Probably different than your weekends

This goes on all across the West Bank every Friday.

Israeli forces use massive amounts of (usually) non-lethal weapons to prevent people from using or accessing their land. Villagers in Nabi Saleh, where this photo was taken, attempt to walk to a natural spring on the outskirts of their village, which has been de facto annexed and controlled by Israeli settlers. The Israeli army prohibits villagers from reaching their spring.  

There are only 50 months left to save the world

From the Guardian: 

The world has 50 months to go before the dice become loaded against us in terms of keeping under a 2C temperature rise. We asked Guardian readers and public figures what they would do to lead us out of this climate predicament. From mass protest to pensions to personal carbon targets, here are their suggestions...

Below I excerpt some of the more interesting answers (but you should check out all of the answers), my thoughts follow:

Saci Lloyd, Author of The Carbon Diaries
Don’t be timid. When did trying to pull humanity back from the brink of ecocide become confused with Buddhism?

Barbara Stocking, Chief Executive, Oxfam
The hard truth is that our lifestyles in rich countries are not compatible with our efforts to confront climate change. Our over-consumption of resources comes at the cost of the life chances of those who are denied their fair share of access to water, energy and food.

Bill McKibben, Author of The End of Nature, & founder of 350.org
We're going to have to work harder - in the next 50 months we're going to go straight at the fossil fuel companies, whose business model means the destruction of the planet's climate system. It's us or them, and I'd rather it be us.

Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP
Instead of treating the climate crisis as an environmental issue, to be dealt with by environment and energy departments alone, we need to reframe it as the overwhelming threat to national and global security which it is.

Ruth Bond, Chair of the National Federation of Women's Institutes
The huge threat we all face from climate change means that the day to day decisions made about the food we buy, our travel and how we heat our homes are more important than ever.

Caroline Lucas' quote stands out above the rest; climate change is truly an "overwhelming threat to national and global security."  There were several answers on the site which suggested that mass movements (a globalized Tahrir square, of sorts) and changes to the consumptive behaviors and habits of the global citizenry are of utmost importance.  I agree that mass mobilization and changes to our eating and transportation habits are necessary and important, but I don't think these changes are of utmost immediate importance for leading us out of our climate change predicament.  What we must immediately realize and emphasize is that big business and the fossil fuel industry are contributing in a disproportionately large way to climate change.  Their emissions must be curbed drastically.

If I decide to grow all of my own food. or buy food with 50 food miles or less, and only ride my bike or take public transportation, I won't put a dent in carbon emissions.  If I convince all of my friends to do the same and we have a community garden and organize our own midnight mass bike rides, we won't put a dent in the projected increase in global temperatures.

But I don't want to discount the reasons why these individual changes in behavior are important.  We will be creating a more healthy world, and will be leading healthy and fulfilling lives.  Our actions will also raise the consciousness of those with whom we interact as I talk about my delicious tomatoes and that day I got two flats on the way to work but my boss didn't care because she thought it was cool that I ride my bike to work.  There is a need to raise the public's awareness of climate change and the negative impacts of our current food delivery and transportation models.  There is a need to start living out more healthy practices and lifestyles instead of just talking about them: growing our own food, driving less (if at all), using non-toxic chemicals in our cosmetic and cleaning products, etc.

However, those changes in lifestyle and advances in the popular awareness of climate change and humanity's role in it will not stall the already increasing global temperature.  We need to push for global legislation and  demand that governments immediately address this issue. We need to take the fight to business and industry. They are the big emitters.  Their profits can afford to come down a few percentage points while instituting more earth-friendly practices.  After all, it's for the survival of our planet.

It matters how we choose to remember 9/11

We'll never forget. 

We'll always remember.

Remember 9/11. 

It's right to remember the victims of that day, to build memorials for the victims and the capacity (locally, nationally, and globally) for dealing with grievances in a nonviolent manner. But I wonder who "we" are, and I wonder what it is that we are "remembering."

I assume "we" is meant to be U.S. citizens, people who have lived most of their lives in the United States and identify as "Americans."  "We," in the context of 9/11 remembrance, seems to include those who identify as being in the same community as those who were killed in the World Trade Center. But I struggle with national categories because I've come into contact with the ugly side of nationalism: when it's manifested as xenophobia rather than positively, as a sense of community.  National communities are certainly imagined communities, "socially constructed, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group."    I also struggle with national identity because I may have more in common with a street vendor from Bangladesh than I do a farmer from Kansas or a banker from California. The farmer, the banker, and I might all know the rules of baseball and the first line of the Gettysburg Address, but the vendor and I might share values and life aspirations (and the vendor probably knows cricket, which is like baseball but with British costumes and weird throwing motions).

I also wonder whether those of us who have mixed feelings about the popular national narrative of 9/11 are included in the "we." What if I'm conflicted about the jingoistic narrative of 9/11 and downright appalled at all that was done in response to the attacks on 9/11?  Which leads me to the politics of remembrance.

What if I think that we should remember the innocent Iraqis and Afghanis that were killed as a result of the wars that my country waged shortly after 9/11? Most of them were innocent just like the firefighters and businesspeople that were killed in the World Trade Center, no? But if I happen to mention the innocent civilians killed, who happen to be of a different nationality, then I am perceived as less than a full member of my own national community.  Those who question the national narrative of 9/11 are dismissed in explicit and implicit ways.  And I'm white. The situation has been downright ugly for many Arab, Arab-looking, and Muslim Americans, even those who haven't uttered a word of critique about the U.S. national narrative of 9/11.

What we choose to remember and how we choose to remember matters. Do we only remember our own, or do we remember all those who were lost as a result of hatred, sectarianism, nationalism, and intolerance: NYC firefighters and police, World Trade Center workers, Afghan women, and Iraqi children. There were hundreds of victims of suicide bombings last week in Iraq, a phenomenon that only arrived after the U.S. invasion of the country, and continues (according to many analysts) as a result of U.S. counterinsurgency policies (such as allying with and arming Sunni militias) which radically fomented sectarian divisions in Iraqi society.

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I was recently in New York (for the first time!) and solicited advice for things to do. A couple of friends suggested that I visit the 9/11 memorial as it was quite moving and meaningful for them when they visited.  I thought about their suggestion but decided it wasn't the right time for me to visit the memorial.

I remember all of the details of that morning just like the rest of you, but I don't know how to handle all of the pain that has resulted from the ripples of that day, especially the pain and tragedies that have not been recognized by the American people.  Thousands killed that morning. Hundreds of thousands killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan as the War on Terror has spawned more and more foreign militants who want to combat the War on Terror.

Going to the memorial would make me feel like I was remembering our dead at the cost of forgetting their dead. It matters how we define "we," and it matters how we remember.   

Must-read on Lonmin massacre

I had the opportunity to visit Marikana, two hours outside of Johannesburg, approximately one week after the massacre of 34 miners at the hands of South African police. I've written a bit about the visit for organizational purpose and unfortunately my ability to provide new thoughts or analysis is worn a bit thin.

But before I offer anything (which I'll do in a later post), I find it vital to read one piece. Daily Maverick reporter, Greg Marinovich, spent two weeks in Marikana, trying to figure out how 34 miners were killed. Information gleaned from eyewitness testimony and from good ol' PI work led him to believe that approximately 12 people were killed when they moved towards police (however, according to many accounts they were running away from tear gas and rubber bullets fired from behind them), and somewhere around 14, or more, miners were killed in cold blood by police. They were targeted and summarily executed; murdered as revenge for police officers slain several days before. Marinovich's piece should make its way around blogospheres and twitter feeds, and should inform reporting by international media. If it interests you, Marinovich wrote a follow-up piece after again visiting Marikana and gathering more information.

Secondly, there was a statement released by a number of civil society organizations, including Centre for the Study of Reconciliation, where I am working, that addresses a number of the issues surrounding this incident and the government's response. An excerpt:

We stand for the interests of the poor and marginalised and believe our Constitution’s greatest strength is its promise of equality and the advancement of the political, social and economic rights of the poor.

The Marikana massacre is a defining moment in our history and cannot be allowed to pass without establishing the full truth, ensuring justice and providing redress for the victims and their families.

The massacre at a South African mine: government in bed with industry, union battles, and substandard wages

South African police opened fire on a group of miners protesting insufficient wages, killing 34 and wounding 78. It was the single most lethal use of force since the end of the apartheid era. The workers were employed at the Lonmin-operated mine (a London-based Platinum corporation) near Marikana, some 50 miles from Johannesburg. It's been all over the news and the photos and videos have caused many South Africans to liken the incident to similar massacres and instances of police brutality that occurred during the apartheid era.

Al Jazeera English has a report:



From the outside, looking in, it probably appears that a group of poor, low-wage workers were disgruntled, feeling their bosses, union leaders, and government, were failing to listen to their demands, and violence ensued when the miners took up arms (mostly machetes) against the security forces. However, the issues are layered, and significantly more complicated.

Some of the issues at play:

• Dueling unions: NUM vs. AMCU.  NUM is the most powerful union in South Africa, boasting 300,000 members, and is a part of COSATU, the national trade union federation which is allied with the dominant ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC).  NUMSA, the second-largest metalworkers union, is left-leaning and advocates for that nationalization of resources, something that President Zuma and mainstream ANC leaders (along with, obviously, the IMF and the World Bank) have opposed. The third-most-powerful metalworkers union in the country is the Association of Mining and Construction Union (AMCU) and there are reports that 25% of the workers at Marikana recently switched their membership to AMCU. Thus there's been a bit of a turf battle between unions that resulted in something quite sinister.   
• Wages: The underground mine workers are earning 4,000 Rand per month ($480). The work is extremely difficult and dangerous, and the wages are low. The workers also live near the mine in informal housing that does not have water, sanitation, or electricity.  The workers were demanding a 300% increase in wages to account for their substandard living conditions and the taxing nature of the work.  
• Platinum: The cost of platinum has spiked since the killings -- partially because of the mine's closure, a result of striking workers, that has continued into Tuesday -- now nearly $1500/ounce.  However, this short spike has balanced the price of platinum that had been falling over the last couple of years. As a result of the closure, and some bad press, Lonmin's stock has dropped 13%. Platinum is highly valuable metal that is used for catalytic converters, electrodes, dentistry equipment, and jewelry, among other things.  South Africa is the largest victim-of-extraction producer of platinum in the world.
• Precipitous violence: The striking workers had killed two policeman and two private security officers in the days preceding the massacre. The heavy presence of police at the mine wasn't completely inappropriate from a public order point of view.  The fact that more than 100 people were shot, while the vast majority of protesters (maybe all of them) did not have guns, is an entirely different matter.          

While these issues are central to the tragic, and large-scale, loss of life, there is an overarching theme that I have yet to mention.  18 years after the fall of the apartheid government, South Africa remains a profoundly unequal society.  Income inequality has only increased since the end of apartheid and a majority of South Africans live below the poverty line, out of the line of sight of World Cup visitors and international businesspeople.

South Africa does have a strong and growing economy, but most South Africans remain poor. South Africa's Constitution, established during the transition to democratic government, is quite progressive, and has economic provisions and guarantees similar to those found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: rights to housing, property, and access to basic amenities. Yesterday as we brainstormed as an office about the implications of the tragedy in Marikana and how we thought we should respond, I was jotting down thoughts.
  

[To help you make sense of my sketch: I drew a rough outline of South Africa. Money flows out of the country to multinationals and also flows to economic and political elites. Violence and other negative results of the mining operations cascade to poor laborers.] 

Extractive mining operations don't contribute to development in any meaningful way.  Profits largely leave the countries borders and into the offshore accounts of multinational corporations. Also, the level of corruption and cronyism in the South African government suggests that money also flows into the pockets of economic and political elites who allow contracts to be established outside democratic and transparent processes.  While the benefits of mining operations (profits) leave the country and flow to the haves, the have-nots (the miners and their families) are faced with the consequences of the mining operations.  Health complications from years of underground labor, ecological and environmental problems (which tend to disproportionately affect poor communities), and police brutality are forcibly borne by mineworkers and their families as well as the communities living in the proximity of the mine's toxic output.  Expressed differently, the mining operations create a series of outputs; the majority of positive outputs are delivered to economic and political elites while the negative outputs are left in the hands of southern Africa's poorest.  

Update: Their is a good column along these lines -- pointing out the role of inequality and the connections between government and industry -- in the National. 

Where rape, murder, and gross income inequality are classified as "peace"

Over the last week, a common theme has randomly emerged out of lectures I have attended and blog posts I’ve read: scholars and practitioners of conflict (resolution), international affairs, peacebuilding, and transitional justice are fixated on political violence, often at the expense of other, more discreet, but equally as menacing forms of violence.

At a seminar hosted by the Institute for Security Studies in Cape Town, Australian academic, John Braithwaite spoke about “cascades of violence” that tend to move and morph in location and in type.  Violence in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo seeps across the border to Rwanda.  Policymakers often fail to see the impacts of their political decisions and military movements. One acute example of a violence cascade is the Iraq sectarian war that was fomented (or mobilized) by the US invasion and occupation of that country. Not only did the sectarian divide contribute significantly to the more than 100,000 Iraqis that are now dead as a result of the war, but sectarianism is increasingly problematic throughout the region.  Iran and Saudi Arabia’s feud is starting to resemble US-USSR relations during the Cold War period, albeit on a much smaller scale. Iran funds Shia, and non-Sunni, movements and regimes while Saudi Arabia generally supports Sunnis. 

Not only does political violence cascade from one place to another, but violence can shift and cascade from one type to another.  In South Africa, political violence has decreased in the last 18 years, since the political transition to democracy in 1994.  However, other types of violence in South Africa have remained static or have even increased. Violent crime in South Africa remains quite high.  According to 2010 data, the southern Africa region has the highest rates of intentional homicide in the world, followed closely by Central America.  South Africa, as a country, ranks in the top 10 for intentional homicides per 100,000 people.  As of the early 2000s, South Africa had the highest rape rate per capita in the world.

In addition to high rates of violent crime, South Africa remains one of the most economically unequal societies on the planet.  South Africa has an incredibly high GINI coefficient, a World Bank statistic that measures the level of economic inequality in a given country (however, comparing GINI coefficients between countries is difficult because of the different ways that data is gathered and because the type of numbers that go into the production of a GINI coefficient aren’t uniform from country to country). South Africa also ranks among the top 10 most unequal societies in the world when the average income of the top 10% is compared with the average income of the bottom 10%, the same holds when the top 20% is compared with the bottom 20%.

Many community organizations working in townships and formal/informal settlements in South Africa will also attest to the disparity of quality service delivery in townships as compared with wealthier (and usually whiter) areas.  Crime, income inequality, and high rates of HIV (among many other health and education indicators) attest to acute forms of structural violence in South Africa.  Many donors and scholars have turned their attention away from South Africa, yet continue to refer to it as a prototypical success story, despite the ongoing economic and social maladies that plague the country. 

In his new, highly-touted book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, Steven Pinker suggests that violence has decreased over time.  However, Christian Davenport recently pointed out that Pinker doesn’t look at the full scope of violence.

OK, so maybe the magnitude of violence has been diminished (which Pinker says) but the form may have shifted (which he does not).     

Davenport goes on to suggest that governments aren’t more angelic towards one another, nor to their own citizenry; instead, the forms of violence have simply changed.  States have also become quite effective at silencing voices of dissent and weakening movements that attempt to change the status quo and dethrone the throne-sitters. 

Will H. Moore also gets in on the conversation and suggests that the fixation of violent political conflict fails to account for structural violence and the connection between justice and peace.  Peace is too often (mis)understood as the absence of political violence.  Within this (misunderstood) understanding, peace can be at hand when wealth is disproportionately in the hands of whites while black South Africans don’t have access to electricity or proper toilets and peace can be manifest while women have a better chance of being raped than getting an education.     

Therein lies South Africa: high rates of violent crime, income inequality, and a plethora of social structures and social institutions that prevent the vast majority of South Africans (and a disproportionate number of non-whites) from meeting their basic needs; yet, there is a relative absence of overt political violence.

Has political violence in South Africa cascaded into more severe forms of structural violence? Have social and economic agreements made during the political transition only entrenched the (unequal) economic and social status quo while the political landscape changed without benefit for South Africa’s poor (black) majority?          

Threats of demolitions; These are real people

From the NY Times:

The Israeli government has asked its Supreme Court to allow the demolition of eight Palestinian hamlets in the South Hebron Hills so the area can be used for military training.

Amira Hass at Haaretz clarifies the villages that are slated to be demolished:

The villages slated for demolition are the larger villages in the region: Majaz, Tabban, Sfai, Fakheit, Halaweh, Mirkez, Jinba, and Kharuba, which have a total of 1,500 residents. The villages to be spared are Tuba, Mufaqara, Sarura and Megheir al-Abeid, which have a total of 300 residents.

The southernmost villages on this map are the villages that are threatened with demolition.  The army currently operates a firing zone in this southern region of the West Bank. There are signs that warn residents to not cross certain expanses of the territory; however, is appears the Israeli defense minister needs more land to train his troops.

All demolitions and cruel, and enraging, but these newly-requested demolitions are especially painful for me because I know these places and I know the people.  I'll include some information about these villages to hopefully humanize the residents.

• Fakheit - In April 2009, Fakheit school opened to accomodate students living in Maghayir Al-Abeed, Markaz, Halawe, Fakheit, Majaaz, and Jinba. Previously, children from these villages attended school in Yatta, which required them to live in the city during the school week. Now the teachers at Al-Fakheit school travel from Yatta each day and pick up schoolchildren along the route.  The school has grown significantly in the last several years, from three tents in Fakheit, to numerous cinder block structures in both Fakheit and Jinba. The growth in the number of students suggests that more families with children are able to live permanently at their homes in the south hebron hills because their children can attend primary school there.  

• Majaz - Many of the kids that attend the Fakheit school are from Majaz. I'd often ride in the pick-up that transports the school kids from their villages to Fakheit school.  All the kids would be waiting outside their houses, donning their blue, UN-provided backpacks, grinning from ear-to-ear and jumping with excitement as the pick-up approached. They absolutely loved going to school.   
• Halaweh - Halaweh is also the name of a popular Palestinian (maybe Arab) desert.  When I was at the school I'd chat with the kids, asking them their names and where they were from.  When kids answered, "Halaweh," I'd always make a remark about how I loved Halaweh and it was nice to know it was made in their village. That would usually get the kids laughing while they explained to me that Halaweh wasn't made in their village, it just happened to be the same name. I'd play dumb every time and thank them for informing me about the coincidence of names.  

I could write more about Jinba and Kharuba and the other villages that are slated for demolition.  The point is that there are real people living in these villages.  The title of the NY Times article says that the Israeli army is looking to use this "West Bank area," but that's misleading, Israel is looking to use the land on which these Palestinians live, it's seeking to erase Palestinian villages and Palestinian people from the landscape.

This can't be allowed to happen.  

Kids at Fakheit school