Chris McGreal in Jerusalem The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009 Article history
Throughout the two-week bombardment of the Gaza Strip most journalists have been kept out by the Israeli government on the pretext of security. And the Israelis are pleased with the results.
Foreign journalists have been forced to report without getting to the detail of what is going on. That meant, at least in the early days of the bombardment, that reporters who would have been in Gaza were instead reporting from Israeli towns and cities under fire from Hamas, and Israeli officials found it easier to get themselves in front of a television camera.
An Israeli official told me they were delighted at a BBC TV correspondent broadcasting from Ashkelon in a flak jacket, reinforcing the impression that the Israeli city is a war zone when there is more chance of being hit by a car than a rocket. The notable exception is al-Jazeera TV, which has a bureau in Gaza City and has been broadcasting live from there.
Danny Seaman, head of the Israeli government's press office, who has described foreign journalists as a "figleaf" for Hamas, says the exclusion of reporters from Gaza has worked in Israel's favour as it has forced a greater focus on Israel's side of the story.
"When you have hundreds of journalists coming in, most haven't the faintest idea about the war or the situation," he said. "Take the UN school [where 42 people were killed by an Israeli shell] for example. There's a lot of questions as to what actually happened. If the foreign media had been there it would have had much more of an impact on the conflict than it has at the moment. For the first time, when Israel raised questions, journalists had to address these issues and not get caught in feeding frenzy of reporting the story."
Israel has long accommodated an often critical foreign press corps, generally without interference, although hostility grew after the outbreak of the second intifada because journalists were perceived as pro-Palestinian. The Israeli government boycotted the BBC at times and a cabinet minister wrote to the corporation to accuse its highly regarded former Jerusalem correspondent, Orla Guerin, of antisemitism.
The BBC has two Palestinian producers in Gaza who have supplied material. But its Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, is among those unable to enter Gaza. "We've had coverage but of course it is not the coverage that we would have liked to have had because we would have preferred to have gone in ourselves," he said.
Israel says there is no formal ban on reporters entering Gaza and that they are prevented only by the security situation. But the government has failed to implement a high court order to let in reporters when the principal crossing is open.
Israel is not alone in this. British forces restricted access by journalists to parts of Afghanistan because of government fears about public reaction to pictures of dead Afghans. The US has manipulated coverage from Iraq, via the policy of embedding journalists with troops and discouraging "unilateral" reporters.
BBC man on the ground
Palestinian TV producer Rushdi Abu Alouf has become the unlikely star of the BBC's Gaza coverage after Israel banned foreign correspondents entering the territory, preventing Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen from taking the helm. Although unknown to most British viewers, Abu Alouf has worked for the BBC for more than five years and is a familiar voice on the BBC Arabic service. His on-camera assurance is remarkable given that he has little previous broadcasting experience."He's the unlikely star but in other ways he is the most obvious because he's used to keeping things in Gaza running," said the BBC's world news editor, Jon Williams.
Oliver Luft
Monday, 19 January 2009
Sunday, 18 January 2009
Afghanistan's best hope is for controlled warlordism
The Taliban are losing the battles but winning the war. The prognosis is wretched, yet we must sustain military ai
Max Hastings The Guardian, Monday 13 October 2008 Article history
While most of the world spent the weekend trembling for its wealth, in Afghanistan the Taliban busied themselves dying in quite large numbers, during an ill-advised assault on Helmand's provincial capital, Lashkar Gar. Around 50 insurgents were killed, for no loss to Nato and Afghan security forces.
This fits the war's pattern. Almost every time the Taliban fights a battle, it loses to overwhelming firepower. Unfortunately, such western successes are strategically meaningless. Nato is absent from vast areas of this intractable country, where the insurgents prosper. There is greater gloom about the conflict than at any time since the Taliban was ousted in 2001.
I spent a week in Afghanistan in September, and was shocked by the deterioration since my last visit two years ago. The British army, which justly prides itself on its "can-do" philosophy, has been sobered by recent experience. Its casualties are acceptable within a context of progress. But they become dismaying against a background of growing Taliban influence and slumping confidence in the Kabul government.
President Bush has decreed an American troop "surge" in Afghanistan. Some 10,000 additional troops will be committed under General David Petraeus, the Iraq "miracle worker" who now runs US Central Command.
Petraeus, the most impressive soldier America has produced since Colin Powell, is a clever and charismatic leader who might one day emerge as a presidential candidate. But he is well aware that Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is a far more primitive society, whose people find it hard to perceive the merits of any central government - least of all one as corrupt as President Hamid Karzai's - and which is now trapped in a narco-economy.
It is almost impossible for westerners, military and civilian alike, to engage with Afghans. Almost none speak the language. It is only possible to travel outside heavily fortified bases in helicopters or armoured vehicles. Afghan gratitude for the creation of a few schools and hospitals is outweighed by the simple fact that, in a diplomat's words: "Seven years ago most of the population felt safe. Now they don't."
He added brutally: "The British army has been irresponsible in suggesting that it could do the business in Helmand. We should never have taken it on. It's much more than we can handle."
The only bright spot in an overwhelmingly dark picture is the growing effectiveness of the Afghan army. Its troops are fighting well, as Afghans usually do, whoever they happen to be shooting at. Smart westerners argue that we should abandon any notion that Nato can win this war with its own troops, instead concentrating on helping Afghans to defend their own government - if they are willing.
The Kabul regime is pitifully short of credible people to run the country. I met Barna Karimi, the deputy local government minister, a 34-year-old former exile who spent 17 years in California before returning here to work for Karzai. Unsurprisingly, he talks the language of US business schools: "We have developed a strategic framework," he says. "We are constantly evaluating the performance of our governors and district governors. We have formulated a social outreach programme which revives the traditional role of the community. You guys" - he means westerners, of course - "don't have the problem of lacking a system. I am trying to create a system without qualified people."
Listening to this fluent but unmistakably Californian young social engineer, parachuted into Afghanistan from an unimaginably alien culture, I found it impossible to believe that Afghans relate to him as one of themselves.
The newish governor of Helmand, Gulab Mangal, is much more convincing. He is 52 years old and a former commissar in the Afghan army in Russian times; he was a businessman and ruler of two other provinces before he was transferred to Helmand during the summer. The British are much in love with Mangal, whom they perceive as one of the country's only honest and able officials. Their enthusiasm is dangerous, however. It feeds Karzai's morbid suspicions of him as a prospective rival.
When I told Mangal how much his efforts are admired, he said wryly: "Nobody in Kabul seems to appreciate them." He acknowledges that more than half of Helmand is today under Taliban control. "When government can't deliver," he said, "people think it better to have no government. We need to convince people that we are working for them. If we cannot do that, it would be better to go."
I found it easy to understand why foreigners are so impressed by Mangal's poise and courage. There are few people in Afghanistan whom more people want to kill. Every time he goes out to walk in a bazaar, there is a real chance that he will come back dead.
The British are desperately impatient for the impending US change of government. They believe that an Obama presidency will recognise the impossibility of military solutions in Afghanistan. It might throw its weight behind finding a substitute for Karzai and talking a way out of this shambles.
On these pages Simon Jenkins has said from the outset that the Afghan war is unwinnable. I have always shared his dismay about western blundering. Yet it seems to me that we must keep trying, though the odds against success are greater than ever. It is futile to escalate the Nato troop commitment. The only slender chance of stabilising Afghanistan lies in sustaining military and economic aid for Afghans to help themselves.
The highest aspiration must be for controlled warlordism, not conventional democracy. A civil war may prove an essential preliminary before some crude equilibrium between factions can be achieved. If this sounds a wretched prognosis, it is hard to find informed westerners with higher expectations.
Max Hastings The Guardian, Monday 13 October 2008 Article history
While most of the world spent the weekend trembling for its wealth, in Afghanistan the Taliban busied themselves dying in quite large numbers, during an ill-advised assault on Helmand's provincial capital, Lashkar Gar. Around 50 insurgents were killed, for no loss to Nato and Afghan security forces.
This fits the war's pattern. Almost every time the Taliban fights a battle, it loses to overwhelming firepower. Unfortunately, such western successes are strategically meaningless. Nato is absent from vast areas of this intractable country, where the insurgents prosper. There is greater gloom about the conflict than at any time since the Taliban was ousted in 2001.
I spent a week in Afghanistan in September, and was shocked by the deterioration since my last visit two years ago. The British army, which justly prides itself on its "can-do" philosophy, has been sobered by recent experience. Its casualties are acceptable within a context of progress. But they become dismaying against a background of growing Taliban influence and slumping confidence in the Kabul government.
President Bush has decreed an American troop "surge" in Afghanistan. Some 10,000 additional troops will be committed under General David Petraeus, the Iraq "miracle worker" who now runs US Central Command.
Petraeus, the most impressive soldier America has produced since Colin Powell, is a clever and charismatic leader who might one day emerge as a presidential candidate. But he is well aware that Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is a far more primitive society, whose people find it hard to perceive the merits of any central government - least of all one as corrupt as President Hamid Karzai's - and which is now trapped in a narco-economy.
It is almost impossible for westerners, military and civilian alike, to engage with Afghans. Almost none speak the language. It is only possible to travel outside heavily fortified bases in helicopters or armoured vehicles. Afghan gratitude for the creation of a few schools and hospitals is outweighed by the simple fact that, in a diplomat's words: "Seven years ago most of the population felt safe. Now they don't."
He added brutally: "The British army has been irresponsible in suggesting that it could do the business in Helmand. We should never have taken it on. It's much more than we can handle."
The only bright spot in an overwhelmingly dark picture is the growing effectiveness of the Afghan army. Its troops are fighting well, as Afghans usually do, whoever they happen to be shooting at. Smart westerners argue that we should abandon any notion that Nato can win this war with its own troops, instead concentrating on helping Afghans to defend their own government - if they are willing.
The Kabul regime is pitifully short of credible people to run the country. I met Barna Karimi, the deputy local government minister, a 34-year-old former exile who spent 17 years in California before returning here to work for Karzai. Unsurprisingly, he talks the language of US business schools: "We have developed a strategic framework," he says. "We are constantly evaluating the performance of our governors and district governors. We have formulated a social outreach programme which revives the traditional role of the community. You guys" - he means westerners, of course - "don't have the problem of lacking a system. I am trying to create a system without qualified people."
Listening to this fluent but unmistakably Californian young social engineer, parachuted into Afghanistan from an unimaginably alien culture, I found it impossible to believe that Afghans relate to him as one of themselves.
The newish governor of Helmand, Gulab Mangal, is much more convincing. He is 52 years old and a former commissar in the Afghan army in Russian times; he was a businessman and ruler of two other provinces before he was transferred to Helmand during the summer. The British are much in love with Mangal, whom they perceive as one of the country's only honest and able officials. Their enthusiasm is dangerous, however. It feeds Karzai's morbid suspicions of him as a prospective rival.
When I told Mangal how much his efforts are admired, he said wryly: "Nobody in Kabul seems to appreciate them." He acknowledges that more than half of Helmand is today under Taliban control. "When government can't deliver," he said, "people think it better to have no government. We need to convince people that we are working for them. If we cannot do that, it would be better to go."
I found it easy to understand why foreigners are so impressed by Mangal's poise and courage. There are few people in Afghanistan whom more people want to kill. Every time he goes out to walk in a bazaar, there is a real chance that he will come back dead.
The British are desperately impatient for the impending US change of government. They believe that an Obama presidency will recognise the impossibility of military solutions in Afghanistan. It might throw its weight behind finding a substitute for Karzai and talking a way out of this shambles.
On these pages Simon Jenkins has said from the outset that the Afghan war is unwinnable. I have always shared his dismay about western blundering. Yet it seems to me that we must keep trying, though the odds against success are greater than ever. It is futile to escalate the Nato troop commitment. The only slender chance of stabilising Afghanistan lies in sustaining military and economic aid for Afghans to help themselves.
The highest aspiration must be for controlled warlordism, not conventional democracy. A civil war may prove an essential preliminary before some crude equilibrium between factions can be achieved. If this sounds a wretched prognosis, it is hard to find informed westerners with higher expectations.
'I'm more afraid of piracy than of cyclones'
Greece has the biggest merchant fleet in the world. Here Panayiotis Tzanetakos, captain of the 75,000-tonne Greek-flagged Ellivita, speaks to Helena Smith about the ordeal modern-day piracy has created for crews
Helena Smith The Guardian, Saturday 22 November 2008 Article history
'No seaman has ever seen anything like this. It's a war zone out there and, put simply, the situation is out of control. They've got weapons, RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], you name it, and it's not like before when they'd come on board and rob you. These days they hijack ships, take the entire crew hostage and demand huge ransoms. It's very primitive and very frightening.
'I come from a seafaring family, my father and brother are both merchant seamen and I've been in this job for nine years, doing seven months at a stretch on the high seas. I can tell you I'm scared. It makes you sick with worry when you transit through seas that are as dangerous as this. I have a young family, a wife who is expecting a baby and rightly she is beside herself with worry.
'This month we've had to go through the Gulf of Aden twice - carrying grain from the Ukraine to Iran and now carrying the fertilisers we picked up in Saudi Arabia and are taking to New Orleans.
'It creates a knot in the pit of your stomach passing through the Gulf. The first time we were totally unprotected and I felt so alone, so responsible for my crew and cargo.
'The second time we were able to join a convoy that was being escorted by a Russian frigate but when another merchant ship about 30 miles south of us was suddenly attacked, the warship had to leave. Everyone in this business is afraid. We are all in contact with each other over VHF, one ship [master] will let another know if he thinks he has seen something suspicious, and on the basis of the conversations I've heard it's no exaggeration to say that we're all terrified.
'More often than not the coalition warships that are meant to be patrolling the seas, warding off the pirates, are useless. A lot of the time they don't respond to distress calls and, anyway, the pirates are so quick.
'I am now more afraid of piracy than storms and cyclones. In fact, I'd rather take my ship into the North Atlantic in winter, when the seas can be at their most difficult to navigate, than transit the Gulf of Aden because, frankly, in terms of menace pirates are more dangerous than nature at its worst.
'My crew consists of eight Greeks and 12 Filipinos and I've instructed that lookouts be increased but the pirates tie the speedboats to trawlers and skiffs they pretend to be fishing in and usually such craft aren't visible more than three miles away.
'When they attack you - and so far the Ellivita has been lucky - the game is up quickly. In five to 10 minutes the pirates surround you in speedboats; then using ladders they board the vessel and from that moment there's nothing you can do. They're the ones with the weapons and they've taken the crew hostage.
'We're mariners not military men and our job is not to use guns against other people. But I also think we have reached a point where to protect ships we have to have security teams, or weapons, on board. Right now it seems it really does seem as if it can't get any worse. But crews are also concerned that the next thing we'll be seeing are deaths, people being shot by pirates demanding ransoms.'
Helena Smith The Guardian, Saturday 22 November 2008 Article history
'No seaman has ever seen anything like this. It's a war zone out there and, put simply, the situation is out of control. They've got weapons, RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], you name it, and it's not like before when they'd come on board and rob you. These days they hijack ships, take the entire crew hostage and demand huge ransoms. It's very primitive and very frightening.
'I come from a seafaring family, my father and brother are both merchant seamen and I've been in this job for nine years, doing seven months at a stretch on the high seas. I can tell you I'm scared. It makes you sick with worry when you transit through seas that are as dangerous as this. I have a young family, a wife who is expecting a baby and rightly she is beside herself with worry.
'This month we've had to go through the Gulf of Aden twice - carrying grain from the Ukraine to Iran and now carrying the fertilisers we picked up in Saudi Arabia and are taking to New Orleans.
'It creates a knot in the pit of your stomach passing through the Gulf. The first time we were totally unprotected and I felt so alone, so responsible for my crew and cargo.
'The second time we were able to join a convoy that was being escorted by a Russian frigate but when another merchant ship about 30 miles south of us was suddenly attacked, the warship had to leave. Everyone in this business is afraid. We are all in contact with each other over VHF, one ship [master] will let another know if he thinks he has seen something suspicious, and on the basis of the conversations I've heard it's no exaggeration to say that we're all terrified.
'More often than not the coalition warships that are meant to be patrolling the seas, warding off the pirates, are useless. A lot of the time they don't respond to distress calls and, anyway, the pirates are so quick.
'I am now more afraid of piracy than storms and cyclones. In fact, I'd rather take my ship into the North Atlantic in winter, when the seas can be at their most difficult to navigate, than transit the Gulf of Aden because, frankly, in terms of menace pirates are more dangerous than nature at its worst.
'My crew consists of eight Greeks and 12 Filipinos and I've instructed that lookouts be increased but the pirates tie the speedboats to trawlers and skiffs they pretend to be fishing in and usually such craft aren't visible more than three miles away.
'When they attack you - and so far the Ellivita has been lucky - the game is up quickly. In five to 10 minutes the pirates surround you in speedboats; then using ladders they board the vessel and from that moment there's nothing you can do. They're the ones with the weapons and they've taken the crew hostage.
'We're mariners not military men and our job is not to use guns against other people. But I also think we have reached a point where to protect ships we have to have security teams, or weapons, on board. Right now it seems it really does seem as if it can't get any worse. But crews are also concerned that the next thing we'll be seeing are deaths, people being shot by pirates demanding ransoms.'
Shipping industry urges EU governments to take up arms against Somali pirates
• Fears grow that fleets will be forced to avoid area
• Islamist group says it is hunting hijackers
Xan Rice in Nairobi and David Gow in Brussels The Guardian,
Saturday 22 November 2008 Article history
(Abdul Hassan, chief of the pirate group called the 'Central Regional Coastguard', carries a rocket-propelled grenade on to a boat with some of his crew. Photograph: Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images)
European shipowners are urging their governments to wage war on Somali pirates and seize vessels by force, the Guardian has learned, amid growing fear that shippers will otherwise avoid the seas off the Horn of Africa altogether - at huge cost to global trade.
A day after the world's biggest shipping company, AP Moller-Maersk, said it would divert some of its fleet from the Suez canal and take the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope, the industry urged stronger action against pirates. Last night, the BBC reported the UN had given the green light to warships to go after vessels.
Alfons Guinier, secretary general of the European Community Shipowners Association, said other companies were thinking of following Maersk's example. But he said that his association, which claims to speak for 41% of the world's merchant fleet, wanted EU governments to go further after the hijacking a week ago of the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star more than 400 miles off the Somalian coast.
"We know there will be more military forces in the area, but let's hope they will go after the pirates and stop this escalation," he said. "We're asking not just for more escorts but for repressive action." The demand comes after the International Maritime Organisation asked the UN security council to sanction dispatch of as many warships and aircraft as possible to "disrupt" pirate operations, secure shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden, and escort vessels, including those bringing food relief to war-torn Somalia.
The pirate gangs have operated with near impunity for years, but may now also face a confrontation on land.
Yesterday, rebels from the al-Shabaab Islamist movement entered Harardheere, a pirate base halfway up Somalia's east coast. An elder in the port said: "The Islamists arrived searching for the pirates and the Saudi ship. The Islamists say they will attack the pirates for hijacking a Muslim ship."
Some residents said the fighters wanted a cut of the ransom, but a spokesman for al-Shabaab claimed they were hunting the pirates for the "bigger crime" of hijacking a ship belonging to a Muslim country.
Sheikh Abdirahim Isse Adow said: "Haradheere is under our control, and we shall do something about that ship."
Pirates yesterday released a Greek chemical tanker held since September. The East African Seafarers' Association said the Liberian-flagged MV Genious and 19 crew were released after its owner paid a ransom.
But Somali pirates still hold at least 15 other vessels and more than 250 crew members. Kenya's foreign minister, Moses Wetangula, claimed yesterday that the pirates had netted $150m (£101m) in ransoms this year, though maritime experts say the figure is closer to $30m. Iran's biggest shipping firm confirmed that it had also received a ransom demand for a Hong-Kong-registered ship carrying 36,000 tonnes of wheat that was captured on Tuesday. The British foreign secretary, David Miliband, has called on shipowners to refuse to negotiate.
The European shipowners' demand will be made on Monday in talks in with the EU naval coordination cell set up by foreign ministers in September. It is creating an enforcement unit, under Operation Atalanta, based in RAF Northwood outside London. It is due to be fully operational in early December and be headed by a British rear admiral.
Guinier said the EU should coordinate its military efforts with other navies from Nato, Russia, Japan, Canada and India, which is sending four warships to the region. An Indian warship destroyed a pirate "mothership" this week.
The IMO's secretary-general, Efthimios Mitropoulos, meanwhile, told the UN that, with more than 12% of global oil transport passing through the Gulf of Aden, widespread diversions via South Africa would bring "a series of negative repercussions". "Such diversions would almost double the length of a typical voyage from the Gulf to Europe, thereby increasing fuel consumption, emissions and transport costs which would have to be passed on eventually to consumers everywhere," he said in a statement.
Peter Beck-Bang, a Maersk spokesman in Copenhagen, said that the diversion of its ships would add eight days to a voyage to the US and 14 days to one to Europe. If the situation remained unchanged, this would cost the firm "two-digit millions of dollars" in 2009. The diversion covers eight tankers and three container ships.
Ditch the smooth transition. The people voted for change
Instead of accepting the corrupted bail-out and reassuring Wall Street, Obama's team must start doing the hard stuff now
Naomi Klein The Guardian, Friday 14 November 2008 Article history
The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington's handling of the Wall Street bail-out is not merely incompetent: it is borderline criminal.
In a moment of high panic in September, the US treasury pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed - a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140bn in tax revenue, legislators found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that "[the] treasury had no authority to issue the [tax change] notice".
Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals the treasury has negotiated with many of the banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals: "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending - for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions ... is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.
Then there is the nearly $2 trillion that America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg news service believes this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.
Yet the Democrats are either openly defending the administration or refusing to intervene. "There is only one president at a time," we hear from Barack Obama. That's true. But every sweetheart deal the Bush administration makes threatens to hobble Obama's ability to make good on his promise of change. To cite just one example, that $140bn in missing revenue is almost the same sum as Obama's renewable energy programme. Obama owes it to the people who elected him to call this what it is: an attempt to undermine the electoral process by stealth.
Yes, there is only one president at a time, but that president needed the support of powerful Democrats - including Obama - to get the bail-out passed. Now that it is clear the Bush administration is violating the terms to which both parties agreed, the Democrats have not just the right, but a grave responsibility, to intervene forcefully.
I suspect the real reason the Democrats are failing to act has less to do with presidential protocol than with fear: fear that the stockmarket, which has the temperament of an over-indulged two-year-old, will throw one of its world-shaking tantrums. Disclosing the truth about who is receiving federal loans, we are told, could cause the market to bet against those banks. Question the legality of equity deals, and the same thing will happen. Challenge the $140bn tax giveaway and mergers could fail.
More than that, the Democrats, including Obama, appear to believe that the need to soothe the market should govern all key economic decisions in the transition period. Which is why, just days after a euphoric victory for "change", the mantra abruptly shifted to "smooth transition" and "continuity".
Take Obama's choice for chief of staff. Rahm Emanuel, the House Democrat who received the most donations from the financial sector, sends an unmistakably reassuring message to Wall Street. When asked if Obama would be moving quickly to increase taxes on the wealthy, as promised, Emanuel pointedly did not answer the question.
This same market-coddling logic should, we are told, guide Obama's selection of treasury secretary. Fox News and MNSBC explained that Larry Summers, who held the post under Clinton, is the man "the Street would like most". Let's be clear why. "The Street" would cheer a Summers appointment for the same reason the rest of us should fear it: because traders will assume that this champion of deregulation will offer a transition from Henry Paulson so smooth that we will barely know it happened. On the other hand, someone like Sheila Bair, the chairman of the banks' insurer of last resort, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, would spark fear on the Street - for all the right reasons.
One thing we know for certain is that the market will react violently to anyone likely to impose serious regulation, invest in people, and cut off the free money. In short, the markets can be relied on to vote in precisely the opposite way that Americans have just voted. (A recent poll found 60% strongly favour "stricter regulations on financial institutions", while just 21% support aid to financial companies.)
There is no way to reconcile the public's vote for change with the market's foot-stomping for more of the same. Any moves to change course will be met with market shocks. The good news is that once it is clear the new rules will be applied across the board, fairly, the market will stabilise and adjust. Furthermore, the timing for this turbulence could not be better. Over the past three months, we've been shocked so often that market stability would come as more of a surprise. That gives Obama a window to disregard the calls for a seamless transition and do the hard stuff first. Few will be able to blame him for a crisis that predates him, or fault him for honouring the clearly expressed wishes of the electorate. The longer he waits, however, the more memories will fade.
When transferring power from a functional, trustworthy regime, everyone favours a smooth transition. When exiting an era marked by criminality and bankrupt ideology, a little rockiness at the start would be a very good sign.
This column was first published in The Nation
Naomi Klein The Guardian, Friday 14 November 2008 Article history
The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington's handling of the Wall Street bail-out is not merely incompetent: it is borderline criminal.
In a moment of high panic in September, the US treasury pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed - a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140bn in tax revenue, legislators found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that "[the] treasury had no authority to issue the [tax change] notice".
Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals the treasury has negotiated with many of the banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals: "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending - for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions ... is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.
Then there is the nearly $2 trillion that America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg news service believes this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.
Yet the Democrats are either openly defending the administration or refusing to intervene. "There is only one president at a time," we hear from Barack Obama. That's true. But every sweetheart deal the Bush administration makes threatens to hobble Obama's ability to make good on his promise of change. To cite just one example, that $140bn in missing revenue is almost the same sum as Obama's renewable energy programme. Obama owes it to the people who elected him to call this what it is: an attempt to undermine the electoral process by stealth.
Yes, there is only one president at a time, but that president needed the support of powerful Democrats - including Obama - to get the bail-out passed. Now that it is clear the Bush administration is violating the terms to which both parties agreed, the Democrats have not just the right, but a grave responsibility, to intervene forcefully.
I suspect the real reason the Democrats are failing to act has less to do with presidential protocol than with fear: fear that the stockmarket, which has the temperament of an over-indulged two-year-old, will throw one of its world-shaking tantrums. Disclosing the truth about who is receiving federal loans, we are told, could cause the market to bet against those banks. Question the legality of equity deals, and the same thing will happen. Challenge the $140bn tax giveaway and mergers could fail.
More than that, the Democrats, including Obama, appear to believe that the need to soothe the market should govern all key economic decisions in the transition period. Which is why, just days after a euphoric victory for "change", the mantra abruptly shifted to "smooth transition" and "continuity".
Take Obama's choice for chief of staff. Rahm Emanuel, the House Democrat who received the most donations from the financial sector, sends an unmistakably reassuring message to Wall Street. When asked if Obama would be moving quickly to increase taxes on the wealthy, as promised, Emanuel pointedly did not answer the question.
This same market-coddling logic should, we are told, guide Obama's selection of treasury secretary. Fox News and MNSBC explained that Larry Summers, who held the post under Clinton, is the man "the Street would like most". Let's be clear why. "The Street" would cheer a Summers appointment for the same reason the rest of us should fear it: because traders will assume that this champion of deregulation will offer a transition from Henry Paulson so smooth that we will barely know it happened. On the other hand, someone like Sheila Bair, the chairman of the banks' insurer of last resort, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, would spark fear on the Street - for all the right reasons.
One thing we know for certain is that the market will react violently to anyone likely to impose serious regulation, invest in people, and cut off the free money. In short, the markets can be relied on to vote in precisely the opposite way that Americans have just voted. (A recent poll found 60% strongly favour "stricter regulations on financial institutions", while just 21% support aid to financial companies.)
There is no way to reconcile the public's vote for change with the market's foot-stomping for more of the same. Any moves to change course will be met with market shocks. The good news is that once it is clear the new rules will be applied across the board, fairly, the market will stabilise and adjust. Furthermore, the timing for this turbulence could not be better. Over the past three months, we've been shocked so often that market stability would come as more of a surprise. That gives Obama a window to disregard the calls for a seamless transition and do the hard stuff first. Few will be able to blame him for a crisis that predates him, or fault him for honouring the clearly expressed wishes of the electorate. The longer he waits, however, the more memories will fade.
When transferring power from a functional, trustworthy regime, everyone favours a smooth transition. When exiting an era marked by criminality and bankrupt ideology, a little rockiness at the start would be a very good sign.
This column was first published in The Nation
Franco repression ruled as a crime against humanity
Giles Tremlett in Madrid The Guardian, Friday 17 October 2008 Article history
A Spanish judge yesterday ordered the grave of poet and playwright Federico García Lorca dug up as, for the first time, the repression unleashed by the dictator General Francisco Franco was formally declared a crime against humanity.
In a controversial reversal of Spain's traditional refusal to seek out those responsible for the killings of Lorca and more than 100,000 other people, Judge Baltasar Garzón also asked investigators to provide him with information on Franco's chief henchmen and generals. Franco and his chief collaborators, Garzón said, had been responsible for "mass killings, torture and the systematic, general and illegal detentions of political opponents".
Death squads, military courts and other tribunals sent 114,000 people to their deaths during and after a three-year civil war in the 1930s that traumatised Spain for generations, according to the judge.
Several thousand lie in unmarked mass graves, despite the attempts of volunteers over the past eight years to disinter corpses and hand them over to relatives for reburial. The judge ordered the digging up of 19 such graves, including one on a hillside overlooking the southern city of Granada where Lorca is thought to have been shot in 1936. Lorca's family do not want the poet exhumed, but recently promised not to oppose a petition from relatives of two men shot and buried alongside him for the grave to be dug up.
"I'm very pleased. I've been waiting 10 years for this," said the granddaughter of one of them, Nieves Galindo.
Garzón requested formal proof that 35 generals and Francoist ministers are no longer alive. He also ordered the interior ministry to provide a list of those in charge of the pro-Francoist Falange movement up until 1951. It is doubtful, however, that any are still alive.
The judge explicitly said that his investigations included repression carried out until 1952, 13 years after Franco had won the civil war and established his dictatorship. Many Spaniards still find the period hard to talk about and some fear Garzón's investigation will reopen old wounds.
The right has been critical of the judge and of a recent "historical memory" law to help Franco's victims passed by the Socialist government of the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
An unwritten "pact of forgetting" underpinned Spain's rapid transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975.
Garzón's critics claim that all civil war and Francoist repression is covered by a 1977 amnesty law and by rules which mean that most crimes lapse after 20 years. Garzón declared yesterday, however, that where a victim's body had not been found a crime of kidnapping was still being committed and had not lapsed.
The attorney general's office, which has opposed the judge's investigation, is expected to appeal against the decision. It argues that international human rights laws do not apply to the civil war as Spain was not signed up to them at the time.
Garzón has previously investigated repression by military regimes in Latin America in the 1970s. In 1998 he ordered the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile while he was in London but failed to get him extradited to face trial in Spain.
Spanish courts have been criticised for investigating crimes committed by other dictatorships without ever looking at those carried out under Franco.
· This article was amended on Tuesday October 21 2008. Our maths was out when we said a Spanish judge had investigated repression carried out until 1952, 17 years after Franco won the civil war. The war ended in 1939. This has been corrected.
A Spanish judge yesterday ordered the grave of poet and playwright Federico García Lorca dug up as, for the first time, the repression unleashed by the dictator General Francisco Franco was formally declared a crime against humanity.
In a controversial reversal of Spain's traditional refusal to seek out those responsible for the killings of Lorca and more than 100,000 other people, Judge Baltasar Garzón also asked investigators to provide him with information on Franco's chief henchmen and generals. Franco and his chief collaborators, Garzón said, had been responsible for "mass killings, torture and the systematic, general and illegal detentions of political opponents".
Death squads, military courts and other tribunals sent 114,000 people to their deaths during and after a three-year civil war in the 1930s that traumatised Spain for generations, according to the judge.
Several thousand lie in unmarked mass graves, despite the attempts of volunteers over the past eight years to disinter corpses and hand them over to relatives for reburial. The judge ordered the digging up of 19 such graves, including one on a hillside overlooking the southern city of Granada where Lorca is thought to have been shot in 1936. Lorca's family do not want the poet exhumed, but recently promised not to oppose a petition from relatives of two men shot and buried alongside him for the grave to be dug up.
"I'm very pleased. I've been waiting 10 years for this," said the granddaughter of one of them, Nieves Galindo.
Garzón requested formal proof that 35 generals and Francoist ministers are no longer alive. He also ordered the interior ministry to provide a list of those in charge of the pro-Francoist Falange movement up until 1951. It is doubtful, however, that any are still alive.
The judge explicitly said that his investigations included repression carried out until 1952, 13 years after Franco had won the civil war and established his dictatorship. Many Spaniards still find the period hard to talk about and some fear Garzón's investigation will reopen old wounds.
The right has been critical of the judge and of a recent "historical memory" law to help Franco's victims passed by the Socialist government of the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
An unwritten "pact of forgetting" underpinned Spain's rapid transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975.
Garzón's critics claim that all civil war and Francoist repression is covered by a 1977 amnesty law and by rules which mean that most crimes lapse after 20 years. Garzón declared yesterday, however, that where a victim's body had not been found a crime of kidnapping was still being committed and had not lapsed.
The attorney general's office, which has opposed the judge's investigation, is expected to appeal against the decision. It argues that international human rights laws do not apply to the civil war as Spain was not signed up to them at the time.
Garzón has previously investigated repression by military regimes in Latin America in the 1970s. In 1998 he ordered the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile while he was in London but failed to get him extradited to face trial in Spain.
Spanish courts have been criticised for investigating crimes committed by other dictatorships without ever looking at those carried out under Franco.
· This article was amended on Tuesday October 21 2008. Our maths was out when we said a Spanish judge had investigated repression carried out until 1952, 17 years after Franco won the civil war. The war ended in 1939. This has been corrected.
Thursday, 15 January 2009
The return of the Baghdad blogger
Two years ago, Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger, was forced to leave the city he loved. But this week he returned from exile ... cautiously optimistic about the future of his country
Original Baghdad Blog
Baghdad Blog (Salem Pax)
Twitter Salem Pax
I have arrived in Baghdad on a magic carpet! Honestly, I have. There was never a more aptly named airline: Magic Carpet Airlines. And it flies daily flights to the Iraqi capital from Beirut, where I've been living for the last three months. As the pilot announced our descent in to Baghdad airport, I prepared myself for the 15-minute stomach-turning downward spiral flights have to make to keep within the secured airspace above the airport. But instead we went for an unhurried, gradual landing: the first and very welcome sign that things have changed.
I have been out of Iraq for almost two years now. The Baghdad I left in 2007 was not the city I had grown up in and loved. She had become so different, so violent, so not herself that I didn't feel I was abandoning her.
I remember the moment when it felt as if leaving wasn't a choice, but a very clear necessity. I was sitting in my pyjamas on the ground in our front garden; my father, mother and aunt crouched beside me, also in their pyjamas. Two American soldiers pointed these absurdly large rifles at us and an unnecessarily aggressive Iraqi translator hissed: "We know you have explosives in this house. It's better for you to tell us where they are than us going through the whole place and finding them."
At the time we were living in an Iraqi-army-protected compound in which many current and previous government officials had been provided "safe" housing. My father's short stint as a minister during Ayad Allawi's interim Governing Council in 2004, as well as his heading of the election campaign for the Iraqi National Accord, gave us the dubious privilege of said housing. The oh-so-many factions who were willing to kill and/or kidnap for money or political reasons, only had to keep an eye on who was going in and out of the gates to the compound. We were fish in a barrel.
But back to that morning in May 2007 as we sat on the ground in our PJs with six humvees at the gate, a dozen American soldiers going through our belongings and an Iraqi translator wearing a balaclava doing his "nobody moves, nobody gets hurt" thing.
None of us were particularly surprised by all this. To be honest, it felt inevitable. Let me count some of the reasons why: the Sunni family name, the tribal connections related to that name, the tide turning against Ayad Allawi and all those associated with his government when a strongly religious Shia government was elected, and last but not least, my father's very vocal opposition to this religious tide taking over. We - the rest of the family - had become pawns in all this.
After about an hour searching our house the US military unit left, having found nothing that could give them an excuse to detain any of us. But what they did find is the money my mother had taken out of the bank in preparation for our trip to Jordan the following day. We all knew the drill by then: after your house has been searched, go through your possessions. I managed to catch the translator before he left to tell him that $2,000 was missing from the house: he told me that he would look into it.
We left home 10 minutes after all the humvees had gone. When being on the street felt dangerous, we had stayed home; now that didn't feel safe either. We felt that as a family we had somehow managed to escape kidnappings and assassinations when they were daily realities around us, and we shouldn't push our luck any further. Most of my extended family had left Iraq by then. We almost had as many acquaintances and family in Jordan and Syria as we had in Iraq.
We left, and so did many, many others. By 2007 the UN High Commission for Refugees estimated that about five million Iraqis had had to leave their homes since the war began in 2003, most moving to other cities within Iraq. When I visited the south of Iraq, early after the start of the war, there were already signs that some Shia Muslim factions were forcing Christians to move to the north. Meanwhile the Kurds in the north were pushing Arabs out of Kurdistan. In Baghdad, not only were districts becoming identified by sect and religion but to curb the violence between them huge concrete walls were being erected demarking Shia and Sunni territories.
I still can't understand why doctors were driven out of the country. They were followed by academics; lists of names of university professors were being circulated, along with businessmen and government officials. They were on hit lists, we were told. Never mind why they were being targeted, were they going to risk it? Of course not: they packed and left. If you didn't fit into the political, ethnic and sectarian compartments created in the postwar chaos, you were out. Baghdad became a city of fear and grief.
And to make sure that the boot was firmly planted on our backsides, one of my uncles who was still in Baghdad got kidnapped from a supposedly protected compound within the ministry of oil. Shia militias walked in, knocked on doors, took high-level officials in the ministry and walked out. It was an ugly, ugly affair. It took months to get him released and no one in the family talks about it much. It left those of my family still in Iraq terrified because they had to deal with the kidnappers who were demanding a ransom. Those of my family already outside washed and dried their hands of the whole country. It felt like a clear message: this is not your country any more, you are not welcome.
Not that there were many places outside Iraq welcoming Iraqis. Governments in neighbouring countries were already grumbling about the number of Iraqi refugees "flooding" their gates and European countries were revising their asylum policies regarding Iraqis. The general argument was: "Your country is now safe, go back." We fled to wherever we could: my mother stayed in Jordan, my father in Lebanon; my brother managed to find a job in the United Arab Emirates, and I travelled to London having been lucky enough to secure a British Council scholarship to do a postgraduate degree in journalism.
So, two years later, after all that, what on earth am I doing back here?
I wish I could say that it is a wider general trend of Iraqis returning. If you were following the news after the US "surge" and the widely publicised improvement in the security situation since that time, you might have the impression that Iraqis were returning in big numbers. The truth is many of those who did go back left shortly afterwards again, having found their homes occupied by other people, or their neighbourhoods still unsafe. But many of those kept returning, bringing more family members with them: one foot in Iraq and the other holding the door open just in case a quick retreat was needed. That's where my family and I are now.
Since the war started, Baghdad has become for me the sort of place where you can never really judge how it is until you are there. Listening to the news from afar can be confusing and rarely gives you the full picture. When I moved to Beirut three months ago the picture got slightly less blurry. And now I want to see if the situation really has improved.
While in Beirut I found out that the Lebanese design consultancy firm I used to work for while I was writing my blog from Baghdad is back doing work in Iraq, and that the scope of the projects the Iraqi government is planning is amazing. A new general masterplan for greater Baghdad is being formulated, former army barracks are being turned into huge new housing districts and Sadr City should be seeing some impressive developments very soon. All of this has been boosted by gradual improvements in security and profits from high oil prices last year.
Even as we were hearing about a suicide bomber near the Kadhimya shrine just a week ago, the Baghdad municipality website was announcing an open call to architects and urban planners to submit designs for the development of the wider area around that holy shrine. This, just a month after opening bids for the construction of the Baghdad subway project. I didn't even know plans had been submitted for the project, let alone it being ready for construction.
An underground railway in Baghdad? Sounds delightfully crackers, doesn't it? But no less so than the plans for five-star hotels and shopping malls in the city centre, or a UAE property development company planning a $15bn housing project in the north. OK, I know what you're going to do now. You're going to send me a link to that mad "Disneyland in Baghdad" project the Times reported on last April and tell me not to get overexcited.
But what gives me some optimism regarding these projects - not the Disneyland thing, that would be silly - is what I've seen on TV over the last two weeks from the city of Karbala. The city has just been through Ashura, the 10-day commemoration of one of Shia Islam's most revered imams. The event was widely covered with live broadcasts from the city centre, and what I saw was a far cry from the shabby city centre I visited in 2003 when I made a film for Newsnight about the Ashura festivities. What we are betting on, given money and some calm, is that it can be done.
On the politics front, I have never felt as supportive of the current Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki as I was during the negotiations for the Status of Forces Agreement with the United States. For once it felt as if the Iraqi government could stand up for itself and not be a pushover. Yes, the negotiations were messy and the Iraqi parliament acted, in the end, like a bunch of kindergarten kids, but as an executive authority the prime minister and his cabinet mostly played hardball with the US negotiators. It was great to follow, and hopefully a sign of political maturity.
My mother spent about four weeks in Baghdad very recently. She stayed in my flat in the centre of the city, where I am now living. She came back feeling very positive about the situation. She told everyone she talked to about how much she enjoyed herself there. Without telling us about her plans, she travelled to Karbala and Najaf to visit relatives and went on a taxi ride through Baghdad. And all she complained about when she told us about her adventures was the traffic and how incredibly expensive everything was now. But when my aunt decided to go to Baghdad for a trip too, my mother called her to tell her that she hoped she hadn't sounded too enthusiastic and optimistic, it was just that she was so excited about being back.
Now that I am in Baghdad myself I think I should temper my optimism as well. Let's not forget that until recently Christians were being driven out of their homes in Mosul, suicide attacks are still killing hundreds weekly and with provincial elections approaching, things could take a turn for the worse. Services are still more miss than hit - long electricity and water cuts are still the norm.
And I am not sure if the city I left is the city I have arrived back in. Will what it went through have changed it and its people so much that it will feel alien to me? I hope not. I want to feel like a Baghdadi again; I want to get my driver's licence back and drive along the roads I used to love. I want to visit the book market and check out the art galleries. I even hear the Iraqi National Museum is open to the public again. After becoming a source of fear, worry and sadness, I want Baghdad to feel like home again.
The busy and bustling streets from the airport to my flat are a good omen and my aunt's welcoming words, "Good, you're back, you'll like it" make me even more hopeful. So, until my next update from Iraq, keep your fingers crossed that Baghdad gives me as warm a welcome as she did.
by Salem Pax
'He spared neither regime nor invader' (How the Baghdad Blogger became a global media phenomenon)
by Leslie Plommer
In the breathless limbo of early 2003, as Iraqis waited for the American-led assault against the regime of Saddam Hussein, a special voice emerged to tell the world what it was like to be an ordinary person in a city on the approach to war. Writing in wry, idiomatic English under the pseudonym Salam Pax, "the Baghdad Blogger" became an international media phenomenon - his web diary avidly followed around the world, quoted, criticised and admired. And puzzled over: who was he?
On 20 March, the war arrived. The bombing of Baghdad began. By 9 April, a crowd in the capital was pulling down the huge bronze statue of Saddam Hussein under the eyes of newly arrived American troops. Before, during and after this focal period, a young man living somewhere in the Baghdad suburbs transmitted (with just one temporary break in service) his account of his life among family, friends and neighbours. Closely observed, intelligent, sometimes passionate, frequently funny, he spared neither regime nor invader.
Yet masked by his insouciant tone is the fact that what he was doing held great danger as the dying apparatus of the regime lashed out.
Excerpts from his blogpost on 9 March 2003 give a flavour, as he takes aim at a British reporter who has ended his piece from the Mutanabi Friday book market by saying that Iraqis seemed to be putting on an air of normality. "Look," responds Salam, "what are you supposed to do then? Run around in the streets wailing? War is at the door eeeeeeeeeeeee! . . . But in order not to disappoint the BBC, me, Raed and G put on our 'normal' faces and went to buy CDs from Arassat Street in a demonstration of normality ... many thanks to Malaysian bootleggers for providing us with cheap CDs. The Deftones, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Erykah Badu and the Amr Diab have joined the Pax Radio CD racks.
"Other normal stuff we did this week: finished taping all the windows in the house, actually a very relaxing exercise if you forget why you are doing it in the first place. Bought 60 litres of gasoline to run the small electricity generator we have, bought two nifty kerosene cookers and stocked loads of kerosene and dug holes in the garden to bury the stuff so that the house doesn't turn into a bomb. Prepared one room for emergency nasty attacks and bought 'particle masks' - that's what it says on the box.
"Got two rooms in our house ready to welcome our first IDPs (internally displaced persons) - my youngest aunt who is a single mom with three kids because she lives farthest away from the rest of us and another aunt from Karbala in the south. Hotel Pax is officially open for the season, no need to make reservations but you might need to bring a mattress if you come too late."
In the wake of the invasion, a Guardian correspondent set off in search of the blog's author. He proved to be "a witty young Iraqi living in a two-storey house in a Baghdad suburb", Rory McCarthy reported. "In June last year, Salam (this much of his name, at least, is real) was a recently graduated architect, aged 29, living at home with his parents and brother in Baghdad. His best friend was Raed, 25, a Palestinian-Jordanian he had met while studying architecture, who was taking a masters degree in Jordan. Raed was at best an infrequent email correspondent and so Salam started writing up his news from home on a weblog, a site on the internet where he could post his scribblings as often as he liked for his friend to read. He called it: Where is Raed?"
As war approached, that site - www.dear_raed.blogspot.com - became the stage for the Salam Pax phenomenon.
Original Baghdad Blog
Baghdad Blog (Salem Pax)
Twitter Salem Pax
I have arrived in Baghdad on a magic carpet! Honestly, I have. There was never a more aptly named airline: Magic Carpet Airlines. And it flies daily flights to the Iraqi capital from Beirut, where I've been living for the last three months. As the pilot announced our descent in to Baghdad airport, I prepared myself for the 15-minute stomach-turning downward spiral flights have to make to keep within the secured airspace above the airport. But instead we went for an unhurried, gradual landing: the first and very welcome sign that things have changed.
I have been out of Iraq for almost two years now. The Baghdad I left in 2007 was not the city I had grown up in and loved. She had become so different, so violent, so not herself that I didn't feel I was abandoning her.
I remember the moment when it felt as if leaving wasn't a choice, but a very clear necessity. I was sitting in my pyjamas on the ground in our front garden; my father, mother and aunt crouched beside me, also in their pyjamas. Two American soldiers pointed these absurdly large rifles at us and an unnecessarily aggressive Iraqi translator hissed: "We know you have explosives in this house. It's better for you to tell us where they are than us going through the whole place and finding them."
At the time we were living in an Iraqi-army-protected compound in which many current and previous government officials had been provided "safe" housing. My father's short stint as a minister during Ayad Allawi's interim Governing Council in 2004, as well as his heading of the election campaign for the Iraqi National Accord, gave us the dubious privilege of said housing. The oh-so-many factions who were willing to kill and/or kidnap for money or political reasons, only had to keep an eye on who was going in and out of the gates to the compound. We were fish in a barrel.
But back to that morning in May 2007 as we sat on the ground in our PJs with six humvees at the gate, a dozen American soldiers going through our belongings and an Iraqi translator wearing a balaclava doing his "nobody moves, nobody gets hurt" thing.
None of us were particularly surprised by all this. To be honest, it felt inevitable. Let me count some of the reasons why: the Sunni family name, the tribal connections related to that name, the tide turning against Ayad Allawi and all those associated with his government when a strongly religious Shia government was elected, and last but not least, my father's very vocal opposition to this religious tide taking over. We - the rest of the family - had become pawns in all this.
After about an hour searching our house the US military unit left, having found nothing that could give them an excuse to detain any of us. But what they did find is the money my mother had taken out of the bank in preparation for our trip to Jordan the following day. We all knew the drill by then: after your house has been searched, go through your possessions. I managed to catch the translator before he left to tell him that $2,000 was missing from the house: he told me that he would look into it.
We left home 10 minutes after all the humvees had gone. When being on the street felt dangerous, we had stayed home; now that didn't feel safe either. We felt that as a family we had somehow managed to escape kidnappings and assassinations when they were daily realities around us, and we shouldn't push our luck any further. Most of my extended family had left Iraq by then. We almost had as many acquaintances and family in Jordan and Syria as we had in Iraq.
We left, and so did many, many others. By 2007 the UN High Commission for Refugees estimated that about five million Iraqis had had to leave their homes since the war began in 2003, most moving to other cities within Iraq. When I visited the south of Iraq, early after the start of the war, there were already signs that some Shia Muslim factions were forcing Christians to move to the north. Meanwhile the Kurds in the north were pushing Arabs out of Kurdistan. In Baghdad, not only were districts becoming identified by sect and religion but to curb the violence between them huge concrete walls were being erected demarking Shia and Sunni territories.
I still can't understand why doctors were driven out of the country. They were followed by academics; lists of names of university professors were being circulated, along with businessmen and government officials. They were on hit lists, we were told. Never mind why they were being targeted, were they going to risk it? Of course not: they packed and left. If you didn't fit into the political, ethnic and sectarian compartments created in the postwar chaos, you were out. Baghdad became a city of fear and grief.
And to make sure that the boot was firmly planted on our backsides, one of my uncles who was still in Baghdad got kidnapped from a supposedly protected compound within the ministry of oil. Shia militias walked in, knocked on doors, took high-level officials in the ministry and walked out. It was an ugly, ugly affair. It took months to get him released and no one in the family talks about it much. It left those of my family still in Iraq terrified because they had to deal with the kidnappers who were demanding a ransom. Those of my family already outside washed and dried their hands of the whole country. It felt like a clear message: this is not your country any more, you are not welcome.
Not that there were many places outside Iraq welcoming Iraqis. Governments in neighbouring countries were already grumbling about the number of Iraqi refugees "flooding" their gates and European countries were revising their asylum policies regarding Iraqis. The general argument was: "Your country is now safe, go back." We fled to wherever we could: my mother stayed in Jordan, my father in Lebanon; my brother managed to find a job in the United Arab Emirates, and I travelled to London having been lucky enough to secure a British Council scholarship to do a postgraduate degree in journalism.
So, two years later, after all that, what on earth am I doing back here?
I wish I could say that it is a wider general trend of Iraqis returning. If you were following the news after the US "surge" and the widely publicised improvement in the security situation since that time, you might have the impression that Iraqis were returning in big numbers. The truth is many of those who did go back left shortly afterwards again, having found their homes occupied by other people, or their neighbourhoods still unsafe. But many of those kept returning, bringing more family members with them: one foot in Iraq and the other holding the door open just in case a quick retreat was needed. That's where my family and I are now.
Since the war started, Baghdad has become for me the sort of place where you can never really judge how it is until you are there. Listening to the news from afar can be confusing and rarely gives you the full picture. When I moved to Beirut three months ago the picture got slightly less blurry. And now I want to see if the situation really has improved.
While in Beirut I found out that the Lebanese design consultancy firm I used to work for while I was writing my blog from Baghdad is back doing work in Iraq, and that the scope of the projects the Iraqi government is planning is amazing. A new general masterplan for greater Baghdad is being formulated, former army barracks are being turned into huge new housing districts and Sadr City should be seeing some impressive developments very soon. All of this has been boosted by gradual improvements in security and profits from high oil prices last year.
Even as we were hearing about a suicide bomber near the Kadhimya shrine just a week ago, the Baghdad municipality website was announcing an open call to architects and urban planners to submit designs for the development of the wider area around that holy shrine. This, just a month after opening bids for the construction of the Baghdad subway project. I didn't even know plans had been submitted for the project, let alone it being ready for construction.
An underground railway in Baghdad? Sounds delightfully crackers, doesn't it? But no less so than the plans for five-star hotels and shopping malls in the city centre, or a UAE property development company planning a $15bn housing project in the north. OK, I know what you're going to do now. You're going to send me a link to that mad "Disneyland in Baghdad" project the Times reported on last April and tell me not to get overexcited.
But what gives me some optimism regarding these projects - not the Disneyland thing, that would be silly - is what I've seen on TV over the last two weeks from the city of Karbala. The city has just been through Ashura, the 10-day commemoration of one of Shia Islam's most revered imams. The event was widely covered with live broadcasts from the city centre, and what I saw was a far cry from the shabby city centre I visited in 2003 when I made a film for Newsnight about the Ashura festivities. What we are betting on, given money and some calm, is that it can be done.
On the politics front, I have never felt as supportive of the current Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki as I was during the negotiations for the Status of Forces Agreement with the United States. For once it felt as if the Iraqi government could stand up for itself and not be a pushover. Yes, the negotiations were messy and the Iraqi parliament acted, in the end, like a bunch of kindergarten kids, but as an executive authority the prime minister and his cabinet mostly played hardball with the US negotiators. It was great to follow, and hopefully a sign of political maturity.
My mother spent about four weeks in Baghdad very recently. She stayed in my flat in the centre of the city, where I am now living. She came back feeling very positive about the situation. She told everyone she talked to about how much she enjoyed herself there. Without telling us about her plans, she travelled to Karbala and Najaf to visit relatives and went on a taxi ride through Baghdad. And all she complained about when she told us about her adventures was the traffic and how incredibly expensive everything was now. But when my aunt decided to go to Baghdad for a trip too, my mother called her to tell her that she hoped she hadn't sounded too enthusiastic and optimistic, it was just that she was so excited about being back.
Now that I am in Baghdad myself I think I should temper my optimism as well. Let's not forget that until recently Christians were being driven out of their homes in Mosul, suicide attacks are still killing hundreds weekly and with provincial elections approaching, things could take a turn for the worse. Services are still more miss than hit - long electricity and water cuts are still the norm.
And I am not sure if the city I left is the city I have arrived back in. Will what it went through have changed it and its people so much that it will feel alien to me? I hope not. I want to feel like a Baghdadi again; I want to get my driver's licence back and drive along the roads I used to love. I want to visit the book market and check out the art galleries. I even hear the Iraqi National Museum is open to the public again. After becoming a source of fear, worry and sadness, I want Baghdad to feel like home again.
The busy and bustling streets from the airport to my flat are a good omen and my aunt's welcoming words, "Good, you're back, you'll like it" make me even more hopeful. So, until my next update from Iraq, keep your fingers crossed that Baghdad gives me as warm a welcome as she did.
by Salem Pax
'He spared neither regime nor invader' (How the Baghdad Blogger became a global media phenomenon)
by Leslie Plommer
In the breathless limbo of early 2003, as Iraqis waited for the American-led assault against the regime of Saddam Hussein, a special voice emerged to tell the world what it was like to be an ordinary person in a city on the approach to war. Writing in wry, idiomatic English under the pseudonym Salam Pax, "the Baghdad Blogger" became an international media phenomenon - his web diary avidly followed around the world, quoted, criticised and admired. And puzzled over: who was he?
On 20 March, the war arrived. The bombing of Baghdad began. By 9 April, a crowd in the capital was pulling down the huge bronze statue of Saddam Hussein under the eyes of newly arrived American troops. Before, during and after this focal period, a young man living somewhere in the Baghdad suburbs transmitted (with just one temporary break in service) his account of his life among family, friends and neighbours. Closely observed, intelligent, sometimes passionate, frequently funny, he spared neither regime nor invader.
Yet masked by his insouciant tone is the fact that what he was doing held great danger as the dying apparatus of the regime lashed out.
Excerpts from his blogpost on 9 March 2003 give a flavour, as he takes aim at a British reporter who has ended his piece from the Mutanabi Friday book market by saying that Iraqis seemed to be putting on an air of normality. "Look," responds Salam, "what are you supposed to do then? Run around in the streets wailing? War is at the door eeeeeeeeeeeee! . . . But in order not to disappoint the BBC, me, Raed and G put on our 'normal' faces and went to buy CDs from Arassat Street in a demonstration of normality ... many thanks to Malaysian bootleggers for providing us with cheap CDs. The Deftones, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Erykah Badu and the Amr Diab have joined the Pax Radio CD racks.
"Other normal stuff we did this week: finished taping all the windows in the house, actually a very relaxing exercise if you forget why you are doing it in the first place. Bought 60 litres of gasoline to run the small electricity generator we have, bought two nifty kerosene cookers and stocked loads of kerosene and dug holes in the garden to bury the stuff so that the house doesn't turn into a bomb. Prepared one room for emergency nasty attacks and bought 'particle masks' - that's what it says on the box.
"Got two rooms in our house ready to welcome our first IDPs (internally displaced persons) - my youngest aunt who is a single mom with three kids because she lives farthest away from the rest of us and another aunt from Karbala in the south. Hotel Pax is officially open for the season, no need to make reservations but you might need to bring a mattress if you come too late."
In the wake of the invasion, a Guardian correspondent set off in search of the blog's author. He proved to be "a witty young Iraqi living in a two-storey house in a Baghdad suburb", Rory McCarthy reported. "In June last year, Salam (this much of his name, at least, is real) was a recently graduated architect, aged 29, living at home with his parents and brother in Baghdad. His best friend was Raed, 25, a Palestinian-Jordanian he had met while studying architecture, who was taking a masters degree in Jordan. Raed was at best an infrequent email correspondent and so Salam started writing up his news from home on a weblog, a site on the internet where he could post his scribblings as often as he liked for his friend to read. He called it: Where is Raed?"
As war approached, that site - www.dear_raed.blogspot.com - became the stage for the Salam Pax phenomenon.
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