Mick Hartley

In Ingushetia

Perhaps the lucky citizens of South Ossetia, newly hacked out of Georgia to be welcomed (back) into the glorious embrace of Mother Russia, should cast an eye on recent events in Ingushetia, where the violence is spreading from neighbouring Chechnya. On the other side of Ingushetia from Chechnya, in that linkage of small Caucasian republics to the north of Georgia, is North Ossetia.

Human Rights Watch issued a report a couple of months back:

The 120-page report, “‘As If They Fell From the Sky!’ Counterinsurgency, Rights Violations, and Rampant Impunity in Ingushetia,” documents human rights abuses committed by law enforcement and security forces involved in counterinsurgency, including dozens of summary and arbitrary detentions, acts of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial executions. The report covers action taken during 2007 and early 2008, and describes the legal and political contexts in which they have occurred.  
 
“The crimes in Ingushetia, although on a far smaller scale, evoke the thousands of enforced disappearances, killings, and torture cases that plagued Chechnya for more than a decade,” said Tanya Lokshina, Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Russia’s brutal counterinsurgency policies are antagonizing local residents. Far from ending the insurgency, ‘dirty war’ tactics are likely to further destabilize the situation in Ingushetia and beyond in the North Caucasus.”  

Tanya Lokshina describes here how the current violence started back in June 2004 with a raid by Chechyan militants who attacked the Ingushetian town of Nazran and killed dozens of policemen:

The next day the funerals of the murdered policemen began and Ingushetia was almost literally flooded with hatred. The population was prepared to approve any action by the authorities - as long as nothing like this ever happened again! They really did support the first special operations, believing them to be necessary But these operations were conducted "Chechen style"...

Law-enforcement officers broke into houses and seized young men. Many were taken to neighbouring North Ossetia. Some were put in pre-trial detention centres and tortured there. Others were even held in pits. They were forced to confess to taking part in the "attack on Nazran" and having connections with the militants. They were forced to name accomplices. If a young man said he didn't know any militants, he was tortured until he started naming neighbours and classmates....

Villages were also "cleansed"....

So the cycle of violence escalated, with Russian repression causing more people to join armed rebel groups, causing more repression...

The editors of the opposition site Ingushetia.ru posted an explanation to the city and the world. "After the most recent... punitive operation at a village, the number of militants only increases... If you talk to these guys in the right way, and say to them, ‘look at how the federal troops treat you, take up arms and defend your honour', they just disappear into the forest". The main objective of the political opposition in Ingushetia is to replace the president of the republic, Murat Zyazikov. One of their main arguments is that Zyazikov does nothing to prevent the outrages perpetrated by the law-enforcers or the kidnappings, and is thus indirectly involved in the growth of the armed underground movement.

It is difficult to say how many young men really go into the mountains, but the violence and humiliation inflicted by the law-enforcement officers, combined with the ineffective reaction of the authorities to the mood of the young people, naturally have an effect. Support for the militants is constantly increasing. And so is hatred of the special services.

Here's the English version of that opposition site, Ingushetia.ru - "News from Ingushetiya". And here's their latest news, today, from AP:

The owner of an independent Web site critical of authorities was shot and killed Sunday by police in a volatile province in southern Russia, his colleague said.

Police arrested Ingushetiya.ru owner Magomed Yevloyev on Sunday, taking him off a plane that had just landed in Ingushetia province near Chechnya, said the site’s deputy editor, Ruslan Khautiyev.

Police whisked Yevloyev away in a car and later dumped him on the road with a gunshot wound in the head, Khautiyev said. He said Yevloyev died in a hospital shortly afterward.

In Moscow, Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said in a statement that Yevloyev was detained by police and died in an “incident” while being taken to police headquarters for an interrogation....

Yevloyev has angered regional authorities with bold criticism of police treatment of civilians in the region. A court in June ordered him to shut his site on charges of spreading “extremist” statements, but it reappeared under a different name.

That's right. An independent journalist, a blogger in effect, reporting critically on the situation in his home republic, was taken out and shot by the Russian police.

So, if you're a loyal Putin supporter in South Ossetia or Abkhazia, you'll probably be OK. If you're not, or if you're deemed to be ethnically Georgian - well, you know what to expect.

[Most links via Metafilter]

Over the Des Moines River

From Shorpy, a 1902 photograph by William Henry Jackson of the Kate Shelley High Bridge in Iowa:

Full size here.

Centuries-Old Traditions

Further to this tale of the five women shot and then buried alive in Balochistan:

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani lawmaker defended a decision by southwestern tribesmen to bury five women alive because they wanted to choose their own husbands, telling stunned members of Parliament this week to spare him their outrage.

“These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them,” Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents Balochistan province, said yesterday. “Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid.”

The women, three of whom were teenagers, were first shot and then thrown into a ditch. They were still breathing as their bodies were covered with rocks and mud, according to media reports and human rights activists, who said their only “crime” was that they wished to marry men of their own choosing. Zehri told a packed and flabbergasted Parliament on Friday that Baloch tribal traditions helped stop obscenity and then asked fellow lawmakers not to make a big fuss about it.

[More on Balochistan here]

The Judgment is to Kill Them

Are we ready for the Undercover Mosque follow-up?

Women preachers are urging followers at one of Britain’s most influential mosques to kill homosexuals and view all non-Muslims as “vile”, according to a television documentary.

The London Central Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre, known as the Regent’s Park Mosque, is one of the most respected centres for moderate Islam in western Europe.

However, an undercover investigation by the Channel 4 Dispatches programme has found extremist preachers have held study circles there and are teaching followers a hardline version of the faith followed in Saudi Arabia, known as Wahhabism.

The documentary, to be broadcast tomorrow, is a follow-up to Undercover Mosque, which investigated a number of mosques and was made by the same team more than a year ago. That resulted in an investigation by West Midlands Police, who accused the makers of distorting sermons and inflaming tensions. Officers took no action against extremist preachers whose words were broadcast. Ofcom rejected the complaint and the force had to apologise to Channel 4. It agreed at the High Court to pay £100,000 for libel.

In the new documentary, a female reporter infiltrated women’s study circles. In one, a preacher using the name Umm Amira told followers: “We are not going to be like animals . . . or to be like the homosexuals, God save us from that, you understand? We have to take the judgment, the judgment is to kill them.”

Umm Amira is recorded as saying converts from Islam should also be killed. “He is Muslim and he gets out of Islam, he doesn’t want any more. What are we going to do? We kill him, kill, kill.”

In another study circle, Umm Amira describes Christians as “vile”. Another preacher, Umm Saleem, tells her congregation not to take British citizenship or become friends with nonMuslims....

The Muslim Council of Britain, of which the mosque is an affiliate, said: “Some of the statements are deeply offensive . . . [but] it would be very wrong, and quite unfair, to smear the whole centre.”

Smear? Do you smear someone by pointing out that they advocate murdering gays or apostates? The MCB have to turn any criticism into a personal attack: more evidence of Islamophobia, no doubt. 

Update: there's a fuller treatment of this in the Telegraph, written by the reporter who did the filming:

Regent's Park Mosque has a major interfaith department, which arranges visits from the Government, the civil service, representatives of other religions and thousands of British school children a year.

I watched as an interfaith group was brought in to meet the mosque's women's circle for a civilised exchange. But when the interfaith group wasn't there, the preacher attacked other faiths, and the very concept of interfaith dialogue.

One preacher said of Christians praying in a church: "What are these people doing in there, these things are so vile, what they say with their tongues is so vile and disgusting, it's an abomination." As for the concept of interfaith live-and-let-live: "This is false. It does not work. This concept is a lie, it is fake, and it is a farce."

Like many of the other women at the circle, I was soon invited to private sessions in houses around London, to "learn more" about Islam - or their version of Islam. Um Saleem was also at some of these sessions. Here, the women were given strict restrictions on their lives: it is reiterated that British Muslim women cannot travel far without a male guardian, cannot mix with men, and have to remain fully covered up at all times.

One woman in the audience queried the strict rulings that she cannot travel without a mahram - a male member of the family - escorting her. She asked: "Sister, if me and my husband, we can't go together, what do I do if I want to go?"

She was told she cannot travel by herself.

She asked again: "So what do I do?"

"You go with your husband," Um Saleem replied.

There were also restrictions on education or work opportunities. One woman, who works for the NHS, was told she should leave her job as it meant mixing with men and not wearing a full Islamic garment.

"You know that working in an environment that is not Islamic, working with the kuffaar, all this takes you away from the religion and hardens your heart and it would be lying to you if I say it's OK," Um Saleem explained.

Summertime

The sun? In London? I say, steady on...

London Fields, above. And below, some chaps cooling off on Stoke Newington Road.

London From Above, at Night

From The Big Picture at the Boston Globe.

The Naomi Wolf Myth

You might think that women walking around in head-to-toe black clothing, with faces veiled to ward off lustful male stares, would be a cause for concern for Western feminists. Well....not necessarily. Here's what Naomi Wolf, author of acclaimed books such as "The Beauty Myth", has to say:

A woman swathed in black to her ankles, wearing a headscarf or a full chador, walks down a European or North American street, surrounded by other women in halter tops, miniskirts and short shorts. She passes under immense billboards on which other women swoon in sexual ecstasy, cavort in lingerie or simply stretch out languorously, almost fully naked. Could this image be any more iconic of the discomfort the West has with the social mores of Islam, and vice versa?

Ideological battles are often waged with women's bodies as their emblems, and Western Islamophobia is no exception. When France banned headscarves in schools, it used the hijab as a proxy for Western values in general, including the appropriate status of women. When Americans were being prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were demonised for denying cosmetics and hair colour to women; when the Taliban were overthrown, Western writers often noted that women had taken off their scarves.

The Taliban were demonised for denying cosmetics and hair colour? They also denied schooling for women, to the extent that they now bomb girls schools and murder anyone daring to teach in them. And the burqa was obligatory for any woman stepping outside her house (if she could persuade her male guardian to let her: you know, for a trip to the market to buy food, say). Still, no doubt anything's better than the oppression of being a Western woman constantly subject to the Male Gaze.

But are we in the West radically misinterpreting Muslim sexual mores, particularly the meaning to many Muslim women of being veiled or wearing the chador? And are we blind to our own markers of the oppression and control of women?

The West interprets veiling as repression of women and suppression of their sexuality. But when I travelled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women-only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women's appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one's husband. It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channelling - toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home.

Outside the walls of the typical Muslim households that I visited in Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt, all was demureness and propriety. But inside, women were as interested in allure, seduction and pleasure as women anywhere in the world.

At home, in the context of marital intimacy, Victoria's Secret, elegant fashion and skin care lotions abounded. The bridal videos that I was shown, with the sensuous dancing that the bride learns as part of what makes her a wonderful wife, and which she proudly displays for her bridegroom, suggested that sensuality was not alien to Muslim women. Rather, pleasure and sexuality, both male and female, should not be displayed promiscuously - and possibly destructively - for all to see.

Indeed, many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualising Western gaze. Many women said something like this: "When I wear Western clothes, men stare at me, objectify me, or I am always measuring myself against the standards of models in magazines, which are hard to live up to - and even harder as you get older, not to mention how tiring it can be to be on display all the time. When I wear my headscarf or chador, people relate to me as an individual, not an object; I feel respected." This may not be expressed in a traditional Western feminist set of images, but it is a recognisably Western feminist set of feelings.

I experienced it myself. I put on a shalwar kameez and a headscarf in Morocco for a trip to the bazaar. Yes, some of the warmth I encountered was probably from the novelty of seeing a Westerner so clothed; but, as I moved about the market - the curve of my breasts covered, the shape of my legs obscured, my long hair not flying about me - I felt a novel sense of calm and serenity. I felt, yes, in certain ways, free.

Is this a 1984-style satire? "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength" - Islam is feminist, and covering yourself head-to-toe is liberating.

 

Of course you know what she means. If you're obsessed with how people see you, then it might seem like some klind of freedom to do a fancy-dress style shopping trip in the full shalwar kameez (does she really mean shalwar kameez?) and headscarf, so you don't have to worry about your bum looking big; just as it might seem liberating, if you're worried about keeping up with the Joneses, to join a monastery; or, indeed, if you're worried about what to think, with all the confusion of the modern world and the conflicting viewpoints and arguments, to decide that The Truth was written down fourteen centuries ago, and the sum total of your intellectual obligation is to obey your local imam and submit to the will of Allah. But....well, let's say I don't think you should confuse submission with liberation.

 

For a start, it's part of a package. You don't get to walk to the market dressed up like a tent in the morning, then write your article for the newspaper in the afternoon, and give a lecture on female sexuality at a nearby college in the evening. You buy in to the whole deal, which will usually involve subjugating yourself to your male guardian, and accepting that women are worth a whole deal less (quantified in Sharia law as one half) than men. Not quite what the original feminists had in mind...

 

And then there's that business of responsibility. I thought that one of the points of feminism was to make men take control of their sexuality, rather than blaming everything on women. Having women walk around covered up like perambulating black sacks so that they don't excite male lust surely sums up everything that feminism should be fighting against.

 

But then, to argue like that, are you perhaps being Islamophobic? Oh dear, what is a girl to think?

Color is Relative

Nice interactive colour chart here (via Metafilter): move the cursor over the colours (or indeed the colors) to change the background. I think this is the best - yellow to blue poles. For some commentary from Gabriel Mott, the man responsible, go here and here.

Still Singing from the Same Songsheet

Joan Baez is interviewed in the Times:

Her strident sincerity is something that doesn’t always sit well with audiences as radical politics fall in and out of fashion. “After 9/11 nobody wanted to hear anything bad about America,” says Baez, growing animated as she enters into political territory. “Nobody loves a war better than the President, and a few years ago it got to the point where if I said anything I truly believed about the Iraq war or global warming during a concert, people would get up and leave. That’s fine with me. Actually, it’s a badge of honour.”

"Nobody loves a war better than the President". So there you go. He got elected as the most isolationist president for decades, but hell, he just couldn't help himself: he just loves a war.

“Little by little it became clear that Bush was bizarre — and dangerous,” she says. “I would do concerts where I would see people in the audience sitting with their arms crossed, looking angry as I said: ‘I was right 40 years ago and I am right now!’ and throw my fist in the air. Now they’re listening."

The notion that Baez's concerts were packed with Bush supporters who couldn't stand to hear her criticise the Iraq war strikes me as a little implausible, but who knows. Perhaps they were more annoyed at someone who's resurrecting their career by pretending that we're back in the Sixties again.

After years of being written off as an unsmiling anachronism, Joan Baez is relevant once more. She thrives on political and economic tension — such as now. “At times of great uncertainty music and politics are fused,” she says. “I would never have sung We Shall Overcome to an American audience during the Eighties because it would have been a nostalgia trip. Now it’s appropriate again because it’s relevant. I’m happiest when that happens.”

The Lockerbie Files

More doubts about the official Lockerbie line:

Scottish police had information that might have changed the outcome of the Lockerbie bombing trial, a BBC TV programme has learned.

The information could have affected the credibility of key evidence, but was not passed to the defence team.

Libyan national Abdelbaset ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is serving life for killing 270 people in the 1988 bombing....

The prosecution case was that al-Megrahi took the bomb, wrapped in clothes bought from a shop in Malta, to the island's Luqa airport, where it was checked in and then transferred onto Pan Am flight 103.

A key witness against al-Megrahi was the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who owned Mary's House, where the police say the garments were bought.

He identified al-Megrahi as having been in his shop some weeks before the bombing.

The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie reports that some of his evidence contradicted itself and that Mr Gauci had seen al-Megrahi's photograph in a magazine under a headline "Who planted the bomb?" a few days before he picked him out at an identity parade.

The SCCRC discovered this was the case, and this is one of the grounds on which they recommended that the case should be looked at again.

The BBC programme has discovered that the Scottish police knew Mr Gauci had looked at al-Megrahi's photograph just days before the line-up.

But contrary to police rules of disclosure, designed to ensure a fair trial, this crucial information was not passed on to the defence.

Mr al-Gaddafi [Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, son of the Libyan leader], who carries out political and diplomatic roles on behalf of his father, was interviewed in the programme about whether Libya truly accepts guilt for the Lockerbie bombing.

He admitted to the programme's producer Guy Smith that the Libyan government had merely accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing in order to get international sanctions lifted.

"Yes, we wrote a letter to the Security Council saying we are responsible for the acts of our employees... but it doesn't mean that we did it in fact.

"I admit that we played with words - we had to.

"What can you do? Without writing that letter we would not be able to get rid of sanctions."

Well, he's got a point, hasn't he? It may be cynical, as the BBC interviewer points out - provoking Gaddafi into a rant about the greed of the Lockerbie victims' families - but less so than what many suspect to be the truth of the matter: that Libya was a convenient scapegoat at a time when the real culprits, Iran, acting in retaliation for the downing by the US six months earlier of an Iranian Airbus A-300, needed to be kept onside during the build-up to the first Gulf War.

Though that, it has to be said, is only one possibility in what's turned out to be a conspiracy theorist's dream.