Link Banana

It’s a momentous date for number of reasons. The three most prominent:

1. The Olympics begin. That’s a link to a Big Picture post.
2. Russia and Georgia are in the midst of an “undeclared war” over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. This had been speculated about for a while — The Economist even ran an analysis piece on their website today about what trouble such a conflict would cause. Passport has a wrap-up.
3. It’s the 20th anniversary of the biggest pro-democracy demonstration in Burmese history. That one, like the recent “Saffron Revolution”, was pretty handily suppressed. (Link goes to The Irradday’s special issue, via Passport.)

Jasmina Tešanović was neighbors with the recently apprehended (accused) genocider. Its interesting, but not terribly surprising:

To judge by the chatter on my B92 blog and the phone messages I get from my friends: as I long suspected, “Europe’s Osama bin Laden” and I have been neighbors. We shared the same food, saw the same beggars in downtown Belgrade where he had been hiding all these years, a genocidal butcher disguised as a New Age quack.

A journalist who lives close to me sent me an sms: Karadzic must have been drinking beer with our gypsy neighbor in the street. As we all suspected, or as some of us surely knew: Karadzic was hiding from justice behind our names and our daily lives, using the Serbian population as his living shields.

For a broader perspective on the Karadzic arrest, try this Economist story.

Two interesting data points, both pointed out by Kevin Drum, should cheer gay activists and allies:

• Support for Proposition 8, California’s ballot initiative to define marriage as “between a man and a woman,” is only at 42%. With 51% opposed, most think it’s unlikely to pass, leaving the recent court decision in favor of gay marriage as state law.
• American public opinion now favors gays serving openly in the military by a wide margin. Where in 1993, only 44% of people supported it, a recent poll puts the number as high as 75%.

I haven’t been following too closely, but I found both of these pieces on the (recommended) indictment of the Sudanese president to be useful:

• John Boonstra clarifies a few points — like that Bashir hasn’t yet been “indicted” — that don’t come across clearly in most reporting of the story.
• Richard Goldstone considers whether this will help or hinder the prospects for peace.

For similar reasons as Equatorial Guinea, The Economist’s Asia.view column asks “why we don’t hear more about Bangladesh?”

According to Odhikar, a Bangladeshi human-rights group, 68 people died in extrajudicial killings (often called “crossfire”) in the first half of this year. Torture is endemic. The government also quietly adopted a new counter-terrorism ordinance last month, without debate. Human Rights Watch, a research and lobbying group, says it violates fundamental freedoms.

I don’t know what’s more astounding, the number he was given or the number that haven’t been taken away. For those institutions that haven’t rescinded, consider this horror.

While discussing the broad decline of the practice, The Economist made a point I’d never known:

Countries where teachers still use force include the United States, where a Supreme Court ruling in 1977 (concerning two pupils whose beatings with a wooden paddle caused medical harm) found that a constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” applied only to judicial proceedings. That left individual states to decide; in 22 of them, corporal correction in schools occurs in at least some districts.

Perhaps more glaringly:

Indeed, [the United States] is the only country, along with Somalia, which has failed to ratify a United Nations convention on children’s rights, which since 1990 has protected children from “all forms of physical or mental violence”. American officials helped draft the document, but it faces stiff opposition in some quarters of the United States.

Kenji Yoshino offers an interesting idea — straights getting only as close to “marriage” as gays are allowed — though I wonder what good it would actually do. (Anyone who would think to do this probably already favors gay marriage.)

The Temporary Domestic Partnership Strategy asks straights to cross over, in a limited way, from sympathy (pity for the plight of others) to empathy (direct experience of that plight). It seems plausible that if a straight couple experienced a temporary domestic partnership even briefly, they would have a more visceral sense of why gays need the right to marry. For instance, straight couples will find that no contractual arrangement can give them rights against the federal government (which would refuse to issue either partner a green card). Moreover, these couples would experience the importance of the word “marriage” when confronted with the question of their marital status in the myriad places that question is posed.

Even for homosexuals eager for the right to get married, there could be one drawback to California’s making it legal: doting parents and the persistant question of “When are you gonna get married?”

America has more prisoners on death row than any country but Pakistan. (China’s figures are open to dispute.) It’s either a triumph of justice that they’re still alive — and likely appealing their cases — or a damnable pity that they’re there at all.

I feel vaguely like I’ve heard this story before, but it’s interesting nonetheless:

Jane Novak, a 46-year-old stay-at-home mother of two in New Jersey, has never been to Yemen. She speaks no Arabic, and freely admits that until a few years ago, she knew nothing about that strife-torn south Arabian country.

And yet Ms. Novak has become so well known in Yemen that newspaper editors say they sell more copies if her photograph — blond and smiling — is on the cover. Her blog, an outspoken news bulletin on Yemeni affairs, is banned there. The government’s allies routinely vilify her in print as an American agent, a Shiite monarchist, a member of Al Qaeda, or “the Zionist Novak.”

I’ve been a little behind, but this week-old report on Burma from The Economist deserved sharing. A telling anecdote about the country’s problems:

Alarmingly, despite agricultural plenty, Myanmar has the classic conditions for a famine: acute poverty, poor or non-existent flows of information and crazy policies. In one cackhanded intervention in agriculture, the junta in 2006 ordered every farmer with an acre (0.4 hectares) of land to plant “physic nuts” (jatropha) around the edge of his plot. It was so keen on the crop that it also set up special plantations. The idea was to make biofuels to meet Myanmar’s energy shortage—even much of Yangon spends most evenings in darkness. But Myanmar lacks the refineries to turn the plants into fuel. The policy has been cited by many refugees pitching up at the Thai border as one reason for their flight: typically, the junta has been dragooning farmers into working for no pay in its jatropha plantations, so it becomes even harder to make a living.

Those angered by the system of justice being deployed at Guantanamo should probably blow their lids about what’s passing for justice in some cases in Afghanistan. Here, for example, was enough evidence to convict a man to eight years in prison:

“Confessions/Admissions/Incriminating Statements: None”

“Witnesses: None”

“Physical Evidence: None”

“Photographs: None”

(via brijit)

Zimbabwe’s been under the thumb of Robert Mugabe for over two decades. The difficult-to-read election this coming weekend will determine if his time is up. I’ve been saving stuff on this topic for a week, looking to avoid flooding readers with it. Now here it.

From The Economist’s massive — and well done — article:

And yet, despite this stack of advantages, Mr Mugabe is plainly on the defensive. He must fear that Zimbabwe is in a state of such economic and political ruin that he needs more of a head-start than the 20% or so of votes provided by the standard forms of rigging. For Zimbabweans, however, there are two worries. One is that Mr Mugabe steals the election. The other is that he just fails to, especially if that means the president is forced into a run-off. In that case, he may resort to outright violence. “The violence has so far been contained, more or less,” says a former ZANU-PF minister who has joined Mr Makoni, “but if the election goes to two rounds it’ll go right up.”

Also:

• In a review, The Economist tackles the making of Mugabe
• The Financial Times says Mugabe’s denying his opponents food
• The Guardian says the opposition had to eat it’s campaign poster (via BB)
• The BBC reports that Mugabe won’t let the opposition MDC win during his lifetime
• Newsweek has a story about the country’s hyperinflation

Though it’s still completely impossible to call Saudi Arabia a friend of human rights, and though it’s moving at a snail’s pace, the Christian Science Monitor says that some have found reason to hope.

…another sign of what some Saudis describe as an expanding awareness of human rights among the public and government officials. They cite increased discussion in the media and private blogs of such issues as child marriage, domestic violence, and treatment of foreign laborers.

“The big achievement is that it’s no longer taboo to talk about human rights,” one Saudi says privately.

Mark Helprin says that that’s the solution to the crisis in Darfur.

Which would the regime in Sudan prefer? To be annihilated, or to discontinue its campaign of mass murder in Darfur? Given Sudan’s record, very few nations would be willing to come to its aid with other than a pro forma whimper, and given the geography and the air and naval balance, no nation could. Though many a repressive dictatorship would protest, and Sudan’s patron, China, might determine to speed up the formation of the blue-water navy it is already building, little else would change except for the better.

Also of note, a damning rebuttal from Mark Goldberg.

In school, I was told that “the rule of law” was good for stability and good for economic growth. What exactly “the rule of law” was I was never completely sure of. Turns out there are essentially two definitions:

Thick definitions treat the rule of law as the core of a just society. In this version, the concept is inextricably linked to liberty and democracy. Its adherents say a country can be spoken of as being ruled by law only if the state’s power is constrained and if basic freedoms, such as those of speech and association, are guaranteed. …

Thin definitions are more formal. The important things, on this account, are not democracy and morality but property rights and the efficient administration of justice. Laws must provide stability. They do not necessarily have to be moral or promote human rights. America’s southern states in the Jim Crow era were governed by the rule of law on thin definitions, but not on thick.

Yes, and even if you knew that, I didn’t. What’s more interesting (or troubling) is that they still hang people. But this is what really raised my eyebrows:

In a country with a conviction rate of over 99%—and where even defence lawyers urge clients to plead guilty…

I’ve rather ignored this story. A protest by Tibetan monks wasn’t that surprising to me, and that China would do it’s best to suppress it certainly wasn’t. This morning, I woke up — both literally and figuratively — and began paying attention. Says Reuters:

Protesters in Tibet’s capital Lhasa burnt shops and vehicles and yelled for independence on Friday as the region was hit by protests, prompting the Dalai Lama to urge Beijing to stop “brute force.”

Peaceful street marches by Tibetan Buddhist monks over past days gave way to the biggest and angriest demonstrations the remote, mountainous region has seen in nearly two decades, with anti-riot police patrolling the streets just months before the Beijing Olympics.

“Now it’s very chaotic outside,” an ethnic Tibetan resident said by telephone. “People have been burning cars and motorbikes and buses. There is smoke everywhere and they have been throwing rocks and breaking windows. We’re scared.”

This seems to have an eerie similarity to Burma, I do hope it ends differently. Also, I should note that it’s Mr. Fallows who made me really wake up, saying this:

But as you follow the news, be aware that this is something that could matter a great deal in many ways. More later.

I feel a certain amount of shame that South Africa’s race relations sound only a little worse than those in the United States. You’d think that our 25 (or, depending on how you count, 125) year head start would count for something. (I know that’s reductive, but it doesn’t change the feeling.)

Though the poor and unemployed remain disproportionately black, an emerging black middle class is slowly blurring racial and social lines. Once-segregated schools and universities now include students of all colours. Even at the formerly all-white University of the Free State, where the racist video was shot and where tuition was once in Afrikaans (the language of the early Dutch settlers), most students are now black. A rising majority of South Africans think that race relations are improving.

Yet South Africa is far from colour-blind. People of different races often eat in the same restaurants—but at different tables. Peaceful coexistence, which South Africa generally enjoys, does not mean integration. People in rural areas are even less likely to mix than those in large cities such as Johannesburg.