"With violence down sharply this year, the U.S. military is broadening its efforts to reconcile Sunnis and Shiites, reintegrate former insurgents into society and repair the rift between residents and their government...The U.S. reconciliation campaign includes some major projects, but much of the American effort is decentralized, consisting of reconstruction programs, peace marches and meetings with rival tribal leaders over platters of rice and lamb. In many cases, soldiers are making up the details as they go along...
Lt. Col. Monty Willoughby, 42, has had to figure out how to keep the peace in an area of northwestern Baghdad that was previously a hotbed of Sunni insurgents. He became worried last spring when U.S. commanders announced a plan to release thousands of Iraqis detained for alleged ties to insurgents.
"We're like, man, how are we going to keep these guys from falling back into it?" asked Willoughby, an earnest, freckled officer from Clever, Mo., who commands the 4th Squadron of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, which is attached to the 101st Airborne.
Willoughby decided he needed someone to help the detainees reenter society. And that is how a squadron of macho U.S. infantrymen and gung-ho tankers came to hire their first professional nurturer...
[nuturer] Kashmoola and his fellow managers line up housing as well as jobs or training programs. Then the managers check up on the men to ensure they stay out of trouble.
On a recent sunny Thursday, Kashmoola and Willoughby attended a detainee release ceremony on the lawn of a blue-domed mosque. The U.S. military has made these into gala affairs, with flag-waving crowds and speeches from Muslim leaders and Iraqi army officers. The 48 newly freed men were handed gift-wrapped bags of chocolates by U.S. soldiers who a year ago might have flex-cuffed them...
The Army issued a field manual last month on "stability operations" to guide its troops in facilitating reconciliation and providing essential services. It was produced after the Department of Defense in 2005 elevated "stability operations" to the same level in its doctrine as offensive and defensive operations...
Building support for government institutions is a key part of the U.S. military's pacification effort in Iraq. In Willoughby's area of northwestern Baghdad, for example, American troops have cleaned out sewers, rebuilt schools and put in a swimming pool.
"As you, as a citizen, are looking on, you've got to say, 'It's nice to live here,' " Willoughby said. If insurgents return, the U.S. officers hope, Iraqis will consider what they have to lose.
It can be difficult to assess the effectiveness of some of the American programs. Hickman's soldiers, for example, have helped organize soccer games between Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods, providing the young players with T-shirts or uniforms.
The matches aren't billed as peace events, he said, but the parents mingle, re-creating an atmosphere that existed before the invasion. The games draw them from neighborhoods divided by giant blast walls and painful memories of sectarian warfare."
NYT: 10,000 Sadr supporters protest US-Iraqi troop agreement in Baghdad"A spokesman for Mr. Sadr in Baghdad said his followers opposed the security agreement because they did not believe assurances that the Americans would leave."
NYT: historical headlines on troop agreements past
"In a treaty signed on Oct. 10, 1922, Britain agreed to prepare the country for independence. But the treaty postponed discussion of exactly how this would happen, and effectively prolonged Britain’s mandate under another form for at least 20 years (a period later reduced)."
NYT: photos from the Congo, Iraq, and Afghanistan
WP: UN security council approves immediate deployment of 3,100 peacekeepers to the Congo
"The 15-nation council urged the leadership of the U.N.'s largest peacekeeping mission -- which has faced criticism for failing to defend civilians -- to forcefully implement its mandate. But the council has ignored appeals by the U.N.'s special representative in Congo, Alan Doss, to send a heavily armed multinational force to help restore stability.
Doss cautioned this week that U.N. reinforcements, while welcome, would not be sufficient to restore peace in a region the size of France. He said any durable peace would have to be reached in political talks led by the U.N.'s special envoy, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, between the rebels and the Congolese government."
NYT: Mai Mai militias complicate the conflict
"The Mai Mai are the third piece to eastern Congo’s violent puzzle, with the rebels on one side, the government forces on the other and the Mai Mai often terrorizing the uncontrolled areas in between. With their guns, leaf headdresses and special potions that many fighters believe make bullets bounce off them, they are a surreal — but still deadly — dimension to Congo’s civil wars.
The Mai Mai insist that they are Congo’s true patriots, but it is questionable how much influence they wield — most villagers call them crooks and they tend to lose their battles. In the past few weeks, they have emerged as spoilers, fighting on when the other armed groups have agreed to stop. The Mai Mai now seem to have a beef with just about everybody: the rebels (whom they clashed with on Thursday); United Nations peacekeepers (whom they clashed with on Wednesday); and Congolese government troops (whom they clashed with on Tuesday)...
There are thousands of Mai Mai fighters in dozens of loosely connected Mai Mai groups scattered across Congo. The movement started decades ago when Congolese communities formed militias to protect themselves and tapped into local customs as a way to inspire the fighters. The term “mai mai” refers to maji, the Kiswahili word for water, because many of the Mai Mai fighters grease themselves up with a mixture of palm oil and holy water before stepping on the battlefield. Often the emollient — and some homemade necklaces — is all they wear...
Many of the Mai Mai militias in other parts of Congo have agreed to disarm. But in eastern Congo, the Mai Mai seem increasingly restless."
LAT: brief respite in Goma in history of hard times
"In a sign of how bad things are, Goma's residents now say that life under brutal Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko is seen as the "good old days."
Then, this eastern Congolese border town [of 600,000] was looked at as the Switzerland of Africa, envied for its natural beauty, stability and prosperity. A vast agricultural industry of coffee, tea, potatoes, beans and cheese fed not only Congo, but the entire region. Gold and tin mines pumped the local economy. Tourism flourished thanks to lush parks and a nearby population of several hundred mountain gorillas.
The relative idyll began unraveling with the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda, when bodies clogged Lake Kivu and millions of refugees fled here, trampling Congolese farmland, depleting resources and bringing cholera and other epidemics.
Then Goma became a launching pad for two civil wars, one of which escalated into a regional conflict known as Africa's First World War. The most recent estimates put the war's death toll at 5 million, mostly due to disease and malnutrition, with many of the fatalities in Goma.
Finally, when peace seemed around the corner, Mt. Nyiragongo exploded in 2002, engulfing half the town in ash and lava and killing as many as 100 people.
Today farms lie fallow and 1 in 10 people rely on international food aid. Mines still thrive, but three-fourths of the profits line the pockets of rival militias and illicit foreign-owned businesses. Tourism long ago disappeared.
Surviving in Goma, residents say, requires a combination of fatalism and pragmatism, accepting that their future is largely out of their hands but keeping a suitcase packed...
An explosion in rapes is another side effect, Butsitsi said. Thousands of women have been sexually attacked in eastern Congo over the last five years, one of the worst records worldwide."
Ind: carving out a parallel state
"Inside General Nkunda's territory the markets are starting to operate again, there are uniformed police and there are plans for an anthem and a flag. There are also – officials insist – no refugees or displaced people. Around the town of Rutshuru that recently sheltered nearly 15,000 refugees, there is little or no sign that they were ever there. Dumes camp which housed 4,000 people last month has been razed, its clinics dismantled."
Econ: options for negotiation
"The simplest way forward would appear to be the reintegration of Mr Nkunda and his National Congress for the Defence of the People into Congo’s security structures. But the price would almost certainly be too high. Mr Nkunda wants the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to grant him a principality in eastern Congo, a sinecure in Kinshasa and the disarming of the Hutu militias he accuses of attacking Tutsis."
WP: NIC predicts rise of state-run capitalism in multipolar world
"It is not a prediction," [Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis] Fingar said. "Nothing that we have identified in this report is determinative. Nothing in it is inevitable or immutable. These are trends and developments and drivers that are subject to policy intervention and manipulation."
LAT: judge orders release of 5 Guantanamo prisoners
"A federal judge ruled here for the first time Thursday that the Bush administration had no basis for holding several of its long-term prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he ordered that five of the Algerian natives go free."
Gdn: tensions still high in Nicaragua over disputed election
"Sandinista supporters armed with machetes, rocks and home-made mortars snuffed out opposition protests earlier this week, leaving dozens injured. For much of the trouble police were notably absent.
A tense calm descended on the capital when the opposition withdrew from the fray and vowed to challenge the results in the national assembly, setting the scene for weeks of political wrangling and fears of renewed flare-ups."
LAT: drug violence flares in Sinaloa"Sinaloa, a fertile state on the Pacific coast, has long been at the center of Mexico's drug trade. It has become a hub of violence since President Felipe Calderon dispatched an army of soldiers and federal police to take on some of the biggest drug lords.
The alarming level of violence -- shootouts and kidnappings almost every day -- has sown panic and fear among a normally resilient citizenry."
BBC: Syrian weapons dealer convicted of trafficking arms to the FARC
BBC: "Hindu terrorism" debate in India
WP: grenade kills protester in Bangkok; demonstrations continue
"The dispute between the predominantly urban, middle-class demonstrators and the government, which was voted into power last year with the backing of millions of Thailand's rural poor, has paralyzed the country's political process and gouged deep political divisions between the rural and urban populations.
The demonstrators have ruled out any compromise, vowing to maintain their protest until the government is forced out of office."
Econ: new UK law to punish johns attempts to tackle trafficking
"Most prostitution [in the UK], which is legal, is consensual. But worries about abuse are rising. Performed behind closed curtains and often by people who fear to seek help, prostitution has always been a job in which exploitation is possible. Now, like most unappealing, low-paid occupations, it is increasingly carried out by immigrants: eight out of ten London prostitutes are foreigners, police think. Isolated, lacking knowledge of English or the law and sometimes trafficked by criminal gangs, the new arrivals are especially vulnerable. In the past two years police have rescued 251 women whom they believe were trafficked to Britain for sexual slavery.
The situation is shameful, but the proposal the government unveiled this week—to make those buying sex liable to criminal charges if it subsequently emerges that the prostitute was controlled for another person’s gain—is no way to remedy it. This newspaper tends toward a liberal view of these matters, but even those who do not will find this amber light a waste of space. Better by far either to criminalise outright the purchase of sex or to legalise it and regulate what ensues."
BBC: testifying against the Camorra
"The Camorra kills someone on average every three days, so I only have to stop a random person on the street to find someone who has witnessed a murder first hand and ask if they gave their testimony to the police.
"No, no, no," one woman tells me, "I would be afraid, no-one talks about this."
She tells me the murder she saw took place at nine in the morning in a crowded square, and no-one talked to the police."
Econ: experimenting with disorder and behavior
"The tendency for people to behave in a particular way can be strengthened or weakened depending on what they observe others to be doing. This does not necessarily mean that people will copy bad behaviour exactly, reaching for a spray can when they see graffiti. Rather, says Dr Keizer, it can foster the “violation” of other norms of behaviour...The researchers’ conclusion is that one example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing."
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Slate: a new translation of the Quran
"The new crop of Quran translators are brushing aside centuries of traditionalist, male-dominated, and often misogynistic clerical interpretations in favor of a more contemporary, more individualized, and often more gender-friendly approach to the Quran. In the process, they are not only reshaping the way Islam's holy book is read; they are reinterpreting the way Islam itself is being understood in the modern world."
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NYT (Brooks): Brooks tips off terrorists, Sarah Palin
"If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed." (ht: steve shewfelt)
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