Arab investigative journalism conference this week

 

 

AMMAN – More than 200 Arab journalists are convening in Amman on Friday to discuss ways of enforcing quality in-depth journalism under the motto, “From Arabs to Arabs”.

Supported by the expertise of veteran international journalism professors, reporters and editors from 12 Arab countries are participating in the three-day conference, organised by the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) network.

Among the keynote speakers are Charles Lewis, executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop and founder of the Centre for Public Integrity in the US; South Africa’s Mondli Makhanya, chief editor of The Sunday Times; and former BBC “HardTalk” host Tim Sebastian.

The event will also feature presentations by 16 out of over 75 Arab journalists who have produced investigative reports through ARIJ on human rights, miscarriage of justice, sexual abuse and pollution, among other issues, in ARIJ’s eight countries of operation: Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain and Palestine.

Read more…

Brutal Destruction Of Iraq’s Archaeological Sites Continues

Buried in Iraq’s clay and dirt is the history of Western civilization. Great empires once thrived here, cultures that produced the world’s first wheel, first cities, first agriculture, first code of law, first base-sixty number system, and very possibly the first writing. A brutal plundering of this rich cultural heritage has been taking place in broad daylight ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These days Ancient Mesopotamia looks more like a scene from the movie Holes.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-tucker/brutal-destruction-of-ira_b_290667.html

View slideshow and Read more at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-tucker/brutal-destruction-of-ira_b_290667.html

For ‘Amreeka’ Director, Life As Inspiration For Art

Writer and director Cherien Dabis drew upon her own childhood experiences as a first-generation Arab immigrant growing up in the Midwest for her feature film Amreeka. The film explores the journey of a single mom and her teenage son as they emigrate from the West Bank to America during the first Gulf War. Amreeka has garnered high praise from both critics and audiences alike.

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Daily Beast: Can USAID Survive Without a Leader?

Until last week, Farmer was rumored to be Hillary Clinton’s choice to head USAID, an organization that has languished without a leader for almost seven months. Then he bowed out, and Wednesday came news that he’s going to be the U.N. Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti under Bill Clinton. It’s probably a much better position for him—Farmer isn’t a bureaucrat, and Haiti, where he founded the pioneering Zanmi Lasante hospital, is by all accounts where his heart is. But it raises a question that’s being asked with increasing urgency within development circles—why can’t the Obama administration fill the void at the top of USAID?

Read more….

A very important topic since Jordan is very dependent on USAID…

Iraqi Refugees Struggle to Adjust to Life in U.S.

By KIRK SEMPLE

Not long after the Iraq War began in 2003, Uday al-Ghanimi was accosted by several men outside the American military base where he managed a convenience store. They accused him of abetting the Americans, and one fired a pistol at his head.

Now, after 24 operations, Mr. Ghanimi has a reconstructed face as well as political asylum in the United States. On July 4, his wife and three youngest children joined him in New York after a three-year separation.

But the euphoria of their reunion quickly dissipated as the family began to reckon with the colder realities of their new life. Mr. Ghanimi, 50, who has not been able to work because of lingering pain, is supporting his family on a monthly disability check of $761, food stamps and handouts from friends. They are crammed into one room they rent in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a city whose small Iraqi population is scattered. And Mr. Ghanimi’s wife and children do not speak English, deepening their sense of isolation.

A report released in June by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement organization in New York, said that many Iraqi immigrants have been unable to find jobs, are exhausting government and other benefits and are spiraling toward poverty and homelessness.

“They say, ‘Let’s go back,’ ” Mr. Ghanimi said glumly. “It’s not what they were thinking. I told them, ‘Just be patient.’ ”

For years after the American invasion of Iraq, thousands of Iraqis clamored for admission to the United States and found the door all but closed — until the government reacted to widespread criticism in 2007 by making it easier for more to enter with special visas or as refugees.

But now that Iraqis are arriving in larger numbers, many are discovering that life in the United States is much harder than they expected.

Read the article

Iraq’s National Symphony Orchestra

I haven’t heard about Iraq’s National Symphony Orchestra for two years now, so it’s good to get an update. Here’s more about it in a New York Times blog:

By Steven Lee Myers

BAGHDAD – It was achievement enough that the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra managed to survive the darkest days of the war, when it struggled for supplies and electricity, when its members fled for safety abroad and those who remained practiced in secret for fear of offending militants who considered music un-Islamic.

“We were fighting against the impending doom simply by functioning,” the orchestra’s charismatic director and chief conductor, Karim Wasfi, said the other day.

Now the orchestra finds itself “out of the bottleneck,” as Mr. Wasfi put it, facing challenges in a post-conflict society that are no less daunting for being less immediately life-threatening.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times Tuqa Saad Al Waeli warms up prior to rehearsal.

The orchestra is fighting for its budget, only now beginning to solicit corporate sponsorship in a country where the state once controlled all (and still does, if chaotically). Mr. Wasfi is lobbying to build an opera house in a country where electricity, clean water and garbage removal remain scarce services.

Hardest of all, the orchestra is trying to recreate a shared cultural life – “the concept of Iraq,” he said – that decades of isolation, international sanctions, war and sectarianism have thoroughly shattered.

“Iraq has achieved a lot, but it’s not yet on a solid, concrete foundation,” Mr. Wasfi said. “Stability is not related just to people not killing each other.”

The New York Times’s Edward Wong wrote movingly about the orchestra nearly three years ago , a time when sectarian bloodshed seemed to threaten its very mission: to give a troubled nation succor through music.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times Students and teachers practicing.

Even with today’s vastly improved security, the orchestra’s home in a former royal concert hall near the edge of the Old City still feels like an oasis of civility and cosmopolitanism – something evident from a lone trumpeter practicing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” to the full orchestra rehearsing Dvorak’s “New World” symphony.

At the height of the sectarian bloodshed in 2006 and 2007 the orchestra dwindled to just 43 members; violence and checkpoints meant as few as 17 made it to some rehearsals.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times Dua’a Majid Hussien Al Azawi, a young oboe player in the orchestra, prior to rehearsal.

There are 85 members now, including 13 who recently returned from self-exile in Syria and the United Arab Emirates. (During rehearsal Mr. Wasfi chided one whose playing was off, “Are you thinking of Syria?”) The dearth of musicians also forced the orchestra to find and train aspiring young people; the youngest member is only 15. Mr. Wasfi dreams of building a full philharmonic orchestra with 120 players.

Its foundation seems firm at last. The Ministry of Culture pays the members’ salaries, the equivalent of roughly $1,000 a month. Members carry their instruments openly into the concert hall. The orchestra has 14 concerts planned in the coming year, as well as 10 chamber performances, around the country.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times Nubar Bashtikian prepares for rehearsal.

The most recent was July 16 in Sulaimaniya, in the northern Kurdish region, sponsored by Asiacell, a mobile telephone company, which will cover its travel costs. The playlist included Verdi, Liszt, Strauss, Webber, Gershwin and Dvorak, as well as Iraqi classical music.

For the first time, Mr. Wasfi has even negotiated performances in the next year in the holy Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf, where conservative religious values still dominate. “There’s no indecent music,” he said, explaining his delicate negotiations with religious leaders there.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times The Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra rehearses under the direction of Karim Wasfi.

Iraq remains a troubled place, but the orchestra should be a bridge to a better future, as he explained, “when we have an opera house, when attending a performance and opening a gallery is part of your normal life, when political leaders fight in the parliament and not in the streets, when they set aside their differences and attend a concert.”

UNDP: Insecurity due to unemployment, environmental degradation, lack of healthcare and legal rights is hindering progress in MidEast

Jordan Times

By Taylor Luck

According to the UNDP Arab Human Development Report 2009: Challenges to Human Security in the Arab Countries, which was launched yesterday in Beirut, insecurity due to unemployment, environmental degradation, lack of healthcare and legal rights is hindering progress in the region.

“The security of people themselves is threatened not just by conflict and civil unrest, but also by environmental degradation, discrimination, unemployment, poverty and hunger,” Director of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Arab States and UN Assistant Secretary General Amat Al Alim Alsoswa said in a statement received by The Jordan Times.

“Only if these sources of insecurity are addressed in a holistic manner will the people of the Arab region be able to make progress in human development,” he added.

According to the study, the region’s economic progress is tied to the fluctuations of the demand for oil, which accounts for more than 70 per cent of Arab exports, with Arab countries home to the highest regional unemployment rate in the world, some 14.4 per cent, compared to a world average of 6.3 per cent.

One in five people in the region live under the international poverty level of $2 a day, and many more live in nationally determined conditions of poverty, leading to undernourishment, it said.

Jordan along with Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Yemen witnessed increases in the number of undernourished citizens, according to the report, as the number of undernourished persons across the region rose by 5.7 million between 1992 and 2004.

Read more

Read more about the report and download it…

Honoring World Refugee Day

By Queen Noor of Jordan

For 35 years, my home has been one of the world’s major conflict regions, home also to over 10 million refugees and displaced inhabitants. World Refugee Day (June 20) is a time to honor and support these individuals and families who persevere through devastating tragedies.

I have lived and worked with the nearly 6 million Palestinian refugees and now nearly 5 million displaced Iraqis, many from each group now making their homes in Jordan. I have also worked with displaced people from Afghanistan, Colombia, Somalia, and those seeking safe haven during the first Gulf War. I have witnessed first-hand the anguish of those uprooted from their homes — people who have had their lives threatened, homes bombed, and family members kidnapped or murdered.

The global displacement crisis is both a humanitarian and a security issue. History shows that mass migrations pose a serious threat to regional stability, as we have seen in Palestine, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and West Africa. The Middle East is particularly vulnerable as ongoing tensions are further strained by such large scale displacement.

Read more on this June 20, 2009 World Refugee Day

Obama’s Address in Cairo

Watch the Obama Speech in Cairo and read the transcript here.

News2you: Best of the best in Jordanian Media

News2you's Best of the Best in Jordanian Media

Here is News2you’s best of the best in Jordanian Media:

1) Best journalism writing and analysis: Al Sijill Newspaper

2) Best columnist in Arabic: Jamil Al Nimri (Al Ghad newspaper)

3) Best columnist in English: Nermeen Murad (Jordan Times)

4) Best cartoonist: Emad Hajjaj (Al Ghad Newspaper) 

5) Best Arab Twitterer:  The Arab Observer

6) Most user-friendly and in-depth newspaper website: Al Sijill Newspaper (View the newspaper in PDF)

7) Best investigative Arab journalism website: ARIJ

For Journalists:

1) Best Sociologist in Jordan to interview: Dr. Musa Sheitwei

2) Most cooperative in visits and interviews: Jordan Police and Security Department (Media Office)

3) Best Human Rights Advocate to interview: Nisreen Zerikat (National Center for Human Rights)

4) Smartest journalism students in Jordan : Yarmouk University (Media Department)

5) Best Blogger: Naseem Tarawneh (Get the news and the scoop)

Guardian: Iraqi Children for Sale

 

And so, what happens after the storm? Here’s an article published in the Guardian newspaper:

Corruption, weak law enforcement and porous borders are compounding a growing child trafficking crisis in Iraq, according to officials and aid agencies, with scores of children abducted each year and sold internally or abroad.

Criminal gangs are profiting from the cheap cost of buying infants and the bureaucratic muddle that makes it relatively easy to move them overseas. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain because there is no centralised counting procedure, but aid agencies and police say they believe numbers have increased by a third since 2005 to at least 150 children a year.

Iraqi Surveys Start to Unveil the Mental Scars of War, Especially Among Women

 

An article in the New York Times on the mental health situation in Iraq…since the article came out more than 50 Iraqis have died this week…

Only when the guns fall silent does the extent of damage wrought by conflict become visible. So in Iraq, as security improves, only now are the full effects of the violence on the Iraqi people emerging. Two studies being released this weekend, one on mental health and the other on the status of women, paint a sobering portrait of the enormous difficulties that lie ahead as the country tries to recover from years of war and state-sponsored terrorism under Saddam Hussein and the more recent sectarian and ethnic strife that followed the American invasion.

Iraqi refugees returning to danger zone to escape poverty in Utah

An article from the Salt Lake Tribune on Iraqi refugees who are leaving their life in the US due to poverty and returning to Iraq. 

As human rights organizations call for aid and resettlement for millions of Iraqi refugees, some who are exasperated by America’s refugee system are going home or attempting to return to other countries in the Middle East. They feel abandoned by federal policies that offer limited and brief financial support and leave many refugees living in poverty.

Refugees planning to leave acknowledge they may be less safe in Iraq, but believe they will be better able to afford food, pay rent and receive medical care.

Educated Iraqis eager to re-establish their middle-class lifestyle are making flaws in the U.S. resettlement system more apparent, while the troubled economy is compounding them, critics charge.

American Military Interventions In Post 9/11 World

My second HuffPost contribution:

A year after the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington and New York, former President Bush’s national security strategy was clear: US interests triumph all else and international institutions would not hinder military actions deemed necessary. Therefore, when contemplating humanitarian interventions, the US would weigh the potential benefits–in terms of foreign lives saved–against the likely costs to the United States. Even if US strategic interests intertwine with internationally accepted humanitarian criteria for humanitarian interventions, it may have consequential effects on the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect.’

Throughout the 1990s, experiences such as Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor among others built a momentum towards the idea that governments had a “responsibility to protect” people suffering in complex humanitarian emergencies. However, according to experts like Thomas Weiss, author of ‘Military-Civilian Interactions’, the September 11th attacks and subsequent US led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, led to two world organizations: “The United Nations, global in members; and the United States, global in reach and power.”

The primary purpose in a humanitarian intervention must be ‘right intention’–to halt or avert human suffering, despite other motives intervening states may have. But the debate after September 11th, shifted to the right to intervene-to protect the intervening country’s people from a threat seen to be originating from another country. The debate shifted to self-defense. Samantha Power, author of ‘A Problem From Hell’, writes that since the September 11th attacks, the “U.S. government is likely to view genocide prevention as an undertaking it cannot afford as it sets out to better protect Americans.”

Security Council resolutions have authorized the use of armed forces led by US-led coalitions, rather than under the command of the UN. In a humanitarian intervention, the intervening states have the responsibility to rebuild. Since September 11th, none of the US interventions taken were primarily called humanitarian interventions, despite clear complex humanitarian emergencies. But Weiss points out the US led invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, turned primarily humanitarian. In 2002, a planned operation against Iraq began to surface. The Bush administration called on the UN to enforce its resolutions on Iraq or risk ‘irrelevance’. But military intervention without a UN mandate raises questions over a country’s motives and capabilities to rebuild in the post-conflict period. The implication of such a reality has also posed a dilemma for the notion of ‘neutrality’ once forces are deployed on the ground and raises concern among independent aid agencies.

Read it all…

‘Buying’ Journalists in Iraq

Land for Favorable Media Coverage?

Mr. Maliki has pledged to give plots of land to journalists.From an article in the New York Times. Be careful what you read in the Iraqi press:

BAGHDAD — At a recent meeting with the Iraqi journalists’ union, Prime MinisterNuri Kamal al-Maliki made a pledge that would have scandalized the Iraqis’ American counterparts: the government would give plots of land to thousands of journalists, for a nominal price or possibly even free.

A campaign sign for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq. Mr. Maliki has pledged to give plots of land to journalists.

His timing, a month before provincial elections, as well as his admonition to journalists to focus on stories of progress and reconstruction, might be seen as an attempt to buy favorable news coverage.

Video: Obama Interview with Al Arabiya Television

Obama speaking to the Arab world.

Obama’s Mideast Policy Examined

 

Listen to Rami Khouri on NPR.

 

Richard Holbrooke has been named special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and George Mitchell has been picked to be special envoy for Middle East affairs. Rami Khouri, editor at large of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon, and director for the Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs, weighs in.

Iraq Election Highlights Ascendancy of Tribes

An article from the Washington Post by the great journalist and author Anthony Shadid on Iraqi elections and tribes.

How sad it is to know that nothing has changed in the Arab world, as the article clearly illustrates, when it comes to political participation and elections:

Here, the new Iraq looks like the old one, imbued with politics that might be familiar to Gertrude Bell, the British diplomat and adventurer who drew the country’s borders after World War I.

There is a saying heard these days in Anbar: “Everyone claims they have the love of Laila, but Laila loves none of them.” In other words, Laila gets to choose. The same might be said of the tribes, whose mantle everyone claims and which often demand a tidy sum for their support. Coddled and cultivated, the tribes are kingmakers.

“The center of power in Anbar,” Hais called them as he sat in the guesthouse, decorated with purple, red and yellow plastic flowers, with 25 tribal leaders gathered over a sprawling, artery-clogging dish of chicken, lamb and a slab of fat, mixed with rice.

Peace and War in the Middle East

Top Ten humanitarian crises

Read about each crises

Massive forced civilian displacements, violence, and unmet medical needs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, andPakistan, along with neglected medical emergencies in Myanmar and Zimbabwe, are some of the worst humanitarian and medical emergencies in the world, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reports in its annual list of the “Top Ten” humanitarian crises.

The report underscores major difficulties in bringing assistance to people affected by conflict. The lack of global attention to the growing prevalence of HIV-tuberculosis co-infection and the critical need for increased global efforts to prevent and treat childhood malnutrition—the underlying cause of death for up to five million children per year—are also included in the list.

Video: Pres-Elect Obama: The Middle East Response

Watch 

On this edition of Independent Sources we talk with an Iraqi and Jordanian journalist about how people in their countries are reacting to the Obama victory. We look at the challenges facing African-American newspapers, and we profile Claire Chen, an award-winning journalist for the Chinese-language daily World Journal.

 

 

Ethnic Divide in Iraqi City a Test for Nation

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 20, 2008; A01

 

KIRKUK, Iraq – Darawan Salahadin, dressed in a black shirt and blue jeans, strolled out of his home in the Kurdish part of his ethnically fragmented neighborhood, passing concrete barriers and a checkpoint guarded by a Kurdish fighter. He entered the Arab section and walked swiftly to his tan, flat-roofed school.

In the classrooms were only Kurdish students. The Arabs would arrive as Kurds left, and then the Turkmen students would get their turn. The school has three names, one in each community’s language, and three sets of teachers and principals.

“I have no Arab and Turkmen friends. I have only Kurdish friends,” said Salahadin, a slim 17-year-old with thick, gelled black hair. “I can’t speak Arabic or Turkmen. So I don’t know them.”

The school’s divisions illustrate the tensions rippling through this neighborhood and all of Kirkuk, ground zero of Iraq’s most vexing conflict over land, oil and identity. The battle over who will rule Kirkuk is a significant test of whether the Iraqi government can solve the country’s internal disputes as the U.S. military draws down.

In contrast to security improvements elsewhere in the country, Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen residents of Kirkuk remain targets of political violence as their leaders vie for control of what they see as their ancestral lands. Last week, at least 57 people died in a suicide bombing on the outskirts of the city, the deadliest assault in Iraq in six months.

“Kirkuk could be the capstone in the house of freedom, or it can be the cheap thread that when you pull out unravels the entire suit,” said Lt. Col. David Snodgrass, deputy commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, which oversees the city.

Kurdish political parties, citing historical claims to the city, want to expand their autonomous region in northern Iraq to include it. Iraq’s predominantly Arab central government opposes Kurdish control over Kirkuk, whose oil fields produce 40 percent of Iraq’s output, as does Kirkuk’s minority Turkmen community and its backers in Turkey.

Iraqi leaders and the United Nations are struggling to reach at least a temporary solution to the question of who should control the city. At a time when the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Kurdish leaders are increasingly at odds over the disposition of oil revenue and other issues, Kurdish parties have deployed forces in the city and the surrounding area in what they say is an attempt to protect Kurdish civilians from attack.

Even the name of Salahadin’s neighborhood is contested. Arab and Turkmen residents call it Hay al-Wasiti, as it was known before the 2003 U.S-led invasion of Iraq. The Kurds have renamed it Nowruz, after the Kurdish New Year.

Read more

Which politics for Arab poetry?

From the Archives

By Rana F. Sweis

IHT

The Daily Star, 12/18/03

 

The key to understanding the hearts and minds of Arabs is through shiir, or poetry, their greatest art. The Iraq war and its aftermath fueled mixed emotions in the Arab world ­ resignation, reflection, rage ­that are now being articulated in verse. “No people in the world manifest such enthusiastic admiration for literary expression and are so moved by the word, spoken or written, as the Arabs,” wrote historian Philip Hitti in his History of the Arabs. Poetic expression has been admired and exalted by caliphs, clerics and revolutionaries and has always been at the heart of Arab politics. Al-Mutanabbi, the greatest classical poet, was also a political rebel: “The horses, the nights and the desert know me/As well as the sword, the spear, the pen and the paper,” he wrote. He was slain near Baghdad in 965.

Throughout decades of conflict and stagnation, Arab poets have retained their influence. Indeed, today in the Arab world more poetry is published than prose. “Poetry is the art and beauty of our language,” says Othman Hassan, the Jordanian author of Kibbrayaa al-Sifa (Description of Pride), a recent collection of verse. Moreover, since most Arab poetry is written in classical Arabic and understood by all literate Arabs, it transcends dialects and regionalisms. “Say an Iraqi writes a classical poem. You would never recognize that he’s an Iraqi or Moroccan or Egyptian,” says Saleh Niazi, an Iraqi poet. What unites all, he adds, are “common mental images.”

 Mohammed al-Thaher, cultural editor of the second-largest daily in Jordan, Ad-Dustour, calls the Iraq war a “shock” that will stir Arab emotions. But transforming these feelings into verse will take some time, he predicts. “Poetry always comes after an event; we may see a long period of time pass before we can realize what happened, especially in the case of Iraq.” But the hunger for poetry to describe the war can be felt already. Khalil al-Sawahri, a columnist for Ad-Dustour, has written an article entitled Poetry and War, in which he challenges the Arab literary community to respond quickly to the Iraq conflict: “What are Arab poets doing to make their voices heard?”

Despite this call, some are sidestepping politics, for example Iraqi singer Kazim al-Saher, who came to music through poetry. He argues: “Poetry is the language that speaks our feelings … It’s the kingdom we enter whenever we feel desperate.” Yet others will read what they want into specific poetry or songs. At a recent concert in Amman, for example, young men carried a banner that read, “Kazim is the voice of all Arabs.” Saher’s best-received song that night was ‘Baghdad, Don’t Grieve’, a generalized lament for his home city, where he expressed the hope that Iraq would prosper again.

But while Saher’s lyrics point away from political specifics, other poets speak directly about the turmoil in their land ­ and in their souls. Their poetry describes the sound of tanks, soldiers searching homes, Arab hands tied with nylon cords and children in raggedy clothes.

Indeed, even the most romantic Arabs have turned the political turmoil in the Middle East into verse. The late Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, perhaps the most influential of modern Arab poets and an early defender of women’s rights, wrote, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war: “Ah my country! You have transformed me/From a poet of love and yearning/To a poet writing with a knife.”

His fellow Syrian, Adonis, who now lives in France, published a poem last April, after US forces entered Iraq, entitled ‘Homage to Baghdad’. He began by urging his readers to “Listen to the words of the invaders: ‘With the blessing of Heaven/We are leading a preventive war/We will bring the water of life/From the rivers Hudson and Thames/And make it flow into the Tigris and Euphrates.’” Then he described events as they happened: “A war against water and trees/Against birds and the faces of children/The fire of cluster bombs spurts from their hands.”

He asked, in conclusion: “Are we to believe, oh invaders, that an invasion can bring prophetic missiles? That civilization is only born in nuclear waste?” These and similar passages reflect a wider phenomenon of how Arabs feel adrift. Their political leaders have failed, and their poets have found no consistent or effective voice. Meanwhile, America, the new hegemon in the Middle East, is seen as a combination of power, wealth and temptation, a mix of goodwill and bad faith. No American seems able to speak persuasively, let alone poetically, to the Arab soul. And so, today, those who are mostly hostile to American influence are reciting the battle of poetry.

However, the last words have yet to be written, says Mohammed Tommaleh, a novelist and social columnist for Jordan’s Arab al-Yawm newspaper: “Baghdad fell, Saddam fell, but poetry will continue to be written”

ICRC: Millions of Iraqis at risk from dirty water

The International Committee of the Red Cross warns that 40 percent of Iraq’s population of 26 million has no access to clean water and is at risk of waterborne diseases.

A statement Wednesday by the ICRC says that despite some improvement in essential health services, millions of Iraqis still live in households not connected to water networks and have no choice but to drink dirty river water.

To read more…

What America Could Have Spent the Iraq War Funding On

DUNCAN MANSFIELD | October 27, 2008

 When the Sunday morning political pundits began talking last year about the tab for the war in Iraq hitting $1 trillion, Rob Simpson sprang from his sofa in indignation.

“Why aren’t people outraged about this? Why aren’t we hearing about it?” Simpson said. And then it came to him: “Nobody knows what a trillion dollars is.”

The amount _ $1,000,000,000,000 _ was just too big to comprehend.

So Simpson, 51, decided to embark “on an unusual but intriguing research project” to put the dollars and cents of the war into perspective. He hired some assistants and spent 12 months immersed in economic data and crunching numbers.

The result: a slim but heavily annotated paperback released, “What We Could Have Done With the Money: 50 Ways to Spend the Trillion Dollars We’ve Spent on Iraq.”

Simpson is no geopolitical, macro-economic, inside-the-Beltway expert. He’s an armchair analyst and creative director for an advertising agency, a former radio announcer and music critic in Ontario and a one-time voiceover actor.

His alternative spending choices reflect his curiosity and wit.

He calculates $1 trillion could pave the entire U.S. interstate highway system with gold _ 23.5-karat gold leaf. It could buy every person on the planet an iPod. It could give every high school student in the United States a free college education. It could pay off every American’s credit card. It could buy a Buick for every senior citizen still driving in the United States.

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“As I started exploring, I was really taken aback by some of the things that can be done, both the absurd and the practical,” Simpson said.

America could the double the 663,000 cops on the beat for 32 years. It could buy 16.6 million Habitat for Humanity houses, enough for 43 million Americans.

Now imagine investing that $1 trillion in the stock market _ perhaps a riskier proposition today than when Simpson finished the book _ to make it grow and last longer. He used an accepted long-term return on investment of 9 percent annually, with compounding interest.

The investment approach could pay for 1.9 million additional teachers for America’s classrooms, retrain 4 million workers a year or lay a foundation for paying Social Security benefits in 65 years to every child born in the United States, beginning today.

It’s too recent to make Simpson’s list, but that $1 trillion could also have paid for the Bush administration’s financial bailout plan, with $300 billion to spare. It might not be enough, however, to pay for the war in Iraq. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has recently upped his estimate of the war’s cost to $3 trillion.

Simpson created a Web site companion to his book that lets you go virtual shopping with a $1 trillion credit card. Choices range from buying sports franchises to theme parks, from helping disabled veterans to polar bears.

Click on Air Force One, the president’s $325 million airplane. The program asks: “Quantity?”

“At one point we couldn’t find anybody who actually stuck with it long enough to spend $1 trillion,” Simpson said. “It will wear you out.”

From the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com)

Copycat Kidnappings Spreading In Iraq

500 percent increase in foreigners taken hostage around the world as militants adopt the methods of the most violent figures in the Iraq insurgency.

The 1,079 foreign kidnappings since 2001 for which the hostage takers are unknown. That smaller number is drawn from public sources and includes cases in which the details of the disappearance are unverified.

To read more…

Iraqi Red Crescent Paralyzed by Allegations

Here’s an article published today regarding allegations against The Iraqi Red Crescent. The group’s former president, Said I. Hakki, an Iraqi American urologist recruited by Bush administration officials to resuscitate Iraq’s health-care system, left the country this summer after the issuance of arrest warrants for him and his deputies.

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi Red Crescent, the country’s leading humanitarian organization, has been crippled by allegations of embezzlement and mismanagement, including what Iraqi officials call the inappropriate expenditure of more than $1 million on Washington lobbying firms in an unsuccessful effort to win U.S. funding.

The group’s former president, Said I. Hakki, an Iraqi American urologist recruited by Bush administration officials to resuscitate Iraq’s health-care system, left the country this summer after the issuance of arrest warrants for him and his deputies. He and his aides deny the allegations and call them politically motivated.

Book: The Forever War (Iraq)

Listen to this book review. On this page you will also find an interview with the author and you can read an excerpt.

To classify The Forever War as a work of literature instead of, say, as a piece of “war correspondence,” is not to denigrate its journalistic integrity. Dexter Filkins’ reporting is as rigorous in this book’s informal vignettes and essays as it was when he delivered the daily news from Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times.

The Forever War, though, deserves to be considered alongside long-praised and similarly structured modern literary classics such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carriedand Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street — books that achieved their raw force and nightmarish beauty by mixing elements of fiction and creative nonfiction. That The Forever War is, front to back, a true story, is a testament to Filkins’ literary talent and extraordinary accomplishment.

Don’t look here for an explanation of “How the war was lost” or even of “How the war reporter’s innocence was lost.” Filkins, as he notes in his epilogue, writes from the impossibly limiting perspective of one who’s Been There. For those who haven’t Been There, then, The Forever War’s narrator can sometimes come across as inhumanly cold and unlikable. That’s because Filkins is incapable of placing himself into a fake, pre-war personality in order to persuade his readers that he’s not the Iceman but is, in fact, as outraged with things as they are.

But this is the point. Filkins’ shell-shocked, haunting ennui carries readers through The Forever Warand its slaughterhouse imagery with a matter-of-fact bluntness that’s difficult to sentimentalize. He writes of one soldier: “His face was shredded like hamburger but he’d worn his goggles and his eyes were beaming bright and wide.”

Though the politics of The Forever War are thoroughly ambiguous — Filkins’ interviewees were murdered and miserable under Saddam, murdered and miserable under the Americans, and now the same under the Iraqis — the book is firm on one point. Beyond the beheadings and the bombings, the massacres and missed targets, are millions of Sunnis, Shiites and soldiers, all of whom are owed our acknowledgement and — for however long we can stomach looking (and then a little longer) — our attention.

Cleansing of Neighborhoods in Iraq?

This is a claim published today by Reuters:

Satellite images taken at night show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a U.S. troop surge in 2007, graphic evidence of ethnic cleansing that preceded a drop in violence, according to a report published on Friday.

The images support the view of international refugee organizations and Iraq experts that a major population shift was a key factor in the decline in sectarian violence, particularly in the Iraqi capital, the epicenter of the bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands were killed.

Music in Iraq Plays On

Listen to a story on Karim Wasfi, director and co-conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra. He discusses the integral role music and culture play in the ongoing rehabilitation of Iraq. It’s difficult gathering all the musicians for rehearsals, but Wasfi and the orchestra have drawn crowds of more than 600 people in war-torn Bagdhad.Also, Melik Kaylan, culture contributor for The Wall Street Journal, talks about the cultural exchange going on between Iraqis and Americans in Baghdad.

Iceland Takes Palestinians who fled Iraq

Iceland is a very small country that has been very gracious with resettling some of those who fled from Iraq. 

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service

BAGHDAD, Sept. 8 — Iceland has agreed to resettle nearly 30 Palestinian refugees who have lived for two years at a desolate camp on the Iraqi-Syrian border, the U.N. refugee agency announced Monday. The refugees, who were expected to leave Iraq on Monday, include widows of men killed during the war and their children, according to a statement by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Saddam Hussein protected Iraq’s Palestinian community, which included approximately 34,000 people when he was deposed in the spring of 2003. Between 10,000 and 15,000 Palestinians remain in Iraq, according to the United Nations. Palestinians living in Iraq have been particularly difficult to resettle. Syria and Jordan, the two countries that have taken in the majority of Iraqi refugees, have refused to take in many Palestinians out of concern that thousands would follow. Few countries have heeded the U.N. refugee agency’s call to open their doors to Palestinians living in Iraq. More than 2,000 Palestinians have languished at two austere camps near the Syrian border for years, including some with severe ailments who have had scarce access to medical care. Iceland resettles 25 to 30 refugees a year. This is the first group of refugees from Iraq that the country has accepted.