(not so) novel incentives [using their heads]

WP: Israel continues to bomb Gaza; moves 6,500 reserve forces to border
"While Israel claims the vast majority of those killed [estimated over 280] were active in Hamas's military operations, Palestinian medical officials in Gaza say that women and children have also been among the dead."
CSM: tunnels are targeted
"Israeli helicopters and combat jets struck the Hamas' main prison compound in Gaza city and, in a simultaneous strike, pounded about 40 supply tunnels leading under the Egyptian border on Sunday. Israel said the tunnels are the main artery of Hamas' improved arsenal of missiles. Palestinians say the tunnels are the only route for imported consumer goods after an Israeli blockade sealed commercial crossings."
NYT: it's Hamas's fault, according to Israel (and the US)
Gdn: Arab states unconvinced
Gdn: photos of the destruction

CSM: UN peacekeeping in South Lebanon

CSM: military officers reluctant to engage in drug interdiction in Afghanistan
"NATO commanders in Afghanistan say they are holding back because of concerns over the legality of drug operations. But they may also be unwilling to conduct what is seen as a politically unpopular mission that could endanger their troops."

WP: CIA gains allies in Afghanistan with Viagra
"The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills...

While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country's roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations...

Not everyone in Afghanistan's hinterlands had heard of the drug, leading to some awkward encounters when Americans delicately attempted to explain its effects, taking care not to offend their hosts' religious sensitivities.

Such was the case with the 60-year-old chieftain who received the four pills from a U.S. operative. According to the retired operative who was there, the man was a clan leader in southern Afghanistan who had been wary of Americans -- neither supportive nor actively opposed.

The man had extensive knowledge of the region and his village controlled key passages through the area. U.S. forces needed his cooperation and worked hard to win it, the retired operative said. After a long conversation through an interpreter, the retired operator began to probe for ways to win the man's loyalty. A discussion of the man's family and many wives provided inspiration. Once it was established that the man was in good health, the pills were offered and accepted."

Slate: Kaplan says it's part of a plan, sort of
"The biggest problem is that the country's fate ultimately lies outside its borders. As long as Pakistan's northwest territories remain a lawless free-for-all, with Taliban and al-Qaida fighters crossing the border at will, Afghanistan will never be stable. And as long as Pakistan faces a threat from India to the east, its leaders will never deploy enough troops to quash the insurgents in the northwest territories."

WP: what's that, you say? Pakistan moves troops from Afghan to Indian border
"The Pakistani security official said the additional troops were deployed near the cities of Kasur and Sialkot in Punjab province as well as the Line of Control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir, a region that has been claimed by both countries since the bloody partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The official said the troops were removed from areas where insurgents were inactive because of the snowy winter...
Maulvi Omar, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, welcomed the government's decision to withdraw some troops from the tribal areas. "We will not attack the convoys of army withdrawing from tribal areas as it is a good development," he said, adding that the Taliban would help defend Pakistan against any aggression."

NYT: the Taliban takes opportunity for retribution
Four months ago, the people of the Pakistani mountain village of Shalbandi gained national repute after a village posse hunted down and killed six Taliban fighters who had tied up and killed eight local policemen. The posse displayed the Taliban corpses like trophies for other locals to see, and the village was celebrated as a courageous sign that the Taliban could be repelled.

On Sunday morning the Taliban struck back.

A suicide car bomber exploded at a school in Shalbandi that was serving as a polling place, as voters lined up to elect a representative to the national assembly. More than 30 people were killed and more than two dozen wounded, according to local political and security officials. Children and several policemen were among the dead...Shalbandi had received constant threats after the posse hunted down the Taliban. 'Disrupting elections is a general strategy for these elements,' Mr. Khattak [head of the Awami National Party in the province] said, 'but there was a reason for choosing this specific village.'..

...the efforts of villagers in northwest Pakistan have proved little deterrent to the Taliban, who continue to take over more territory despite major Pakistani military campaigns. In the latest sign of Taliban domination of Swat, militants announced last week that by Jan. 15 no girls would allowed to attend school in the valley."

CSM: voting mostly peaceful in Kashmir
"Instead of picking up a gun, Bashir, who asked that his real name not be used due to his political activities, has used text messages to create "flash mob" protests – instant rallies organized through cellphone messages – and posted videos on YouTube of unarmed protesters being shot, allegedly by Indian forces. Even as India and Pakistan rattle sabers after last month's massacre in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the 20-something's generation has helped Kashmir – the contested state at the heart of the two countries' enmity – take a historic step back from violence."

LAT: fissures and alliances in Basra as elections approach
"The last provincial elections, in 2005, sparked an ugly cycle of assassinations and political violence, in which most political parties were implicated. The next elections could either shatter or bolster the stability established since March, when Maliki ordered the Iraqi army and national police to crack down on armed groups...

As the election nears, Maliki is busy maneuvering. He has tapped local leaders to organize tribes in support of the central government. And under Maliki's direction, the national government has funded $100 million worth of reconstruction projects in Basra, bypassing the provincial council. The national government also has started paying unemployment benefits in the province...

But other factions also are maneuvering. The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, Maliki's main partner in the national government but also his party's main rival, wants Basra to serve as an anchor of a Shiite-majority nine-state federal region in the south. Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's followers wish to reclaim their influence in the port city, which they dominated before the springtime military offensive. The Al Fadila al Islamiya party of Gov. Mohammed Waeli wishes to hold on to privileges accrued in the last four years, notably its influence in the oil industry."

Reuters: US sends Ambassador to Libya for first time in 36 years

Chris Blattman: while SV was celebrating the season, there was a coup in Guinea
(alas, SV is more pessimistic about the relevance of the coup's lack of popular support)
BBC: generals move to consolidate power - and those people? fickle.
"The junta, which took over in a bloodless coup, has said it wishes to "reassure the international community" of its commitment to stamping out corruption and holding elections in 2010.

Its seizure of power was condemned internationally but Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade has urged the world community to recognise the new leadership.

Correspondents say the coup appears to have been welcomed by many people within the country who were tired of despotic rule under the former president and his corrupt government."

Ind: Mauritanian president released from house arrest after August coup

NYT: white dispossessed farmers win ruling against Mugabe, but are unlikely to see enforcement
"The case is rooted in one of the most fraught issues facing not just Zimbabwe, but other nations in the region, especially South Africa: the unjust division of land between whites and blacks that is a legacy of colonialism and white minority rule...

Zimbabwe’s handling of the land issue has had disastrous consequences. Since 2000, when Mr. Mugabe began encouraging the violent invasion of the country’s large, white-owned commercial farms — once the country’s largest employers — food production has collapsed, hunger has afflicted millions and the economy has never recovered.

Mr. Mugabe presents this redistribution as a triumph over greedy whites. But it set off a scramble for the best farms among the country’s ruling elite, who often had little knowledge or interest in farming, and became a potent source of patronage for Mr. Mugabe. His own relatives, as well as generals, judges, ministers and members of Parliament, were beneficiaries, farmer and human rights groups say.

By this year, the number of white-owned commercial farms dwindled to about 300 from 4,500. Even many of the remaining ones came under assault in this year’s bloodstained election season."

LAT: land is problematic in Kenya as well

BBC: war games in Mogadishu

NYT: post-war, less secular Bosnia
"Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are common. Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half the population. But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in an already fragile state...

Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly an outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.

'The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,' said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the grand mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.

'And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers,' he said. 'We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.'...

Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, cleave to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints."

BBC: elections set for Monday in Bangladesh
"For Bangladesh's eunuchs, river gypsies and prisoners, Monday's general elections will be a unique experience. It is the first time any will be allowed to vote.
But for the vast majority of the country's 81 million voters, the elections will mark a return to Bangladeshi politics as normal, after two years of emergency rule when an army-backed caretaker government tried to rewrite how things are done here."

NYT: Moro Islamic Liberation Front attacks kill 9 in the Philippines
"In recent months, fighting between the separatists and the government has killed dozens from each side and displaced more than half a million Filipinos from their homes. Tens of thousands are in refugee camps in several provinces.

Many Filipinos, particularly Christian politicians and local officials, opposed the agreement with the insurgents that would have created an enlarged Muslim autonomous region. The issue went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the pact was unconstitutional.

Since the agreement was rescinded in August, the government has been trying to repair the situation, and last week it announced a new negotiating panel in the hope that talks with the rebels could be restarted. But rebel leaders say any negotiations will have to resume where they left off: with the territorial agreement the Supreme Court found unconstitutional."

BBC: the Communist Party of the Philippines celebrates its 40th anniversary
"The CPP's armed wing, the New Peoples' Army (NPA), has an estimated 5,000 members and has been fighting the government since 1969 in one of Asia's longest-running insurgencies."

BBC: recovering from natural and human disaster in Aceh, Indonesia


war on drugs
WP: kidnapping of negotiator in Mexico draws attention to a trend
"Independent organizations say Mexico has one of the world's highest kidnapping rates, competing with Colombia, where kidnap crews tied to anti-government guerrillas perfected the art. About 70 abductions are officially reported each month in Mexico, although even the federal attorney general says the true number is far higher. Independent groups say about 500 people a month are abducted in Mexico. Many kidnap crews have been found to include police officers."

WP: Miss Sinaloa busted
"Zúñiga was arrested with a group of seven suspected gunmen and cartel associates, who were riding in a couple of trucks that got stopped at a military checkpoint around midnight Monday just outside the colonial city of Guadalajara. The headline in El Universal almost translates itself: 'Detienen a Miss Sinaloa y 7 narcos.'..The television news flashed back and forth between a beaming Miss Sinaloa clasping a bouquet of red roses and accepting her crown, and images of cartel violence, which has left more than 5,300 people dead this year."

LAT: what's a girl to do?: beauty queens become the girlfriends of capos in places like Sinaloa "This is where narco folklore started, with songs and icons that pay homage to gangsters, and where children want to grow up to be traffickers. How Sinaloa confronts its own divided soul offers insight on where the drug war may be going for Mexico, where more than 5,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence this year...

Political pluralism in Mexico may have made room for more firebrands like [state legislator] Del Rincon, but it also fed a free-for-all among trafficking gangs, which began to splinter and compete.

'The state was no longer the referee, and so the traffickers had to referee among themselves,' Astorga said. And that was not going to be a well-mannered process...

That chaos might make some nostalgic for the old days, when a few Sinaloa dynasties dominated the drug trade, as they had for generations. Amado Carrillo Fuentes branched out from Sinaloa into Chihuahua in the 1980s and '90s and ran the Juarez drug network that made him one of the richest men on the planet, owner of a fleet of jets and vast real estate holdings the world over.

As the centralized system broke down, the Sinaloans met a new challenge: the Gulf cartel.

Based in the state of Tamaulipas, the Gulf gang was reputed to have ties with, and the protection of, Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. After the arrest of its leader, Osiel Cardenas, the Gulf cartel became the first of the drug mafias to introduce a paramilitary army.

The narcotics ring recruited from Mexican and Guatemalan army special forces and formed the Zetas, ruthless hit men. The Zetas left one of their earliest calling cards in the town of Uruapan in Michoacan state in September 2006, when they tossed five severed heads onto the floor of a dance hall...

Buscaglia warns against the "Afghanistan-ization" of Mexico, in which rival kingpins gradually take over different states.

"If one criminal organization takes over one state, and another criminal organization takes another, then you have the ingredients of civil war," Buscaglia [an expert on organized crime who advises Mexico's Congress] said. Mexico is not there yet, Buscaglia said, but that breakdown looms as a real danger."

LAT: violence is astronomical in Ciudad Juarez, home of the Juarez cartel and a quarter of all homicides in Mexico in 2008
"The killings here are carried out in a style best described as baroque, with bodies hung headless from bridges, stuffed upside down in giant stew pots, lined up next to a school's playing field. Often, they are accompanied by taunting, handwritten messages, the hit man's equivalent of an end-zone dance."

LAT: money laundering avoids crackdown


modern slavery
WP: enslavement of girls for domestic work in Togo
"The number of girls like Adiza, who leave their communities or even their countries to clean other people's houses, has surged in recent years, according to labor and human rights specialists. The girls in the maid trade, some as young as 5, often go unpaid, and their work in private homes means the abuses they suffer are out of public view."
Ind: and India
"Far from being trained in the skills of acupuncture, for two years she was forced to work as an unpaid domestic help in the home of the "doctor" supposed to be teaching her. She toiled from 5am to midnight, seven days a week. She was abused and mistreated. Almost certainly she was brought to Delhi by a professional trafficker; what is beyond doubt is that once she got here she lived the life of slave."

Harper's: the truly astounding Index dedicated to Mr. Bush
featuring: "Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069...Portion of his presidency he has spent at or en route to vacation spots: 1/3...Estimated number of juveniles whom the United States has detained as enemy combatants since 2002: 2,500"

LAT: on that last point, when can a child be held accountable as a combatant?
" 'Under international law, adults who recruit children for combat are to be prosecuted for that offense. But the children caught up in combat are to be protected, not prosecuted,' said Diane Marie Amann, a UC Davis law professor who observed the latest hearing in Khadr's case for the National Institute of Military Justice...Now 22, Khadr has spent almost a third of his life in U.S. custody. He was raised in a militant Muslim family and was surrounded in his teen years by holy warriors. His lawyers describe him as confused, immature and emotionally damaged."

++
Salon: best indie films of 2008
Salon: one that makes the list is Waltz of Bashir
"[The film] invents an ingenious new method of portraying the notoriously untrustworthy realm of memory, which is especially fraught when one is trying to dredge up memories one has worked hard to suppress for 25 years. By his own account, Folman remembered only bits and pieces from his wartime experience before making the film, and remembered them almost as a movie he had seen, or as things that had happened to someone else...

'I think there are a lot of ways to define war. One of them is definitely as a very bad acid trip, and I wanted the audience to go on this sort of trip.'...

...one of those events is the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982, when Christian militias allied with Israel massacred hundreds or perhaps thousands of Palestinian civilians in two refugee camps. It's such an explosive topic, with unresolved questions about how much the Israeli government and military knew, and how much responsibility they bore. Were you hesitant about addressing such a painful and loaded subject?

'No. I don't think the film brings any news with regard to what happened at Sabra and Shatila. There was a government committee that made an inquiry, and top generals were banned from office. Arik Sharon was banned from office as the minister of defense, even though he came back later as prime minister. I think everyone knows what happened in terms of, like, journalistic facts.

I was not interested in that at all, because I thought I had nothing new to say. I was interested in the common soldier, his point of view, and in the chronology of massacre. Meaning, when do you put all the facts you hear and see, and all the hints you get, into one frame that makes you realize there is a mass murder going on just around the corner? I was interested in that -- telling that story through the eyes of a simple soldier.' "

++
WP: to take us out on a high note (or something), Dave Barry reviews notable events of 2008 in the US

tis the season [famous last words]

NYT: US and Afghanistan plan to use local militias
"The militias will be deployed to help American and Afghan security forces, which are stretched far and wide across this mountainous country. The first of the local defense forces are scheduled to begin operating early next year in Wardak Province, an area just outside the capital where the Taliban have overrun most government authority...

But the plan is causing deep unease among many Afghans, who fear that Pashtun-dominated militias could get out of control, terrorize local populations and turn against the government. The Afghan government, aided by the Americans, has carried out several ambitious campaigns since 2001 to disarm militants and gather up their guns. A proposal to field local militias was defeated in the Afghan Senate in the fall.

“There will be fighting between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns,” said Salih Mohammad Registani, a member of the Afghan Parliament and an ethnic Tajik. Mr. Registani raised the specter of the Arbaki, a Pashtun-dominated militia turned loose on other Afghans early in the 20th century.

“A civil war will start very soon,” he said...

American and Afghan officials say they intend to set up local militias of 100 to 200 fighters in each provincial district, with the fighters being drawn from the villages where they live. (Wardak has eight districts.)

To help ensure the dependability of each fighter, the Americans and Afghans are planning to rely on local leaders, like tribal chiefs and clerics, to choose the militiamen for them. Those militiamen will be given a brief period of training, along with weapons like assault rifles and grenade launchers, and communication gear, said Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan defense minister...

In Iraq, American commanders relied almost exclusively on tribal leaders to put Sunni gunmen at their disposal. But in Afghanistan, 30 years of war has left the tribes scattered and attenuated. American and Afghan leaders say they are instead trying to cobble together councils made up of a wider range of leaders...

American and Afghan officials say that they are confident they can keep the militias under control and that the militias can carry out a range of duties, like providing intelligence on Taliban movements that American and Afghan forces can act on...

In an interview, Mohammed Naim Haqmal, a leader of the Nuri tribe, said the Taliban controlled about 80 percent of Wardak Province — essentially everything except the centers of each district. At night, Mr. Haqmal said, the Taliban range freely, setting up checkpoints and laying bombs for American convoys traveling on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar.

But for all that, Mr. Haqmal said, the Taliban are unpopular in Wardak, mainly because their constant attacks prevent people from leading normal lives. Two months ago, Mr. Haqmal said, a group of villagers from the Jagatoo district rioted when the Taliban blocked a local road in order to stage an attack on some American forces. Taliban fighters opened fire on the villagers, killing five.

“The Taliban want to fight, and that causes problems for the people,” Mr. Haqmal said. “People just want to live their lives.”

Still, Mr. Haqmal said he was skeptical that the government-backed militias could succeed because the Afghan and American officials were bypassing the traditional leaders of the province. So far, he said, they had selected leaders in the community who lacked credibility with the local people. Moreover, Mr. Haqmal said he was worried that the militias would fail to receive proper support and guidance from the government, and end up starting tribal feuds with members of the Taliban. “We already have the Afghan Army and police — they should stick with them,” Mr. Haqmal said.

A Taliban commander based in Wardak Province, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear that he would become a target, predicted that the government militias would find it hard to put down roots in the area, if only because the Taliban had already done so.

'We are living in the districts, in the villages — we are not living in the mountains,' the Taliban chief said. 'The people are with us.' "

WSJ: disuptes that the militias will receive weapons, suggests possibility of attracting Taliban defectors
"In the first phase of the pilot program, villages throughout Wardak will convene "shura" meetings of local tribal, religious and political figures. The community elders will then be responsible for recruiting the local militias and overseeing their conduct.

As in Iraq, the new Afghan militias will be paid by the U.S. A senior American military official in Kabul said the money would likely be first funneled to the individual village shuras, which would in turn be charged with disbursing salaries to their fighters.

The U.S. won't provide weapons or ammunition to the militias, but the local forces will be allowed to keep and use the weapons they already have. "The honest truth is that these guys don't need us to give them guns," the U.S. official said.

Gov. Fidai said that he hopes the local militias will attract some former insurgents, potentially boosting the Afghan government's efforts to win over moderate members of the Taliban."

WSJ (op-ed): Bush should recommend leniency for shoe thrower

looking for a few good recruits [fight and flight]

LAT: profile of an elusive capo in Tijuana
"His heavily armed hit men, authorities say, have been leaving the gruesome displays of charred and decapitated bodies across the city, signed with the moniker "Tres Letras," for the three letters in "Teo." And authorities believe he runs a network of hide-outs where kidnap victims are held in cages...

"The government's strategy was to break the cartels into smaller, more manageable pieces," said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego. "But smaller doesn't mean more manageable. . . . It's begetting more violence . . . and more dangerous organizations, and people like this guy."

Garcia, whose family is said to be from Sinaloa state, grew up in Tijuana and started out in the Arellano Felix organization as a trusted enforcer, probably in the 1990s, and grew powerful as a lieutenant who helped transform kidnapping into a multimillion-dollar industry.

This year, the head of the cartel, Fernando Sanchez Arellano, a nephew of the founding brothers, tried unsuccessfully to halt the abductions of doctors, businessmen and politically influential figures. Sanchez Arellano apparently was worried that the crime wave, attributed to Garcia, was hampering the cartel's drug-trafficking business, according to U.S. and Mexican authorities.

In April, the renegade lieutenant and the cartel leader split in spectacular fashion; their gangs shot it out on an expressway in eastern Tijuana, leaving 14 dead. Garcia fled to Sinaloa but returned in September to launch all-out war. He is believed to be allied with the Sinaloa cartel, which is led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman...

The government, meanwhile, seems helpless to stop the killings. Police officers who have not been lured away to work for Garcia as drivers, lookouts and hit men are paralyzed with fear. Garcia is said to possess a list with every cop's address and phone number."
BBC: drug traffickers biggest organized crime threat to US: National Drug Threat Assessment
WP: 12 decapitated bodies found in southern Mexico

AP: UN tribunal convicts Rwandan of genocide
"On Thursday, the court said Bagosora used his position as the highest authority in Rwanda's Defense Ministry to direct Hutu soldiers to kill Tutsis and moderate Hutus. According to the indictment against him, Bagosora once said he was returning to Rwanda to "prepare the apocalypse."

The court said he was responsible for the deaths of Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and 10 Belgian peacekeepers who tried to protect her at the outset of the genocide...

About 63,000 people are suspected of taking part in the genocide. Many have been sentenced by community-based courts, called gacaca, where suspects were encouraged to confess and seek forgiveness in exchange for lighter sentences."
Gdn: background on Bagosora
Gdn: Q&A on the genocide

BBC: massacre by 'bandits' in the Central African Republic
"So who are these bandits that plague the CAR? Many are veteran fighters from the many coups there have been in this country.

Others are fugitives from neighbouring countries like Chad and Sudan.

They have been able to operate freely here as the government of President Francois Bozize has little control over much of the countryside which is divided between a number of rebel groups.

Often the bandits are better organised and equipped than any of these other forces."
BBC: the violence attracts little attention but is generating a humanitarian crisis
"The Central African Republic has seen more than 300,000 people forced from their homes over the past three years, due to civil war and attacks by armed bandits.

One father of four, Zaoro Joseph, told of bandits killing eight people in his village and beating those that remained.

But when the government soldiers came to chase the bandits away, they robbed and burned the village too...

There are only 500 miles of paved roads in an often lawless country that is bigger than France."

BBC: evidence of enslavement in Darfur
"Kidnapped men have been forced to work on farmland controlled by Janjaweed militias, a coalition of African charities says.

Eyewitnesses also say the Sudanese army has been involved in abducting women and children to be sex slaves and domestic staff for troops in Khartoum."

WP: Somalis join or flee the Islamist group al-Shabab
"Ibrahim and two friends fled several months ago, just after the Shabab began beating people not attending Friday prayers and just before the group publicly stoned to death a 13-year-old girl it had convicted of adultery.

The options for young men like them, it seemed, had narrowed to two: sign up or run.

"For us, it was not good to join," said Ibrahim, a lanky 22-year-old who fled to this overflowing refugee camp across the Kenyan border. "Because if we join one side, the other side will hunt us and kill us."...

Mohamed estimated that about 80 percent of his friends had relented and joined the Shabab, some because they were "seduced" by religious ideology, he said, and others because they felt they had no other choice.

The rest attempted to survive by banding together in small groups, he said. When the Shabab took over southern Mogadishu, they fled to the northern part of the city. When it took over the north, they fled south again."

BBC: Kenya sets up tribunal for voting violence, will seek "ring leaders"

wronging rights: UNHCR awareness campaign video on the Congo (via Chris Blattman)

London Review of Books: Mamdani on how Mugabe has retained power (via Chris Blattman)
"There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country’s growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. This view of Zimbabwe’s crisis can be found everywhere, from the Economist and the Financial Times to the Guardian and the New Statesman, but it gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved.

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe."
WP: US says it's time for him to go

WP: the US military has been protecting an Iranian opposition group that had ties to Hussein; Iraq to expel it
LAT: 35 arrested in Iraq, accused of membership in Al Awda (The Return), reorganized Baath Party
WP: Interior Minister claims arrests based on 'a big lie'
WP: segregation and violence in Kirkuk
"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..

Politics infuses virtually every discussion in this neighborhood -- a sprawling jumble of houses, shops and mosques connected by dusty, unpaved roads in the southern part of Kirkuk. About 120 Kurdish families are clustered inside sand berms, blast walls and checkpoints. Arab and Turkmen houses surround them.

For decades, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens mingled freely, intermarried and ran businesses together. Today, the communities rarely mix...

Senior non-Kurdish police commanders complain that Kurdish intelligence agencies were opening offices in many enclaves, mirroring Hussein's security apparatus."

Newsweek: interview with President Zardari
"[Q:] 'Do you control Pakistan or does the Army control Pakistan?'
[A:] 'Democracy controls Pakistan … All the players today understand that democracy is the only way.' "

WP: protests seem to be spreading among urban middle class in China
"Rural protests, often led by impoverished farmers angry over land seizures that leave them unable to feed their families, have occurred sporadically over the past decade. But richer, more educated Chinese are behind the recent strikes, which have disrupted life in China's cities. The success achieved by the drivers in Chongqing has inspired work stoppages elsewhere."

NYT: Georgian military needs makeover
"The military Mr. Saakashvili inherited was a Red Army orphan: small, decrepit, badly trained and poorly equipped. In the early 1990s the Georgian Army lost two wars against Russian-backed separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Some of its troops were accused of committing war crimes. (Abkhaz and Ossetian forces have also been accused of ugly battlefield excesses.)

Mr. Saakashvili purchased new arms and vehicles, raised salaries, built new bases, increased the country’s collaboration with the Pentagon and urged the armed forces to emulate Western practices, in part by encouraging volunteer soldiers.

The Georgian military appeared to be transforming. American officers praised a few of their Georgian counterparts in Iraq. And Eduard Kokoity, the president of South Ossetia, said the Georgian military was much more prepared and capable in its initial attack in August than it had been in the past.

But as the war drew into a second day and Russian forces flowed into South Ossetia, the Georgian military quickly broke down. Many commanders were reduced to communicating by cellphone. The army fired cluster munitions on its own villages. Many units fled, abandoning equipment, ammunition and their own dead...

“One of the reasons they got into the war is that their command and control is a mess,” [an American] officer said. “They have no ability to process and analyze strategic information and provide it to decision makers in a systematic way.” The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the assessment."

Gdn: recruitment, displacement, and denunciations as gov't continues push against the LTTE in Sri Lanka
"With its back to the jungle, the Tigers are stepping up pressure on civilians to defend their dwindling area of control, according to a Human Rights Watch report this week. "Trapped in the LTTE's iron fist, ordinary Tamils are forcibly recruited as fighters and forced to engage in dangerous labour near the front lines", Brad Adams, HRW's Asia director said on Monday. "It has recently gone beyond its longstanding 'one person per family' forced recruitment policy and now sometimes requires two or more family members to join its ranks. The LTTE claims to be fighting for the Tamil people, but it is responsible for much of the suffering of civilians".

The government, meanwhile, urges civilians to flee the Tiger areas and houses them in so-called welfare camps, which independent sources describe as detention camps. There government-paid informers wearing masks walk through the ranks of the displaced, identifying people as alleged Tiger supporters who are promptly detained."

Newsweek: the whistleblower on the wiretaps comes forward
"In the spring of 2004, Tamm had just finished a yearlong stint at a Justice Department unit handling wiretaps of suspected terrorists and spies—a unit so sensitive that employees are required to put their hands through a biometric scanner to check their fingerprints upon entering. While there, Tamm stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program that seemed to be eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. The unit had special rules that appeared to be hiding the NSA activities from a panel of federal judges who are required to approve such surveillance. When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that "the program" (as it was commonly called within the office) was 'probably illegal.'...

For weeks, Tamm couldn't sleep. The idea of lawlessness at the Justice Department angered him. Finally, one day during his lunch hour, Tamm ducked into a subway station near the U.S. District Courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue. He headed for a pair of adjoining pay phones partially concealed by large, illuminated Metro maps. Tamm had been eyeing the phone booths on his way to work in the morning. Now, as he slipped through the parade of midday subway riders, his heart was pounding, his body trembling. Tamm felt like a spy. After looking around to make sure nobody was watching, he picked up a phone and called The New York Times."

pay up [handsome boy ransoming school]

Salon: kidnapping on the rise in Afghanistan

"Kidnappers come either from the ranks of the Taliban, who target their ideological enemies, or from criminal gangs looking for victims with deep pockets or, sometimes, children to sell into prostitution or use as labor. The lines blur when criminal gangs sell their hostages to the Taliban, Kabul's police chief said in late November. The Taliban, who are closing in on the capital, already control much of southern Afghanistan, creating a sort of free zone to hold kidnap victims with impunity."

BBC: US employing COIN strategy, but it's slow going

"In Khost province, the US military insists it has hit upon a counter-insurgency model that is working. It has fanned out across the province, creating what it calls district centres, in effect, small military bases.

The idea is that you create a mesh - making it difficult for the insurgents to travel from area to area.

Rolling patrols are meant to reassure the local population that there is security and a permanent US presence.

Small reconstruction teams build projects that aid rural communities such as schools and health clinics. New roads are also being built.

These efforts are intended to pull the locals away from the insurgency and into the embrace of the Afghan government with a helping hand from Uncle Sam.

While it sounds entirely workable on paper, on ground, the difficulties of the process are laid bare.

Frequently patrols stop at local markets where an American officer wanders the streets speaking to shopkeepers who look decidedly uncomfortable with all the attention.

The officers' roll call of questions often has a just-out-of-Westpoint feel to it.

How are you? How's business? Have there being any attacks? Followed by the request: if you have any information please report it to the district centre. But not many Afghans ever do.

Many of them are fearful of insurgent reprisals if they are seen to be openly associating or passing on information to the US forces."
BBC: poppy farmers seeking alternative development

NYT: Hamas factions signaling opposite takes on whether truce will end Friday

LAT: recently freed Christian warlord in Lebanon apologizes for 'past mistakes'

"The war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, set the standard for a new kind of lawless, media-saturated civil conflict now common in desperate corners of the world. It left an estimated 100,000 people dead and nearly a million displaced. Palestinians, Shiites, Sunnis, Druze, Christians and their foreign backers were pitted against one another, and sometimes against their own kind.

Geagea's story illustrates the complexity of coming to terms with that dark past.

He was a year away from completing medical school at the American University of Beirut when he was sucked into the conflict's vortex as a member of a right-wing Christian militia eventually called the Lebanese Forces. He gained a reputation for no-holds-barred killing, including violence against rival Christians.

In 1990, Syrian troops occupied the country, ending a conflict already petering out. There would be no truth commission to examine who did what during the conflict.

All parties agreed to sweep the war's dirty business under the rug. The government offered amnesty to all fighters except those accused of killing foreign diplomats, high-ranking officials and religious leaders.

Geagea immediately alienated other Christian leaders and Syrian-backed authorities, who charged him with bombing a church and assassinating several officials during the war. After a trial that independent observers said was seriously flawed, he was thrown into prison in 1994, in the third basement level, with "no fresh air, no sun, no winter, no summer . . . nothing," he said."

BBC: LRA bases attacked in Congo; calls off peace process

Econ: the ICC and/or justice in Sudan, plus post-civil war trials in Lebanon, Cambodia, Uganda, and CAR 

"...Sudan’s most prominent opposition politician, Sadiq al-Mahdi, thinks he has an answer: what he calls a “third way” between hauling Mr Bashir to The Hague and doing nothing about crimes in Darfur. He suggests setting up an independent “hybrid” court for Darfur, which would have both Sudanese judges and international ones and sit in Sudan."

BBC: meanwhile, ongoing clashes between ethnic groups in Darfur 
"Unamid says 150 people died as hundreds of members of the Fallata and Salamat ethnic groups attacked the Habaniya in South Darfur.

About 100 more died in clashes between two groups from the Gimir group.

These clashes do not appear to be directly linked to the Darfur conflict between Arabs and black Africans.

But UN officials say ethnic relations have not been helped by the Darfur conflict, which started in 2003 when mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against the government, accusing Khartoum of neglecting the western region.

This has seen an increased flow of weapons to the region."
BBC: troops withdraw from Abyei after fighting with police

Econ: getting by in Sierra Leone

"Demobilisation has gone fairly well. Sierra Leone is a less violent place than it has been for a long time; by and large, the rule of law prevails. A special court set up to try the okadas’ former commanders, directly responsible for ordering much of the mayhem, is winding down; some are going to jail. Moreover, the country has had two peaceful elections in a region not famed for democracy. Yet in many ways, despite the relative peace, Sierra Leone’s problems remain as intractable as ever, leaving those responsible for keeping the country on life-support wondering what to do next...

Those who are trying to strengthen the country’s institutions and economy know they are in a race against time. The region’s warlords are being replaced by drug lords, many from Colombia. Circling like vultures around weak states, they are starting to use Sierra Leone as a base to ship drugs on to Europe and beyond, with all the corruption and violence that will come with it. A country like Guinea-Bissau, just up the coast, has already fallen prey; it is now almost a 'narco-state.'"

UN dispatch: counter-piracy (via Chris Blattman)

"There's a pirates nest, I guess; where are they? If you can separate them from their ports or wherever they hide out, then obviously you get them before they even come out. The difficulty you have there is what you have with most insurgent-type activities: sorting out the good from the bad."
NYT: undaunted at sea
"More than a dozen warships from Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia, Britain, Malaysia and the United States have joined the hunt.

And yet, in the past two months alone, the pirates have attacked more than 30 vessels, eluding the naval patrols, going farther out to sea and seeking bigger, more lucrative game, including an American cruise ship and a 1,000-foot Saudi oil tanker.

The pirates are recalibrating their tactics, attacking ships in beelike swarms of 20 to 30 skiffs, and threatening to choke off one of the busiest shipping arteries in the world, at the mouth of the Red Sea."

WP: Somali PM fired by president
"Hours later, as the government veered toward collapse, Islamist insurgents held a brazen news conference in the capital and vowed never to negotiate with the leadership."

BBC: ...who is then sanctioned by Kenya

BBC: Tuaregs kidnap UN envoy to Niger
"The Tuaregs have traditionally been a nomadic people roaming across the Sahara Desert but some took up arms, saying the Niger government is not doing enough to improve their lives.

The FFR [Front des Forces de Redressement] broke away from the better known Tuareg MNJ rebels who are fighting for greater autonomy and a larger share of northern Niger's vast mineral wealth.

The MNJ has had frequent clashes with the country's army and has also kidnapped foreigners working in the uranium mines."

LAT: 22 activists disappeared in Zimbabwe over last 6 weeks

LAT: it's a tactic that allows Mugabe hangs on

"To help understand his staying power, one need only rewind to the 1980s and the massacres of his early years in power, when he was a conquering hero who had thrown out the white minority regime of Ian Smith.

The name of the murderous operation, Gukurahundi, was as lyrical as a haiku: the wind that blows away the chaff before the spring rains.

Mugabe's political opponents were the chaff. The spring rains were supposed to signify the golden era of a one-party state (or rather, a one-man state).

Western leaders and news media ignored the massacres of the "dissidents" by the army's crack Five Brigade in Matabeleland province in southern Zimbabwe. Some estimates put the dead at 20,000.

Mugabe drew his most important lesson from the West's blase reaction, analysts believe: that there's a level of "acceptable" violence that will escape international condemnation, but still destroy any threat to his power."

WP: dissident ANC members establish new political party in South Africa

"The new party, the Congress of the People, has been accused of offering little more than criticism and is not expected to topple the ANC in general elections next year. But the ANC is clearly worried about an exodus of members to the new party, and whether that might signal there is enough discontent among voters to seriously cut into its large parliamentary majority."  

NYT: signs of renewed conflict along ethnic lines in Bosnia

"The power-sharing agreement between former foes has always been tense. Now, however, the uneasy peace has been complicated by Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in February, which many here worry could prompt the Serbian Republic to follow suit, tipping the region into a conflict that could fast turn deadly...

But the decentralized political system that Dayton engineered has entrenched rather than healed ethnic divisions. Even in communities where Serbs, Muslims and Croats live side by side, some opt to send their children to the same schools, but in different shifts."

AP: mass arrests at protest outside Kremlin

"The Other Russia movement organized the protest, in defiance of a ban, to draw attention to Russia's economic troubles and to protest Kremlin plans to extend the presidential term from four years to six. Critics say the constitutional change is part of a retreat from democracy and is aimed at strengthening the grip of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his allies.

News broadcasts on Russia's main television networks made no mention of the Moscow crackdown or of protests in St. Petersburg and Vladivostok.

Kasparov and other prominent liberals have just launched a new anti-Kremlin movement called Solidarity in a bid to unite Russia's liberal forces and encourage a popular revolution similar to those in Ukraine and Georgia."
BBC: Abkhazia wants in

BBC: Turkmenistan holds first parliamentary elections since adoption of new constitution

Ind: Turkish intellectuals issue apology to Armenians
"Turkey accepts that many Armenians were killed during the collapse of the Ottoman empire, but insists they were victims of civil strife and that Muslim Turks also died. Most Western historians agree that the ethnic cleansing that killed roughly 700,000 Armenians amounted to genocide...

The public apology coincides with a diplomatic rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia, whose shared border has been closed since the Nagorny-Karabakh war in 1993 and who have been locked in almost 100 years of hostility. President Abdullah Gul made history in September when he became the first Turkish leader to visit Armenia, and the two countries have been talking about restoring full diplomatic relations."

Obs: comparing ETA and Islamic terrorist groups 
"Personal networks are hugely important in recruiting. Islamic militant cells, especially in Europe, have often used outdoor adventure activities to bring otherwise disparate individuals together. As one British security source said last year: 'That moment when someone takes someone else's rucksack because they are exhausted is worth a decade of indoctrination in terms of preparing a group for violent action.'"

Ind: Italy arrests 100 alleged mafia associates  

BBC: Colombian NGO calls gov't data 'unbelievable'
"About 114,000 members of the warring factions were said to have been dealt with by the army in the last six years.

However, other estimates say there are only 30,000 in the warring factions.

Even allowing for recruiting to replenish depleted ranks, the government figures suggest that eight members of the warring factions are killed every single day in Colombia, something not substantiated by any other sources." 

BBC: museum dedicated to Pinochet opens in Santiago

WP: new leader for Thailand - 3rd in four months

WP: Secret Service slow to respond to shoe

BBC: journalist beaten, still in custody; supporters rally for 2nd day

++

wronging rights: charity porn / pornographic charity (via Chris Blattman)

in training [who's the most nationalist of them all]

NYT: the US military is training African troops in effort to control territory more effectively
"In Africa, a five-year, $500 million partnership between the State and Defense Departments includes Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia, and Libya is on the verge of joining.

American efforts to fight terrorism in the region also include nonmilitary programs, like instruction for teachers and job training for young Muslim men who could be singled out by militants’ recruiting campaigns...

With only 10,000 people in its military and other security forces, and just two working helicopters and a few airplanes, Mali acknowledges how daunting a task it is to try to drive out the militants.

The biggest potential threat comes from as many as 200 fighters from an offshoot of Al Qaeda called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which uses the northern Malian desert as a staging area and support base, American and Malian officials say." 

Just the Facts: it's been training Latin American troops for years; the Center for Int'l Policy, Latin America Working Group, and the Washington Office on Latin America track it

WP: UN links Rwandan and Congo elites to rival militias

"The panel found evidence that "Rwandan authorities have been complicit in the recruitment of soldiers, including children, have facilitated the supply of military equipment, and have sent officers and units from the Rwandan Defence Forces" to Congo in support of Nkunda's forces.

Nkunda has presented himself as a defender of the region's ethnic Tutsis from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), an armed Rwandan Hutu movement that played a central role in orchestrating Rwanda's 1994 genocide. A former officer in the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front, which seized power in Rwanda in 1994, Nkunda has denied receiving Rwanda's military support. 

The Congolese government has pledged to disarm the FDLR and enable the return of its members to Rwanda, where many would probably by prosecuted for their role in the genocide. But the U.N. panel said it had obtained "strong evidence" showing that the Congolese army has "collaborated extensively" with the FDLR since 2007.

Congo stands accused of supplying the Rwandan militia with large shipments of ammunition in exchange for participating in joint military operations against Nkunda's forces, according to the panel."

Gdn: illicit gains fuel the conflict
"The FDLR, a Hutu force whose original members are linked to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, relies on the illegal mineral trade to raise most of its funds. It earns profits "possibly worth millions of dollars a year" through the trade of cassiterite and coltan, which are used in consumer electronics products and gold, and wolframite, which is used to make tungsten...

For Laurent Nkunda's Tutsi rebel group, the CNDP, land and cows provide key revenue and external financing. Land records showed that six local businessmen with close links to the CNDP had recently purchased ranches in areas under its control. The rebels are paid protection money.

Grazing restrictions imposed by the Rwandan government have caused many cattle to be moved across the border into Congo. Official agricultural documents show that, in just one small part of their territory, CNDP officers own more than 1,500 cows, worth up to £500,000.

Nkunda's rebels were also reported to have earned about £470,000 in the last year by controlling the Bunagana customs post on the Congo-Uganda border."

BBC: violence in disputed town in Sudan

BBC: election protester shot by police as voting begins in Kashmir

AP: riots reach 7th day in Greece, spread to other cities in Europe

"The violence has hammered Karamanlis' conservative government, which already faced vociferous opposition to economic and social reforms. Karamanlis, whose party has only a single seat majority in parliament, rejected calls for him to resign, saying today that Greece needed to focus instead on the global financial crisis...

Protesters who are occupying high schools and universities are demanding a reversal of public spending cuts, the resignation of the country's interior minister and the release of arrested riot suspects.

About 200 people have been arrested during the riots and 70 injured.

As unrest spilled over into other European cities, concerns have been raised that the clashes could be a trigger for opponents of globalization, disaffected youth and others outraged by the continent's economic turmoil and soaring unemployment...

Protesters in Spain, Denmark and Italy this week have smashed shop windows, pelted police with bottles and attacked banks, while in France, cars were set ablaze outside the Greek consulate in Bordeaux."

WP: specialists in violence gaining skills in Mexico
"In Mexico's chaotic drug war, attacks are no longer the work of desperate amateurs with bad aim. Increasingly, the killings are being carried out by professionals, often hooded and gloved, who trap their targets in coordinated ambushes, strike with overwhelming firepower, and then vanish into the afternoon rush hour -- just as they did in the Huerta killing.

The paid assassins, known as sicarios, are rarely apprehended. Mexican officials say the commando squads probably travel from state to state, across a country where the government and its security forces are drawing alarming conclusions about the scope and skill of an enemy supported by billions of dollars in drug profits." 

LAT: Central American migrants targeted by organized crime (to add to the list of border crossing perils)
"Tens of thousands of Central Americans traverse Mexico illegally each year on their way to the U.S. border. The trek, which can involve perilous journeys by boat and through isolated countryside and mean city streets, often ends unhappily.

Migrants have been maimed or killed hopping aboard freight trains. Others are robbed or raped. Often, they are arrested, and held in squalid cells or denied medical care. In hundreds of cases, Central American families never hear from their relatives again."

AP: Colombia extradites 'Don Diego' - last head of Norte de Valle cartel - to US

"Colombia's cocaine trade is now splintered among far smaller groups and much of the profits -- and competition-related violence -- have shifted to Mexican cartels.

At the time of his capture. Montoya headed a private army of several hundred gunmen. He had remained a fugitive for years by paying off military and police officials.

Montoya, 47, was indicted in two U.S. courts -- southern Florida and District of Columbia. He sent tons of cocaine to the United States and is responsible for at least 1,500 killing in a two-decade career, Colombian officials say."

NYT: sit-in successful in Chicago
The word came just after lunch on Dec. 2 in the cafeteria of Republic Windows and Doors. A company official told assembled workers that their plant on this city’s North Side, which had operated for more than four decades, would be closed in just three days...

There was a murmur of shock, then anger, in the drab room lined with snack machines. Some women cried. But a few of the factory’s union leaders had been anticipating this moment. Several weeks before, they had noticed that equipment had disappeared from the plant, and they began tracing it to a nearby rail yard.

And so, in secret, they had been discussing a bold but potentially dangerous plan: occupying the factory if it closed...

all the workers wanted, they said, was what they deserved under the law: 60 days of severance pay and earned vacation time.

And to their surprise, their drastic action worked. Late Wednesday, two major banks agreed to lend the company enough money to give the workers what they asked for...

In many ways, however, Republic was an unlikely setting for a worker uprising. Many workers interviewed, including some who had been at the plant for more than three decades, said they considered it a decent place to work. It was a mostly Hispanic work force, with some blacks. Some earned over $40,000 a year, including overtime, pulling them into the middle class and enabling them to set up 401(k) retirement accounts and buy modest homes." 

Slate: corruption competition: Illinois vs Louisiana

LAT: they should consider a pageant: nationalism and swimsuit competitions, outdoors, in the Russian winter? meet Miss Constitution.

"In between trilling traditional songs extolling the Moscow scenery and strutting in their bathing suits, the blond from Rostov-on-Don and three other nubile finalists paused to answer questions about authority, state obligations and the role of the elite.

"Who is the only source of authority in the Russian Federation?" the announcer asked.

"The multiethnic people of the Russian Federation!" one of the women fired back.

Organized by the government and the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, or Ours, the pageant was aimed at whipping up public enthusiasm for the constitution. The 15th anniversary of the post-Soviet constitution has come at a sensitive moment, as President Dmitry Medvedev, backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, is pushing for the first-ever amendments."

WP: who put the politics in my cricket match?

vision impaired [just teasing]

WP: Senate Armed Services Cmte finds administration responsible for detainee abuse
"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the report states. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."
Gdn: inside (parts of) Gitmo (video)
WP: Portugal lobbies EU to accept released detainees
WP: Belgium arrests 14 in alleged terror plot

NYT: bomb kills at least 48 near Kirkuk (WP says 57)
"The apparent target was symbolic and incendiary: a meeting of Kurdish officials and Sunni Arab members of the Awakening, mostly former insurgents now working for the government, trying to reduce tension between Arabs and Kurds, each with claims on the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

Even before the bombing, the fear of violence in Kirkuk was so high that the city was exempted from nationwide provincial elections, scheduled for Jan. 31."

LAT: Sheik Lawrence important US ally in Anbar
"There are many Sunni tribal sheiks in Anbar, but there is only one Sheik Lawrence. His authority and name are inherited from his great-grandfather, one of the Bedouin leaders who rode beside the Englishman T.E. Lawrence during the World War I fight against the Ottoman Empire.

His tribe, the Anezi, is not particularly large, and the area he controls isn't prominent in Iraqi politics. But as U.S. military and civilian officials have learned, he is a man to be reckoned with...

When the history of the U.S. involvement in Iraq is written, one focus will be the Americans' relationship with the sheiks of Anbar, the province that was the birthplace of the Sunni-led insurgency. At first, the U.S. military sought to ignore them as cultural anachronisms -- a decision it soon came to regret as the insurgency burgeoned.

Then came the Anbar Awakening, a pledge by some of the sheiks to side with the Americans against the insurgency. Within two years, Anbar went from lost cause to success story in the eyes of U.S. officials, even before the buildup of troops in Baghdad.

Figuring out the pecking order among sheiks has been a challenge for the U.S. military. Some sheiks have great authority; others pretend to. Some are what commanders have come to call 'fake sheiks.'"

LAT: US military claims violence down because fewer Iranian weapons
Gdn: timeline of important events in Iraq, 2003-2008
BBC: history lesson as Brits prepare to pull out: a diplomat's diary from 1920
NYT baghdad bureau blog: the symbolism of Firdos Square

CSM: Pakistani general reigns in Army

WP: small hometown of captured Mumbai gunman in spotlight
"Centuries ago, Faridkot was best known for its Sufi patron saint, Baba Farid. That was when Muslim mystics and poets roamed the subcontinent -- long before the 1947 partition that created six decades of enmity between Pakistan and India. In more recent years, the deeply impoverished area around Faridkot, which is about 25 miles from the Indian border, has been a recruiting ground for the Pakistani military as well as increasingly virulent Sunni Muslim extremist groups such as Lashkar-i-Taiba, according to experts on the region. Now the story of this Pakistani town includes Kasab, even if his former neighbors are deeply reluctant to admit it."

Ind: 'dancing girls' of Lahore on strike over Taliban restrictions
"The strike, which is supported by the theatres where they perform, was sparked by the decision of Lahore High Court last month to ban the Mujra, the graceful and elaborate dance first developed in the Mughal courts 400 years ago, on the grounds that it is too sexually explicit...

In the face of the strike and the lack of enthusiasm for alternative entertainment, the court has suspended its ban. It has, however, ordered dancers to cover their necks with shawls and wear shoes (they used to dance barefoot but the court deemed that too erotic)."

BBC: Syria's approach to containing terrorism 

WP: wall, speculation on Palestinian state borders generate migration within Jerusalem and Israel
"Many of the 250,000 Palestinians who are residents of East Jerusalem, but who are not Israeli citizens, are equally concerned about losing access to Israeli services such as medical care and social security if their neighborhoods became part of a Palestinian state. A growing number are moving into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods such as French Hill or Pisgat Zeev -- areas that Palestinian officials consider to be illegal Israeli settlements."

IHT: accounting for the riots in Greece
IHT (op-ed, Kalyvas): the problem is a cultural, not social, one
"Undergirding these actions is a more or less complete absence of sanctions - few people get arrested and almost no one gets sentenced. Participation in these riots is seen as a fun and low-risk activity, almost a rite of passage. This attitude of toleration covers a variety of other acts, such as the widespread use of graffiti, which has totally defaced Athens in the past few years.

The police lack a consistent policy. They are regularly harassed by groups of youths - a recurrent activity that is perceived as more or less normal; badly trained and inefficiently led, they are prone to outbursts of brutality. The cycle is vicious."

BBC: France arrests ETA leader

Ind: Luxembourgers remake their monarchy
"The people of Luxembourg stripped their beloved monarch of his political powers today after he tried to veto a bill that allows for the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Grand Duke Henri, ceremonial ruler of Luxembourg's 470,000 inhabitants, provoked an unprecedented crisis in the sedate territory two weeks ago when he refused to sign the law, apparently for reasons of conscience." 

BBC: (approximating) peace and justice in Central African Republic

AP: Nigerian election results upheld by court
"The April 21, 2007 election saw power transferred from one elected civilian to another for the first time in Nigeria's coup-plagued history. But thugs openly stole and stuffed ballot boxes and harassed voters, and international observers said the election was deeply flawed."

BBC: run-off set in Ghana

LAT: the politics of public health: no end in sight for cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe
Econ: unless you're Mugabe, who is apparently blind
"Zimbabwe’s leader dismisses suggestions that his people are suffering as attempts by outsiders to make a case for military intervention. On Thursday he concluded that 'Now that there is no cholera, there is no need for war.' "

NYT: massacre in the Congo, despite presence of peacekeepers

"In little more than 24 hours, at least 150 people would be dead, most of them young men, summarily executed by the rebels last month as they tightened their grip over parts of eastern Congo, according to witnesses and human-rights investigators.

And yet, as the killings took place, a contingent of about 100 United Nations peacekeepers was less than a mile away, struggling to understand what was happening outside the gates of its base...

The trouble began on Oct. 28, when Congolese Army troops fled the town, fearful of the advance of Mr. Nkunda’s troops.

The soldiers, who had already been routed by Mr. Nkunda’s men farther south, looted and raped as they ran, taking everything of value and even forcing some residents to help them carry the spoils, according to witnesses and investigators. Fearful residents had to choose between two bad options: follow the rampaging army or wait to see what the rebels might bring.

With the soldiers long gone, Mr. Nkunda’s troops took the towns of Kiwanja and Rutshuru without firing a shot. Immediately, they ordered the residents who remained to torch sprawling camps that held about 30,000 people displaced by earlier fighting, proclaiming that it was now safe for the camp dwellers to return to their villages, witnesses said.

“They said there was security, so everyone should go home,” said François Hazumutima, a retired teacher who had been living in a nearby camp. “But none of us felt safe.”

A week later, on Nov. 4, a group of militia fighters known as the Mai Mai carried out a surprise attack on Kiwanja. But the rebels soon routed the Mai Mai — and ordered all residents to leave.

The soldiers then went house to house, saying they were searching for militia fighters who stayed behind to fight. But many residents who stayed were scared their houses would be looted or were too old or infirm to flee, according to witnesses. Others had simply not gotten the message to leave.

The rebels came to the door of a 25-year-old trader, banging and threatening to shoot their way in.

“There were gunshots everywhere,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “They asked for money. I gave them $200.”

He then watched in impotent horror as the rebels went to his 22-year-old brother’s house next door. The man, a student, had no money to offer them. The soldiers ordered him to lie on the ground. They stabbed him in the neck with their bayonets and shot him in the head, he said.

“They said, ‘If you don’t have money, you are Mai Mai,’ ” he said. “Everyone who was young was destined to die.”...

Mr. Nkunda’s men continue to hold the town, as well as neighboring Rutshuru. Outwardly, calm has returned to the streets. But mothers have sent their sons packing because the rebels have been forcing men and boys to join them."
Gdn: UK rejects EU call to send more troops
Ind: EU does begin mission in Kosovo

BBC: Somali military and police in tatters: 80% have deserted
BBC: pirates put down hostage mutiny

BBC: EU launches first-ever joint naval operation to police Gulf of Aden

BBC: how pirates were managed in South East Asia

AP: Tamil Tigers claim they've killed 90 gov't troops
"With reporters banned from the war zone, the media must depend on government and rebel statements for most information about the war. Each side commonly exaggerates its enemy's casualties and plays down its own.

Fighting has escalated in recent months as government troops have moved deep into rebel territory and captured a number of key bases and towns, but they are still locked in heavy battles at the edge of Kilinochchi."
BBC: internal politics of the Tamil diaspora in the UK

CSM: Christian militia arming in anticipation of conflict with Muslims in Philippines 
They call themselves ilaga or "rats" in a local Philippines dialect. They're vigilantes: Christian farmers who have taken up arms to protect their land and families against Muslim rebels in this troubled corner of the southern Philippines...

Here on the island of Mindanao, such Roman Catholic vigilantes haven't been a force since the 1970s, when all-out communal war raged. Their return now, some 30 years later, is a sign of a society that's again become dangerously polarized along religious lines.

It's one sad consequence of the breakdown of peace talks between the Philippines government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Four months after talks broke down, the military is still engaged in a deadly, cat-and-mouse game with three "rogue" commanders, including Mr. Kato. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians remain in makeshift camps, afraid to return to their homes. And Malaysian monitors who helped enforce a cease-fire left Nov. 30 after their mandate expired.

With the peace process in tatters and no clear way forward, many fear that the gains of 11 years of negotiations are fast disappearing amid recriminations and communal mistrust."

BBC: campaigning begins in Bangladesh

Econ: rape by an American serviceman near base in Japan goes unpunished

WP: escaped North Korean political prisoner recounts life in camp
"There are 14,431 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, according to the latest government count. Shin is the only one known to have escaped to the South from a prison camp in the North...

[His book] is illustrated with simple line drawings of his mother's hanging, the amputation of his finger, his torture by fire. There are black-and-white photographs of his scars, as well as drawings and a satellite photo of Camp No. 14. It is located in Kaechon, about 55 miles north of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

The book grew out of a diary he kept in the Seoul hospital while he was recovering from the nightmares and screaming bouts that were part of his adjustment.

It begins with the story of his birth in Camp No. 14 to parents whose union was arranged by prison guards. As a reward for excellent work as a mechanic, his father was given the woman who became Shin's mother. Shin lived with her until he was 12, when he was taken away to work with other children.

In the book, Shin describes the "common and almost routine" savagery of the camp: the rape of his cousin by prison guards and the beating to death of a young girl found with five grains of unauthorized wheat in her pocket. He once found three kernels of corn in a pile of cow dung, he writes. He picked them out, cleaned them off on his sleeve and ate them. "As miserable as it may seem, that was my lucky day," he writes."

LAT: nearly 5,400 have died in Mexico drug violence in 2008

LAT: guns-for-gifts campaign in LA nets nearly 1,000 weapons
"A gun could be swapped for a $100 voucher, while an assault weapon would net $200.

The most popular vouchers were for a supermarket chain, police said.

"People just don't have the money to buy the food these days," said Sergeant Byron Woods." 

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NYT mag: the benefits of teasing
The language of teasing is intimately linked to the language of social behavior. Because teasing allows us to send messages in indirect, masked ways, it is an essential means of navigating our often-fraught social environments. In teasing, we become actors, taking on playful identities to manage the inevitable conflicts of living in social groups...

Teasing can be thought of as a status contest with a twist. As humans evolved the ability to form complex alliances, the power of a single individual came increasingly to depend on the ability to build strong bonds. Power became a matter of social intelligence (the good of the group) rather than of survival of the fittest (raw strength). As a status contest, teasing must walk a fine line, designating status while enhancing social connection...

In seeking to protect our children from bullying and aggression, we risk depriving them of a most remarkable form of social exchange. In teasing, we learn to use our voices, bodies and faces, and to read those of others — the raw materials of emotional intelligence and the moral imagination. We learn the wisdom of laughing at ourselves, and not taking the self too seriously. We learn boundaries between danger and safety, right and wrong, friend and foe, male and female, what is serious and what is not. We transform the many conflicts of social living into entertaining dramas. No kidding."

course of treatment [stuck on band-aids]

NYT: riots continue in Greece
"A march through downtown Athens on Monday night turned violent, as demonstrators threw concrete slabs, rocks and flaming gasoline bombs at the officers and smashed storefronts. A government Christmas tree along their path was set on fire.

Rioting also intensified in the country’s second largest city, Salonika, and spread to Trikala, a city in the agricultural heartland.

Schools were shut in Athens, the capital, and high school and university students spilled onto the streets, leading to scattered violence throughout the day.

But the evening demonstration, which had attracted thousands and was organized by the Communist Party, was accompanied by some of the worst of the violence of the past several days."
Gdn: timeline
Gdn: photos
BBC: more photos
BBC: cultural context

New Yorker: policing Pashmul with outsiders
Khan and his police officers are members of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, identifiable among Afghans because of their Asiatic features; the population they patrol is Pashtun. Hazaras are mostly Shia, with a history of ties to Iran, whereas most Pashtuns are Sunni and have turned to Pakistan for support. Over the past century, the two peoples have fought periodically, and the Hazaras, who are thought to make up between nine and nineteen per cent of Afghanistan’s population—the Pashtuns make up nearly half—have usually lost...

Units like Khan’s, made up of a despised minority with an unsparing attitude toward those they police, embody many of the paradoxes involved in trying to bring order to Afghanistan’s ethnically fissured society...

In July, I visited Pashmul’s police base, a small installation about twice as large as a tennis court and surrounded by ditches and razor wire. Nearby are crumbling Pashtun villages of mud-brick homes, sprinkled with trash and unexploded ordnance. Pashmul is ideal terrain for an insurgency. The main sources of livelihood, other than hemp and poppies, are grapes and pomegranates, and, during the summer fighting season, foliage in fields and orchards provides cover for insurgents. Because farmers are too poor to use wooden frames in their vineyards, their grapevines are supported by deep furrows cut in the earth; thus in an apparently empty field hundreds of Taliban may be hidden. Grape huts, scattered around the fields, have mud walls thick enough to stop bullets, and narrow ventilation slits that can accommodate rifle barrels. Fighting has caused many Pashmul residents to flee to a temporary camp in the desert, from which they trek several miles each morning to cultivate the fields.

Khan’s police unit patrols a war zone, and the men often do the work of soldiers rather than of normal beat police officers. Although the Army lends support when the police encounter armed resistance, the soldiers then retreat to a base outside Pashmul. On most days, the police patrol the alleys alone, except for a few Canadian soldiers whom NATO has assigned to train and mentor them...

At the command level, the decision to exploit one of Afghanistan’s least noted and most bitter ethnic rivalries seems to have been improvised rather than planned. I asked Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, the top Canadian commander, about Khan’s unit, and he emphasized the similarity between Hazaras and Pashtuns, rather than the differences. “The advantage of any Afghan, regardless of their ethnicity, is that they get a better measure of what’s going on on the ground than we could ever get,” he said. “They know when something is amiss in this district.” No NATO officer I met seemed to appreciate the full significance of the Hazara-Pashtun rivalry...

Two days earlier, NATO artillery strikes had destroyed a Taliban position. Footage from a Predator drone suggested that Taliban soldiers had suffered serious injuries and that, more interestingly, villagers had surrounded and stoned wounded Talibs as they tried to crawl away. Cox’s mission was to lead soldiers to the village to find out what had happened, and to see whether they could harness any anti-Taliban feeling. Some areas haven’t seen a patrol in years, so even farmers who might sympathize with the government lack any guarantee that the government will protect them if they oppose the Taliban. “How are these people supposed to know about their government and support it when there’s no police there?” Cox asked.

The men on duty were not inattentive, but they seemed fundamentally unserious. They lacked initiative, and sat back and murmured to one another while the Canadians interviewed a local farmer. The Canadians barely spoke with their A.N.A. contingent at all, and the Afghan soldiers seemed to regard it as their principal duty to stand in place while the Canadians conducted their search.

The team cornered a farmer, who confirmed that some villagers had persuaded the Taliban to set up their heavy machine gun in another area, in case the Canadians sent in artillery to destroy the position. The team seized on the disclosure as a sign that the villagers could rise up against the Taliban. The farmer shook his head. “No,” he said. “We can argue with you. Not with them. If we say just one thing against the insurgents, they will come and kill us.”

“Have the insurgents come back to say that to you?” the Canadian asked.

The farmer leaned in and looked around. “They always come here.”

Soon afterward, Cox received word that some insurgents were just a few hundred yards away. An unmanned aerial vehicle had spotted men clustering south of us, across a vineyard and near a suspected weapons cache. Cox summoned an A.N.A. quick-reaction force, to support an assault against the position. Half an hour later, no one had arrived, and Cox was furious. He yelled at his counterpart in the Afghan forces, stabbing his finger at the soldier, who was suppressing a laugh: “I’m asking you if they’re ready to come here and help us fight. If you want to take this job half-assed, then fucking get out of the Army.”

When the Afghan quick-response force arrived, its soldiers stood looking dazed. We started to move toward the insurgents’ position by fanning in two directions—one of the most basic tactical maneuvers an infantry unit can attempt. The Afghans now looked slightly frightened—less of the Taliban ambush than of their officer, an Afghan captain trained by Green Berets. As he issued commands through a radio, the soldiers moved down the road and into the vineyard, correctly enough but with uneasy attention to detail, like a troupe of dancers staring at their feet. When we had closed half the distance, I crouched in a furrow, amid grapevines, until a soldier ahead of me—a stubbly, spindly man with a backpack full of rocket-propelled grenade warheads—yelped “Gun!” and pointed at the ambush point.

Seeing a weapon triggered the rules of engagement, and we ran toward the position. I kept my head low, looking at the ground a few steps ahead of me to avoid I.E.D.s. We leaped over an irrigation ditch, and, when I looked up to make sure I was still running in the right direction, I saw the soldier again. He had his grenade-launcher in one hand and, in the other, a colossal bunch of grapes, which he had started to eat. By the time we arrived at the place where the surveillance had spotted the insurgents, the Taliban had long since vanished back into the surrounding villages. As we stood in the empty Taliban position, I noticed that most of the Afghan soldiers carried grapes that they had picked up during the maneuver, and that they looked pleased...

When the patrol encountered residents, [Hazara] Khan and [Canadian] Vollick asked them about Taliban in the area, and received jittery and unhelpful answers. Neither spoke Pashto, but through a translator they managed to perform a kind of good-cop, bad-cop act. Vollick approached two old men sitting outside a house, and asked about Taliban. The response was cordial but evasive. Vollick repeated a line, familiar by now to the villagers, about NATO’s desire to make sure the government could meet their needs for schools and wells. While the men spoke, Khan rolled his eyes in operatic boredom and instructed his men to search the building and to frisk every passerby. The villagers obviously regarded Khan and Vollick as equally foreign. They denied any knowledge of Taliban activity, but, as Khan’s aggressiveness and suspicion grew, they gave Vollick more and more desperate excuses for not coöperating—they were afraid, they said, and hadn’t seen any insurgents anyway. Two other men and a teen-ager looked at us over the walls, perhaps close enough to report back to insurgents on what was said."

LAT: sectarian polarization intense as violence subsides in Baqubah, Diyala
LAT: Tonga troops end deployment as 'coalition of the willing' members

WP (Eugene Robinson): the trial of Blackwater contractors is a whitewash by the White House et al
"There is a huge difference between self-defense and the kind of indiscriminate fusillade that the Blackwater team allegedly unleashed. Proper training and supervision -- which was the Blackwater firm's responsibility -- would have made it more likely for the guards to make the right split-second decisions amid the chaos of Nisoor Square. Rather than give Blackwater a free pass, the Justice Department ought to investigate the preparation these men were given before being sent onto Baghdad's dangerous streets...

But a real attempt to establish blame for this massacre should go beyond Blackwater. It was the Bush administration that decided to police the occupation of Iraq largely with private rather than regular troops.

There are an estimated 30,000 security "contractors" in Iraq, many of them there to protect U.S. State Department personnel. The presence of these heavily armed private soldiers has become a sore point between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. Until now, the mercenaries -- they object to that label, but it fits -- have been immune from prosecution by the Iraqi courts for any alleged crimes. This will change on Jan. 1, when the new U.S.-Iraqi security pact places them under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law. Blackwater and other firms are likely to have a harder time retaining and recruiting personnel, given the possibility of spending time in an Iraqi prison. Yet it is presumed that more private soldiers, rather than fewer, will be needed as the United States reduces troop levels...

Putting national security in the hands of private companies and private soldiers was bad practice from the start, and incidents such as what happened at Nisoor Square are the foreseeable result. The five Blackwater guards may have fired the weapons, but they were locked and loaded in Washington."
Slate: Gates should follow his own advice to change the Pentagon
WP: report offers recommendations to intervene and prevent genocide

Gdn: short list of 9/11 suspects
Slate: how to close Guantanamo

LAT: Pakistan raids Lakshar-e-Taiba; unclear if leader in custody
Ind: former militants describe schooling/ indoctrination
Gdn: tracking down the captured attacker's home in Punjab
NYT: in op-ed, Ali Zardari says that Mumbai terror attacks meant to target Pakistan too
WP: apparently no one told him that whole thing was just a prank

NYT: tribe in Brazil asks for state intervention as drug war encroaches
"For the Tikunas, these traumas represent the latest threat in a fight for tribal survival. With high unemployment and new challenges to its subsistence livelihood, the community is struggling to keep young people from losing themselves in the vices of the white man’s world and from destroying what is left of traditional Tikuna culture.

Like other Indian communities tucked close to growing urban areas, Tikunas are tempted by the consumerism on display and frustrated that it is beyond their means. To the youth especially, alcohol, drugs and drug money seem to offer a way out. They have also unleashed a surge of violence and disobedience.

Alarmed by these trends, Mariaçu’s two chiefs recently made an unusual and desperate appeal for help: they asked the Brazilian police, who generally do not have jurisdiction in Indian towns, to enter their community and crack down on traffickers and substance abusers, even if that would mean putting the Indians at the mercy of Brazilian laws.

“We want government officials to help us save our children, so they don’t take part in these ruinous practices,” said Oswaldo Honorato Mendes, a deep-voiced Mariaçu chief. “Every day the situation gets worse. The younger generation does not obey. They do not show respect for our authority as chiefs. They need to learn respect.”

Respect and obedience to the chiefs are the pillars of tribal law, which usually holds sway in Indian communities but has proved insufficient to cope with new challenges...

[The chiefs] pleaded for the police to do more to control drug traffickers and arrest lawbreakers in their communities. The police officials listened politely but walked away unconvinced they could help.

“It is a desperate request, but not one that we can legally respond to,” said Sergio Fontes, the superintendent of the federal police in the northern city of Manaus, which oversees Tabatinga. “The chiefs want to resolve a social problem with the police, and that is wrong.”

The police generally may not enter an Indian community to carry out investigations, and Indians generally enjoy immunity from Brazilian laws, Mr. Fontes said. In addition, Brazil treats drug users as victims who require treatment, not as criminals. They are usually sentenced to receiving drug-addiction treatment and performing community service in lieu of serving prison time...

But with the police rejecting the Indians’ plea, for now, at least, the Tikunas will have to find ways to cope with their own social problems and the swirling new influences."

LAT: slaying in Monterrey jewelry shop offers gruesome window into expanding drug war
CSM: the military has replaced the police in Tijuana

LAT: paramilitaries, new drug trafficking groups, and guerrillas fighting for control on Colombia's Pacific coast
"The reemerging armed gangs are wreaking havoc in Nariño state. They are vying with guerrillas and drug traffickers for control of a zone that boasts ideal coca growing conditions as well as a labyrinthine coastline offering hundreds of concealed, mangrove-studded inlets from which to ship drugs to U.S. markets.

The new paramilitary groups, like the rebels and traffickers, often force people such as Antonio from their homes and farms to take possession of land as war booty and to clear the area of potential enemy sympathizers. With an estimated 3 million people having been displaced, Colombia is second only to Sudan in the number of its internal refugees."

LAT: Brookings rept says US drug war has failed, should turn focus to treatment
Brookings: full rept here

NYT mag: the evolution of the revolution - change and stasis in Cuba
"The confining shadow of Fidel’s tropical curtain, on the 50th anniversary of the revolution, was captured in the emptiness before me — of the Malecón, but even more so of the sea. I noticed over subsequent days that Cubans perched on the seafront wall rarely looked outward. When I asked Yoani Sánchez, a dissident blogger (www.desdecuba.com/generaciony), about this, she told me: “We live turned away from the sea because it does not connect us, it encloses us. There is no movement on it. People are not allowed to buy boats because if they had boats, they would go to Florida. We are left, as one of our poets put it, with the unhappy circumstance of water at every turn.”

WP: speaking of unending terms, Chávez tries to extend his again


WP: turnout high in Ghana presidential election

LAT: Islamists poised to take control when Ethiopia withdraws from Mogadishu
"Although the movement is divided by competing ideologies and goals, it has nonetheless made many gains recently through a combination of brutal force and political dialogue.

The militant wing, Shabab, which claims affiliation to Al Qaeda, now controls 90% of southern Somalia, including parts of the capital, Mogadishu. The moderate faction signed a peace deal with Somalia's transitional government that could hand it half the seats in parliament.

Islamists who fled two years ago after their defeat by Ethiopian troops who had crossed the border to prop up Somalia's government are reemerging to assert their authority in several cities, often imposing strict Islamic laws against dancing, drinking or conducting business during prayer time. They're even starting to flex their muscles again to halt piracy offshore...

The other main faction, led by former Islamic Courts chairman Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, is working to reconcile with the transitional government in a power-sharing agreement. Ahmed is viewed as a possible new prime minister, but Shabab commanders accused him of betrayal.

A third Islamist faction falls somewhere between the other two. Rivalries are so bitter that fighting among groups recently broke out south of Mogadishu."

CSM: discontent in the Zimbabwe army leads to looting in Harare
LAT: Zimbabwe has bloody diamonds too
"The prison official said the real aim of the recent crackdown was to give the syndicates operated by top ruling party figures free rein.

"In effect, these operations are not to restore order but to make sure [the syndicates] can take the diamonds," the official says. "But what is devastating us is that they're actually killing people. They're shooting to kill."

Political violence and power struggles in Manicaland province, where the Marange diamonds are found, suggest how important the area is to Mugabe and ZANU-PF. Manicaland was one of the areas most severely hit by political violence after the elections in March, which saw ZANU-PF lose the Mutare council, the mayoral post and 20 parliamentary seats there to the Movement for Democratic Change.

Although Zimbabwe's diamonds are not technically "blood diamonds," or ones that fuel wars, they are bloody in nature."

CSM: talks to end violence in eastern Congo began Monday, already in jeopardy
"A last-minute glitch in the talks between General Nkunda's representatives and the Congolese government still could bring the talks to a precipitous halt. Congo's government announced this weekend that it had invited more than 20 other rebel groups to the talks, a move that Nkunda's spokesman called "impossible" and likely to scupper the talks altogether."
Econ: mapping the wars in the Congo over the last 15 years
Gdn: gendered violence: women and girls are raped, while men are killed
Gdn: people taking on risks to shelter the displaced
"The people who had set up home in the open fields of Nyabirehe had fled fighting between government troops and the rebels in their village of Kiwanja, some 15 miles (24km) north, where more than 50 people had been killed.

'The rebel captain came to Nyabirehe and told everyone to leave, that it was shameful to live in camps,' said Nyanzira Vitwaiki, 14. 'He said they are places where spies and enemies hide. They opened fire because people didn't run fast enough. Five people were hurt.'

With her mother and crippled brother, she was taken in by a family of strangers in Kalengera, a sprawling village that sits midway along what is now a rebel-controlled stretch of line that leans out into a semi-circle from a point just outside Goma in the south, up to Ishasa, some 100 miles north, on the Ugandan border. Hundreds of people displaced by the violence of the past month have been taken in by people here."

Ind: albinos hunted in Tanzania
"There is similar violence throughout east and central Africa. And even in west and southern Africa, albinos face persecution and discrimination. The campaign is being orchestrated by witch doctors who claim they can make people rich using limbs and blood from their white-skinned neighbours. In some areas, albino children go to school with bodyguards, others hide at home, and distraught relatives pile rocks on their dead loved ones to deter grave-robbers."

Slate: Canada's constitutional crisis?!


NYT: Chinese officials sending detractors to mental hospitals
"In an investigative report published Monday by a state-owned newspaper, public security officials in the city of Xintai in Shandong Province were said to have been institutionalizing residents who persist in their personal campaigns to expose corruption or the unfair seizure of their property. Some people said they were committed for up to two years, and several of those interviewed said they were forcibly medicated."

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history lessons
Gdn: genes reveal forced conversions of Sephardic Jews in 15th and 16th century Spain and Portugal
LAT: Museum of the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea
Slate: inside the Stalin archives
"All of this gave a new lease on life to the incestuous world of Soviet studies, which had been divided for decades into historians who preferred the triumphant version of Soviet history, accessible in official documents like newspapers, and those who listened to the very different story told by witnesses, refugees, and dissidents. This essentially ideological argument ended forever with the publication of archival information by Yale and others, replacing it, for the first time, with real history—and proving, among other things, that the witnesses, refugees, and dissidents had largely been right.

Although he discusses some of the academic issues that lay at the heart of the Yale project, the point of Inside the Stalin Archives is somewhat different: Brent is less interested in what his series meant for Western academics and more interested in explaining the strange atmosphere of post-Soviet Moscow, and in particular the ways in which Russia's twisted past continued to shape its present."

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NYT: praying for a bailout at the auto altar