Mick Hartley

Arresting the Messengers

Reporting rape is damaging to the image of Sudan.

Sudan arrested one of the most prominent international aid workers in the country yesterday, for claiming that there was evidence of widespread rape in the Darfur region.

Paul Foreman, the country head of the aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Holland, has been charged with crimes against the state and faces three years in jail if convicted.

MSF Holland released the report in March, saying its doctors working in Darfur had medical evidence of about 500 rape cases over four-and-a-half months.

The Sudanese government, embarrassed by the attention drawn to its campaign of genocide in Darfur, has cranked up the pressure on aid agencies over the past six months.

The Oxfam country director was ordered out at the end of last year, and a number of aid workers, including Rafe Bullick from Edinburgh, have been killed.

Yesterday, Mohamed Farid, Sudan's attorney-general, said the report was false and that the government had begun criminal proceedings because MSF should have consulted and co-ordinated with the governmental Humanitarian Aid Commission before publishing any such information.

He said: "These kind of false reports damage the image of Sudan. We need the organisation MSF to do its medical work in Sudan ... and to be present here," he said. "But it has to do its work in its specific capacity, and this is not within its capacity here."

Meanwhile in China:

A journalist considered the doyen of China correspondents has been held in Beijing and could be charged with stealing state secrets after he tried to obtain a copy of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist leader who was purged after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong national who works for The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, would be the first reporter for a foreign publication to face charges in China.

His wife, Mary Lau, said: “He told me that he expected to be shut up for a long time. It seems they suspect him of stealing state secrets.” Mr Ching, 55, was detained in the southern city of Guangzhou on April 22. He had been trying to obtain a copy of interviews with the late Zhao, who opposed the use of military force to suppress the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Untold hundreds died when troops moved in to break up the student-led demonstration. Zhao, who died in January, was deposed as general secretary and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Mr Ching’s detention is evidence of the tight state grip on the media in China, which last year, according to the New York-based Committee to Protest Journalists, was holding 42 journalists in its jails.

A Compromise Solution

Andrei Lankov in the Asia Times (via The Marmot's Hole) argues that a major factor in the prolongation of the North Korean regime is that the leaders simply see no way out for themselves. A promise of amnesty might therefore be a way forward. I doubt the hapless North Koreans would be overjoyed to see those responsible for their plight escape with nothing more than slapped wrists, but it makes an interesting argument:

A survivor of the North Korean prison camps concludes a story of his suffering at the hands of Kim Il-sung's henchmen by saying, "I think I will live to see how those bastards will go to prison, to pay for all what they have done to us." It is easy to understand that this man, in his late 30s, with such an experience of torture, betrayal, lies and destitution, would expect revenge. After all, Adolf Hitler's executioners (well, most of them) went to prison, and some even to the gallows. Thus, it is only rational to expect that the same fate would befall the people who run one of the bloodiest "minor" dictatorships in the world.

But let's face it: such a triumph of justice is unlikely to happen. Furthermore, it probably should not be allowed to happen: the only way to prevent further suffering in North Korea might be by granting the country's elite complete immunity from persecution for all crimes committed during their rule. [...]

Nobody can restore to life the people who have perished in the torture chambers and concentration camps of the regime. But we are talking now about the living and of preventing more deaths. Countless people would be alive or have better lives had North Korea's leaders been less persistent in their stubborn (and understandable) rejection of reform, and had they been given a way out.

Certainly, the North Korean leaders might be cautious of buying into any talk of amnesty. They will have seen what happened to the former South Korean generals-turned-presidents who once were promised immunity in exchange for their willingness to surrender power in a peaceful manner. The new democratic South Korean government tried to keep its promises for a while, but in 1995, facing mounting pressures from the political left, former presidents Roh Tae-woo and Chun Doo-hwan faced prosecution.

Hence, to make such a promise believable, it should be very public, unequivocal and all-inclusive, leaving as few loopholes for future revenge-seekers as possible. Further, international involvement and overseas asylum for the top leaders might be a good idea.

There is a precedent for this, from Idi Amin of Uganda, Mobutu Sese Seko of then-Zaire to Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The latter, the hereditary dictator of Haiti, if anything, was much more of a bizarre personality than Kim, but this did not prevent him from being warmly accepted by France after his downfall.

Talk of an amnesty for North Korea's elite will have its opponents, but it is a compromise solution that might help save lives and hasten the end of the regime: if the rulers in Pyongyang know that in spite of being on the losing side they will not face persecution, let alone die in jail, but will spend the rest of their days in relative safety and comfort, they might be more willing to throw in the towel. And if lower-level officials know that they will at least keep their personal freedom after unification, they will be far less ready to fight and kill.

Illusions in Iran

Amir Taheri neatly takes apart the delusional European initiative on Iran:

The Europeans are victims of their own delusions. Their policy on Iran is based on a logical contradiction and a number of illusions.

The contradiction is this: They assume that Iran has been lying about its nuclear program for two decades, and invite the Iranians to stop lying. But to do that, they would first have to admit that they had been lying. The Europeans are asking Iran to stop doing what Iran insists it is not doing at all. Thus to satisfy the Europeans Iran must first do what it says it is not doing and then stop doing it in a verifiable way. Remember the conundrum about the liar who says that, all his life, he had told nothing but lies?

What about the European illusions?

One such is Straw's belief that the results of the Iranian presidential election will have an impact on Tehran's position. "We have to wait and see who wins," he told US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

What Straw ignores is that we already know who the winner is. He is a mid-ranking mulla named Ali Hussein-Khamenehi whose position as "The Supreme Guide" in the system created by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, gives him unlimited constitutional powers. Whoever wins the Iranian presidency next month will be little more than a member of Khamenehi's vast entourage. Like all his predecessors, the future president will be part of a façade that hides the true decision-making mechanisms of the system. Any suggestion that a president of the Islamic Republic could overrule "The Supreme Guide" is too absurd to merit refutation. [...]

The problem that the Europeans, among others, have with the Islamic Republic is not one of behavior, as Straw and his colleagues assume. The problem is with the nature of the Iranian regime.

Put in terms of practical power politics the problem is simple: The present global system is almost exclusively a Western creation. Francis Fukuyama's theory of "the end of history" is true in the sense that there no longer is a major ideological challenge to the Western world, which is now opposed only by a few oddballs such as North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Cuba. The Khomeinist regime sees itself as the successor of the late Soviet Union as the principal challenger of the West's global domination.

Talleyrand once said that there are powers that will not stop because they do not know how; they stop only when they are stopped. The experience of the past three decades shows that this is true of the Islamic Republic.

Hamid-Reza Asefi, the Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tehran, has already dismissed the package of concessions that the Europeans and, to a lesser extent, the Bush administration, have offered Iran, as "a joke." He is not being frivolous. Almost half a century of Cold War with the USSR teaches at least one lesson: Your adversary will stop doing whatever it is that you don't like only if you stop him. If you cannot, he won't stop. Why should he?

If Iran has decided to get the bomb, it is not going to stop because Straw talks to a junior mulla. Nor would the promise of investment and trade persuade them to change course. As for the threat of "referring" them to the United Nations, then above-mentioned Asefi has already described it as "laughable".

The European initiative is not only useless but could also be dangerous. By fostering Tehran's illusion that the Islamic Republic could take the major powers for a ride, the European initiative strengthens the hands of those in the camarilla who believe, or pretend to believe, that their war of attrition against a "corrupt, cowardly and moribund West" is winnable. There are many ways of dealing with the Khomeinist challenge. The European imitative, now heading for another failure, is the worst.

A Suggestion

You'd have to be churlish not to rejoice in Liverpool's triumph. So who's pissing on the parade? Who else but a Man U fan:

I was desperate for Milan to hammer Liverpool, and when the Italian team led 3-0 at half time, I hoped it might be six by the end.

This was not because Milan were the better team. (Although as Diego Maradona said: “I have seen comebacks like that in football, but never against a team so clearly superior as Milan were.”) It was because I always want other English teams to lose in Europe. And above all, because I honestly hate Liverpool FC.

For how much longer must we put up with this unpleasantness from Man U fans?

It seems to me that a solution presents itself here to the dilemma of Liverpool being unable to defend their European title. Man U should bow out of Europe next season, with Liverpool replacing them. It would give European football fans a welcome break from pictures of Alex Ferguson chewing gum, and Wayne Rooney or Roy Keane abusing other players and match officials. It would also go someway towards redeeming the reputation of a club that, frankly, could do with some good PR. Maybe Man U fans could lead the campaign: it would be one in the eye for Malcolm Glazer, and isn't that what they want? If they started losing money maybe he'd sell his shares. And by such an act of largesse they'd show that football can rise above petty rivalries, and be capable of heart-warming gestures of solidarity with other clubs. Anyway it's not like they're going to do well in Europe next season or anything.

Hair

Here's a problem which hasn't been given enough thought, in my opinion. Before the invention of scissors, how did people cut their hair? No, seriously.

I seem to remember a suggestion from some evolutionary psychologist that we evolved hair which required cutting so the socially capable could distinguish themselves from social outcasts, who, unable to find anyone to groom their matted locks, would wander round looking like Ozzy Osbourne. But that presupposes some hair-cutting technology. I've never tried cutting hair with a sharpened flint stone, but imagine it wouldn't be easy. In fact it'd be hopeless. Singeing it off? A bit risky. I've really no idea.

And then there's toe nails....

Darfur Shortfall

As Kofi Annan arrives in Sudan, The Scotsman report a shortfall in the amount pledged by donor nations to finance an adequate AU force:

Diplomats charged with funding an expanded African Union peacekeeping force to prevent further slaughter in the Darfur region of Sudan yesterday pledged less than a half of the money needed for the mission.

A year on since the genocide in Darfur was first brought to the attention of the United Nations, and in spite of a growing clamour for action led by human rights campaigners, aid agencies and newspapers such as The Scotsman, the UN concedes that the situation in the western region of the vast African country remains critical.

Yesterday, Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, told a conference in Ethiopia that they were "running a race against time".

Mr Annan urged rich nations to fund an expansion of the small African Union forces sent to Sudan "without delay", saying civilians were still being attacked. "An expanded African Mission, at full operational capability, will mean the great majority of vulnerable civilians in Darfur will be protected from violence," he said.

But, despite the reports of continuing attacks in Darfur, where upwards of 300,000 people are already believed to have died as a result of conflict, the countries gathered at the conference failed to come up with the cash required.

The African Union told donors that it needed $466 million (£256 million) to more than triple its existing force in Darfur and to equip it with six helicopter gunships, 116 armoured personnel carriers and fuel.

Instead the donors pledged only $200 million (£110 million), $134 million of that coming from Canada alone. The United States pledged $50 million on top of the $95 million it had already offered to end what Charles Snyder, the US State Department's senior representative on Sudan, described as "acts of genocide". Britain offered $12 million and Germany $1 million.

North Korean Refugees

The Marmot's Hole reprints a powerful speech by Nicholas Eberstadt urging South Koreans to do more to help North Korean refugees:

Not far from where we are gathered today—maybe a half hour’s journey north, by jet plane—an untold number of terrified Koreans are hiding in a foreign land, engaged there in a grave and uncertain struggle for survival. (There may be tens of thousands in the ranks of these misérables, or there may be hundreds of thousands—it is a chilling indication of their plight that we should have no reliable information about such a basic fact.)

These wretched vagabonds—most of them women and children—are of course escapees from North Korea. They have individually crossed the Yalu and the Tumen into China in tiny, separated groups, driven commonly into the unknown by Kim Jong Il’s man-made—or more precisely, yongjoda-made—famine. That catastrophe—the only peacetime famine to befall an urbanized, literate society in all of human history—claimed hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of victims in the 1990s; though the death toll from the ongoing North Korean food crisis seems for the moment to have subsided, hunger remains a dire problem in the DPRK—especially for that society’s officially disfavored strata.

For the North Korean border-crossers in China, existence is stripped of the most modest vestiges of ordinary human dignity. In the cruel and unforgiving place to which they escaped, and where they remain still trapped, local rules of survival oblige them to live like animals—if they hope to live at all. You have all read about the border crossers’ existence. Many of them stay in the woods, sleeping by day and foraging by night, alone and in constant fear of discovery by fellow humans. Their women can be sold, like cattle; the men are regularly hunted down and rounded up, almost like dogs.

With nothing to protect them against the two-legged predators, these escapees are at the mercy of the least scrupulous element of the populace North of the Yalu River. They can be robbed without recourse—or raped, or beaten and even killed just for the fun of it. And that is the peril when their hunters are simply ordinary villagers or townsmen. When they are captured by local security agents or members of the secret police, their fate is possibly even more frightening—for then they are deported back to the DPRK, a receiving state that regards any independent and voluntary departure from North Korean “paradise” as a crime, an act of betrayal verging on treason. The deportees forced back into North Korea face unspeakable punishments in political prisons, “re-education camps”, and special detention camps just for children. In addition to the tortures the “refouled” returnees can expect to face themselves, there is the added pain of knowing that their family line is also subject to retribution—for in the North Korean control system, horrible penalties can fall on family members as many as three generations removed from the perpetrator of a so-called political crime.....

Today I will argue that the case for a Republic of Korea (ROK) rescue of these escapees—that is to say, for aiding in their relocation to the South, for welcoming them into South Korean life, and for positively determining to abet their integration as ROK citizens and members of ROK society—is compelling, in fact overwhelming.

Indeed, I believe it is imperative that the ROK—for legal, and for moral, but also for entirely practical reasons—accept the challenge now posed by the continuing distress of these very vulnerable fellow Koreans (Koreans so far from home, and yet so near!) and actively rise to meet it.

Conspiracy Theories

The belief that Western scientists are in the habit of using vaccination programs to spread rather than cure disease, as noted in my previous post on the supposed decimation of the Yanomami tribe, is a common enough meme. It can also have deadly consequences. Here's a report in the Jerusalem Post (via lgf) on the recent resurgence of polio:

A worldwide campaign begun in 1988 to eradicate polio was on the verge of success when, early in 2003, a conspiracy theory took hold of the Muslim population in northern Nigeria. That conspiracy theory has singlehandedly returned polio to epidemic proportions.

The theory's source seems to be one Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, 68, a physician and president of Nigeria's Supreme Council for Shari'a Law. Ahmed, an Islamist, accuses Americans of lacing the polio vaccine with an anti-fertility agent that sterilizes children (or, in an alternate theory, infects them with AIDS) and considers them, according to John Murphy of The Baltimore Sun, "the worst criminals on Earth... Even Hitler was not as evil as that."

This fear of polio vaccines caught on, explains a doctor with the World Health Organization, because of the war in Iraq. "If America is fighting people in the Middle East," goes the Islamist logic, "the conclusion is that they are fighting Muslims."

Local imams repeated and spread the sterilization theory, which won wide acceptance despite vocal assurances to the contrary from the WHO, the Nigerian government and many Nigerian doctors and scientists.

Ibrahim Shekarau, governor of Kano, one of the three Nigerian states that refused the polio vaccine, justified the decision not to vaccinate on the grounds that "it is a lesser of two evils to sacrifice two, three, four, five, even 10 children [to polio] than allow hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of girl-children likely to be rendered infertile."

The Baltimore Sun offers the example of a young Nigerian mother who rejected polio vaccine for her child. The child did get polio, and the mother was asked if she regretted her decision. Unhesitatingly, she replied, "No, I would do the same [again]." Villagers saw the vaccination program as a threat and on occasion "chased, threatened and assaulted vaccinators. Frustrated, some vaccination teams dumped thousands of doses of the vaccine rather than face angry villagers."

By mid-2004 the conspiracy theory had jumped to India, where a health worker noted that in one slum, "many poor and ignorant women regard the anti-polio drops as a deceptive strategy to control the birth rate."

Such phobia about the West infecting Muslims with diseases is nothing new. In a 1997 book I surveyed some earlier accusations:
The British imported cholera and malaria to Egypt after World War II; a British midwife who trained in the Kabylia province of Algeria got accused by an angry Algerian supervisor of working in league with the "white-coated saboteurs passing their hands from vagina to vagina, infecting my heroic people with syphilis!" An unnamed enemy – presumably American – infiltrated deadly diseases into Iraq via maggot-ridden cigarettes; Israel transmitted cancer to Palestinians by getting them to take dangerous factory jobs, or subjecting them to phosphorous searches.

The polio-vaccine conspiracy theory has had direct consequences: 16 countries where polio had been eradicated have in recent months reported outbreaks of the disease – 12 in Africa (Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Sudan and Togo) and four in Asia (India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Yemen). Yemen has had the largest polio outbreak, with more than 83 cases since April. The WHO calls this "a major epidemic."

A classic conspiracy theory is Edward Hooper's book "The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS" which suggests that AIDS originated through the use of contaminated polio vaccines in the Congo in the Fifities. Of course the whole MMR-Autism scare is another example closer to home.

Darkness in the Amazon

The American Anthropological Association has just published the results of an investigation into charges of abuse of the Yanomami Indians of Venezuela and Brazil that had been brought by its own members against their colleagues Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel. Butterflies and Wheels link to an interesting article on the whole sordid story.

The academic culture wars (which, coincidentally, Christopher Hitchens writes about here, also via B & W) were fought most famously in English departments, but the struggles in the Social Sciences, notably with the birth of Sociobiology and its offspring Evolutionary Psychology, were not entirely unrelated, seeing a similar entrenched Leftism refusing to consider ideologically unacceptable positions. The most outrageous expression of this mindset was in the field of Anthropology.

Napoleon Chagnon is a colourful and abrasive figure who's written extensively about the Yanomami Indians in the Brazilian rainforest. He's called them "the fierce people". Since the Yanomami murder rate makes Johannesburg look like Tunbridge Wells on a Sunday afternoon, that might seem to be a not unreasonable comment, but it offended the anthropological left in numerous ways, notably as being a slur on the Rousseau-esque fantasy of natural innocence, an anthropological tradition going back as least as far as the gullible Margaret Mead, who believed all the stories that the Samoan kids were teasing her with about guilt-free sex and so on, even while the Samoan rape rate put Western society in the shade. So, Chagnon made enemies, and all the poison and whispers collected and grew into a book by journalist, Patrick Tierney, called "Darkness in El Dorado - How Scientists & Journalists Devastated the Amazon".

Tierney painted a picture straight out of some leftist/green fantasy, where the innocent purity of the natives is desecrated by the wicked machinations of evil Western scientists. To quote from the review at Amazon.com:

While Chagnon made the Yanomami synonymous with aggression, Tierney charges that Chagnon himself fomented wars through his tactics of creating false alliances, giving away machetes, and staging scenes in order to substantiate his own belief in male aggression. Even worse, Tierney believes that Chagnon and his mentor, the famous geneticist James Neel, actually started the measles epidemic that decimated up to 20 percent of the tribe's population by administering a contraindicated "dinosaur vaccine" to a highly vulnerable population. Tierney paints a horrific picture of Neel and his team of scientists rushing to get their samples of blood, urine, and saliva out of the tropical heat--and Chagnon choreographing his documentary--while the Yanomami fall like flies around them.

So we're not just talking about a lack of professional ethics here: we're talking about mass murder, on a scale even Mengele (whose name inevitably crops up) would have been proud of. But really, any old accusation will do, even including child abuse.

The vaccine accusation was effectively rebutted as soon as the book appeared. As for the rest, well, read the article.

In Venezuela and Brazil, as we write, the Yanomami are dying from malaria, tuberculosis, and malnutrition. In the face of this tragedy, the association has squandered its moral capital and its civility on an ad hominem attack on Napoleon Chagnon and the late James Neel. While the Yanomami die, the association debates whether Neel's lifesaving research and immunization campaign in 1968 met standards of informed consent.

There's also a good summary of the case from 2001 by Andrew Brown here.

It's worth noting though from the Amazon reviews how much people want to believe this sort of anti-Western anti-science guff. The UK site has only one, five-star review:

A very moving book to read indeed. An untouched, isolated, civilised tribe called the Yanomami's are exposed to the greediness of a modern civilisation brought down to Brazil from the capitalist west. Financial riches is the motivation for Gold diggers who destructively cause environmental damages to what was once a serene and natural area.

The US site has a far more balanced range, but again there are enough of those for whom such accusations merely confirm what they already knew:

Tierney weaves a spellbinding tale of how a mild-mannered group of starving Amazonian Indians came to be misportrayed as "The Fierce People" to promote the careers and ideological beliefs of scientists funded by a powerful U.S. govt. agency in the mid-20th century. This book rights a great wrong -- the domination and extermination of native American peoples, making it a hero's tale and thus a joy to read. The author also fulfills a journalist's most important mission -- bringing truth to light. There's always a place on my bookshelf for books like "Darkness" that entertain, enlighten, and correct social myths that excuse, cover-up and glorify violence. I have a social science Ph.D. and Mr. Tierney's exhaustive research, careful analysis and reasonable, thoughtful arguments seemed to me a model for social science and journalists. I'm also a working journalist, and this book was as we say in the biz, a "great read."

Unintelligent Letters

In response to Richard Dawkins' critique of the new Creationism comes this extraordinary letter in the Times from Professor Andy McIntosh of Leeds University:

Sir, By building a straw man of creationists (supposedly) misquoting Darwin and Lewontin, Professor Dawkins labels the lot as “ignorant” and skirts the big issue — there is no hard evidence for molecules-to-man evolution.

Dawkins has long touted stories on how the eye and other organs came into being by supposed slow evolutionary processes, but there is no experimental evidence, even if one did accept the fossils as a record of such changes. Any serious thinker knows that the fossils of the “Cambrian Explosion” period, near the base of the geological column, include some of the most sophisticated eyes ever known to have existed — the compound eyes of trilobites have double calcite lenses, which defeat any slow evolutionary explanation, and, what is more, they have no precursor in the rocks.

The non-evolutionist side of the argument is growing not because of ignorance, but because of the rise of knowledge about the real facts of science without the fairytale additions of evolutionism. A growing number of academics on both sides of the Atlantic are attracted to the straightforward logic of scientific reasoning.

The logical, coded machinery of DNA and the information system it carries shout design to an unprejudiced mind. Dawkins’s defence is based not on scientific facts, but on ideology. Evolutionary thinking is teetering as a way of looking at the evidence, not because of some isolated problems here and there, but because the whole structure is scientifically wrong.

If Professor McIntosh wishes to put on record that he doesn't accept evolution as an explanation for the existence of life on earth but believes instead that some supernatural entity designed it all, that's up to him. What's outrageous is to pretend that this is some sort of scientific argument: "The non-evolutionist side of the argument is growing....because of the rise of knowledge about the real facts of science without the fairytale additions of evolutionism."

The theory of evolution is perhaps the most supported theory in the whole of science. There is no question of it being superceded. Nothing in Biology, as Dobzhansky noted, makes sense except in the light of evolution. To assert that Intelligent Design is a scientific alternative to evolution makes about as much sense as arguing that because everyone knows that objects travel in straight lines, the Earth can only rotate about the Sun because God keeps bending the Earth's path. It's a possible explanantion no doubt, but it's got nothing to do with science.

Update: Tom Hamilton looks at this in more detail on his let's be sensible blog.