Requiem

If Sundays are for the sacred, then surely spending an hour or so with opera and Mozart’s Requiem will count towards my score in heaven. Wandering through the house, I heard bits of it coming from the living room where my housemate watched the film Amadeus.

The film is about mediocrity, really - the mediocrity of the composer Salieri (the fictional character portraying real-life composer Franz Sussmayr) who pales in comparison to the great Mozart. The two characters continually oppose one another in both talent, desire, and virtue. Salieri has such desire, warped but sincere, while Mozart’s inane giggle is runner-up for the most enduring noise in the film; certainly it is the most annoying. But the former is doomed to a small place in musical history, while the latter grabs glory without even trying.

Does it matter, desire? Or discipline, or industry? Does any of it matter compared to sheer talent and genius, those things that are indefinable? Genius can be self-destructive, of course, but it cannot be constructed. And there is nothing left to follow genius, nothing but echos and empty pride.

Back in Blackwater

Officials in Iraq have resumed travel under the protection of the U.S. private security firm Blackwater. The move may come as a shock to Iraqis, considering that this morning’s headlines reported that the Iraqi government had concluded that deaths caused by the agency a few days ago were unprovoked.

The New York Times comments that this may be a sign that the U.S. simply cannot afford to suspend travel at this time, considering that U.S. policy is now primarily focused on improving relations to tribal leaders and others in local communities - a goal that cannot be accomplished from within the Green Zone. However, it remains to be seen whether the decision to retain Blackwater’s services will do more harm than good, since the move may rudely affront the very people that U.S. officials are reaching out to.

Assuming that the Bush administration, and the State Department in particular, has not quite lost so much diplomatic tact that they would not prefer to use an alternative source of personnel security, Blackwater’s continued activity may be one of the most dramatic signs of the military’s dependence upon private security firms.

Normalizing Justice

Several news agencies have reported that former Peruvian head of state Alberto Fujimori now faces extradition to Peru on human rights abuse charges. Based on evidence of a direct link between Fujimori and death squads that murdered and disappeared Peruvian students and other citizens during the early 1990s, Chile’s Supreme Court has ruled to extradite the former head of state.

In legal terms, the diplomatic immunity of a head of state (for actions taken while in office) has been considered sacrosanct until recently. Great Britain’s decision to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain, where he faced human rights abuse charges, was the landmark case that opened this door in a more meaningful way than the international community had ever seen. More recent cases of head of state extradition (also on charges of crimes against humanity) include the extradition of Sierra Leone’s Charles Taylor, and Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic.

Unlike those precedent-setting cases, the extradition of Fujimori sets a new kind of standard: one for the increased normalization and de-politicization of such extradition requests. Fujimori’s case was submitted through domestic channels, not through international mediators; he is also being handed over to Peru’s own court system and not to an international criminal tribunal or the Hague. Whether this will become the preferred mode of conduct for those seeking justice for such human rights abuses remains to be seen. In broad terms, the scope of these cases varies fairly significantly (although the Geneva Conventions do not set statistical thresholds for these kinds of crimes). The cases linked to Fuijimori’s administration are in the dozens, whereas Milosevic and Taylor’s actions affected thousands of lives and significantly destabilized their regions. Pinochet’s acts were also more wide-reaching throughout his regime, and arguably more notorious.

Another factor to be considered is Peru’s relative stability and its active pursuit of justice for the murders committed by the death squads. This goes much further than other governments in the region have attempted (such as El Salvador’s). It may also be more than the governments of Sierra Leone or Serbia were ever willing or able to attempt - one can witness this more dysfunctional dynamic in Sudan today, where the International Criminal Court has brought charges against two senior officials from Khartoum. So while Peru’s actions are laudable, they do not necessarily disprove the need for an international court system to adjudicate cases of human rights violations that states are incapable or unwilling to prosecute.

Senior officials appointed for Iraqi refugees

After months of calls for increasing the number of refugee admissions to the U.S. from Iraq, the Bush administration responded several months ago by agreeing to allow 7000 refugees into the country. The figure, illustrated in comparison to the graphic above, was considered a paltry response by human rights organizations and other Middle Eastern countries.

In response to the continued criticism, yesterday the Bush administration announced that it was taking yet more steps to alleviate the refugee crisis in Iraq by designating two senior officials to oversee the refugee process and remove some of the roadblocks that define it. That in itself might have been useful, had one of the senior officials not been James Foley, former U.S. ambassador to Haiti. Haiti, as some may recall, suffered under an extremely restrictive refugee policy that denied entry to thousands who sought to flee the war-torn nation off the U.S. coast. In fact, Haiti’s refugee crisis in the 1990s was then considered one of the more callous decisions made by both the Bush and Clinton administrations, who were happy to engage in the fight over Cuban refugee Elian Gonzales, but remained uninterested in the largely poor and uneducated Haitians trying to escape one of the deadliest, poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.

James Foley should have all the experience he needs: faced with a violent situation exacerbated by an exponentially growing humanitarian crisis, he should know just how few Iraqis the U.S. can admit in order to save face.

Image source: New York Times online

FGM Banned in Egypt

The BBC & New York Times reported today that Egypt has banned the practice of female genital mutilation (or female circumcision, as supporters call it) universally. One of the interesting things noted in the Times’ coverage was the shift in social taboos surrounding the topic in Egypt. Unlike years past, the media in Cairo and other cities now uses far more explicit language to discuss botched operations that result in excess scarring or the death of the woman (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/world/middleeast/20girls.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=04934e7ed73d6aac&ex=1190865600&emc=eta1).

This spells progress on multiple fronts. Not only has the practice become more discussed and publicly banned (and one can hope that this will spread to sub-Saharan Africa, where the practice is far more widespread than it is in the north of the continent), but it speaks well to the pressure that transparent public discourse can bring on the issue. Marking the times when the practice goes wrong makes it harder for advocates to insist that because their wives and mothers turned out alright, their daughters will too. And I would like to think that breaking social taboos can, in fact, have a significant impact on the political will to act.

This and other pieces are cross-posted at http://web.mac.com/caitlin.howarth/iWeb/thedial

Las colonias de los EEUU

Today’s New York Times features a story on the colonias of south Texas - communities where the homes are half-built and are only recently gaining access to water systems, electricity, and paved roads. The Times report focuses on the growth and determination of the residents of these neighborhoods, who appear akin to hardscrabble settlers of an earlier American age. Yet the situation itself cries out not for a nostalgic or romantic perspective, but for supportive solutions. Certainly the residents of the colonias (the majority of whom are Latino) require some protection against the impulses of less-charitable politicians - but let’s go beyond that point.

The Texas Secretary of State, Phil Wilson, has a website that defines a colonia as a residential area along the Texas-Mexico border where the most basic needs of residents are going unmet. This includes access to potable water, wastewater systems, electricity, and roads. What the definition doesn’t give you is an image of homes half-built, where the cost of construction means that one wall goes up at a time over a period of years. These are not stagnant communities, brooding in poverty without recourse to either aid or the will to do better; most residents work hard at jobs that help pay for the land purchase and the concrete, tin, and wood that goes into the house. Even so, this is not your Little House on the Prairie. Over 400,000 Texans live in colonias, according to government statistics; importantly - for those who jump to an ‘illegal immigrant’ state of mind - 64.4 percent of all colonia residents, and over 80 percent of residents under the age of 18, were born in the United States.

Per capita annual income levels are dramatically lower in the colonias than in most of the state; a 1994 study showed that income levels in some border counties were as low as $5,559 and $7,631. Considering that this writer lives on a tight budget while sharing a home with four other people (and four other incomes) but nets over $2000 per month in income, the relative poverty of those living in the colonias shatters all expectations.

So how did the colonias come to be? According to the same government website, they began in the mid-1950s when developers broke outer-suburb land into small lots, put in little to no infrastructure, and sold the lots as affordable housing opportunities to people of low income. The appalling ethics of that aside, there’s another scary factor to consider: the way many of the land purchases are financed, the developer requires a low down payment and low monthly payments. Sound good? Maybe not, when you find out that the deed to the property does not actually transfer from the developer to the landowner until the final payment has been made. Consider then how long it would take to default on a payment if your minimum wage job disappears, or if you get sick (usually less than three months, if that), and the risk of losing everything rises even higher. In other words, those who can least afford it are paying into a system that takes their money with little or no security provided, and the poor pay into a system that never insures or matches their investment.

Sources:

http://www.sos.state.tx.us/border/colonias/index.shtml

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/us/27colonias.html?ex=1189310400&en=068ce04d5ddb4bb8&ei=5070