The International Crisis Group just released a report recommending a new plan for dealing with the FDLR in Congo. It sounds a little like this:
A comprehensive strategy has to be developed, involving the Congo government, Rwanda, MONUC and the other international facilitators that joined in Nairobi declaration, including the African Union, the U.S. and the EU. Their political and operational inputs should be coordinated in a new FDLR disarmament mechanism that should plan both military measures and informational campaigns, as well as prepare the ground for judicial processes in the countries where FDLR political leaders have sought refuge and from which they spread the propaganda that is an important part of the hold they maintain over ordinary fighters. Without such additional efforts and new international momentum, the population of the Kivu will continue to bear the brunt of the FDLR’s presence and of the failed attempts to disarm them, and the fragile Congolese state will remain at risk.
That’s from the Executive Summary; the report is available only in French, which is curious as it directs some of its recommendations to the government of Rwanda, which went adamantly Anglophone last year. In any case, the recommendations are blessedly more specific than descriptive diplo-jargon. Highlights include asking Rwanda for a revised list of genocide suspects and FDLR members, calling off Kimia II, and giving FDLR deserters third-country resettlement options. Those are novel, though buried in the usual diplo-speak.
Here are a few other rec’s-for-thought. More on this later, I’m sure:
To the Government of Congo:
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1. Suspend operation “Kimia II” and refrain from any further military offensive against the FDLR at this time, shifting priority to protecting the Kivu population against FDLR attacks and reprisals by establishing protected areas close to rebel-held territory and controlling major roads day and night.
That sounds mighty sensible, and certainly echoes what groups magnifying the voices of locals have said.
To MONUC:
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4. Reinforce the training given FARDC brigades and assign military mentors to Congolese units.
5. Insert civilian specialists into the joint FARDC-MONUC military planning unit and facilitate the design of civil-military cooperation projects aimed at protecting civilians and building confidence between civilians and Congolese security forces.
6. Ensure the 3,000 reinforcements authorised by UN Security Council Resolution 1853 are speedily deployed in eastern Congo.
7. Reinforce the Disarmament, Demobilisation, Repatriation, Reintegration and Resettlement (DDRRR) section with specialists in intelligence and psychological operations, as well as legal experts who can develop cases for prosecution of crimes committed during the Congo’s violent conflicts.
Hmmmmm…and do all this with what resources? Whose manpower? I will have to stumble through the report later, but why should the UN bring in, through DDRRR, “legal experts” to “develop cases” for prosecution from Congo’s wars? Isn’t that what the ICC is doing? Or, better, the ABA legal clinics? Instead of having the UN drag in some new legal experts, why don’t we ask them to facilitate the work already going on? I’m totally just guessing here, but I bet these legal aid clinics could think of a few ways in which non-monetary cooperation from MONUC would be useful.
Glenna Gordon has an impressive exclusive in Foreign Policy today, an interview with Liberian warlord-turned-senator Prince Johnson. One of my favorite parts of the interview is that Other (Bigger?) Warlord Charles Taylor’s then-recent conversion to Judaism came up: Johnson implied the conversion was self-serving, because Taylor thinks American leaders are Jews…while Johnson’s own, two-graphs earlier acceptance of Jesus was obviously totally sincere. If only either of them realized that a religious affiliation isn’t going to get you off the hook w/ the Western human rights community…
Who was Johnson? Gordon puts it this way: “In 1990, Doe — then Liberia’s president — was tortured and executed. A videotape of the ordeal was distributed to news stations around the world. It showed Johnson sitting at a table and sipping a beer while Doe’s ear was being cut off.”
Then Johnson did the usual–leading rebels, raping, pillaging.
What does Johnson have to say about what he did?:
I sleep sound; I sleep good. I snore.
What are the lessons of leadership we can learn from Johnson?: “Wisdom is a gift from God…. If you want to move forward, you can’t look back. Jesus never looked back.”
He also makes an argument that the TRC failed Liberia because it didn’t bring perpetrators and victims together. I don’t know much about the TRC or how it operated, and you can check out the interview and see if I’m just being uncharitable when I say the criticism sounds self-serving. But it is, alas, ever a concern about these transitional mechanisms.
It took Gordon three days of waiting to get the photo, during which: “political types [were] drinking beer and arguing before noon, and one of the ladies selling sodas was watching a clip of porn on repeat on her phone.”
Check out the pictures of the place as she waited around; I love the plastic chairs tumbling into a Victorian-style couch. This is so quintessentially it.
I asked a Republican friend about the Sarah Palin resignation speech, which has left everyone going, “Huh?” There are a lot of single lines that make you scratch your head–then there’s the overall thing–but one in particular stood out as a Republican friend and I discussed the speech.
She pointed out the line, “The world needs more Trigs, not fewer.” A remarkably bad thing to say, my friend thought. I thought it might be something more.
“Is it a veiled pro-life argument?” I asked.
“Could be,” she said.
“But it could also be an argument for iceberg lettuce. She makes THAT little sense.”
The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission doesn’t quite say yes…but it does say that perhaps the much-lauded president of the new Liberia has more to answer for than she necessarily admits. In today’s TIME.com, Glenna Gordon writes:
In its final report, released yesterday, Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a body modeled on South Africa’s historic truth commission, says Johnson Sirleaf should be banned from government for 30 years for her early support of former Liberian President Charles Taylor.
Ah, but it’s complicated:
But in a conflict that went on for nearly two decades, it’s hard to find any Liberian officials whose hands are completely clean. When she testified at the TRC, Johnson Sirleaf admitted that during the early years of the war she had brought food, supplies and financial assistance to Taylor. At the time, she said, she wanted to see an end to the repressive and tyrannical regime of President Samuel Doe. If she cast her lot with a war criminal, she said, she did so unwittingly.
Check out the full story.
I was so excited to see this today on Wronging Rights, who got it via Congo Resources. There was a really nice guy who ironed guests’ laundry at the hotel where I stayed in Kinshasa. As we waited for him to finish up the last shirt, he said to my friend, “You remind me of my music teacher.” I have a star-crossed-lover’s relationship with my own music education, so I immediately felt squishy and nostalgic and asked for more information. He played oboe, he said. In the Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra.
The Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra?
My fellow traveler told me later that he was sure he didn’t look anything like this guy’s music teacher. “Why do you say that?” He’d noticed that in Congo, more than anywhere he’d been in Africa (like 6 countries or something), “People are eager to make you understand that there’s more to them than what you see them doing right now.” It perfectly summarized the pulse and pride of Kinshasa to me–everyone has to put in their sweat equity, as they do everywhere in whatever form, and everyone had hidden talents that had nothing to do with their day job, as they do everywhere. It’s just that in Kinshasa, the people we met wanted to make us understand that in a way most other people (including people in NYC) ever bother trying. A la, “You look like my music teacher.”
So when I saw this video on WR today of the Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra, I got excited. No sign of my oboe friend, alas.
By the way, I asked myself, apropos all these debates about poverty tourism, which are about the bigger question of how we look at each other, “Why an entire documentary about the Kinshasa Symphony? There has to be something surprising in it to warrant such treatment. Is it that we think Africans don’t (or, to be very uncharitable about it, can’t) play Bach? Is it a neo-neo colonial thing?” I don’t know what inspired the filmmakers, but what I find fascinating is that this musical tradition, so stuffy compared to the rhythms Congo has unleashed into the world (and our own pop music), has so many fans. 170 people play in this orchestra–and at the end, people sit in plastic chairs and listen. Not your typical musical encounter in that part of the world.
With that:
Per WR, I hear CR is helping raise $$ to finish this doc. Hop on over and find out how to help.
John Dinges, a Columbia University journalism school professor and a veteran of Latin America (saving you the string of awards he’s won), headed back to his old stomping ground recently. Visiting Venezuela and Chile was no problem. It’s the coming home that got him:
After examining his passport, he said, the CBP [customs and border protection] agent asked him, “What were you doing on this trip?”
Returning Americans are routinely asked such general questions.
“I told him I was a journalist,” Dinges said, “conducting journalistic business in Chile and Venezuela.”
But that did not satisfy the agent, whose name tag identified him as “Adams,” Dinges said.
He said the agent demanded to know “exactly” where he went and whom he met with.
“I told him I was not comfortable answering those kinds of questions,” said Dinges, who has written three books on Latin America.
But the agent was adamant.
“He said, ‘This is the United States, and I can ask you anything I want,’” Dinges recounted.
The agent said, “You have to answer, for me to assess your status.”
When Dinges again objected, saying, “I feel protected under the Constitution,” the officer told him, “If you don’t want to talk, we can go to the back room, and you can discuss this with my supervisor.”
Read the story at the CQ Politics blog and find out what Dinges didn’t say (but should have?).
Hop over to Scarlett Lion’s blog and read today’s Context Africa piece, about photographer Samantha Reinders. She’s been photographing Township Tourism in South Africa since 2004. Among other things, she points out that this kind of tourism isn’t static:
I have seen the industry at large, as well as the actual tours, change for the better since the beginning of my study. Both the practice of touring the townships (solely looking through the window of a tour bus) as well as the perception that these tours are exclusively voyeuristic tours of poverty has changed slightly….Tourists are treading more lightly in the neighborhoods they are visiting.
Samantha also went on her first tour thinking that this was a really bad idea:
Township Tourism, especially when it just became popular in the mid 90s, got really bad press in South Africa. And admittedly I was swept up in that. I thought the concept was horrible. A Brazilian friend in town was determined to do one of these tours and I went along with him and had a surprisingly good experience. So I decided to do a story on it and investigate the industry in a little more depth. As time went on I changed my mind about Township Tourism. Whilst there are definitely negative impacts on the communities involved when tours are run badly and mismanaged, I saw the positive impacts out way these in many cases. I left the project with a more 50/50 view of the industry.
People who do this stuff for a living–and do it well, responsibly, ethically–are quick to point out (to me anyway) that there are two ways of doing this. One is the sit-in-the-bus variety Samantha mentions. The other is cultural engagement: conversation, experience, exchange. The first one has been nicknamed “poorism” (get it? Tourism of the poor? Also convenient that it almost rhymes a bit with “voyuer”). The second has any number of names, though in my piece we settled on pro-poor tourism.
For the skinny on the pro-poor industry, there’s no better place to look than Harold Goodwin’s online resources. Goodwin is a professor at Leeds University, where he specializes pro-poor tourism (I think he might have coined the term? Can’t recall off hand, and I don’t have access to my research files, so don’t quote me). Goodwin can explain to you what pro-poor tourism is and how (and where) it works; helps you give back to the places you visit (responsibly); and will even offer you a degree in all this craziness.
This is one of the things that intrigued me in the course of my poorism/tourism article: the giving back prospect. On the one hand, I thought when I started the project, there’s the visceral revulsion many people have about this idea, and some good questions to be asked about both our motives and the consequences of our tour. On the other hand, does getting a sense of what poverty looks like make people more likely to give?
Josh Ruxin, who runs the MV in Rwanda, told me he hasn’t seen major donations come in after tours. But New Dawn said they get small donations all the time. The day I took the MV tour, weAnd it brought mouse pads to a school on the tour. A previous tourist had noticed kids were using tattered paperback books or tabletops as mousepads and so sent a dozen or so to the school. It turned out there was a whole computer lab built from the booty of tourism: flat screen desktops, software, even an internet connection (pricey in Rwanda!) had been donated by different people. Except for the dot-matrix printer, it was all pretty high-tech. (And yes, the lab is open to students in the other schools in the village.)
I talked to a lot of people who went on New Dawn’s tour of Mayange’s Millennium Village, and most of them also went elsewhere in Rwanda, contracting New Dawn as their travel agent of sorts. They all came home wanting to give back, and all of them did give back something. One woman started her own small NGO.
The point? Eh, I guess I’m repeating myself: It’s all, always, complicated.
In a moment of serendipity, I published an article this week at the Christian Science Monitor at exactly the same time its topic, poverty tourism, became a hot debate on Bill Easterly’s blog and at Huffington Post.
The controversy started when Magatte Wade, a Senegalese entrepreneur, penned a long piece objecting to a tour that’s run in the Millennium Village in Rwanda and to Jeffrey Sachs in general (Sachs being the intellectual father of the MV projects and many other millennial and non-millennial things). Wade’s objection is that the tour brochure says, “Please do not give anything to the villagers — no sweets, cookies, empty water bottles, pens or even money.” She says the sign “objectif[ies] us”:
Rule #1 goes on to explain the rationale for the rule, “Our desire is to encourage a culture of entrepreneurship and service provision rather than handouts.” Again, I’m completely sympathetic to the encouragement of entrepreneurship, but the situation is entirely ludicrous — American professors spending tens of millions of dollars telling villagers how they should live their lives, so that American tourists can go and watch the new feature at the zoo in which the African natives are doing just as they are told by the American experts — with the careful warning to the tourists not to contaminate the zoo display by feeding the animals. This is how Sachs supports African entrepreneurship?
It’s certainly not a pretty image, but Wade gets the analysis wrong. American professors aren’t spending millions “so that” tourists can go stare at the people they spend millions on. The Millennium Villages weren’t conceived as tourist attractions, and no one treats Mayange like Disney World. (Donald Ndahiro makes this and other interesting points in his response. Gold star for “new media” as “participatory media”!)
Wade goes on to object to Sachs-style development, and that’s a long debate (with installments earlier this spring on HuffPo) that I don’t want to get into. Instead, I want to highlight what Bill Easterly said, picking up on Wade’s post. (It should be noted that Jeff Sachs and Bill Easterly have two very different and competing philosophies on aid and how to do it.)
Easterly agrees with the objectification critique. He blogged:
“Try looking at the poor Rwandans living in the MV not as anonymous and interchangeable exhibits for a “poverty trap,” but as individuals who possess rights and human dignity just like us. Then we maybe we will understand that the most impressive, knowledgeable, and motivated soldiers in the war on poverty are usually poor individuals themselves.”
When I called the tour operators in January to set up an interview, I had similar critiques in mind. $90 to stare at poor people? Africans as exhibits? All with the stamp of approval of the intellectual heirs of Jeffrey Sachs? Oh, this is good…
But I learned in my reporting the same thing I learn over and over again from the conversations on this and other blogs: If it’s that easy to be flip, you’re probably missing something.
(It’s worth noting that of all the voices weighing in on this, only the tour operators, Ndahiro and Josh Ruxin, who founded the Millennium Village in Rwanda, have any actual experience with the village tour. And I guess it’s not too promotional to point out that, so far, I seem to be the only person in the debate who knows the tour from experience but doesn’t have a professional tie to it.)
On the ground, it was a lot more complicated, as it always is. I took the tour and talked with tourists; I went back to the village to interview the people whose homes and places of work were stops on the tour. I put the Wade/Easterly critique to the villagers, but it didn’t resonate. They didn’t admit to feeling exploited; they said they liked exchanging ideas. And when I was on the tour, that’s what a lot of it was–not passive exhibitionism, but active engagement and interesting conversation. You can read more about this in my story.
Here’s the bigger point of the blog post: If you remove money from the equation, would you still feel uncomfortable? If you didn’t pay to take a tour of Mayange, but instead drove out there yourself, brought a translator, and bumbled from homestead to homestead asking the same questions, would you be described as an exploitative voyeur? Chances are you’d more likely be considered an adventurous traveler. You might even be labelled an “ethical” traveler, for choosing to go to such lengths to engage with the local culture.
One more alternative exercise: Think about paying money to go look at rich people and how they live. Do you feel uneasy about touring Windsor Castle? No. So why do we feel bad if the people are poor instead of rich? You might say there’s a greater power differential, and you’d be right. But that differential doesn’t magically disappear if you visit poor people for free. They’re still poor. You’re still (relatively) not. And unless you stop traveling to these places–which I don’t think anyone would advocate as beneficial for the poor–that’s not going to change.
Here’s what I’m getting at: I think the uneasiness that leads to the Wade/Easterly critique–and to my own critiques–is a very useful intuition that can help keep a check on exploitation. But ultimately, I think the critique that poverty tourism exploits the poor has very little to do with the poor. I think that it has much more to do with the discomfort we feel about our own economic power and our concerns about using it ethically. There’s got to be a better way to deal with that than riffing on a brochure.
There is one difficult, uncomfortable question to be asked about the tour; it’s just not the one Wade and Easterly found. I’ll visit this dilemma tomorrow.
Ten-gallon-hat tip to Wronging Rights for this Gem of the Week. I embellish it in obvoius ways:
“Former Liberian president Charles Taylor, on trial in the Hague for alleged war crimes committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone, has adopted Judaism, one of his wives said, adding that Judaism is all they talked about during her recent visit with him at the Hague.
“He has decided to become a Jew. And he wants to follow the true religion according to him. He wants to know deeply about God,” Mrs. Victoria Taylor told BBC radio.
Mrs. Taylor said her husband found Judaism only after his trial began.
It must have been hiding under the stacks and stacks of paper accusing him of 17 counts of war crimes.
“When he got to The Hague, he got to know that he really, really wanted to be a Jew. And he wanted to convert to Judaism. And that’s what he has done… He wants to know deeply about God and all about creation, and he wants to serve God accordingly and immediately,” she said.
Mrs. Taylor said that while her husband has questions about the teachings of Christianity, he still believes in Christ: “He wants to follow the two religions,” she said.”
I think this technically makes Chuckie Senior a Jew for Jesus. A polygamist Jew for Jesus, in fact. No word yet on how the polygamists feel about that, but presumably we can all agree that this is in no way good for the Jews.
Kris Kotarski made a nice point in the comments yesterday: “As far as #CNNfail, it does not necessarily mean #allmediafail.”
But to complicate matters on the new vs. old media front (which is a totally made-up war, of course), check out this report from the New York Times. The report says most foreign journalists’ visas are set to expire, and so most of them will leave. The first quote? A SkyNews reporter, whose sentence is taken verbatim from…you guessed it…Twitter. And as the savvy will have noticed, this isn’t an article; it’s part of the Times media blog.
(An aside, I appreciate the way the Times uses blogs; they feel like an integrated part of the whole–not isolated from the news reporting, and not so cheesy in their layout they feel like you’ve jumped ship. But they also contain a lot of reporting, which is anice standard.)
So where’s the #NYTimesfail? Tell me what you think:
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, also intended to depart Tehran on Wednesday when his visa was set to expire.
“Visa extensions have been denied across the board,” Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail message. “Some reporters have considered staying on without visas, working under the radar. There are two problems with that. First, this is a fairly efficient police state; the chances of anyone eluding arrest long enough to see how the story plays out are slim. More important, in my mind, is that it puts at risk the decent, hospitable Iranians who would be needed to put us up, translate and help us get the story out.”
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, also intended to depart Tehran on Wednesday when his visa was set to expire.
“Visa extensions have been denied across the board,” Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail message. “Some reporters have considered staying on without visas, working under the radar. There are two problems with that. First, this is a fairly efficient police state; the chances of anyone eluding arrest long enough to see how the story plays out are slim. More important, in my mind, is that it puts at risk the decent, hospitable Iranians who would be needed to put us up, translate and help us get the story out.”
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, also intended to depart Tehran on Wednesday when his visa was set to expire.
“Visa extensions have been denied across the board,” Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail message. “Some reporters have considered staying on without visas, working under the radar. There are two problems with that. First, this is a fairly efficient police state; the chances of anyone eluding arrest long enough to see how the story plays out are slim. More important, in my mind, is that it puts at risk the decent, hospitable Iranians who would be needed to put us up, translate and help us get the story out.”
I am in no position to quibble with Keller’s decision to leave for his own safety or the safety of others. But it’ salso true that in places like Iran, a journalist always risks the safety of the people who help her. Iraq and Afghanistan are the most obvious. And maybe Iran is actually a more difficult scenario at this particular moment in time, when things are being watched so closely. The Times piece notes most foreign journalists are effectively confined to their hotel rooms; and as anyone who has tried to work in an authoritarian regime knows, the more pieces of paper with your name on them, the more trackable you are, soI would guess Keller’s right about how hard it will be to slip off the radar. And, as he mentions, if you do that, you’re taking a risk, and you need other people willing to take risks for you.
But still: Times reporters take those risks, and locals take risks on their behalf, all the time in Iraq and Afghanistan. In some of the world’s most important stories, a journalist always has to give some security–and convince others, in helping her, to give some of their security–to get the story out. So it’s hard for me to imagine that Keller’s not also saying, “This story isn’t worth it to us any more.”
Right call or wrong call? (Do read the whole piece, too.)
And here is the obligatory “The Gray Lady discovers YouTube!” story… I bring this up not only to say that “Please, NYT, keep your daily ‘whoa, the internet is COOL’ realizations to yourself and your closest friends.” But also because this story was sent to me with this summary: “News organizations are looking more and more to the Iranians themselves to provide the news, or at least the pictures.”
This is the great fallacy of the new vs. old media war. In Iran, journalists have always looked to Iranians themselves to provide the news. It’s called interviewing, and the best journalists do it a lot.
What new media brings is the chance for BBC to run Iranian YouTube footage, and that’s very cool. I agree with the point Senia made in comments yesterday, that social media are participatory in a way old media never can be. That already says so much; why go illogically far?
