A message from Shirin Ebadi

This is going around, from the well-known Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi:

There is a very important matter I would like to discuss with you. I conduct my human rights activities through the Defender of Human Rights Center (DHRC). I am the president of this center and we have three important responsibilities:

a. We report the violations of human rights that take place in Iran.

b. We defend political prisoners pro bono — about 70% of the political prisoners in Iran are clients of our center and we do not charge them for our services.

c. We support the families of these prisoners both financially — if they require financial aid — and spiritually.

This center is a member of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and has been registered there. It has also been awarded a human rights prize by the Human Rights National Commission in France. This center is very well known and credible in Iran. Two days ago the government of Iran announced that this center is illegal and provided we continue our activities, they shall arrest us. Of course me and the other members of the center do not intend to shut down the center and we shall continue our activities. However, there is a high possibility that that they will arrest us. The government’s action in this regard is illegal.

Therefore, I kindly request that you broadcast this message by all mean and gather spiritual support for our center. This center has been established and working for more than four years now. I believe this decision of the government has been triggered by my memoir being published. In any case, I am happy that my memoir has been published, for the truth must be told.

Many thanks,

Shirin Ebadi

Photographer caught doctoring Lebanon pics

The really stupid thing about the freelance photographer for Reuters who doctored his pictures is that his stupidity will discredit the thousands of real pictures out there that show what an ugly war this has been. And while the pro-Israel blogosphere probably rejoices, it doesn’t change that between 600 and 900 Lebanese people, for the most part civilians, have been killed.

And besides I don’t even see what he was trying to do.

I was interviewed by the German newspaper Stuttgart Zeitung (sp?) today about the Flickr pictures. Clearly a lot of people have picked up on the media side of this war and what a powerful (but ultimately still too weak) impact some of the horrible images we’ve seen have had.

Review: Golia on the Yacoubian Building

My friend Maria Golia, writer, columnist and author of Cairo: City of Sand (What? You haven’t read it yet? Do you like staying ignorant about contemporary Egypt and Umm ad-Dounia? What are you waiting for?) has sent me this review of Egypt’s star-packed, hit movie of the summer, The Yacoubian Building, based on the Alaa Al Aswany novel of the same name. I haven’t seen it yet and heard very conflicting opinions about it, and Maria’s review puts it in the proper socio-political context.

Downtown Cairo’s Odeon Theater charges half the price of other first-run film venues and is consequently always packed. These days, it’s showing the screen adaptation of The Yacoubian Building, based on the eponymous novel by Alaa al-Aswany. Presented at several foreign film festivals, The Yacoubian Building is causing a stir for its so-called frank portrayal of corruption, torture, classism and several types of exploitative sex. The film itself is unsubtle, overlong and visually flat, with all the artistic merit of a wad of chewing gum stuck to the sole of a shoe. What is interesting is the response to the film, or more precisely, to the narrative content that survived the scriptwriter’s hackneyed treatment.

Following the early showings, word was out: The Yacoubian Building has gone too far! People left before intermission, an unheard-of event since Egyptians will sit through unimaginable tripe, if only to enjoy the A/C. When questioned as to who left and why, the ushers at the Odeon said it was mostly girls who found the R-rated film obscene. Whether this delicacy is real or feigned, it’s as melodramatic as the movie, whose only truly obscene moment is one we’ve seen before. Adel Imam – Egyptian comedy’s former tutelary deity, now a maudlin, pot-bellied grandpa – manages to grope and bestow his froggy kisses on yet another beautiful, ambitious bint.

Continue reading Review: Golia on the Yacoubian Building

How does Hizbullah define victory?

A sobering op-ed by Bernard Heykal:

Judging from Sayyid Nasrallah’s speeches it is clear that Hezbollah is not fighting Israel as much as the generalized Arab and Muslim feeling of defeat, humiliation and genuine incompetence. Pay attention, for example, to the way in which Sayyid Nasrallah has defined victory in his typically low-key style, which contrasts sharply with the old-style and bombastic claims of Arab leaders such as Jamal Abdul-Nasser and Saddam Hussein. Sayyid Nasrallah is very clear and precise that Israel cannot be defeated militarily. Hezbollah, he says, “cannot shoot down Israel’s F-16 fighter jets,” but what it can do is bleed Israel’s military forces, harm its economy and extract political concessions, any of which constitutes a victory. Victory, in other words, is a new psychological state for Arabs and Muslims, as well as for the “defeated” Israelis, and bears no relationship to the actual physical or material costs of war. This victory cannot be quantified or calculated and no amount of destruction and killing in Lebanon, or elsewhere in the Middle East, can outweigh its positive value and outcome. It is this psychological aspect to the present war that has so many Arabs and Muslims rallying to Hezbollah’s side—they finally see Arabs who are putting up a real fight against a formidable adversary who had acquired supernatural power in their collective imagination. But does Hezbollah’s resistance really count as a victory or is it merely illusory especially in the long term? Does it constitute anything more than al-Qaeda’s “victory” on 11 September 2001? How will the political map of the Middle East change if Hezbollah is seen to have won this round with Israel? And finally which forces in the United States are benefiting most from this engagement?

I see it a little differently — the Arab support for Hizbullah is not only about the psychological need for a hero, but also related to anger at the Arab regimes’ impotence or collaboration with US-Israeli policy in the region. But the op-ed raises some important questions and is worth reading.

Former Leb PM al-Hoss: Bush is a terrorist

Former Lebanese Prime Minister Salim al-Hoss in an open letter to George W. Bush in the Daily Star:

You repeatedly claim that Israel is acting in self-defense. How preposterous! Self-defense on other people’s occupied territory is tantamount to one thing: blatant aggression.

You call Hizbullah a terrorist organization. We call it a legitimate resistance movement. There would have been no military wing of Hizbullah if there had been no Lebanese territory under Israeli occupation, if there had been no Lebanese hostages languishing in Israeli jails, and if Lebanon had not been exposed to almost daily Israeli intrusions into its airspace and territorial waters, and to sporadic incursions into Lebanese land and bombardment of civilian targets.

You cannot eliminate a party by demolishing a whole country. This would have been achieved peacefully by Israel withdrawing from the land it occupies, releasing Lebanese prisoners, and desisting from further acts of aggression against Lebanon.

Israel is the most horrendous terrorist power. And you, Mr. President, are unmistakably a direct partner, and hence a straight terrorist.

Pictures of attacks on Lebanon – early August

A new set of pictures has been uploaded to the Flickr account. They were sent by Hanady Salman of as-Safir and show some of the effects of the last few days of bombing in Lebanon.

Smoke And Fire Rises After An Israeli Airstrike Hit The Suburbs Of Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, Aug. 4 Ap
An Israeli strike on a suburb of Beirut.

Fishing Boats Covered With Ashes Float Among Debris In The Uzai Port District Port Of South Beirut Destroyed In An Israeli Air Raid 04 August Afp
Fishing boats covered in ashes and surrounded by an oil slick in a port south of Beirut.

Maamelten Ap
Rescuers inspect a destroyed vehicle on a bombarded road.

Shit’s Creek (16)

August 6, 2006

We were nearing the end of our patrol when we got a call about a UXO incident – unexploded ordnance. Someone, somewhere had found some kind of exploded bomb and we were sent to deal with it.

Actually, our patrol was just there to secure the area and provide security while the EOD (explosives ordnance disposal or something, I swear, it’s a new acronym every day) was called in to clean up the mess of the war.

It turned out to be an unexploded mortar shell in a particular poor area somewhere in southwest Baghdad, a Shiite neighborhood not far from a Sunni neighborhood, another one of these fault lines in the city.

The young men and kids that came gathered at the arrival of the Americans and their humvees (we even had a Bradley tank with us, very impressive) said, why yes, someone did mortar us just the other day. Apparently not all of them went off.

One officer described it to me as the “new face of violence in Baghdad is senseless indirect fire.” It’s called indirect fire because you don’t see where it goes. He said once it was bombs in market places or in front of mosques, these days it was just a bunch of guys with mortar launcher and some shells shooting off a few into the nearby neighborhood and then running away. Not particularly aiming at anything, just shooting.

There are so many mortar shells in Iraq, it’s hard to grasp. Everyday the US army issues another press release about some massive “terrorist” weapons cache they have discovered containing hundreds of 60mm or 80mm mortars.

These are the raw materials for roadside bombs, incidentally. Usually they are wired together, attached to a mobile phone, and then when a US or Iraqi army patrol drives by, the insurgent makes a phone call.

Now, however, they are more and more being used for their intended purpose of being shot at people.

It was just a little 60mm mortar, sitting in the middle of a vacant, trash-filled lot in this poor grubby neighborhood. So the soldiers settled down to wait for the bomb squad, all the while grumbling because EOD was known to take a long time and it was already getting near dusk and the patrol should have been near its end.

I was near my own end. It was my second patrol of the day, it was really hot, and I had a throbbing headache so that I really didn’t care what happened to the little rocket over in the trash pile.

Then one of the soldiers comes over and said that one of the locals had told the interpreter that there were two more unexploded mortars nearby. “Who told you this?” asked the sergeant. “Guy with the dark hair and the yellow man-dress on.”

That didn’t narrow it down to much, but we eventually found the guy wearing the yellow dish-dash who directed us down through some buildings.

We come to another vacant trash filled lot, this time filled with sheep and an old shepherd (I mean what better place to pasture the flock than in an urban slum?). We asked him if he’d seen any mortar shells around and so he barked over at one of his teenage sons…

… who proceeded to come walking over to us carrying a pair of mortar shells in his bare hands! There was a collective gasp as everyone shouted for the interpreter to tell him to put them down, very gently. Which he did rather nonchalantly, clearly not sure why four huge soldiers with weapons and body armor were cringing away from him.

Turns out when the shepherd had come across them he’d neutralized them the best way he knew how and, as the soldiers put it, “tossed them into the shit creek” that passed for plumbing in this neighborhood.

Not long afterwards, the bomb squad showed up and was briefed on the situation. And the first thing the bomb guy did was go up to our two shit creek bombs and pick them up himself and carry them over to the other trash pile bomb.

We gave him a lot of room.

They then dug a hole, placed the mortar shells in there, put plastic explosives on top and then put a tire around the whole thing, took cover, and blew the whole mess up.

All in all it took a few hours and these happen all the time. We were minutes from the base when the patrol got a call about another UXO incident (lot of dud mortar shells out there it seems), and we were diverted in the pitch black night to go provide security for another team dealing with an errant mortar shell.

By this time my pounding headache had left me half blind and a little fed up with the whole situation so that as we stood around and provided pointless security, I vented bitterly to the sergeant, who was so amused (and shared my feelings) that he passed on my sentiments to the lieutenant. Who seemed to lack quite the same sense of humor.

We weren’t far from the main US base around there and one of the interpreters, who went around masked like most of them do, described the nearby village as an “insurgent village”. Apparently they would watch for the interpreters to leave the base on their breaks, follow them and then sell their identities to the insurgents.

I heard somewhere once that the insurgents will pay thousands of dollars for the name and address of an interpreter for the coalition forces.

Later I was eating with the soldiers. We’d spent enough time together inside a humvee that it only seemed normal that I sat with them in the chow hall. One sergeant was predicting that their tours were going to be extended this time around.

The 4th Infantry Division came into Baghdad in December so theoretically they should be leaving in November… but new troops were just moved into Baghdad to try to stop the brewing civil war. The new people had been stationed up in Mosul and had been set to go home themselves, now they’ve been moved to Baghdad and extended for three months.

This one sergeant felt pretty sure that they wouldn’t be allowed to go home either, not in the middle of the battle to retake the city.

Part of the sergeant’s skepticism stemmed from his first time in Iraq, he rolled in from Kuwait with the 2nd Armored Division in March 2003 and after one year, they were set to go home, sitting in the airport in Kuwait, six hours from ending the most exhausting year of their life when word came they had to go back.

Days later they were fighting the Mahdi Militia across southern Iraq and stayed another five months through the blazing summer in 2004.

Then they went home for a year and came back 2005. Matching his joking tone, I made some comment about it must be hard to stay normal with all that.

He stopped walking, turned and look at me, suddenly serious with a strange catch in his voice, “normal? I don’t think any of us are normal any more. There is no normal.”