Segacs's World I Know

Archive for the ‘Rest of the world’ Category

That’s the key lesson from Augusto Pinochet’s death today, which some Chileans are mourning while many others celebrate:

More than 3,000 people died in political violence under Pinochet’s rule, many at the hands of repressive secret police. Some 28,000 people were tortured in secret detention centers and hundreds of thousands of Chileans went into exile.

Car horns blared as detractors of the deceased former dictator danced and cheered in Plaza Italia, a major intersection near the city center where Chileans usually congregate to celebrate sporting victories.

“I’m going to celebrate with my family the death of the tyrant. I even have a bottle of Brazilian cane alcohol we’ve been saving for 25 years to celebrate this day,” said Santiago Cavieres, a 75-year-old lawyer.

“I was in the National Stadium (a sports stadium used as a concentration camp in 1973) and from there they sent me to the Chacabuco concentration camp, where I was for eight months… Everyone there was tortured,” he said.

Despite Pinochet’s human rights record, many Chileans loved him and said he saved Chile from Marxism. Supporters say his economic reforms put Chile on track to become Latin America’s model economy.

Pinochet’s coup to gain power, supported by the Reagan administration, is often pointed to as yet another example of American interference gone wrong. And while it’s easy to understand why – at a time when Communism was perceived as the biggest threat facing America – the decision to support Pinochet was made. The United States is not the only country guilty of this, but there have certainly been numerous prominent examples of it in the last number of years stemming from U.S. policy.

The problem is, the world isn’t divided into good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats, Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. Politics isn’t like a bad Western movie (and Reagan knew a lot about bad Western movies). Oftentimes, the enemy of my enemy is also a bad guy, and is also an enemy.

We’re still making that mistake today. The U.S. allying with extremist Shi’ite Muslim groups in Iraq, post-Saddam, is just one more chapter in this saga. And we can already see just how well that’s working out.

The trouble is, often the only person strong enough to oppose one bad guy is another bad guy; moderates tend to be weak in countries facing war and lack of law and order. Faced with the choice of backing the strong extremist or the weak moderate, most will choose the strong extremist and close their eyes to his darker deeds.

But it didn’t work then, and it’s not working now. It’s time to change how we look at the world, to stop breaking it into good guys and bad guys, and to stop supporting an enemy’s enemy that will only come back to bite us in the ass.

(By the way, who had Pinochet in the Dead Dictators Pool?)

Andrea is blogging from Malawi this month. If you’re not already reading her, now would be an excellent time to start.

At least that’s what appears to be happening:

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – Fiji’s president had dissolved parliament and sanctioned the removal of Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said on Tuesday.

“I have been advised this morning that the president of Fiji has acted outside his constitutional powers and supported the removal of the democratic prime minister by the military,” Clark said in a statement to the New Zealand parliament.

I only spent about 3 hours in Nadi’s airport, so I didn’t really get to see anything. But Fiji is full of tourists year-round; it’s one of the most popular vacation spots for Kiwis and even Aussies. It seemed like such a sleepy place; it’s bizarre to think of what it must look like with military roadblocks.

Nicholas Roach of Brossard, who writes in a letter published in today’s Gazette:

U.S. ambassador David Wilkins is mistaken when he assumes all Canadians would be offended if our prime minister’s name were placed in the same sentence as Kim Jong Il and Osama bin Laden. I believe that it is insulting to put Kim Jong Il and Osama bin Laden’s names in the same sentence as Stephen Harper’s and George W. Bush’s.

Why? Because Kim Jong Il’s country is not destroying the planet’s environment and bin Laden is not in bed with Saudi oil anymore. They are not the reason future generations will die from global catastrophes. Future generations will hail North Korea for its lack of energy use and bin Laden for fighting imperialists who mess up the environment.

Yes, just as future generations today hail Adolf Hitler for tackling that pesky problem of overpopulation in Europe.

A Reuters article, perhaps accidentally, stumbles on the true crux of the matter when it comes to North Korea:

North Korea has committed “crimes against humanity” against its own people according to an independent report published on Monday that made a long-shot appeal for the U.N. Security Council to deal with the issue.

Released after North Korea’s October 9 nuclear test, the report describes Pyongyang’s brutal treatment of its citizens, from the beatings of pregnant women to force miscarriages to the abduction, torture and execution of political prisoners.

Commissioned by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, former Czech president Vaclav Havel and former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, the paper seeks to spotlight rights abuses that have been previously reported but are often overshadowed by concern about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

(Emphasis mine).

And that, after all, is the point. North Korea has been committing horrific crimes against humanity that beg the question of why, more than sixty years after swearing “never again”, the world sits back and allows them to happen.

The answer to that question can presumably be found in two little words: nuclear weapons. The theory is that, while in the midst of dealing with the nuclear crisis, there’s little that the world can do about anything else North Korea is doing.

So what’s our excuse, then, when it comes to (nuclear-less) Sudan?

As the Sudanese government does its best to boot the United Nations, the violence is getting worse.

Damian links to this Times article from last week in which a janjaweed defector explains, in horrifying detail, the atrocities that he helped commit against civilians.

The Times reports frightening details of the Dear Leader of Death Camps’ drive towards “racial purity” (via Damian Penny).

As I’ve said before, I don’t take Nazi comparisons lightly, but in some cases they truly are warranted. This is one of those cases, without a doubt.

Looks like the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya is finally opening the eyes of the world to what’s been going on in Russia for quite some time:

Unnatural death occurs with alarming regularity here, despite the carefully cultivated impression that President Vladimir V. Putin has presided over an era of stability, economic progress and resurgent national pride. Some say it occurs because of it.

“This state killed Anna Politkovskaya,” Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a once-prominent democratic leader, declared bluntly as the mourners filed out into a cold, gray afternoon.

Russia is unquestionably a dangerous place for journalists — less so than only Iraq and Algeria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Thirteen of them have been killed since Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, a little more than two a year on average.

It’s not only journalists who are in danger when they speak out. Vladimir Putin hasn’t been particularly tolerant of any kind of political dissent. Anyone who speaks out, threatens him, or becomes too powerful has a way of mysteriously disappearing, as Putin works to steadily and quietly curtail many of the post-Soviet freedoms that have been built in Russia.

When my sister was studying Russian politics in university, she used to rant about the situation, lamenting the blind eye that the West has been turning to Russia – the gradual erosion of human rights, the trouncing that the political system has been taking, the efforts of Putin to cling to power. Not too many people noticed, though. It appears that Politkovskaya’s murder was the catalyst needed to open our eyes, and we will need to be much warier from here on out.

Seems everyone’s jumping on the adopt-a-baby-from-a-poor-country celebrity bandwagon these days. The latest participant in this media circus is Madonna, who seems to have adopted a Malawian boy along with her husband, Guy Ritchie, while on a tour for her various charity projects.

I’m sure that, mixed in somewhere with her publicity-seeking media hogging behaviour, Madonna is trying to do some good in Africa, even if accidentally. But my sense is that Madonna knows about as much about poverty in Malawi as she does about the Kabbalah. In other words, not a whole lot. At least Angelina Jolie is sincerely involved in child poverty and refugee causes, and does a lot of work under the radar. On the other hand, Madonna seems to be just looking for the next new fad to fill whatever emptiness she has in her life. I feel bad for her kids – all of them.

If you want an interesting and informative perspective about Malawi from someone who’s actually spent some real time there, outside the presence of TV cameras, read this.

So much for recent promises… The “so ronery” Dear Leader of Death Camps now officially has nuclear weapons… and it’s about the scariest situation imaginable.

Except that we already pretty much all knew about them. And there wasn’t really anything anyone could do before, so what will really change here? The United Nations? Is anyone really delusional enough to think that this organization which is currently unable to do anything about the mass murder still ongoing in Sudan can do anything about North Korea? It’s not as though a UN threat of sanctions would be too scary to a country already suffering mass starvation. Or that anyone really believes anyone – US or otherwise – would use a military option. In short, a nuclear North Korea is pretty much a fait accompli, because the rest of the world has no options.

Damian thinks the only option for North Korea has to come from within:

Ultimately, the only ways Kim will be removed from power are a potentially catastrophic outside invasion, or an uprising from within. The former is a non-starter; the latter could work. From here on out, we should redouble our efforts to support those brave North Koreans who oppose their government, and to get news and information to the most hermetically sealed society on earth.

Unfortunately, I have to disagree with Damian on this one, for a few reasons:

1) North Korea has no real viable, organized opposition of any form; it’s the world’s least free and most oppressive regime, where opposition is systematically stamped out in its infancy.

2) North Korea is also desperately poor, has no real economy, no rule of law, no independent institutions… in short, it’s much, much worse than even Iraq. We mustn’t assume that the removal of Kim Jong-Il would liberate a country just waiting for the opportunity to instill a flourishing democracy. There is no indication that the removal of the dictatorship would leave anything but total chaos and anarchy. And a situation where chaotic anarchy meets nuclear weapons might be the only thing scarier than the current situation. At least we KNOW which crazy guy has his finger on the button now. What will happen when it’s a free-for-all?

The question we should be asking is, why now? Granted, Kim Jong-Il is crazy, but by some accounts he’s also crazy like a fox. This test was an in-your-face to the West, an in-your-face to the United Nations, and an in-your-face to Bush. And its timing was no coincidence. Given the geopolitical factors in the rest of the world, namely the mess in Iraq and Iran’s ongoing game of nuclear chicken with the U.N., Kim Jong-Il probably decided the time was ripe to flex his muscle a little bit.

But does this mean we’re on the verge of nuclear disaster? That depends on your perspective. The worry about Iran going nuclear is that Ahmadinejad might be crazy enough to actually not care about the consequences of launching a nuclear strike, so deep is his hatred for Israel and the West. Is the same true of Kim Jong-Il? Or is North Korea just trying to prove a point?

These are questions that were always hard to answer about nuclear weapons, but if we think this is the worst of it, then we’re kidding ourselves. To date, nuclear weapons have only ever been in the hands of countries, ranging from democracies to despotic dictatorships with crazy leaders, but all countries nonetheless. It’s only a matter of time until a terrorist group or rogue organization gets ahold of nuclear weapons. What then? What happens when there are no diplomatic options to even attempt?

We’d better start thinking about it, and soon, because if you think that this week is scary, I fear we ain’t seen nothing yet.

My solution? Send in our ultimate weapons: Trey Parker and Matt Stone.