If you're up above your eyeballs in crime, the press is not your friend.
If you are investigating crime and raiding office buildings, marketplaces, and warehouses, you may not care to divulge your reasons for fear of tipping off your quarry: the press is not your friend.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
The lead came out perfect: "The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) suspended aid distribution to more than 75,000 people in Mogadishu on Wednesday after Somali government troops detained the agency's chief in the capital." [1] Here at about 7 a.m. there's not much elaboration on it.
One need not question the immediate facts--the detention, the further privation for 75,000 people--to express curiosity about the surrounding facts.
This now forms or adds to a pattern that would seem familiar to anyone following the primary journalism on Somalia from some distance. As with the government's assault on Shabelle Media's HQ around September 17-18, the headline sensation--government attacks the press!--has yet to evolve into a complete story, especially as regards that famous question: "why?"
To my comment on the matter (http://commart.typepad.com/oppenheim_arts_letters/2007/09/attack-continui.html), one reader responded with a pretty sensible answer but, possibly, a dangerous one too.
The sense of senseless forces operating in Somalia--e.g., the image of a proto-democratic government that readily attacks its own press and encourages through misguided action the further starvation of its people--might well evaporate with clear primary reporting (not a possibility today) and full and detailed disclosure of the government's position after the fact.
With President Yusuf's government--the only entity in Somalia capable of providing disclosure in depth--holding its cards close, one cannot know whether the government's on a witch hunt or acting on decent detective work; we, my fellow Netizens, cannot know the names, social positions, political stances, and personal interests of those the government would call its enemies; from a different sort of writer's perspective, perhaps, the missing data leaves also nothing around which to weave the better story necessary to either re-frame issues in more peacefully resolvable ways or witness mayhem made sensible as a melange of individual acts and struggles.
The recognized government in power may be always the most visible target in wars relying on secrecy for their energy, but it need not be always the culprit.
One thing's certain this morning: there's much one cannot see through news coming out of Somalia and possibly as much one may not wish to see after all.
1. "WFP suspends food distribution in Mogadishu." Reuters Alerts, October 17, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
What is Oppenheim Arts & Letters but a way of recording a reasonably eductaed American Everyman's perception of and response to news zipping around the Internet?
I don't know whether I had in mind the virtual heart of darkness when I started this blog, but certainly I was drawn to Somalia because of its "Black Hawk Down" noteriety combined with its relative obscurity in the pecking order of hot spots covered in the paper press.
Today, with RSS feeds, newsie alerts from Reuters, and other build-your-own-reality technologies, Somalia, and every other person or place on the planet, may be made as prominant or invisible as the reader wants to make it.
Well . . . I'm still "watching" Somalia but feel there's not much my blog can do as regards its issues and its violence. Essentially, my reading, Somalia may be the English and Italian mad political scientist's experiment with transforming a feudal society defined by family relationships and internecine feuds into some sort of "modern" (quotes much needed) federated meritocracy.
Instead, the western adventurers left a healthy looking infant, or so it may have been made to look to their peers back home, with a lot of monsters still floating around in its blood: the post-colonial aftermath has been a horror as well as a deep shame perhaps to all active and generous in spirit in their lives as public figures and politicians.
Luke Baker's piece today in Reuters, "INTERVIEW-Threats and death stalk Somali journalists," [1] touches on the intractability of Somalia's violence.
The message: ain't no one going to be happy with the Fourth Estate.
That wouldn't be such a problem, but in Mogadishu, the leadership (please take your pick: [ ] Clan [ ] Transitional Government [ ] Islamic Courts [ ] Independent Other) seems not to want to sit down and fire off a nasty letter to the snitch who gave them some media play.
Oh, no--firing off letters is not what adversaries prefer to fire in Mogadishu.
"I was getting threatening calls from both sides. They all wanted to kill me," Adde told Reuters as he sat in a cafe in London, where he recently moved to seek political asylum. [1]
Often, the ability to cobble together a story, to frame events and fill in details that make sense (and that may be corroborated and verified through multiple channels and means) presumes some healthy conditions for doing so, and those conditions seem not the conditions afforded in zones where the press may be regarded as merely another tool for one's (anyone's) pet agitprop and agenda.
In his memoir, Where War Lives, Canadian journalist Paul Watson touches on the idea that it's not what people say that probes the heart of a story but rather what they don't say--i.e., the story's missing information, the items left alone, the knowledge left unspoken.
So it goes in Baghdad, Mogadishu, probably Khartoum, and doubtless elsewhere.
None of the Islamic Small Wars are nationally cohesive or visible off the standing government's side, which at least makes an effort to field uniformed personnel. Moreover, all have been marked by fracturing in the ranks of those opposed to recognized government as well as an obsidian opacity in methods overall.
The once boyish (but girls die too) thrill afforded the intrepid in Kipling's wake seems to serve up less in the way of exclusive access and industry scoop and more in the way of kidnappings and murders by any number of aggrieved parties, not only the guys with the Big Obvious Labels above their heads but just as obscure bandits, bit players, and cabals.
"Soon everyone who has any ability to tell the Somalia story will have left. Then the world will definitely never know," says Nadara, looking out intensely from behind super-thick glasses."
Nadara is "Abdulkadir Nadara", described as a "presenter on Universal TV" [2].
It's not so important that a reader like myself know "the Somalia story" but rather that those who hold or would ascend to power, and so many of them often "off the screen", know their own reflection in the culture, language, and life of the country, a thing that cannot be done out of the light of day.
Contraray to belief, in open societies, histories are not written by "the winners".
Usually, and in open societies, they're cobbled back together by down-in-the-mouth (and once upon a time ink-stained) wretches who living meagerly on academic, government, or private stipends follow their curiosity into the sea of records left by old bureaucracies and transient journalists.
May a few be left with trustworthy notes, even out of Somalia.
1. Baker, Luke. "INTERVIEW-Threats and death stalk Somali journalists." Reuters, October 16, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
"Some say the Shi'ites are lucky because they are now ruling Iraq, but that is wrong. It is the Islamist Shi'ites who are ruling Iraq. Their victory was a curse for us," said one sheikh. [1]
Before anyone can fix a problem, someone has to define it in an addressable way.
For most U.S. and other western readers--and here I will exclude myself as I've been following the Islamic Small Wars more closely than most--less than the analysts, more than joe consumer--the "crayon principle" applies: not fine definitions delineations, and lines mark the minds of reader but thick smears of color.
"Those bad Turks" some, if not many, will say this week in regard to the "Armenian Genocide" bill recently released for consideration to the U.S. House of Representatives. The horror may remain a still disputed historical event, 92 years old and associated with a defunct government, but the message for most will boil down to a "+" or "-" influence on psychological affect for the Turks, among the most tolerant of people as regards religions that lay outside of Islam.
Iraq, for most, presents a similar simplification: for most, it's a civil war pitting Shi'ite against Sunni Muslims, and all of the shades are lost, including the representation of secular-minded Muslims who would tolerate, overlook, or set aside historical or other differences in religious identity to lead better lives for themselves and their people.
For the new minted reader, one has always to remind that the Saddam Hussein's Baath Party in rhetoric espoused pan-Arabism, socialism, and secularism, a formula that had operational presence in the oil-funded modernization or contemporary physical development of Baghdad and surrounds and its ability to grow and sustain a middle class of professional service providers.
Today, according to the Reuters article cited, the new society cultivated by Kalashnikov has been altered to the following effects:
I am myself kidding a little on that last point; however, Reuters notes, "Women were also harassed for wearing clothing deemed inappropriate," a statement that fits in with the "Bad Hajib Day" stories some months ago out of Iran (Hamid Tehrani's piece at Global Voice Online [2] may serve as an example).
One understands both the necessity and strength in sustaining alternative beliefs and decorum between cultures. Abundance, imagination, and elaboration in design, including social design, would seem by now an established fact of nature--the world's many "peoples" may not share the same origin or divinity stories or sentiments, but the common possession of some kind of communal and personal sentiment and story is universal.
Another unnamed sheik (representing another undisclosed location and tribal people) interviewed for the Reuters story went on to note, ". . . we are believers, but at the same time we like to live our lives and we like freedom."
Here, here.
Freedom may not require alcohol, but it nonetheless may depend some on the right to speak directly and openly (i.e., free of intimidation) about issues of concern to persons individually and their communities (as the aggregating sources of business, political, and religious outlooks held in common).
At this point, I'm going to do what I generally do: refer back to the way it was and, for me, the little bit of grit that started a pearl or two, maybe, out of this shell: Phillip Robertson's, "The death of Al Mutanabbi Street" in Salon a little more than two years ago. The tag on the title was, "Iraqi culture was reborn when Saddam fell, only to die again. A report from Baghdad's fear-haunted literary cafes." [3]
"Moderates" who have not organized for defense and aggressive assertion of the privileges and "inalienable rights" that are objectively theirs become instead the targets of zealots.
The job--that thing George Bush too hastily said was done--is, in my opinion, to be able to sit in a cafe and read practically anything and converse through speech or writing about anything with anyone free of intimidation and the scrutiny of government and other organizations with exception made only for speech of directly intended criminal (economic, sexual, or political) design.
The loose saying in the United States: without the First Amendment, all of the others are meaningless.
1. Karouny, Mariam. "Shi'ite tribal leaders in Iraq say Islamism on rise." Reuters, October 16, 2007.
2. Tehrani, Hamid. "Iran: Crackdown on Women Again." Global Voice Online, April 30, 2007.
3. Robertson, Phillip. "The death of Al Mutanabbi Street." Salon, August 26, 2005.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
"Here we are, sitting at a desk, in front of a computer, relaying all the news updates to the world and yet, we cannot do anything to cease those atrocities. News that we are posting on our blogs and message boards may appear as just news to the outside world. However, for us, those news are made up of heart-wrenching words." [2]
Every military knows it's "C's": Command, Control, Communications.
With Myanmar's generals blocking the country's Internet border, it's more difficult to discern what civilians know about their own fate, much less about fighting.
Ni Thway, the author of the above-quoted block, goes right on to note, "My fellow Burmese people, who are dying, are just ordinary citizens who have absolutely no knowledge in weapons and warfare."
In 1934, artist-intellectual, warrior-poet, eventually French statesman Andrés Malraux published Man's Fate [3], an exploration of the interior of revolutionary fervor hung on the bare bones of warfare. The book opens with an assassin, armed only with a knife, contemplating his act as it is about to take place--and then the Malreaux puts the reader through it with him.
It may be odd, even ironic, to mention Man's Fate as it had as its sympathetic subject the communist struggle for power, but as with most novels, it finds its strength not in cant or propaganda but in mulling the personal and universal in warfare. As such, it has also the side of the guerrilla and terrorist, the man who starts with nothing but a knife, the men who have only a little money for bribing officials and pirating a small arms shipment, the citizen soldiers who, having acquired small arms, take on a police station.
That was then.
As this is now, the lessons for guerrillas have been made plain this past year: mayhem may be hard to stop but the moment fighters coalesce into an army on the field, the greater force kills them: from Lal Masjid in Pakistan to the southern provinces of Afghanistan, picking fights openly with a state's healthy military proves a disaster more often than not.
Still, what to do: make noise, throw rocks?
For the long term, there's the notion that the "better program" wins wars, not ideologues, less so brutality, but simply the favoring--and favors--of civilians (a fourth "C", perhaps, in Burma's troubles) who, by providing aid and comfort to those who may better represent their own position, may without directly fighting nonetheless gamble their lives on the better future possible.
1. All Burma I.T. Students' Union.
2. Ni, Thway. "From the heart of ordinary blogger." ABITSU, October 2, 2007.
3. Malraux, Andrés. Man's Fate. Harrison Smith and Robert Hass, Inc., 1934; New York: Random House, 1984.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
Old background: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvBnrZhFiuE
New background: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR8PF9FH1Ok
With the Burmese Internet system shut down, the "second row seat" to history grows quickly dark.
1. "Burma: Student Power - A 38-Min. Doc." journeymanpictures, December 1996.
2. "Burma - Another Orange Revolution." tolimoli, September 20, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
Religious sentiment I believe nearly universal in humans; religious expression, however, may in its flowering have all the variety of nature.
http://deenyouknow.com/start.html
How could I not provide a reference here?
The west adopts, co-opts, refines, reinvents, and finds its way.
And farther out on the steppes, "Beauty Under the Burqa":
http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?collectionId=1112
May peace be beautiful and brave among equals.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
This entry's companion piece: "Islamic Women's Revolution".
My literary education in Islam may have started with the classic and on occassion reviled Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973) but I am certain it will end with other reading and other perceptions of Islam and its adherents.
Patai in 1973 set the stage for General Petraeus's echo in Baghdad this summer with the thought that without criticism, introspection, and some kind of updating either in language or practice, there may not be much progress, from a western point of view, to be had with Islam.
That thinking now encounters an established, telling, and growing counterpoint: the presence of Islam in western societies and the prevalence in predominantly "open societies" to question, revisit, and reformulate everything continuously from both expert and popular bases. Implicit in the concept of freedom, curiosity and reformulation prove irresistible to personalities that through accidents of fate coupled with will find themselves on a small part of the wheel of history and endowed intellectually and logistically with the ability to articulate and publish ideas bearing directly on the most difficult issues at hand.
In the wake of Lal Masjid, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf asked, "What do we as a nation want? What kind of Islam do these people represent?" [1]
Those rhetorical questions, which I cannot address, may be answered in part by those who have stakes in Islamic identity, the sculpting of contemporary western lives, and the fashioning of peace.
Note: I'm aware of public relations advocacy and defense institutions representing Islam but seem to want to avoid them here as I do in Jewish life as well. My inclination is to focus on personalities as I find them and as they appeal to me as critical and progressive intellectuals.
Herewith, the start of a list of men, just started this July 26, 2007, writing about Islamic culture and theology as appropriate and fitted to contemporary "western" (I would call it "universal middle class" actually) life.
Hesham A. Hassaballa: His blog: God, Faith, and a Pen: The Official Blog of Dr. Hesham A. Hassaballa. In the creative writing and English literature classrooms, one may try to provide students with a better story about their lives than they would otherwise care to provide to themselves. That intent has nothing to do with fakery or manipulation but rather clarified thinking along well formulated strands. I wouldn't call the foundations--whether mystical or empirically reasoning, secular or religious--for similar invention interchangeable, but they may be less opposed than some (or many) would wish to have them. Either way, the good story strengthens identity and enhances life and the love of it, and I sense that intent in this gentleman's work and pass both his name and blog address along to you.
Mohamed Sifaoui: The blog's in French: http://www.mohamed-sifaoui.com/. Britain's Telegraph has billed him as "The Man Who Got Inside Al Qaeda" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/08/31/bosif24.xml). And there's a book: Inside Al Qaeda. More journalist than activist, possibly, I think he's going to be around a while and thought to list him here. His blog provides for an e-mailed newsletter subscription.
Naser Khader: Founder of the Democratic Muslims in Denmark, the Dutch parliamentarian works to hear and frame the Muslim community's positions in his country while trying himself to stay a democratic and moderate course. In a recent interview with Middle East Quarterly (MEQ) publisher Daniel Pipes, he notes that, "Muslims of Denmark differ widely on politics and religion, and to our delight, it turns out that the largest group of Muslims were those who supported our work." Khader has a web site with an English translation under way: http://www.khader.dk/flx/in_english/. The MEQ interview, "Naser Khader and Flemming Rose: Reflections on the Danish Cartoon Controversy," resides here: http://www.meforum.org/article/1758.
Tawfique Chowdhury: An example of the Aussie's work: "The Ethical Role of Religion in Promoting Peace (Part 1)"; his bio online with the Alkauthar Institute, through which, I presume, he may be reached. Native Americans have made mention to me of the "professional Indian"--the guy who dresses up for the Hollywood buck--and there's a little taint of that in all who package up a little bit of culture for capitalism, which is undeniably in full swing here. However, beneath the "professional Indian" there is always a real one, and beneath the DVD set and jet setting, one finds also the soul of the person and the authenticity of the quest.
Another Native American note passed to me: "Speak, so we may see you."
Last updated: September 25, 2007
1. "Musharraf vows war on militants." BBC News, July 12, 2007, 16:51 GMT.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
