truth and relevance [hearing what you expect]

HuffPo, Rob Blair: Liberians' takes on the Sirleaf-TRC controversy
Sirleaf is under fire, it seems, because she failed to repent her actions, while more sordid characters were dropped from the TRC's list because they expressed remorse. Among them is the notorious Joshua Blahyi, alias Gen. Butt Naked, a warlord-cum-preacher known for his brutality and his penchant for entering battle wearing nothing but boots. Blahyi's compunction outweighed, in the TRC's peculiar calculus, the more than 20,000 deaths he caused during the war. Asks Kristof: "Can anybody explain?"...

I posed Kristof's question to five Liberians living in Monrovia. I picked individuals from disparate backgrounds to try to capture some of the variety in Liberian views on the TRC. Everyone I interviewed agreed that Sirleaf supported Taylor, but disagreed on just about everything else. These are some of their insights.

Making Sense of Darfur, Alex de Waal: on interviewing, listening, and understanding (via wronging rights)
I have observed the same person say completely different things in different contexts. It’s not deceit or even contradiction: it’s that courtesy demands saying certain things, context constrains what can be said, and the ways in which questions are posed—or discussions left unfinished—means that only one part of a complicated picture emerges. In some cases, political instructions dictate that certain things are said in a formal exchange, and other messages passed when the proceedings have formally closed.
Sudan commentary: Kristof responds to Mamdani (via Chris Blattman)

Boston Review: development debate featuring Collier, Miguel, Easterly, Diamond, Krasner, Birdsall, and McGovern (via Chris Blattman)
Collier:
Chad is not alone. It is one of a group of about 60 small, impoverished, post-colonial countries that “came unnatural into the world.” With neither the social unity needed for cooperation, nor the size to reap the benefits of larger scale, they are structurally unable to provide the public goods—such as security—that are critical for decent quality of life and imperative for economic development. They have diverged from the rest of mankind. They will never tap their vast reservoir of frustrated human potential unless the international community, at least for a time, supplies basic public goods that go beyond the typical aid agenda. This, stated baldly, is the thesis of my new book, Wars, Guns, and Votes. It is a troubling thesis. I have come to it reluctantly, and the international community has shied away from it, as have the societies of the bottom billion themselves.

Why is outside intervention necessary? The countries of the bottom billion are, paradoxically, too large to be nations, yet too small to be states. They are too large to be nations because, with rare exceptions, too many different peoples, with too many distinct ethnic and religious identities, live in them. This is not because they have large populations: on the contrary, the typical bottom-billion country has only a few million people. But these populations have yet to forge a strong sense of national identity that overrides older sub-national ethnic and religious identities. Considerable research shows that where sub-national identities predominate, it is more difficult for people to cooperate in providing public goods.

Easterly:
I have been troubled by Paul Collier’s research and policy advocacy for some time. In this essay he goes even further in directions I argued were dangerous in his previous work. Collier wants to de facto recolonize the “bottom billion,” and he justifies his position with research that is based on one logical fallacy, one mistaken assumption, and a multitude of fatally flawed statistical exercises...

Yet even if Collier got valid correlations, which he has not, correlation does not equal causation, which he also fails to address. As Daron Acemoglu of MIT commented on Collier’s earlier research on civil wars: “The correlations that are interpreted as causal effects are really no more than correlations. . . . It is too early to jump to policy conclusions.”

Collier:
Nothing could better illustrate the true nature of the disagreement about peacekeeping than Easterly’s accusation of colonialism. This accusation is founded on coarse thought, not statistical rigor. Colonialism was an oppressive system in which non-democratic empires conquered territories and ran them according to the interest of their own elites. International peacekeeping is temporary, sanctioned by democratic governments whose electorates have no appetite for empire, and aimed at establishing governments that are accountable to their own citizens. Conflating peacekeeping with colonialism is too crude to constitute abuse.

LAT: Uighur - Han violence in China
China's worst ethnic violence in years broke out Sunday in the northwestern city of Urumqi, leaving 140 people dead and more than 800 injured, the state news agency Xinhua reported.
NYT: the violence was sparked by government repression of a Uighur protest
The clashes on Sunday began when the police confronted a protest march held by Uighurs to demand a full government investigation of a brawl between Uighur and Han workers that erupted in Guangdong Province overnight on June 25 and June 26. The brawl took place in a toy factory and left 2 Uighurs dead and 118 people injured. The police later arrested a bitter ex-employee of the factory who had ignited the fight by starting a rumor that 6 Uighur men had raped 2 Han women at the work site, Xinhua reported.

WP: Mexican army accused of egregious human rights abuses in drug war
In Puerto Las Ollas, a mountain village of 50 people in the southern state of Guerrero, residents recounted how soldiers seeking information last month stuck needles under the fingernails of a disabled 37-year-old farmer, jabbed a knife into the back of his 13-year-old nephew, fired on a pastor, and stole food, milk, clothing and medication...

Mexican security forces have long had a spotty human rights record, but the growing number of abuse allegations appears to be a direct response to the savagery unleashed by the cartels after President Felipe Calderón put the military in charge of the drug war in December 2006. Most of the violations have occurred in regions where the sight of dismembered bodies of soldiers and police is remarkably common. In the state of Michoacán, investigators with the government's National Human Rights Commission concluded that the army committed abuses against 65 people over three days -- including several cases of torture and the rape of two girls -- after five soldiers were killed in an attack in May 2007.

LAT: stellar series on gangs and intervention programs in South L.A.
...The boys' lives were at risk, she told him. The gun was for defense. There were no jobs, not here; they had no money to move away from their troubles. Finally, defeated, she whispered: "This is South-Central."

And so it's been for decades -- the cradle of the thug life, the home, still, to many of the city's 400 gangs. But nights like this one are no longer explained away as simply the way things are and the way things will be.

Looking to capitalize on declining crime rates, and gang violence in particular, the LAPD has doubled its rate of gang arrests in some pockets of South Los Angeles, as South-Central is now known officially, and has implemented a new enforcement strategy against six gangs, including Barrio Mojados. Meanwhile, a wave of construction is underway and, in an area long crippled by an absence of social services, community-based groups are bringing job training, kids' baseball -- even a free Internet "cloud" over one neighborhood.

This is still a troubled place, and will be for years to come. But police, residents and civic leaders alike believe there is an opportunity here, however fragile, to restore a sense of community that many feared was lost forever in the crack-and-bullet epidemic of the 1980s and '90s. If so, South L.A.'s identity within the city could begin to shift, revealing a far more dynamic place than the one cemented in the public consciousness as an intractable ghetto.

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NYT: a non-war-related story on Colombia! (who cares if it's about the 'environment'? SV will take it.)