outsidein »

• In whose name?

  February 24, 2010 @ 3:10 pm | by Bryan

  

  PSNI forensic experts at the scene of Monday night’s car bomb attack outside Newry courthouse in Co Down. Photograph: Reuters/Cathal McNaughton.

  I drove past the odd police checkpoint and had to follow a few diversions as I was going through Newry last night. Having listened to news reports on the bombing, read newspaper articles, seen photographs, and having caught a glimpse of what this sort of attack means for directly affected communities through Pól Ó Muirí’s Daddy, there’s a bomb scare blog post, I’m confused.

  In his Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela is candid about his role in the perpetration of what the apartheid government might have called ‘acts of terror’. In Mandela’s defence, a case can probably be made for attacking the infrastructure of an oppressive regime when such acts are supported by the majority.

  Maybe it’s just ignorance on my part – ignorance of Irish history and Northern politics – but I really don’t understand the justification behind the Newry court bombing. I don’t understand how actions that do not have the support of the majority, that are more likely to lead to political disengagement that engagement, can be cloaked under the banner of republicanism, dissident or otherwise.

  When those who had planted the bomb celebrated their success, I wonder in whose name they thought they were celebrating?

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• 2010 pessimism

  January 4, 2010 @ 9:00 pm | by Bryan

  Regular readers of this blog may find the next statement hard to believe. I am, by nature, an optimist. Really, I am. But over the course of 2009, a cloud of pessimism settled over me. And to be honest, I don’t see it lifting over the course of the coming 12 months.

  Here’s an example of where my negativity stems from. Based on conversations with a mix of people in Belfast, it seems as though one of the largest determinants to peace and stability is economic well-being. Money, or more precisely, the process of pursing ‘the good life’ with a reasonable expectation of one day attaining it, can be positively distracting – in a “an idle mind is the devil’s playground” sense. Granted, an argument could be made for the role of things like intrusive body scanners and remote controlled planes that can bomb whole villages to smithereens. But does anyone really think that airport security, a hypertrophied ‘intelligence community’, or wars in far off places will rid the world of people like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, let alone the people who armed and trained him?

  Once upon a time, before that great IMF idea that was economic structural adjustment, Zimbabwe was a relatively prosperous little country. We were wealthier than most of our neighbours, so we did our bit to keep out the poorer Malawians and Mozambicans. Those who got into the country were tolerated, but I’m pretty sure we tried to keep them to a minimum. And then the IMF came along and in a relatively brief period of time, income inequality within the country soared. People who were relatively well off built large walls to keep out their poor fellow citizens. For the most part, the walls served their purpose, but with increasing regularity, some found ways over them. They would then help themselves to things they couldn’t otherwise afford while the owners of the big houses were asleep. There came a point where we wrecked the country. Things got so bad that even those living in big houses behind bigger walls began to struggle. So a lot of Zimbabweans, rich and poor alike, made their way to neighbouring and distant countries, sometimes illegally scaling real and metaphorical walls and fences.

  So why am I pessimistic? Because, it’s easier to build, buy and install body scanners and to blow stuff up than to try to understand the world on the other side of our walls. The world seems destined to imitate the likes of Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro, who have found it easier to live with their fear than address the structures that give birth to their underworld. I’m pessimistic because I get the feeling that we’re a year closer to the day parts of the world are relegated to rubbish heap status, while others become fortified cities.

  But I could be wrong.

  Happy 2010.

  Comments (16)

• Irritating, repellent, wounding

  December 1, 2009 @ 3:51 pm | by Bryan

  I have recently found myself exploring Africa’s colonial past and how that has influenced the identity of the various peoples and institutions on the continent. Perhaps the most pleasurable aspect of this research so far has been reading Ngugi wa Thiong’s A Grain of Wheat.

  In that radical piece of literature, Ngugi crushes the view that colonialism was a simple system of external oppression. He very powerfully animates an idea that goes back a long way: oppression can only be sustained by the assent of a significant proportion of members of the oppressed group. In Ngugi’s hands, the only real heroes of the colonial era are mythical figures who are so far removed from the here and now that it is impossible to know whether they ever really existed in anything like the way they are remembered. Those present are tainted, to various degrees, by some collusion with agents of the repressive past.

  Though it’s an incredibly sensitive topic, so sensitive that an outsider might be best advised to leave it alone, I can’t help but wonder whether Ngugi’s observations apply to last week’s revelations. And not just Ngugi, I wonder if there is also room here for Milan Kundera, who in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting suggested that we have a tendency towards rewriting the past in order to escape its ‘irritating, repellent, wounding’ nature.

  My country refused to have a completely honest and transparent look at the past, chosing rather to simplistically cast some as villains, others as heros, and the great majority as the backdrop against which history took place. South Africa followed suit, sweeping most things under the carpet of peace, reconciliation and the idea of a ‘rainbow nation’. Don’t get me wrong, South Africa did much better than most – victims publicly shared what had happened to them. Some perpetrators confessed their wrongs. But there wasn’t very much in the way of the vast majority collectively acknowledging and revealing the ways in which they had colluded with apartheid.

  What if Hobbes was right? What if our nature tends towards a state of “war of all against all”? And if he was right in suggesting that in order to escape that nature, people will even submit to “a common power to keep them all in awe,” even if that power is an abusive institution?

  I often get a sense of déjà vu in Ireland, and the scandal that is the abuse of the Catholic Church, with the complicity of the state, is a case in point. The great majority are simply taken as having been a passive backdrop which played a negligible role in the propping up or bringing down of that old order. I’m not so sure anymore. I can see why we all like the simple ‘hero-villain-passive everyone else’ narrative, but Ngugi’s uglier picture seems much more realistic to me. But that means that oppression isn’t something that is done to us, but a process in which, to varying degrees, we participate. If that really is the case, the Kundera was much more right than I gave him credit:
  We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and histories.

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• The war crimes trial gimmick

  October 27, 2009 @ 12:15 pm | by Bryan

  

  Radovan Karadzic supporters drink and play gusle, a traditional instrument, in a bar in New Belgrade, Serbia, yesterday. Photographs: Amel Emric, Srdjan Ilic/AP.

  Former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, brought proceedings in the Hague to a standstill yesterday. He decided not to attend the opening of his genocide trial, claiming that he was unprepared. Karadzic is representing himself and the trial couldn’t go on without defence counsel. Big anticlimax.

  But maybe that’s the problem. These big war crime trials bear a striking resemblance to what I can only imagine medieval public executions looked like. I’m not sure how much they have to do with justice as opposed to public retribution. It’s as though the ‘international community’ needs to demonstrate, as visually as possible, that ‘international justice’ really exists and really works, and that – to quote a former US president who had a way with words – ‘evildoers’ really get their comeuppance in the end. I’m not sure.

  I don’t like Karadzic and what he represents. I think the people responsible for acts like Srebrenica make an incredibly strong case for capital punishment. At the very least, they should be tried quickly and if found guilty, locked away somewhere for good. But I also think that the likes of Karadzic, Slobodan Miloševic before him, and Saddam Hussein are right when they say that these genocide trials are gimmicky public spectacles rather than genuine attempts at delivering justice. Were justice the real aim, Karadzic apprehension would not have been the result of a political settlement nor would the massacre of thousands be attributed to just a handful of suitable villains. Also, assuming that justice is blind, the criteria for who counts as a war criminal would be less selective and less dependent on political considerations.

  Still, Case No. IT-95-5/18-PT will eventually get underway. If he doesn’t inconveniently die during the process (like Milosevic), Karadzic will almost certainly be found guilty of something serious – crimes against humanity, violations of the laws of war, something. Some will celebrate the decision as a mark of progress. Others will hold their former leader up as a martyr. The news cycle will roll on. But I’m not sure very much substantive justice will have been done.

  Maybe this is why the African Union don’t want the International Criminal Court getting involved with the situation in Sudan or Uganda.

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• Silvio’s distractions

  July 3, 2009 @ 5:18 pm | by Bryan

  Italy is a special place for many different reasons. One that never ceases to amaze me is the Berlusconi government.

  I’m not a libertarian. I like rules. I think laws, provided they aren’t stupid, are wonderful things. Italy is well within her rights to keep non-Italians out. When the border patrols fail, as they invariably will, Italy also has the right to send illegal immigrants back to their own countries. But to fine illegal immigrants? And to legislate for vigilantism? Someone really needs to make a film about Berlusconi. It should be titled, ‘Because I can!’, or the Italian equivalent.

  I understand how the world works. A global recession has a way of making the people in power seem a lot less attractive than the opposition. People have a way of believing that things couldn’t get any worse, even when it’s clear that they could. If you’re a head of state who has been accused of paying attractive young women (of dubious public standing no less) to attend your parties, on top of a public row with your wife, you’re probably going to feel a little vulnerable. If, just to make matters worse, you crafted a law stating that the head of state (i.e. you) couldn’t be sent to jail, you probably want to remain as head of state, or at least have one of your friends in the job. And what better way to maintain support for yourself and your party than to come up with a completely irrelevant distraction?

  Italy has a lot of real problems. An influx of Roma and African ‘illegal’ immigrants, by comparison, isn’t that big a deal. This has happened before. Rather than dealing with law and order, it was recently decided that violence against women, especially in the form of rape, was the result of Roma gypsies. The solution was to throw them out of the country, despite their legal right to remain. Let’s say that happened. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that Italy was completely Roma free. Does anyone really think rape would cease to be a problem? Yet now that a literal ‘witch-hunt’ against illegal immigrants has been signed into law, the country’s problems will be swept away?

  For the umpteenth time,

  …Bibo’s central hypothesis was that when a community fails to deal with a problem that challenges, if not its existence, then at least its way of being and self-image, it may be tempted to adopt a peculiar defensive ploy. It will substitute a fictional problem, which can be mediated purely through words and symbols, for the real one which it finds insurmountable. In grappling with the former, the community can convince itself that it has successfully confronted the latter. It experiences a sense of relief and thus feels itself able to carry on as before. – Terray, E. 2004, Headscarf Hysteria, New Left Review, 26.

  Those fleeing poverty and hunger aren’t the barbarians at the gate. The real danger comes from our propensity to fall for the distraction, unable or unwilling to see things as they really are.

  Comments (24)

• Ticking time-bomb

  May 14, 2009 @ 5:06 pm | by Bryan

  US President Barack Obama has reversed his earlier decision to make public photographs detailing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The change followed intense pressure from the military and intelligence communities.

  Following US commentary on this issue, it’s interesting to see how often the ‘ticking time-bomb’ hypothesis comes up. It asks what you would do if there was an imminent terrorist threat. Let’s say some group hides a nuclear weapon somewhere in Dublin and all the intelligence community knows is that it is set to go off soon and they have captured one of the terrorists. Assuming that the terrorist refuses to co-operate, and millions of people are in imminent danger, would you torture the suspect on the grounds that they might give you the information necessary to find and deactivate the bomb?

  Some months ago, a human rights lawyer with years of experience working in the middle-east posed the same question to a group of us. My initial, somewhat callous response was to enthusiastically call for the suspect’s torture. It seemed like a no-brainer. Things couldn’t get any worse if the suspect wasn’t tortured, and as for the brutal nature of the process of extracting information, anyone who goes around bombing people deserves what he or she gets.

  The lawyer soon set me straight though. What if the suspect wasn’t saying anything because he was being wrongly accused of something he had nothing to do with? Also, evidence suggests that torture doesn’t work nearly a well as traditional interrogation techniques. And even though we like to think that television is just entertainment, 24 has probably got a lot of people believing that the ‘ticking time-bomb’ hypothesis is a reasonable starting place for a discussion on torture, when in fact real life seldom works like that. But most important is the fact that there are serious long term implications to a decision like instituting state sanctioned torture.

  That’s were the White House finds itself today. The release of photographs is being blocked because, as some have speculated, we would all then realise that prisoner abuse went beyond the actions of a few bad apples. They would also go a long way in wrecking the illusion of the US as some sort of guardian of moral uprightness. Worst of all, those photographs could sow the seeds of further violence and other forms of retaliation.

  I don’t really care about what memos are declassified and which photographs end up in the public domain. I’m not even interested in whether or not they one day lock up Dick Cheney. What I want to know is if in the wake of the next big attack or scare things are done differently, or will short term gains be placed above their potential long term consequences again?

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• Mandela, elephants, starvation & violence

  April 13, 2009 @ 1:24 pm | by Bryan

    

  I am in no way condoning piracy. In fact, I think the piracy off the horn of Africa needs to be addressed as a matter of utmost urgency. But this video raises important questions that demand serious thought.

  Like most other ‘conflicts’, the Somali piracy issue is already being discussed in almost exclusively military terms. Some commentators have raised the possibility of an ‘invasion’ of Somalia to wipe out the pirates. The fact that there are no known associations between them and groups like al-Qaeda is often cited, as though they would only become really significant if they posed a ‘terrorist’ threat to the US. The socio-economic aspect of this issue is largely ignored. I suppose it doesn’t make for a story that is nearly as exciting and attention grabbing as a military one. And that makes sense. Most people would rather watch 24 than read a book on the history and political economy of the horn of Africa.

  Nothing changes:

  Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured. – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” 31 March 1968, National Cathedral, Washington, D.C.

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• Not the real enemy

  March 13, 2009 @ 1:10 pm | by Bryan

  

  Bernard Madoff arrives at Manhattan Federal court in New York city yesterday. Madoff admitted in court to running a massive Ponzi scheme for two decades and tricking investors out of billions of dollars. Photograph: Stephen Chernin/Getty Images.

  A pundit, I don’t remember which one, recently remarked that Bernie Madoff is not the enemy. His point was that although Madoff ripped lots of people off huge sums of money, the attempt at turning him into the poster boy for the economic meltdown was wrong. The pundit was right.

  Con artists existed before the crisis and they will exist long after it has passed. The trouble in the global economy is not the doing of a few dishonest people. It’s not even the doing of a few greedy bankers. Things are so much easier to deal with when you can come up with a tangible villain and get the opportunity to throw rotten tomatoes at him. But to be satisfied with that would be to miss the point.

  In the debate over which matters more, systems or agency, I am firmly of the opinion that structures are more significant than the people. I don’t think the problem is that people like Madoff can be greedy. I think the problem is that the economic system is set up in such a way that our collective greed props up the likes of Madoff, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and gross inequality.

  The arrest of Madoff, the firing of some bankers, and maybe the seizure of some of their assets are all well and good. But none of those things address the fundamental problem that led to the current economic mess. I hope that we aren’t so satisfied when we get our pound of flesh that we lose interest in dealing with the real problems.

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• al-Bashir

  March 6, 2009 @ 8:30 am | by Bryan

  

  People protest against Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in front of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Photograph: Reuters/Jerry Lampen

  In a very brave move, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on Wednesday. This is the first time that the ICC has gone after a sitting head of state.

  Here’s the difficulty that arises from the arrest warrant: al-Bashir still enjoys the support of China and Russia, both of whom sit on the UN’s Security Council. The African Union, as well as several other bodies have long argued that issuing the warrant will worsen the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. And as if to prove them right, Sudan threw 13 NGOs out of its jurisdiction which was followed by a plea from the UN’s secretary general to reconsider. Ban Ki-moon is rightly worried that the humanitarian situation in the country will worsen.

  I believe in the rule of law. I think those who break the law should be punished. Only a very small minority would argue with the fact that al-Bashir deserves to be brought before the Hague. But I dislike posturing and double standards. Unless the issuing of that arrest warrant actually leads to an arrest, the threat of the ICC is diminished. And unless the law is applied consistently to all, is it really still law? The fact that some genocidaires are pursued while others are not leaves bodies like the ICC open to charges of neo-imperialism.

  Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about the arrest warrant. Like so many other things, I wholeheartedly support the intention, but am unsure about the method. If he finds his way to the Hague in the near future though, I will be ecstatic. The world needs all the reminders it can get that war crimes may be punished severely.

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• Migrant worker abuse

  December 3, 2008 @ 8:00 am | by Bryan

  

   

  Minister for Integration, Conor Lenihan, was on television last night defending the government’s record on the protection of migrant workers from exploitative employers. Honestly, I think he came off as someone trying to defend the clearly indefensible. I think he would have been a lot better off just doing a mea culpa and saying that migrant workers have not been a priority but that the government was working on it.

  That would probably have been true and people would have understood and accepted that – especially if the follow up was real. Had there then been evidence that migrant workers’ rights were climbing up the government’s priority ladder, both the minister and the government would have probably won a lot of friends in the migrant communities.

  This is an uncertain time for most people. We are constantly bombarded with warnings of an imminent economic implosion. There is often news of companies failing, employment levels falling, prices rising, and now, it looks like pensions may be in some danger. And as rough as these times are for the local population, things are often worse for migrants.

  Some immigrants worry that the worse things become, the greater the hostility towards them will be. Others fear that if jobs are going to be lost, they will be at the top of the list. Many migrants are not entitled to social security benefits and that just makes things worse. And then there are people who sold everything they had to come to a place like Ireland who would have nothing to go back to if employment dried up here and they were forced to leave.

  That is why so many people are being taken advantage of by their employers. They don’t have a lot of options and sometimes the horrible job is better than not having a job at all. That is why they need a little extra protection at a time like this. Unfortunately, based on last night’s interview, I don’t think very many were reassured.

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