One World, Many Peaces

Newly Demilitarized Darfur Faces Serious Security and Humanitarian Problems

For the fist time since wartime atrocities began in Darfur six years ago, the region's peacekeeping chief has declared that hostile military actions have ceased. "As of today, I would not say there is a war going on in Darfur,"  said the commander of the joint U.N./African Union force, Martin Luther Agwai, at a Khartoum press briefing. However, this does not mean the there is peace in Darfur. Far from it, the region's residents and outside interveners now face a potentially more daunting task: solving serious security and humanitarian problems.

"What you have is security issues more now. Banditry, localized issues, people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local level. But real war as such, I think we are over that." Yet, far from proposing any sort of effective Marshall Plan that "saved" Europe after the ravages of World War Two and helped to created today's European Union, officials seem content to bring in the rest of the planned UN troops without clear goals on any side. This may turn out to be the key unresolved security issue, which the successful oil-for-peace program in southern Sudan can indirectly inform.

The apparent cause of the lull in hostilities is a severe fragmentation of the once more unified opposing sides, mostly Arab pro-government militias and troops against mostly Black rebels. According to Agwai, only "one other group can launch an attack on the ground," referring to the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), rebels who unprecedentedly attacked Khartoum last year. AP journalist Andrew Heavens criticized Agwai for "playing down" the remaining violence, according to him only "the latest senior figure" to do so.

As Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu has written, "Even after the agreements are signed, peacemaking is never finished. Peace is not a goal to be reached but a way of life." Darfur, newly demilitarized, has yet to see any agreements signed, and its security and humanitarian problems will remain a current event creating the future of those who live there until they are solved by leveraging local resources with regional and global coordination.

Criminal CIA Probe is a Copout but there's Hope Elsewhere...

The criminal probe announced by US Attorney General Eric Holder into CIA agents who interrogated "inhumanely" is a copout move for the Obama administration, who should have gone after those who ordered and supervised them too. Might as well have been satisfied with getting Nazi infantry rather than going after Hitler and his close circle. Or better yet continue, as the White House has on the issue since Obama took office, talking lots and doing nothing. But never fear, The 99 are here!

There is a paradox of peace at the core of every superhero: they uphold values of peace by breaking them as they see fit. This paradox applies equally to heads of states as to our favorite DC and Marvel comic book superheroes,  reinterpreted like Greek tragedies over and over again by Hollywood studios: Batman, Iron Man, Superman and my favorite, Hale Berry as Cat Woman, to name a few. Each of them uses all the violence they can to prevent violence being done or to right wrongs. Kapow!

Enter The 99: explicitly Islam-based superheroes who do exactly the same thing for different reasons. Or are they?  Each character mirrors an attribute of Allah: one, Jabbar, is reminiscent of the Hulk except he is Saudi Arabian; Darr the Afflicter is a paraplegic American who can cause pain with his mind alone; and then there is the character in a burka, Batina the Hidden. Forbes named The 99 one of the top twenty trends sweeping the world, from Morocco to Indonesia. They'll get'm.

The irony is that The 99 basically represent the same values of peace as their Western counterparts, but from a different source. Which brings us back to the copout criminal CIA probes. Just as what differentiates Western and Islamic superheroes is not so much what they do or how they do it, but the source which gives them authority to do so, likewise with carrying out military or other state maneuvers:  these fictional current events thus can inform the creation of our actual future.

Powerful Pan-European Moment in Peace History Memorialized

Picnics are far from the first events that generally come to mind when we think of key moments or turning points in the Cold War; the Bay of Pigs, atomic weapons development, the space race, and the fall of the Berlin Wall are understandably much more common. However, European leaders and participants commemorated a peaceful-picnic-turned-exciting-escape that changed the course of world history yesterday, with lessons that can still inform how nonviolent transformations can occur in any culture today.

 

In 1989, Communist Hungary's political opposition party organized a picnic in Sopronpuszta on the Austrian border in an attempt to press for more civil rights and attract closer ties with their capitalist neighbors.  Among the 10,000 people who gathered to eat, drink and be merry-- while making a powerful, peaceful political point to the world-- were about 600 East Germans who got word of the picnic and decided to join.  "Hungarians gave wings to the East Germans' desire for freedom," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the commemorative event. 

 

The wider Cold War context was the new era of glasnost — or openness — under reformist Soviet leader Mikail Gorbachev. Yet, 80,000 Russian troops were stationed in Hungary at the time. There was a bit of impromptu planning involved in the escape, but it was the heat of the moment, or rather the peaceableness of the moment, that provided the impetus for several of these East Germans to be inspired by a Hungarian border guard who was politically passive, letting through the border gate.  After this small group got through, the floodgate burst open.

 

The East Germans who made it across were thereafter known as "Ossies." One of them, Dirk Mennenga, remembers worrying about the sole border guard: "A young Hungarian man kept pointing the way and before we knew it we were in Austria." Today, Lt. Col. Arpad Bella, the lifetime border guard, is considered a hero by the Ossies, former Easterners and Westerners alike. Unbeknownst to all of them, however, was that the opposition leaders had already decided to let them through.The last communist leader of Hungary, Miklos Nemeth, said at the memorial that "It was a planned process on behalf of the government, but it was a transition where everyone was also seeking to secure their own future."

 

The government provided a peaceful opportunity for protest which participants made the most of, and then some. Within a month, Hungary allowed all East Germans to cross into Austria. Within three months, the Berlin Wall fell. All violent protests today, from the anti-healthcare mobs in America to the Taliban jeopardizing Afghan elections, would do well to learn from this powerful pan-European moment in peace history to create a better future.

 

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Key Weapons in 21st Century Military are Multilingualism and Cross-Cultural Fluency for Obama

"In the 21st century," Obama pronounced with assurance facing the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "military strength will be measured not only by the weapons our troops carry, but by the languages they speak and the cultures they understand."

Soldiers of the armies of the future, it turns out, will include cream-of-the-crop linguists, literary critics and cultural studies wonks who will make gun toting and tank driving soldiers look like caveman throwing rocks and cowboys riding horses, or so the President would have us believe. Waging war would be tantamount to battlefield diplomacy, peace found in translation.

Ironically, the weaponization of language (or rather what I call linguistic agency between two or more languages in Multilingualism and Immigration in U.S. Public Policy) is also a form of demilitarization in the traditional sense. Of course, from a General's point of view, speaking to someone in their language cannot replace shooting them in the head if you cannot and they are obstructing the completion of your mission. But we can always hope that if they communicate in writing, such violent acts can simply be replaced with ellipses ("…") and their non-English equivalents. 

"If Congress sends me a defense bill loaded with a bunch of pork," Obama went on to say, "I will veto it." Showing such cultural sensitivity to Jews and Muslim is surely leading by example.

The President's pronouncement is, globally speaking, a counter-cultural move in one sense and a breakthrough for multilingualism domestically and worldwide in another. As previously reported on One World, Many Peaces, Malaysia has imposed a highly problematic partial ban on the English language, and Turkey as well as a host of other countries continue to actively suppress local languages within their nation-states.

Let us not forget, too, that the U.S. Congress declared English the official language of the country for the first time in its history in 2006 in the face of growing presence and protests by Spanish-speakers. Could Obama be reversing the monolingual tide? Could critical theory inform the miltiary strategies of the future?

I have been arguing for a better understanding of multilingualism outside and especially inside the academic humanities for almost ten years now, the study of which led me directly to peace studies in that inter-lingual and cross-cultural communication are at the heart of each discipline. What Obama has done here, however, is bring the theoretical cross-pollinations my research and writings have tried to bring to light into the actual conditions and participants in wars on the ground, with the potential financial and human resources backing that only nation-state military ventures have summoned.

Multilingualism and cross-cultural fluency are current events as sine qua non of globalization, but what their militarization means in creating the future is more difficult to make out.   

 

European Muslims Launch Identity-Based Peace Initiative

Becoming an agent of peace is starting to sound as glamorous to young European Muslims as being a secret service agent was to young Americans until recently, when the profession of sniper took first place (really). An innovative conference bringing together scholars and organizers of Islamic communities across Europe is now taking place in Caux, Switzerland, lead by an inter-faith peace group with a storied and successful past, making clear their concerns for peace and threats to it in the present and future.

In his high-profile book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, Christopher Caldwell estimates that between 20% and 32% of the populations of most European countries will be foreign-born by the middle of the century, the majority of them Muslim. But whereas he does so to contend that by clinging to their identity Muslims will destroy Europe as we know it, the participants of the Caux conference are committed to exploring and enacting the idea that Europeans since the 9th Century CE have always defined themselves in relation to Islam, and that they not only must, but can also benefit from recreating itself with a stronger Islamic component.

Initiatives for Change, organizing this conference, brokered meetings in the late 1940s between opposing factions in World War Two. Their task today seems no less daunting, and picking between their and Caldwell's vision is a no brainer for anyone who cares about humanity in the least. Acknowledging the one-sidedness of bringing only Muslims of different denominations to the conference, its organizer Peter Riddell believes both sides need to seriously reconsider their relations. "We're faced with a need to redefine what it means to be European. In many ways you could say that European culture has defined itself in opposition to Islam," he said in a BBC interview.

"So now the challenge is, whether we're going to embrace a European culture which includes a substantial component of Muslims, or whether we're going to reject that," as Caldwell seems to.  The keynote speaker, Ajmal Masroor, urged participants to "Go back and revive and reclaim the culture of peace which has been the foundation of our faith," words that preachers and practitioners of any and all religious traditions have the duty and honor to repeat until doing so as a current event creates the peaceful future all faiths feed into as a perpetual present.

San Suu Kyi Conviction Points to Dangerous Overdependence on Icons

That the fate of the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar is tied to that of a single person is a sure if ironic sign that icons can limit social change in being their catalyst. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was convicted on charges of breaking her house arrest today, and the outcry by world leaders and her own party shows to what extent they overdepend on her as an icon to further their interests. The irony with dire consequences is that a democracy of one is not a democracy at all, so seeing her conviction as a catastrophe actually bolsters the anti-democratic grip on the country.

Cults of personality are usually demonized when it comes to ruling regimes, but when likeminded demonstrators, protestors or activists hold up a person as the pinnacle and sole possible vehicle for achieving their goals, everyone cheers-- even opponents, who are content to jeer and focus their efforts accordingly. Having spent 14 of the past 20 years in house arrest while remaining the head of her League for Democracy (NLD) party, one wonders why the torch has not been passed on to someone who can carry it more effectively outside the constraints of four walls.

The NLD spokesperson, Myint Myint Aye, denounced the verdict and proclaimed that "We demand her immediate unconditional release and we will keep on pressing." While few doubt that the outcome of the sham trial was politically-motivated and aimed at preventing San Suu Kyi from participating in elections next year, one is forced to serious wonder: To what extent is pressing for democracy coterminous with San Suu Kyi's release? The proverbial putting all your eggs in one basket, when it comes to politics and social change, is more an imperative than a dictum. 

World leaders from Nicolas Sarkozy to Hillary Clinton, for their part, were all appropriately outraged while impervious to the fact that they routinely do business with non-democratic countries with equally horrendous human rights records. Playing into the Myanmar regime's juridical theatre by tying the success of pro-democracy efforts to their outcomes is counterproductive. San Suu Kyi is no doubt a courageous and peace-principled woman, but as a current event she may create the future she and her supporters are seeking by stepping aside and letting no one take her place. 

Mobocracy Threatens U.S. Participatory Democracy in Healthcare Reform

The powerful grassroots strategy that brought Obama to the White House has been difficult to translate into impacts on the formation and passing of specific policies, notably economic. Healthcare has not been an exception, other than  in (or especially because of) the counter-strategies Obama opponents are expanding day by day, community by community.

An email from Democratic National Committee Executive Director Jen O'Malley Dillon makes clear the imminent danger mobocracy in America presents to the burgeoning experiments in participatory democracy. The "five facts about the anti-reform mobs" she presents are shocking even with a grain of partisan salt and an understanding that she comp licitly extends the very fears of which she warns, though overlooking the positive role other corporate and social groups are playing in achieving healthcare reform:

1. These disruptions are being funded and organized by out-of-district special-interest groups and insurance companies who fear that health insurance reform could help Americans, but hurt their bottom line. A group run by the same folks who made the "Swiftboat" ads against John Kerry is compiling a list of congressional events in August to disrupt. An insurance company coalition has stationed employees in 30 states to track where local lawmakers hold town-hall meetings.

2. People are scared because they are being fed frightening lies. These crowds are being riled up by anti-reform lies being spread by industry front groups that invent smears to tarnish the President's plan and scare voters. But as the President has repeatedly said, health insurance reform will create more health care choices for the American people, not reduce them. If you like your insurance or your doctor, you can keep them, and there is no "government takeover" in any part of any plan supported by the President or Congress.

3. Their actions are getting more extreme. Texas protesters brought signs displaying a tombstone for Rep. Lloyd Doggett and using the "SS" symbol to compare President Obama's policies to Nazism. Maryland Rep. Frank Kratovil was hanged in effigy outside his district office. Rep. Tim Bishop of New York had to be escorted to his car by police after an angry few disrupted his town hall meeting -- and more examples like this come in every day. And they have gone beyond just trying to derail the President's health insurance reform plans, they are trying to "break" the President himself and ruin his Presidency.

4. Their goal is to disrupt and shut down legitimate conversation. Protesters have routinely shouted down representatives trying to engage in constructive dialogue with voters, and done everything they can to intimidate and silence regular people who just want more information. One attack group has even published a manual instructing protesters to "stand up and shout" and try to "rattle" lawmakers to prevent them from talking peacefully with their constituents.

5. Republican leadership is irresponsibly cheering on the thuggish crowds. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner issued a statement applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

Compounding the dangers on the healthcare front is another kind of mobocracy hitting communities nationwide, oblivious to the reality the organizing for healthcare and other rights is a longstanding American tradition. The Westboro have held threatening demonstrations at gay-friendly places of worship and clinics, and opendly anti-Semitic and anti-Islam protests, pointing to a reactionary renewal of intimidation tactics new to only those with short historical memories.

Mussolini took power in Italy with similar tactics and the KKK held on to it in the same way, and we all know how well they turned out. That these U.S. mobocracies seem to be decentralized organizationally even if centrally funded is cause for more concern, not less.  As current events, it is in the world's best interest that mobocracy does not create the future.

Trend of Extending Presidential Term Limits Lead by South America and Africa

What's in a term? A presidential term of any other length is just as constitutional when amendments to that effect are passed, now a global trend with momentum. South American and African nations are leading this pack, but even Bill Clinton's impromptu visit to North Korea points to a presidential impulse for more time in the spotlight. Niger will be voting on the issue today.

Over a dozen South American and African countries have either extended re-election limits for their seated presidents or, in the case of Paul Biya of Cameroon and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, abolished them altogether. Among the leaders so endowed now include: Evo Morales (Bolivia, 2009), Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Algeria, 2008), Yoweri Museveni (Uganda, 2006), Idriss Deby (Chad, 2005), Omar Bongo (Gabon, 2003), and Zine Abidine Ben Ali (Tunisia, 2002).

Last month's coup in Honduras was over allegations that Manuel Zelaya wouldseek to extend his term. Countries that have recently rejected extending their leaders' terms include Honduras, Malawi, Nigeria and Zambia. In the minority of cases, such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador, presidential powers (notably fiscal) have been enhanced along with term extensions.

The majority of term extensions are from one or two terms to three or five. Their motives also range from pragmatic mandates to tenacious traditionalism to pure power perpetuation. Where viable alternatives are lacking, fear of the unknown makes picking a lesser but known evil easier though rarely a firmer guarantee of progress, economic, social or political.

Invariably, more than challenges to the constitutions of these countries individually, such term extensions are together a challenge to constitutionality worldwide. Keeping presidents who do their jobs well in office may be good business sense, but then the basis of government should be profit rather than law.

Extending presidential terms tries to change current events by changing the future first, putting modems before computers. And, as an aside, Bill Clinton's North Korean stunt undermines Hillary's legitimacy as Secretary of State with Obama's apparent blessing, showing there may deep foreign policy issues in the administration.