Avuncular American

Huntsville, Order Indian Food for 2010 G-20

It's nice when something you wrote...

"Can We Can the G8 Now? Please?" in April and

"Eight Is Not Enough: Turn the G8 Into G20" in July...

... comes to pass in September.  Or almost, if this "Snap Analysis" from Reuters is accurate:

Adopting the G20 as the new economic steering committee raises questions over the whether or not the Group of Eight, which makes up the world's industrial countries, will eventually be faded out. Diplomats said the G8 would continue to function but would focus on non-economic issues.

Of course, I'd rather they just declare victory and bury the G8 altogether, if for no better reason than to save lots of travel money.  Huntsville, Ontario, site of the 2010 gathering, will just have to add an extra 12 spaces at the table.  No point in continuing what had become a "rich (mostly white) man's club" when the rich men had to admit that they didn't have a clue on how to organize the world's economy.

Now, if Huntsville will just expand its menu to include some Indian restaurants, Brazilian coffee houses, South African rooibos tea rooms...  Oops, just checked.  Looks like they have a long way to go.

(Logo, Town of Huntsville Summit Site)

Harkis - Reminder Of Those Left Behind

A chance flick of the radio dial reminded me that today, 25 September, is the "Journée Nationale d'Hommage aux Harkis" in France.  The radio program is the excellent daily show "2000 ans d'histoire" on France Inter, and you can listen to a podcast of today's rebroadcast of the 2006 interview with author Tom Charbit.

The Harkis were Algerians who served the French cause in what British historian Alistair Horne called the "Savage War of Peace," Algeria's war for independence from 1954 to 1962.  Several films have touched on the torn allegiances of Algerians during that dark period, including L'ennemi intime and La trahison.  They only hint at the violence meted out to Harkis upon independence, meriting Horne's use of "savage" in every sense of the term.

Those who escaped, and there were over 100,000 with their families, were interned in camps as isolated and forlorn as that of Camp Joffre in Rivesaltes, pictured here.  The camp, which was used originally to house Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War, is on a dusty coastal plain at the foot of the Pyrenees.  Some Harki children were born and grew up in camps like this, finally protesting their plight in the mid-Seventies.  Check this excellent French government site for more photos and historical notes on Camp Joffre.

Whatever your political stance on Algeria's war for independence, you'd have to be pretty hardcore and hard hearted not to admit that the Harkis got a bad deal.  Scorned (when they weren't massacred) by fellow Algerians, they got little of the honor they deserved by the country they served.  President Chirac started their rehabilitation, calling them "brothers in arms," when he established the day of commemoration in 2001.  Two years ago, just after returning from a trip to Algeria, President Sarkozy acknowledged the "debt" owed those who had given up everything for the lost cause of "Algérie française."

But it's an uphill battle, and the political debates of a half century ago still echo.  In 2006, Socialist politician Georges Frêche of Montpelier referred to Harkis as "sous-hommes" ("sub-humans") when some rallied to the UMP successors of de Gaulle.

A half century after their war, France's Harkis still have to struggle to get recognition for their role.  Let's see how historians, fifty years hence, will judge the West's contemporary allies in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Will they get to write the official history, or will it be someone whose eduction was in a madrassa?

14 Kilometers, But Oceans Apart: Trans-Mediterranean Migration

Spanish writer/director Gerardo Olivares' film 14 Kilómetros tells us how far the Moroccan coastline is separated from Spain.  Tantalizingly close, visible from your window whether you're in Tangier on the African side or Tarifa on the European coast.  But if you are one of the thousands of desperate African migrants who has spent your last cent crossing the Sahara getting to the jump off point, you are not going to let 14 Km get in your way.  Or you are going to die trying, as thousands do.

Dr. Bichara Khader of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CERMAC) at Belgium's Université Catholique de Louvain knows this world of mass migration, and has made the study of it his life's work.  Today's presentation at MEDEA's "Mediterranean Midday" was largely devoted to Maghrebi migration to Europe, but the Africans of 14 Kilómetros were never far from our minds.

The fictionalized trio of francophone Africans in Olivares' film (amateurs recruited on the streets of Mali and Niger) start a little hesitantly, and at first appear to be reciting their lines a bit mechanically.  But that impression passes, and the viewer is left with just the three protagonists and the utter vastness of the Sahara.  One of the film's most lingering images is of the impossibly overloaded truck (Olivares was reminded of "boat people" on wheels) lumbering through the desert, dropping people off at some unmarked crossroad in the sand: Libya to the right, Algeria and Morocco to the left.

Our trio takes the latter route, and add to the 100,000 or so sub-Saharan Africans living in the limbo of the Maghreb.  Their Algerian and Moroccan "hosts" may still attempt to make the crossing themselves, but the heyday of North African migration to Europe in the boom time of the Sixties and Seventies is long over.  With Maghrebi birthrates dropping to European levels, how long will it be, asks Dr. Khader, until the Africans simply start to replace the missing Maghrebi workers and give up on their dreams of Europe?

For the crossing is increasingly difficult.  Whether it is 14 Kilometers in the Strait of Gibraltar or hundreds of kilometers to the Italian coast from Libya, European nations are increasing their pressure on the countries of the Maghreb to prevent the African migrants from crossing.  With their detention centers and increasingly sophisticated patrol boats, are the North African countries becoming, in Dr. Khader's words, "the gendarmes of Europe?"

In Olivares' film, the characters are shunted between border posts, safe houses, and brothels.  We come to care for the characters, and to root for them as they confront traffickers whose only interest is in their well-hidden wads of Euros.  We hold our breath as they risk being discovered by Algerian, Moroccan, or Spanish border guards.

For what?  To spend their lives on the edge of society, performing "Difficult, Dirty, Dangerous" jobs shunned by Westerners?

Gerardo Olivares' amateur actors have no such illusions.  As the director told Nicolas Crousse of Le Soir, at the Madrid opening of his film, they saw how African migrants lived in the Spanish capital.  "If it's like that," they told him, "we prefer staying in our own countries."

(Image: Strait of Gibraltar, NASA Earth Observatory)

Journée Sans Voitures - No Car Day In Brussels

This is an experiment, attempting to do a post by email. I am cheating, because to insert this nice "No Car" sticker from the Boston bloggers "Choosing No Car," I had to log on to my Typepad account.

Okay, enough geeky detail. The important thing is this: for the nth time in recent years, Brussels, seat of the European Union, is turning itself into a carless capital. "La Journée Sans Voitures" is a joy for anyone who values fresher air, walking IN the streets, and peace and quiet.

Not that our leafy neighborhood is noisy, but this morning, going out for fresh bread, it was like the final scene (minus the scary post apocalyptic music) of the end of the world in "On The Beach." No sound, empty streets. That will have changed when we take the tram a little later; last year our tram could barely move for all the cyclists and pedestrians clogging the city's many cultural and historic venues.

Brussels, a city of only about a million people, can go carless thanks to its wonderful integrated public transport system, where one simple ticket gets you on to trams, buses, metros, and trains. We almost never go into city center by car. So, looking for inspiration for a post-Detroit future? Come to Brussels next September and savor what it's like to spend a day without The Car.

Industrial Infrastructure - Not Just For the Museum

Throughout August and September, Europe’s cities, regions, and nations have been marking various “heritage,” “open house,” or “patrimoine” days. This weekend it is Brussels’ turn, but we also intend to take in some sites in northern France. Value for money doesn’t get much better: most of the sites are free, and some only open for this event.

Last weekend it was the turn of Belgium’s two largest regions, Flanders and Wallonia. We checked out several places in Wallonie, concentrating on the rich industrial heritage of what is now a region known for its depressed economy. In the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, it was quite the opposite.

As you can see from the photo of the stupendous canal elevator at Strépy-Thieu, Wallonie and Belgium have seen fit to create marvels of the 21st century, just a few kilometers from the UNESCO world heritage site of its 19th century predecessors. Strépy-Thieu and its attendant infrastructure show how investment in transport alternatives for trucks clogging motorways exist, and can be made to thrive again.

For those who still know what a factory is, and who know that “industrial zone" doesn’t only refer to prefab warehouses to store Chinese goods destined for our shelves, check out the “European Route of Industrial Heritage” (ERIH), which has a store of information on its website.

One of Belgium’s most interesting ERIH stops is the Ecomusée (eco as in economic) du Bois-du-Luc, in the former coal belt of La Louvière south of Brussels. The road signs still tend to say “musée des mines,” but once you find the place, there’s no missing its purpose. It’s a veritable company town, built when capitalists had a paternal hold over their workers, even providing housing, shopping, and medical care on site. Quite an innovation for the 19th century.

But the paternalism only went so far. That impressive entrance you see in the photo, separating the courtyard of the mining site from the “cité ouvrière,” separates more than residential from industrial. That heavy steel gate between the brick towers is called, rather ominously, a “porte guillotine,” and though it may not have chopped any heads off, the message was clear to striking workers: do not try anything stupid. A far cry from today’s impunity with industrial property, when strikers in France kidnap management or strap homemade explosives to the machine tools.

But I digress. Much as I laud the work of these institutions which safeguard the industrial past in all its forms, I want future generations to admire what should be our industrial present. And that means retaining an industrial base, no matter how “yuppie” or gentrified our cities might become.

Recently I read in Belgium’s Le Soir (”Industries SDF à Bruxelles?“) that space for industry in Europe’s capital is disappearing at the rate of some 8,600 square meters per month, which, says journalist François Robert, “means there won’t be anything left, if this rate is maintained, in less than a year.” Sorry, folks, that just won’t do. Brussels, or Belgium, or any country for that matter, cannot live by bureaucrats and university students alone. And as much as tourists like to admire Brussels’ impressive sites like the Grand Place and the Atomium, I have yet to see a country achieve 1st world status (or retain it) via package tours.

So admire these wonders of the industrial world that have been preserved for posterity, but avoid crying “not in my back yard” when some entrepreneur wants to set up a little workshop down the street. Your future economic health may depend on it.

Un Prophète

"Prison dramas", unless they are quality films like Leonera or Vier Minuten, are often simply that - prison dramas.  Genre films that are quickly produced, formulaic, and easily forgotten.  Not so with Jacques Audiard's Un Prophète, winner of the Cannes Grand Jury prize.  For Un Prophète is, as they tend to say in France, "un grand film."  Check out the official site for a trailer.

No big name actors or flashy pyrotechnics, though the special effects for the apparition of a departed cell mate - ostensibly from Hell - with little tufts of flames singing his track suit, are rather nifty.  No, the special effects are all in the acting - Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup (yes, French actors are no longer just "Alain" or "Jean-Paul") in the principal roles of Malik and César - and in Audiard's directing.

Prisons in France are all the news these days.  If it's not condemnation for overcrowding or suicide rates 10 times the non-prison population, it's spectacular breakouts with the help of hired or hijacked helicopters.

Malik and César have no need for such high-profile techniques.  César, as the grey-bearded godfather of the prison's Corsicans, can order an execution as easily as he can ensure privileged treatment for his troops.  Malik, a quick-learning "petty" criminal whose primary talent is survival, comes to serve the Corsicans, even learning their language (the film is primarily in French, but with frequent, and credible, use of Arabic and Corsu).  It's hard to say exactly at what point the Corsicans come to serve Malik, but that is clearly the trajectory.

In prison films in the United States (I can see Brad Pitt trying to snap up the remake rights after his capture of the excellent French-Georgian thriller 13 Tzameti), the Corsicans would become the Cripps, facing off the Bloods.  In Audiard's film, the other major power brokers are "les frères" - the brothers, referring to the bearded Muslim prisoners.  They are not necessarily Islamists, but they are disciplined.  Malik, himself of maghrebi origin but of no apparent religious conviction, somehow bonds with the brothers, but is also chummy with a gypsy (gitan) drug dealer who controls a deadly ring on the outside.  Why have enemies when allies can come in handy, inside or out?

The Outside.  If there's anything in Un Prophète that shows how prison is just "Criminality, Uninterrupted," it is the almost sheer impunity with which prisoners continue to ply their trade.  There are cell phones, of course, and special prison delivery services with packages swung between barred windows.  But Malik's specialty is making the utmost out of his occasional 24-hour paroles.  César thinks that he "owns" Malik's hours on the outside.  Malik has other ideas.

I've already said more than I usually do about the content of a highly recommended film.  Jacques Audiard, the latest in his family to gain cinematic glory, has made a keeper.

(Poster: Cinema de France.com)

Transatlantic Trends: Can US Surf Obama's Wave In Europe?

The 8th annual Transatlantic Trends survey of European and American attitudes is out.  I must first qualify "European," which includes non-EU Turkey (which is not even in Europe, according to many), but does not include a number of EU countries.  No Scandinavians, no Balts?  Likewise, "American" is just that: North American partners in NATO, the Canadians, don't figure in the report.  Maybe next time, funding permitting.

That said, it is a fascinating survey of public opinion on a range of important policy issues, from what to do about Afghanistan to whether to kowtow to the Russians.  And don't presume you know where public opinion in selected countries already stands on these questions.  Ronald Asmus, the German Marshall Fund's Executive Director in Brussels and former Clinton Administration State Department appointee, says that a common reaction to his numbers is "that can't be so!"

Yes, the numbers don't lie: "Old Europe" Westerners are generally more pro-NATO and pro-US than their "New Europe" Eastern counterparts (Donald Rumsfeld must be saying "that can't be so!!").  And Turks - whom successive US administrations have adopted as their favorite EU candidate country - haven't gotten over their Iraq War slump, when Rumsfeld's Deputy Paul Wolfowitz tried to sic the Turkish Army on a recalcitrant elected civilian government.  Turkish attitudes toward the US - though improved over the Bush years - are the least susceptible to the Obama charm.

But the sheer magnitude of the "Obama Bounce," as Asmus likes to call the chart-topping effect, is what is so different.   "Unprecedented," says Asmus, of the 70 point jump in approval ratings between Bush and Obama (in the case of German public opinion).

I wish I had another slide that was shown at the recent GMFUS briefing, a composite of similar surveys taken since 1952, where European opinion of the US has had its momentary ups and downs, but nothing like the abyssal depths of the Bush years, followed by the bends-inducing rise beyond the surface after Obama's appearance on the scene.

Okay, all this is refreshing but what to do with it?  Confirmed Atlanticist Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, German Liberal Member of the European Parliament, called the findings evidence of "political capital."  "Now, let us use it," he said.   Indeed.

So I pose that very question to the public diplomacy community, which knows that it is good to have public opinion on your side.  How can the Obama Administration build on this groundswell of European public opinion in favor of the person of Barack Obama, which, as the survey shows, does not always have its corollary in support for US policies?

In a week where some of his fellow citizens called him a liar, it has to be reassuring in the White House and in Foggy Bottom that the Obama magic still appears to be working on the European side of the Atlantic.

9/11/09 - Fear Of a Different Sort

September 11th.

Americans are frustrated, they're angry, and, most importantly, they're scared to death.

Representative John Boehner, House Republican leader (Washington Post, 9/11/09)

Last year on September 11, just weeks before the US Presidential election, I asked whether this year's commemorations would see "fear up" or "fears overcome."  Thankfully, President Barack Obama has tried to calm the nerves of peoples across the world, most especially in the Muslim world.  We are far from the early days after 9/11/01, when George W. Bush let loose the "C" word - Crusade, the born-again Christian answer to Jihad.

But on the US domestic front, fear-mongering is thriving, as if a certain type of politician cannot appeal to any other emotion but people's fears.  If, as Rep. Boehner asserts, Americans are "scared to death," then maybe it's because he and his colleagues have done little else than rant on about "death panels" and urge on the kind of person who brandishes a sign "Obama Lies While Grandma Dies."

A certain breed of politician appeals to gut fears - fears of "the Other," the foreigner, the outsider - when things are going badly at home.  By "home," I mean the Republican party, which appears to have run out of ideas.  Except bad ideas, negative ones.  And it was a Republican - Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign the Vice Presidency even before his boss Richard Nixon had to leave the White House - who used to rant about the "nattering nabobs of negativity."  He should check out his own party now.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ran their administration based on fear for eight long years.  Fear is what the GOP has to offer.  And the Know-Nothings are back.  This is not what I had hoped for on September 11, 2009.

Republican SDD - Selective Deficit Disorder

Sufferers of ADD - Attention Deficit Disorder (see BeatADD.com for some funny and compassionate material on the modern malady; thanks for the poster) - please forgive my confusing your situation with that of the US Republican party.  Whatever the cause of ADD, it appears to be completely involuntary, whereas what is ailing the GOP is entirely of its own doing.

Take the outburst of Republican Congressman Joe Wilson (from South Carolina) last night during President Obama's address to the joint session of Congress.  Blurting out "You lie!!" (see WaPo's Dana Milbank's article and video) to the President was not only a historic breach of etiquette and protocol, it was also, like his colleagues' brandishing anti-health care reform signs, entirely premeditated.

Republicans came to the Rotunda ready to diss the Prez, who was not displaying sufficient "humility," as Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said on the eve of the address.  Coming as he does from a state where people of the President's complexion were addressed as "boy" not so long ago, Chambliss' racial reference was understood by all with a memory of the coded language.

"The practitioners of the "Big Lie" (and they have the audacity to label Obama a "fascist") have assimilated the lesson of the people who invented fascism: lie early, lie often, and lie big."

The practitioners of the "Big Lie" (and they have the audacity to label Obama a "fascist") have assimilated the lesson of the people who invented fascism: lie early, lie often, and lie big.  Like their professed concern about adding to the federal deficit, nicely trashed today by the ever watchful (and always funny) Gail Collins in the NYT:

These guys are really, really, really concerned about balancing the budget. And that seems only fair since they were basically the ones who unbalanced it in the first place when they worked in splendid bipartisan concert in 2001 to pass George W. Bush’s first $1.6 trillion in tax cuts.

"These guys" include Senators Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley, respectively Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who hold the future of health care reform in their SDD-trembling hands.  But Bush's deficits - his trillion dollar tax cuts wiped out the Clinton surplus - willfully committed while he was leading the country to a war of choice in Iraq on the national credit card, are conveniently forgotten by the GOP.  Just like the huge deficits of the Reagan/Bush I era, which Clinton had to erase before he created the surplus, which was wiped out by Bush II...

Selectivity over deficits is just politics, you might say.  Perhaps. But it might also be a sign of a breakdown.  Consider what the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has to say about ADHD, then substitute "GOP" for "child" (particularly after last night's behavior):

• Impulsiveness: a child who acts quickly without thinking first.
• Hyperactivity: a child who can't sit still, walks, runs, or climbs around when others are seated, talks when others are talking.
• Inattention: a child who daydreams or seems to be in another world, is sidetracked by what is going on around him or her.

As Bob Herbert said the other day, maybe "It's Time to Get Help."

 

Barak Bulldozes Chances For Israel-Palestine Peace

"The Bulldozer" was Ariel Sharon's nickname, but current Israeli Defense Minister and onetime Camp David peace processor Ehud Barak was the one who today gave the green light for the construction of hundreds of additional homes in West Bank settlements.  Building cheap housing for Russian immigrants would appear to outweigh building goodwill with Palestinians who own (or owned) the land where these fortress-settlements are sited.

Running roughshod over Palestinians and other Arabs was par for the course for Sharon, but you might expect more of Labour man Barak.  Then again, he is part of the most right-wing government in Israel's history.  But what of the impact on the negotiations (or talks about negotiations) brokered by US envoy George Mitchell?  It would appear that this is a rather provocative Israeli poke in the eye of the Obama Administration.  Will the President blink?

Chutzpah is a commodity in plentiful supply in the Netanyahu government, but yesterday's op-ed by Jimmy Carter in the Washington Post detailed an Israeli practice that has to take the world record for gall:

I visited a family who had lived for four generations in their small, recently condemned home. They were laboring to destroy it themselves to avoid much higher costs if Israeli contractors carried out the demolition order.

Demolishing your own house to avoid an Israeli bill for same?  That's like having to pay for your water from the very people who drain your wells - another Israeli-imposed practice.  Or how about paying for the "losses" of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, should it lose a court battle (highly unlikely) over confiscated Palestinian land, as lawyer Raja Shehadeh recounts in his award-winning book "Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape."

Those of us who live in countries where rule of law is generally applied to residents in a fair way, whatever the plaintiff's race or religion, will have difficulty even comprehending the daily lot of Palestinians in the West Bank, where confiscated Arab land may not be sub-leased to "non-Jews," as Shehadeh writes.

Shehadeh and other non-violent rights activists deserve our admiration and support.  Who among us would stand for years of niggling harassment over bypass roads (for Jews only), checkpoints (for Arabs only), and Separation Walls (which not only separate Jew from Arab, but also ensure that Palestinian farmers are cut off from their fields).

The poke in the eye, repeated enough, will result in self-defense mechanisms.  Have we not gotten beyond "an eye for an eye... ?"  How about "what goes around, comes around?"  Are a few hundred more houses really worth that much to Israel?