Mick Hartley

Growing Tragedy

The death toll from Aceh alone may now reach 400,000, according to Indonesia's Ambassador to Malaysia Drs H. Rusdihardjo:

He said the estimate was based on air surveillance by Indonesian authorities who found no signs of life in places like Meulaboh, Pulau Simeulue and Tapak Tuan while several islands off the west coast of Sumatera had "disappeared".

He said the latest death toll of more than 40,000 in Acheh and northern Sumatera did not take into account the figures from the other areas, especially in the west of the region.

"Aerial surveillance found the town of Meulaboh completely destroyed with only one buiding standing. The building, which belonged to the military, happens to be on a hill," he told reporters after receiving RM1 million in aid for Indonesia's Tsunami Disaster Relief Fund here Thursday.

Rusdihardjo said there were about 150,000 residents in Meulaboh, which was located 150km from the epicentre of the earthquake while Pulau Simeuleu had a population of 76,000.

The inexorable rise in the death toll reflects one of the most pervasive features of this whole tragedy: the way that the full enormity of the disaster has taken so long to sink in. The Swedish government's response is fairly typical: "we didn't fully understand the scale of how many people would be injured and dead." I was certainly guilty of this: my first post was almost light-hearted, complaining about the poor quality of the footage we were seeing. I had the excuse that I'd just received word from my son in Thailand that he was safe: a colossal relief of course, but looking back I never really expected it to be otherwise. It seemed like just a handful of tourists had been caught. Now, well, I read about the father who flew out to look for his son, in time to identify the body....

I wonder if there's not some kind of protective mechanism at work here. It's the sheer excitement of it - the awe-inspiring vision of nature doing its worst - that grabs you at first. Wow, you think, just look at the power of that. I'm sure something similar would have been the response of many of those who saw the waves approaching: before self-preservation kicks in and you run like hell, there's an overwhelming urge just to stand and gawp in amazement, like the tourists in the series of pictures in the Times today, from Hat Rai Lay Beach, near Krabi in southern Thailand (I can only find one on line - no. 16 in the picture gallery "pictures of the disaster" from the Times front page). Some are running, but some are just staring, transfixed, in awe.

Update: that same photo - which in the Times print edition is the third of three - features here, in the blog of an American in Phuket describing what happened when the tsunami hit.

Hitch at FrontPage

Clive Davis links to a long Hitchens interview at FrontPage, with the man, promoting his latest book, on great form.

FP: Mr. Hitchens, it was a real privilege to speak with you. Congratulations on your new collection of brilliant essays and I wish you all the luck in the future. I hope you will not be shy to visit us again soon.

Hitchens: Shyness is not the problem.

Indeed.

Sontag and Courage

In the wake of Susan Sontag's death, the most quoted of her writings is this paragraph penned in the New Yorker just after 9/11 (see Tim Blair or LGF):

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing America bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue) whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.

For Marc Cooper, jumping to her defence, "Sullying Sontag for this postulation was, in itself, an act of cowardice." Marc goes on to say how poorly Sontag fitted the stereotype of a kneejerk leftie:

In 1982, Sontag raised a storm at a New York Town Hall rally for the Polish Solidarnosc movement. Saying that Communism was but Fascism with a human face, Sontag angered the liberal audience by arguing that if anyone had read only The Nation or only the Readers Digest over the previous 20 years, the one who read the Digest would be be better prepared to understand the revolt in Poland.

During the 1990's Sontag made the Balkans and opposition to Milosevic's form of facsism her personal crusade, making serveral perilous visits to Sarajevo and -- somtimes alone among American intellectuals- calling for armed Western intervention.

Which is all true. Nevertheless her New Yorker remarks were offensive. She's claiming to be stating uncomfortable facts whereas she is in truth condoning - "undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions" - and even lauding, comparing the hijackers favourably with pilots bombing Iraq. Despite the pretence that courage is morally neutral, it is no such thing. To ascribe courage to someone is to praise them. That's why her contention that the attackers were not cowards - in effect, that they were courageous - grates so much, and intentionally so. She claims to be just giving the facts, which the general hysteria of the moment had obscured, which people of lesser integrity (and, yes, courage) than herself were too scared to utter, intimidated as they were by the herd requirement to condemn. But to ascribe courage to the 9/11 hijackers, or to suicide bombers generally, is simply perverse. Yes, it's clear why someone might wish to say that: in a sense the decision to pull the pin and end your life along with other innocents around you requires a certain determination which is also required by acts of courage; but that's as far as it goes. Courage is not a word we should be using in such situations. Perhaps cowardly is not much more appropriate, but at least it manages to convey some condemnation of a despicable act: a condemnation which Sontag was at pains to distance herself from.

Update: Roger Kimball provides a typically jaundiced but amusing overview of Sontag's career. Going to Sarajevo in 1993 to produce Waiting for Godot--"surely one of the consummate radical chic gestures of all time".

Iranian Bloggers

Parthisan at the Persian Students in the UK blog (via Jeff Jarvis) translates a post by Mohammed Ali Abtahi, the former VP of Iran, "because I believe it is one of the most important actions that he (as part of Khatami's government) has taken during the past 8 years. Abtahi, as the ex VP in Parliamental Affairs, and a member of the Constitutional Supervision Committee, has published some details of interrogation and torture that has happened in prisons, and I'm sure by doing so he is seeking public and international attention to this subject. It is very important to let the world, the media, and human rights organisations hear about it. FYI Abtahi is the only Iranian government official who blogs daily in his famous personal weblog Webneveshteha."

Following a call from the President, the constitutional supervision committee -- of which I'm a member -- invited a number of imprisoned bloggers for a meeting to investigate about the way they were treated in prison. Mr Hanif Mazruee, Ghoreishi, Ms Fereshte Ghaazi, Naderpoor and Ms Mahboobeh Mollagholi attended the meeting. They told very important points about the unjustifiable treatment they had received, including:

1- Physical torture, punches and kicks: "he banged my head to the bench that made my recently-operated nose bleed, and later I found out that they broke my nose"; "they punched us"; "we were alone in single cells for months"; and things of this kind...

2- The classical questions about sexual relationships [to create moral scandals]: "Write down the names of your boy/girl friends"; "tell us about your illegal [= out of marriage] sexual relationships"; "what kind of relationship have that girl/guy had with you?"; "how many times have you been raped, or have you raped?"; and worst of all, they gave the names of 6 reformist activist to one of the girls asking her to confess in writing that she had had illegal sexual relationship with them. And when the girl refused, they brought in a former prisoner (who had turned to their side under torture) who told the girl face to face that he had had sexual relationship with her!

3- The interrogations were managed by a formerly arrested blogger. A few other bloggers who had [given up and] repented before were under less pressure, and were in a way helping the interrogators who had lack of technical knowledge on the subject [of internet and blogs]. This proves that weak people cannot be trusted in politics. However, we understand the situation they're in and can't really blame them for what they've done.

4- Objection to the bloggers right to hire lawyers, ignoring their legal rights.

5- The interrogators lacked technical knowledge [on the subject].

6- The interrogators tried to force bloggers to confess in writing based on the templates given to them in prison, which were along the same line as the Spider's Web conspiracy article published in Kayhan newspaper. The bloggers were told that they would be freed once their confessions were printed in daily newspapers. Some of the bloggers had accepted the terms, but those whom we met today had not given up.

7- The bloggers were individually asked to write lies about the sexual and sometimes political corruptness of a number of different politicians. All of them were asked to write about Mostafa Tajzadeh and myself [Abtahi] amongst others.

The SEA-EAT Blog

Here's a blog devoted to the SE Asian earthquake crisis. "News and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts". Lots of helpline info, emergency numbers, etc.. Latest death toll 34,000, though the Indonesian figure alone could increase by 20,000. Also this:

An earthquake that unleashed deadly tidal waves on Asia was so powerful it made the earth wobble on its axis and permanently altered the regional map, US geophysicists have said.

The 9.0-magnitude temblor that struck 250 km southeast of Sumatra island on Sunday may have moved small islands as much as 20 metres, according to one expert.

"That earthquake has changed the map," US geological survey expert Ken Hudnut said.

"Based on seismic modeling, some of the smaller islands off the southwest coast of Sumatra may have moved to the southwest by about 20 metres. That is a lot of slip."

Korea Magazine

NK Zone contributor Andrei Lankov takes a wry look back at Russian attitudes to North Korea in the Asia Times:

Back in the 1970s, when I was a teenager in the then Soviet Union in my native Leningrad, many barbershops stocked copies of Korea magazine, a lavishly illustrated North Korean propaganda monthly. What was such a publication doing in the barbershops? The answer, I suspect, would be quite embarrassing for its editors: it was subscribed to in order to amuse the patrons who were waiting for a haircut.

The magazine was heavily subsidized by Pyongyang, so its annual subscription rate was dirt-cheap while its content was both bizarre and funny. Thus the magazine, which was published to inspire worldwide love and admiration for the Great Leader and his son and successor, the Dear Leader, was often (I would say from my experience, in most cases) subscribed to by people who saw it as a laughingstock and opened its pages only to make fun of the Great Men. The North Korean propaganda appeared very weird to the Russians - not least because it looked like a grossly exaggerated version of their own official propaganda. The grotesquely bad Russian translation of the texts also provided unintended comical effects.

This remarkable magazine is warmly remembered by ex-Soviet people of middle age, many of whom still can easily quote more weird sentences from memory. Sets of this venerable monthly are kept by some Russian families, and there are even a couple of Russian websites where sarcastic webmasters have collected particularly bizarre and/or comical quotations from Korean propaganda materials.

Tsunami

The last message we got from our son in Thailand, on Christmas Eve: I've had enough of Bangkok so I'm off to the beaches in the South to relax. Mmm, good timing. He's fine, we now know, but it meant that I spent more time than I wanted yesterday watching the 24-hour news channel. You'd think, what with all the thousands of people lounging on beaches armed with cameras, that someone would have managed to get some decent shots of the tsunami approaching, but instead we had the same tired footage of flooded streets in the Maldives, and interviews with journalists taking their holidays there or in Thailand, who managed to provide uninspired comments on their own little experiences. Pride of place must go to the hack on a beach in Thailand who saw the wave in the distance and rushed into his hut to get his camera, couldn't find it, rushed back out, and just had time to pick up his 5-year old son before they were swept off into the mangrove swamps. Very scary, he reckoned. Give that man a Pulitzer!

In fact the tsunami didn't fit the classic image of tiny figures fleeing in terror before a huge wall of water. It was more of a surge: relatively low, but just as relentless and devastating. The death toll will surely keep on rising.

Tim Blair has details, plus links to aid organisations.

Zahra's Blue Eyes (Updated)

MEMRI report on an Iranian TV drama series about the Israeli government stealing eyes from Palestinian children:

Iran's Sahar 1 TV station is currently airing a weekly series titled "For You, Palestine," or "Zahra's Blue Eyes." The series premiered on December 13, and is set in Israel and the West Bank. It broadcasts every Monday, and was filmed in Persian but subsequently dubbed into Arabic.

The story follows an Israeli candidate for Prime Minister, Yitzhak Cohen, who is also the military commander of the West Bank. The opening sequence of the show contains graphic scenes of surgery, and images of a Palestinian girl in a hospital whose eyes have been removed, with bandages covering the sockets.

In Episode 1, Yitzhak Cohen lectures at a medical conference on the advances being made by Israeli medicine regarding organ transplants. Later in the episode, Israelis disguised as UN workers visit a Palestinian school, ostensibly to examine the children's eyes for diseases, but in reality to select which children's eyes to steal to be used for transplants.

In Episode 2, the audience learns that the Israeli president is being kept alive by organs stolen from Palestinian children, and an Israeli military commander is seen kidnapping UN employees and Palestinians.

Update: Once that old trade-in-human-organs meme gets going, there's no stopping it. This story from the Saudi government daily Al-Watanwas was also published in the Iranian daily Jomhouri-ye Islami, and the Syrian daily Teshreen:

"Secret European military intelligence reports indicate the transformation of the American humanitarian mission in Iraq into a profitable trade in the American markets through the practice of American physicians extracting human organs from the dead and wounded, before they are put to death, for sale to medical centers in America. A secret team of American physicians follow the troops during their attacks on Iraqi armed men to ensure quick [medical] operations for extracting some organs and transferring them to private operations rooms before they are transferred to America for sale.

"The reports confirm the finding of tens of mutilated cadavers or cadavers missing parts. Some were found without a head. The American military command could not offer reasons to explain the bewilderment about the missing parts, suggesting that this may have been caused by the penetration of bullets to the [missing] parts. But these excuses cannot be medically accepted. The reports also confirmed that the burning of bodies was deliberate in order to conceal the crime of organ extraction. [The reports] further indicate that American medical teams have [made] active and suspicious moves in Iraq to recruit some Iraqis to guide them to dead and critically injured individuals to engage in the extraction of organs. These teams offer $40 for every usable kidney and $25 for an eye. The reports confirm the finding of mutilated bodies in Fallujah. The reports indicate that the cadavers are immunized inside special cars to prevent the spread of the plague until the bodies are buried by their relatives.

Syrian Baathists

It's not exactly a surprise, but now the Iraqis claim to have evidence that senior Syrian officials have been assisting the Iraqi insurgency:

The evidence includes photographs of Syrian officials taken from Iraqi fighters captured during the offensive against Fallujah last month.

US Marines in Fallujah also found a hand-held global-positioning system receiver with waypoints originating in western Syria and the names of four Syrians in a list of 27 foreign fighters contained in a ledger.

Hassan Allawi, Iraq’s newly appointed Ambassador to Syria, told The Times in Damascus: “Prime Minister Iyad Allawi wrote a letter to the Syrians saying he had the pictures but was not going to release them despite being under pressure from the Americans to do so.”

Mr Allawi said the photographs were found in the possession of Moayed Ahmed Yasseen, also known as Abu Ahmed, leader of the Jaish Muhammad group composed of former Baathist intelligence personnel. One picture showed Mr Yasseen standing beside a senior Syrian official, he said. Mr Yasseen was arrested in Fallujah in mid-November.

The evidence has triggered renewed accusations by US and Iraqi officials that Syria is providing assistance to former Iraqi Baathists who are believed to be running the insurgency from Damascus.

Last week General George W. Casey, commander of US forces in Iraq, said that the exiled Baathists had formed a group called the New Regional Command and were directing operations from Damascus. He said the Syrian authorities were “not going after the big fish, which is really the people that we’re interested in”.

Mr Allawi claimed there was an “Iraqi Baathist invasion of Syria” which was a real danger to the Syrian Government. “It is overwhelming,” he said. “They stole gold and robbed banks and came here. They have enough funds to keep fighting for 30 years.” [...]

Most of the wealthier Iraqi exiles have settled in the Mezzeh district of west Damascus. They drive expensive cars and dine in the priciest restaurants. Most Sunni Iraqi exiles openly support the anti-US resistance.

Among names mentioned by the exiles as leaders of the reorganised Iraqi Baath party are Sabawi Ibrahim, a half-brother of Saddam Hussein, who headed Iraqi intelligence at the time of the 1991 Gulf War, and Mohammed Younis al-Ahmed, secretary-general of the Iraqi Baath party regional command.

Many Iraqi exiles say that Syria is being unfairly singled out for criticism when there are many more Baathists, including senior figures of the old Iraqi regime, living in Jordan.

Censorship

Those happy to see the cancellation of the Behzti play in Birmingham are all quite adamant that this is nothing to do with censorship. From the co-founders of the Three Faiths Forum, in the Times' Letters to the Editor:

Whatever the message intended by the offending play, it can surely be set within a context other than a place sacred to the Sikh community, and we hope Birmingham Stage Company will not decide to perform the play without considering amendments which will take account of the feelings of the Sikh community. This is not a request for censorship but a plea to show sensitivity — something surely not beyond the skills of the artists concerned — and to desist from religious harassment and deliberate provocation.

From Clare Gorst ("one of the few non-Asian protesters at the demonstration outside Birmingham Repertory Theatre last Saturday"):

The opposition to the production was generated not by a desire by the Sikh community to curtail freedom of speech but by sanctity besmirched.

From Arun Arora (Director of Communications, Diocese of Birmingham, 2000-04):

The issue is not free speech or censorship. Rather it is a matter of religious sensitivity and respect.

If people are at risk of being offended by a play, they have the option of not going to see it. It's as simple as that. Forcing the play's cancellation is, um, censorship.

Update: according to the Scotsman, the play may be staged at the Royal Court theatre in London in the new year.