sometimes necessary. Israel says that intent is what matters: it says it tries to avoid civilian deaths, whereas Hamas deliberately seeks to kill Israeli civilians with its rockets, relatively ineffective as they may be. Hamas responds with two arguments: as the disproportionately weaker party, Palestinians must use the crude means at their disposal to free their lands from Israeli occupation; more controversially, it often says there are no Israeli civilians since most Israelis serve in the army.
Proportionality in jus ad bellum and jus in bello are hard to separate: indiscriminate killing will colour the view of whether a war is justified; and even proportionate actions in battle will be denounced if the war is deemed unjust. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, arguments about legality fast turn into ones about history. If the tit-for-tat starting point is Hamas’s rocket attacks, then the Israelis have a right to defend themselves; if it is Israel’s occupation of Palestine or the dispossession of Palestinians when Israel was born in 1948, then Palestinians can argue for a right to resist. Proportional or not, the killing of innocents will go on until the dispute is settled.
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