Al Jazeera reports: As Egypt gears up for further protests, divisions over President Mohamad Morsi’s recent decrees to solidify his power have had a polarising effect on the judiciary, one of the country’s most sacred institutions.
Morsi’s declaration has led to a judicial boycott by some judges, while others say what the president is doing is justified, and those refusing to hear cases are playing politics.
The Judges Club – an unofficial organisation of judges within the judiciary, primarily made up of those opposing Morsi’s policy decisions – called for a boycott of the courts until Morsi rescinds his declaration.
The Judges of Egypt, another unofficial club of judges, held a press conference of its own, reassuring the public that despite the boycott they would ensure courts and legal proceedings would continue to operate normally.
The Guardian reports: Britain is prepared to back a key vote recognising Palestinian statehood at the United Nations if Mahmoud Abbas pledges not to pursue Israel for war crimes and to resume peace talks.
Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, has called for Britain’s backing in part because of its historic responsibility for Palestine. The government has previously refused, citing strong US and Israeli objections and fears of long-term damage to prospects for negotiations.
On Monday night, the government signalled it would change tack and vote yes if the Palestinians modified their application, which is to be debated by the UN general assembly in New York later this week. As a “non-member state”, Palestine would have the same status as the Vatican.
Whitehall officials said the Palestinians were now being asked to refrain from applying for membership of the international criminal court or the international court of justice, which could both be used to pursue war crimes charges or other legal claims against Israel.
Abbas is also being asked to commit to an immediate resumption of peace talks “without preconditions” with Israel. The third condition is that the general assembly’s resolution does not require the UN security council to follow suit.
The US and Israel have both hinted at possible retaliation if the vote goes ahead. Congress could block payments to the Palestinian Authority and Israel might freeze tax revenues it transfers under the 1993 Oslo agreement or, worse, withdraw from the agreement altogether. It could also annex West Bank settlements. Britain’s position is that it wants to reduce the risk that such threats might be implemented and bolster Palestinian moderates.
France has already signalled that it will vote yes on Thursday, and the long-awaited vote is certain to pass as 132 UN members have recognised the state of Palestine. Decisions by Germany, Spain and Britain are still pending and Palestinians would clearly prefer a united EU position as counterweight to the US.
Yossi Beilin, one of the architect of the Oslo Accords, writes: The cease-fire that ended the latest round of violence between Israel and the Palestinians has enhanced the popularity of the militant group Hamas. This extremist organization has become the only interlocutor for the Arab world, for the West and, indirectly, for Israel. But Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s existence or to negotiate with Israelis. Meanwhile, the pragmatic Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, is rapidly losing legitimacy and Israel’s recent strikes on Gaza will only weaken it further. Negotiating with Hamas may secure a lull, but Hamas cannot be a partner for peace.
If the world wants to express support for the Palestinian party that recognizes Israel, seeks to avoid violence, and genuinely wishes to reach a peace agreement in which a Palestinian state exists alongside — not instead of — Israel, it will have its chance later this week when Mr. Abbas makes his bid for recognition of Palestinian statehood before the United Nations. If American and Israeli opposition to a Palestinian bid continues, it could serve as a mortal blow to Mr. Abbas, and end up being a prize that enhances the power and legitimacy of Hamas.
Beilin claims Hamas refuses to negotiate with Israel and yet he does so in the context of Hamas’s recent negotiations with Israel — a ceasefire agreement and before that the release of Gilad Shilat in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, both deals negotiated in Egypt. Moreover, Hamas’s political leader, Khalid Meshaal, has repeatedly stated that his organization would accept the creation of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders if this has popular support among the Palestinian people.
The real issue that Israel, the E.U., and the U.S. are up against is their unwillingness to accept the fact that Palestinian political leaders cannot be both legitimate in the eyes of the Palestinian people and subservient to Israel.
The Guardian reports: Yasser Arafat was buried eight years ago to a chorus of gunfire before a crowd of thousands amid the rubble of his Ramallah headquarters.
On Tuesday, his corpse was quietly dug up again in the middle of the night, shielded from prying eyes, to test a suspicion that the Palestine Liberation Organisation leader was poisoned with a radioactive substance.
The tests were in part prompted by a French murder inquiry requested by Arafat’s widow. But there’s a good chance they will not provide the answers many Palestinians want to hear. And even if the tests do show he was poisoned, they are also likely to raise unsettling questions many may not want to face.
At Arafat’s funeral in 2004, Palestinians packed the Muqata – the old British administration building that served as his headquarters after his return to the West Bank – and every rooftop within sight as his coffin was navigated through the chanting, shooting crowds, past the rubble left by the Israeli siege to a hastily dug grave site.
The Muqata has been rebuilt, after large parts were destroyed by Israeli tanks, and transformed into a sprawling presidential palace of Jerusalem stone. Arafat’s mausoleum is now a towering quadrangle of limestone and glass, a reflecting pool, and an honour guard.
But all of that was hidden behind large blue tarpaulins, hung to shield the exhumation from outsiders as at around midnight workers began the lengthy process of drilling down through metres of concrete poured over the coffin.
Before dawn, Arafat’s remains were finally reached. A Palestinian doctor and foreign forensic experts looked at the state of the corpse and decided against attempting to remove the whole thing. The Palestinian doctor instead took only samples, which were moved to a mosque where they were prepared for examination by international teams from France, Russia and Switzerland.
The Telegraph reports: Tawfiq Tirawi, head of the Palestinian commission investigating Arafat’s death, said: “If it is proved that Arafat was poisoned, we will go to the international court.”
His remarks were made at a press conference which took place several hours after the veteran leader’s remains were exhumed for testing by a team of international experts.
The removal of the samples was conducted by a Palestinian doctor in the presence of experts from Switzerland, Russia and France.
The controversial exhumation came two days before Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was to present a formal request for upgraded status at the United Nations, which would raise its rank from that of an observer entity to an observer state.
Such a move would allow the Palestinians to join many UN organisations or international treaties, such as the ICC or the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians.
President Obama insists that his right to kill anyone anywhere is based on law, but if the legal basis for his assassination program is so strong, why would there be any need to write a “rules” on how it gets carried out? The crafting of rules after 2,500 people have already been killed suggests two things:
1. That the process through which Obama’s kill list has been developed and applied, has to some degree been ad hoc in its nature, and
2. that the legality of this program is highly contestable — in other words, that the White House’s partially drafted rule book is nothing more than a legal fig leaf.
Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.
The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. But with more than 300 drone strikes and some 2,500 people killed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military since Mr. Obama first took office, the administration is still pushing to make the rules formal and resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action is justified.
Mr. Obama and his advisers are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.
Though publicly the administration presents a united front on the use of drones, behind the scenes there is longstanding tension. The Defense Department and the C.I.A. continue to press for greater latitude to carry out strikes; Justice Department and State Department officials, and the president’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, have argued for restraint, officials involved in the discussions say.
More broadly, the administration’s legal reasoning has not persuaded many other countries that the strikes are acceptable under international law. For years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States routinely condemned targeted killings of suspected terrorists by Israel, and most countries still object to such measures. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian adds: Human-rights groups and peace groups opposed to the CIA-operated targeted-killing programme, which remains officially classified, said the administration had already rejected international law in pursuing its drone operations.
“To say they are rewriting the rulebook implies that there isn’t already a rulebook” said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Center for Democracy. “But what they are already doing is rejecting a rulebook – of international law – that has been in place since [the second world war].”
He said the news was “frustrating”, because it relied on “self-serving sources”. The New York Times piece was written by one of the journalists who first exposed the existence of a White House “kill list”, in May.
The ACLU is currently involved in a legal battle with the US government over the legal memo underlying the controversial targeted killing programme, the basis for drone strikes that have killed American citizens and the process by which individuals are placed on the kill list.
Jaffer said it was impossible to make a judgement about whether the “rulebook” being discussed, according to the Times, was legal or illegal.
“It is frustrating how we are reliant on self-serving leaks” said Jaffer. “We are left with interpreting shadows cast on the wall. The terms that are being used by these officials are undefined, malleable and without definition. It is impossible to know whether they are talking about something lawful or unlawful.
“We are litigating for the release of legal memos. We don’t think the public should have to reply on self-serving leaking by unnamed administrative officials.”
EA Worldview‘s James Miller writes: [A]t several points in this conflict there have been collections of bad data that suggested that EA, and the media at large, was missing a trend. For several weeks there has been a growing number of rumors, low-quality Youtube videos, and eyewitness reports that suggested that not only was the FSA winning in Deir Ez Zor, Lattakia, and Aleppo, but it was on the brink of major victories in all three provinces. Similarly, there is a growing body of inconclusive evidence that the FSA is surging in Daraa province, and was increasingly effective in and around Damascus. While individual reports of this nature may or may not each be true, the trend lines were beginning to look clear.
For more than a week, however, that body of evidence has been harder and harder to dismiss as noise and rumor. With well documented victories yesterday, the FSA has encouraged us to post headlines that we have been sitting on for a long time.
Two trends are clear – The Assad regime is retreating, pulling many units towards the capital and leaving its garrisons to fend for themselves – and they are fending poorly. Meanwhile, the FSA continues to ratchet up pressure on the capital, and despite the fact that Damascus is now the highest priority of the Assad military, those advances are accelerating.
Is it a state of collapse? Perhaps it’s too early to say, and we’re not predicting a sudden collapse even if that were true. Regardless, it is my conclusion that we have been too cautious in estimating the strengths of the insurgency, and this is saying something because we have been consistently more hawkish (and I would argue more accurate) than many media outlets who assess the strength of the Syrian insurgents. [Continue reading…]
The Associated Press reports: Activists say Syrian rebels have captured a hydroelectric dam on the Euphrates river in the country’s north in a strategic victory that followed days of fighting.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the Tishrin Dam, near the town of Manbij, fell to the rebels before dawn on Monday.
Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Observatory, says the dam supplies several areas of Syria with electricity.
The rebels have been making strategic advances recently. On Sunday, they briefly captured a regime helicopter base outside Damascus.
Earlier, Al Jazeera reported: Opposition commanders in the Syrian city of Aleppo have voiced their support to the Syrian National Coalition, a day after a video emerged showing fighters from at least 14 brigades announcing their rejection of the opposition bloc.
The powerful Liwaa al-Tawhid Brigade, along with the Aleppo Military Council and Transitional Military Council, in a video uploaded on YouTube on Tuesday, said they would co-operate with the newly formed opposition body, but called for greater representation in it.
They also said that the earlier statement by some local commanders rejecting the coalition was due to “the marginalisation of the revolutionary forces on the ground”.
“We call on [the coalition] to increase the representation of the revolutionary forces and to activate their role in the coalition’s offices and apparatus,” Tuesday’s statement, read by Abdel Qader Saleh, the head the Liwaa al-Tawhid Brigade, said.
The brigade, formed in July, is said to have at least 10,000 fighters. It has been credited for the opposition’s control of vast areas in Aleppo province.
In the earlier video posted online on Monday, a fighter could be seen reading out a statement that said: “We, the groups in the city of Aleppo and its suburbs, completely reject the conspiratory project which was named the National Coalition.”
By Dafna Linzer, Michael Grabell and Jeff Larson, ProPublica, November 26, 2012
This past summer, as the Syrian economy began to unravel and the military pressed hard against an armed rebellion, a Syrian government plane ferried what flight records describe as more than 200 tons of “bank notes” from Moscow.
The records of overflight requests were obtained by ProPublica. The flights occurred during a period of escalating violence in a conflict that has left tens of thousands of people dead since fighting broke out in March 2011.
The regime of Bashar al-Assad is increasingly in need of cash to stay afloat and continue financing the military’s efforts to crush the uprising. U.S. and European sanctions, including a ban on minting Syrian currency, have damaged the country’s economy. As a result, Syria lost access to an Austrian bank that had printed its bank notes.
“Having currency that you can put into circulation is certainly something that is important in terms of running an economy and more so in an economy that is become more cash-based as things deteriorate,” said Daniel Glaser, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. “It is certainly something the Syrian government wants to do, to pay soldiers or pay anybody anything.”
According to the flight records, which are in English and Farsi, eight round-trip flights between Damascus International Airport and Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport each carried 30 tons of bank notes back to Syria.
Syrian and Russian officials did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the authenticity and accuracy of the flight records. It is not possible to know whether the logs accurately described the cargo or what else might have been on board the flights. Nor do the logs specify the type of currency.
But ProPublica confirmed nearly all of the flights took place through international plane-tracking services, photos by aviation enthusiasts, and air traffic control recordings.
Each time the manifest listed “Bank Notes” as its cargo, the plane traveled a circuitous route. Instead of flying directly over Turkish airspace, as civilian planes have, the Ilyushin-76 cargo plane, operated by the Syrian Air Force, avoided Turkey and flew over Iraq, Iran, and Azerbaijan.
The flight path between Syria and Russia described in the manifests.
Tensions have been rising between Syria and Turkey since the spring. Last month, Turkey forced down a Syrian passenger plane traveling from Moscow. Turkey suspected the flight of carrying military cargo but officials have not said what, if anything, was confiscated.
If the flight manifests are accurate, a total of 240 tons of bank notes moved from Moscow to Damascus over a 10-week period beginning July 9th and ending on September 15th.
U.S. officials interviewed said evidence of monetary assistance, like military cooperation, point to a pattern of Russian support for Assad that extends from concrete aid to protecting Syria from U.N. sanctions.
In September, 2011, six months into the violence, the European Union imposed sanctions that prohibited its members from minting or supplying new Syrian coinage or banknotes. In a statement, the EU said the sanctions aimed “to obstruct those who are leading the crackdown in Syria and to restrict the funding being used to perpetrate violence against the Syrian people.” At the time, Syria’s currency was being minted by Oesterreichische Banknoten- und Sicherheitsdruck GmbH, a subsidiary of Austria’s Central Bank.
President Obama has issued five Executive Orders that prevent members of the Assad regime from entering the United States and accessing the U.S. financial system.
“Increasingly, it is more difficult to finance the war machine and the cost of the war is becoming more expensive for the Assad regime,” said one U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Targeted sanctions on those leading the violence are working and start to bite into their pocket books.”
Russia appears to be helping Syria blunt the impact of the sanctions.
This past June, Reuters reported that Russia had begun printing new Syrian pounds and that an initial shipment of bank notes had already arrived. The report was denied by the Syrian Central Bank, which claimed the only new money in circulation were bills that had replaced damaged or worn bank notes. Such a swap, the bank contended, would have no effect on the economy.
On August 3rd, the official Syrian news agency SANA, reporting from a news conference in Moscow with Syrian and Russian economic officials, quoted Syrian officials acknowledging that Russia is printing money. Qadr Jamil, Syria’s deputy prime minister for Economic Affairs, was quoted by SANA as calling the deal with Russia a “triumph,” over sanctions.
Syrian Finance Minister Mohammad al-Jleilati said that Russia was providing both replacement notes and additional currency to, as SANA put it, “reflect the country’s changing GDP.”
Al-Jleilati said the money would have no effect on inflation. Printing new notes beyond simply replacing old ones could undermine Syria’s already battered currency.
At the time of the meeting, at least 30 tons of currency had already been delivered, according to the flight records, and another 210 tons would be delivered in subsequent flights.
In its regional economic outlook released earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund noted that Syria’s currency has lost 44 percent of its value since March 2011, trading for about 70 pounds to the dollar compared with about 47 pounds when the conflict began.
Ibrahim Saif, a political economist based in Jordan and a resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center said 30 tons of bank notes twice a week is a significant amount for a country like Syria.
“I truly believe it’s not only that they’re exchanging old money for new notes. They are printing money because they need new notes,” Saif said.
“Most of the government revenue that comes from taxes, in terms of other services, it’s almost now dried up,” noted Saif. Yet, “they continue to pay salaries. They have not shown any signs of weakness in fulfilling their domestic obligations. The only way they can do this is to get some sort of cash in the market.”
Before the unrest broke out, Syria had about $17 billion in foreign currency reserves. Saif said he and other economists in the region estimate they now have about $6-8 billion in reserves, dwindling about $500 million a month for salaries and supplies to keep the government running.
In Moscow, the Syrian finance minister had said that his country required additional foreign currency reserves, which Russia may provide in the form of loans.
“It’s possible the Syrians are acquiring foreign currency reserves, either Euros or US dollars, which they would need to conduct any serious commerce,” said Juan Zarate, who served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes during the Bush administration.
Zarate noted that other countries, when faced with economic sanctions, have leaned on allies for foreign currency reserves. China supplied North Korea with such funds in the past and Venezuela agreed to sell reserves to Iran.
Syria’s currency is still traded on open markets, but there is limited on-the-ground information about the economy, including inflation.
Officials at the IMF “have not been able to get direct information about Syria for at least a year,” Masood Ahmed, director of the group’s Middle East and Central Asia department, told reporters at a conference in Tokyo last month.
Glaser, at Treasury, declined to put a figure on Syria’s current reserves but said the Syrian economy is suffering in part from a lack of tourism and a ban on oil sales, both of which provided Damascus with foreign currency. “There is significant inflation in the country. It can be caused by adding new currency or not having foreign reserves to prop up the existing currency.”
In an analysis on defense minister Ehud Barak’s sudden announcement that he is withdrawing from Israeli politics, Anshel Pfeffer wrotes:
[I]n recent weeks, Barak has finally realized that his chances of remaining Netanyahu’s defense minister are increasingly slim. Not because Bibi doesn’t want him by his side; it’s simply because the odds are against him.
Barak has long been a hate-figure for the right-wing element in the Likud who blame him for blocking construction in the settlements and occasionally dismantling outposts. For months, while rumors said that Netanyahu might award him a spot on the Likud list – the prime minister had voiced the possibility that as party leader he would be allowed to “parachute” his own candidates into the list, which widely assumed to be for Barak’s benefit – he faced mounting pressure from his own party ranks against the motion. They didn’t really care whether Barak would become a Likud member or not; they just didn’t want to see him in the next cabinet altogether. One reason why former IDF Chief of Staff and Likud minister Moshe Ya’alon was expected to do well in the Likud primaries is that many members want to make it clear to Netanyahu that he is their candidate for defense minister.
Barak realized that even if Atzmaut would succeed in securing him a seat in the next Knesset, an outcome far from assured, Netanyahu would be unable to reappoint him to the only cabinet position he has any interest in. That was the moment he knew he had to resign and become master of his political fate.
The advent of writing is generally viewed in terms of its significance as a cultural advance — less attention is given to its political implications. Yet it looks like the most important function writing originally served was in the management of slavery and the regulation of society.
The BBC’s Sean Coughlan reports on efforts to understand proto-Elamite, the world’s oldest undeciphered writing system, which was used in an area that is now in south-western Iran over 5,000 years ago. The script was imprinted in clay tablets.
These were among the first attempts by our human ancestors to try to make a permanent record of their surroundings. What we’re doing now – my writing and your reading – is a direct continuation.
But there are glimpses of their lives to suggest that these were tough times. It wasn’t so much a land of milk and honey, but porridge and weak beer.
Even without knowing all the symbols, Dr [Jacob] Dahl [director of the Ancient World Research Cluster at Oxford University] says it’s possible to work out the context of many of the messages on these tablets.
The numbering system is also understood, making it possible to see that much of this information is about accounts of the ownership and yields from land and people. They are about property and status, not poetry.
This was a simple agricultural society, with a ruling household. Below them was a tier of powerful middle-ranking figures and further below were the majority of workers, who were treated like “cattle with names”.
Their rulers have titles or names which reflect this status – the equivalent of being called “Mr One Hundred”, he says – to show the number of people below him.
It’s possible to work out the rations given to these farm labourers.
Dr Dahl says they had a diet of barley, which might have been crushed into a form of porridge, and they drank weak beer.
The amount of food received by these farm workers hovered barely above the starvation level.
However the higher status people might have enjoyed yoghurt, cheese and honey. They also kept goats, sheep and cattle.
For the “upper echelons, life expectancy for some might have been as long as now”, he says. For the poor, he says it might have been as low as in today’s poorest countries.
If we think of writing as an observer’s record-keeping we might imagine some kind of proto-historian assuming the task of creating these first tablets, yet their content as described above makes it clear that these texts had a purely utilitarian function — they were records for the ruling class. Indeed, the creation of writing was likely one of the necessary conditions that facilitated the development and expansion of ownership.
Before the Neolithic Revolution and the first development of agriculture, as wandering hunter-gatherers, our ancestors had virtually no possessions. Without the ability to accrue personal power by being able to control material resources and stockpile food, social groupings — as can still be observed in the last remaining contemporary hunter-gatherer societies — were naturally egalitarian and cooperative.
For inequality to develop we had to stop moving around and start acquiring property and the maintenance of property required writing: a kind of spell-keeping through which an audacious idea — this is mine — could be invested in objects that lay outside the owner’s physical grasp. Writing constituted proof of ownership and the power of writing to codify inequality was no doubt enhanced by a separation between the literate and the illiterate — those who used writing and those who were used by writing.
As the record above reveals, agriculture ‘worked’ by keeping a working class on a starvation diet — fed enough to till the land and harvest the crops, but too weak to rebel against the well-fed land and slave owners. Sustained and pacified with junk food and mild intoxicants — sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
And the order which assigned bountiful rewards to a few and meager provisions for everyone else was enshrined in the written word — the representation of who owned what. Whatever could be written in stone could thereafter be treated as an unalterable fact, not subject to negotiation or easy modification.
A modern echo which also evokes a sense that a dangerous power is contained in writing is offered by the West African shaman, Malidoma Patrice Somé.
At the age of four Somé was kidnapped by Jesuit missionaries who raised and educated him. When he reached twenty, he ran away and returned to his tribal village but struggled to readjust to his native culture because he was now literate. He writes:
As an educated man I had returned [unlike the by-then-common migrant worker], not as a villager who worked for the white man, but as a white man.
It all boiled down to the simple fact that I had been changed in a way unsuitable to village life, and that transformation needed to be tamed if the village was to accept me as I was. People understood my kind of literacy as the business of whites and nontribal people. Even worse, they understood literacy as an eviction of a soul from its body — the taking over of the body by another spirit. Wasn’t the white man notorious in the village for his brutality, his lack of morality and integrity? Didn’t he take without asking and kill ruthlessly? To my people, to be literate meant to be possessed by this devil of brutality. It was not harmful to know a little, but to the elders, the ability to read, however magical it appeared, was dangerous. It made the literate person the bearer of a terrible epidemic. To read was to participate in an alien form of magic that was destructive to the tribe.
If much earlier in human evolution, language liberated imagination, yielding a world of new possibilities, writing served primarily to restrict those possibilities through the creation of laws and codified social structures. Even now, consider who wields more power with the written word: a celebrated author or a Supreme Court justice? Creative writing goes mostly unrewarded while a lawyer can earn $1,000 an hour for producing the most turgid, mind-numbing prose.
If we want to use writing but not be used by it, we must never confuse the rigid form with its fluid content. Writing solidifies language, but the power of language resides in its constant malleability. Words should be chewed, not swallowed whole.
Charles C. Mann writes: About 75,000 years ago, a huge volcano exploded on the island of Sumatra. The biggest blast for several million years, the eruption created Lake Toba, the world’s biggest crater lake, and ejected the equivalent of as much as 3,000 cubic kilometers of rock, enough to cover the District of Columbia in a layer of magma and ash that would reach to the stratosphere. A gigantic plume spread west, enveloping southern Asia in tephra (rock, ash, and dust). Drifts in Pakistan and India reached as high as six meters. Smaller tephra beds blanketed the Middle East and East Africa. Great rafts of pumice filled the sea and drifted almost to Antarctica.
In the long run, the eruption raised Asian soil fertility. In the short term, it was catastrophic. Dust hid the sun for as much as a decade, plunging the earth into a years-long winter accompanied by widespread drought. A vegetation collapse was followed by a collapse in the species that depended on vegetation, followed by a collapse in the species that depended on the species that depended on vegetation. Temperatures may have remained colder than normal for a thousand years. Orangutans, tigers, chimpanzees, cheetahs—all were pushed to the verge of extinction.
At about this time, many geneticists believe, Homo sapiens’ numbers shrank dramatically, perhaps to a few thousand people—the size of a big urban high school. The clearest evidence of this bottleneck is also its main legacy: humankind’s remarkable genetic uniformity. Countless people have viewed the differences between races as worth killing for, but compared to other primates—even compared to most other mammals—human beings are almost indistinguishable, genetically speaking. DNA is made from exceedingly long chains of “bases.” Typically, about one out of every 2,000 of these “bases” differs between one person and the next. The equivalent figure from two E. coli (human gut bacteria) might be about one out of twenty. The bacteria in our intestines, that is, have a hundredfold more innate variability than their hosts—evidence, researchers say, that our species is descended from a small group of founders.
Uniformity is hardly the only effect of a bottleneck. When a species shrinks in number, mutations can spread through the entire population with astonishing rapidity. Or genetic variants that may have already been in existence—arrays of genes that confer better planning skills, for example—can suddenly become more common, effectively reshaping the species within a few generations as once-unusual traits become widespread.
Did Toba, as theorists like Richard Dawkins have argued, cause an evolutionary bottleneck that set off the creation of behaviorally modern people, perhaps by helping previously rare genes—Neanderthal DNA or an opportune mutation—spread through our species? Or did the volcanic blast simply clear away other human species that had previously blocked H. sapiens’ expansion? Or was the volcano irrelevant to the deeper story of human change?
For now, the answers are the subject of careful back-and-forth in refereed journals and heated argument in faculty lounges. All that is clear is that about the time of Toba, new, behaviorally modern people charged so fast into the tephra that human footprints appeared in Australia within as few as 10,000 years, perhaps within 4,000 or 5,000. Stay-at-home Homo sapiens 1.0, a wallflower that would never have interested Lynn Margulis, had been replaced by aggressively expansive Homo sapiens 2.0. Something happened, for better and worse, and we were born.
One way to illustrate what this upgrade looked like is to consider Solenopsis invicta, the red imported fire ant. Geneticists believe that S. invicta originated in northern Argentina, an area with many rivers and frequent floods. The floods wipe out ant nests. Over the millennia, these small, furiously active creatures have acquired the ability to respond to rising water by coalescing into huge, floating, pullulating balls—workers on the outside, queen in the center—that drift to the edge of the flood. Once the waters recede, colonies swarm back into previously flooded land so rapidly that S. invicta actually can use the devastation to increase its range.
In the 1930s, Solenopsis invicta was transported to the United States, probably in ship ballast, which often consists of haphazardly loaded soil and gravel. As a teenaged bug enthusiast, Edward O. Wilson, the famed biologist, spotted the first colonies in the port of Mobile, Alabama. He saw some very happy fire ants. From the ant’s point of view, it had been dumped into an empty, recently flooded expanse. S. invicta took off, never looking back.
The initial incursion watched by Wilson was likely just a few thousand individuals—a number small enough to suggest that random, bottleneck-style genetic change played a role in the species’ subsequent history in this country. In their Argentine birthplace, fire-ant colonies constantly fight each other, reducing their numbers and creating space for other types of ant. In the United States, by contrast, the species forms cooperative supercolonies, linked clusters of nests that can spread for hundreds of miles. Systematically exploiting the landscape, these supercolonies monopolize every useful resource, wiping out other ant species along the way—models of zeal and rapacity. Transformed by chance and opportunity, new-model S. invictus needed just a few decades to conquer most of the southern United States.
Homo sapiens did something similar in the wake of Toba. For hundreds of thousands of years, our species had been restricted to East Africa (and, possibly, a similar area in the south). Now, abruptly, new-model Homo sapiens were racing across the continents like so many imported fire ants. The difference between humans and fire ants is that fire ants specialize in disturbed habitats. Humans, too, specialize in disturbed habitats—but we do the disturbing. [Continue reading…]
While Mann’s long essay is duly cautious about the future because we do indeed have a great capacity to mess things up, he notes major strides in human progress — such as the widespread abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century — which he sees as an indication of our capacity for enlightened change.
I have a less sanguine view. On that specific point, the abolition of slavery, it’s worth noting that it coincided with the industrial revolution and the growth of capitalism. The more skills workers require, the less practical it becomes that they are enslaved, but this is a matter of expedience — not the liberation of human potential.
As fewer and fewer people are required to operate machines, the need to control their behavior has not diminished. The control of human hands has been supplanted by the control of human desires. The enduring fact remains: throughout the world, small groups of people exert enormous power in shaping the lives of the rest of humanity.
Because of this division, it is very hard for the controlling elite to grasp the idea that ultimately we face a common fate. There is too much historical evidence supporting the view that however much misery might prevail in the world, it will always be possible for those with sufficient resources to insulate themselves from every new peril. By the time it becomes inescapably evident that this cannot always be true, it will already be too late.
Benjamin Strauss and Robert Kopp write: The oceans have risen and fallen throughout Earth’s history, following the planet’s natural temperature cycles. Twenty thousand years ago, what is now New York City was at the edge of a giant ice sheet, and the sea was roughly 400 feet lower. But as the last ice age thawed, the sea rose to where it is today.
Now we are in a new warming phase, and the oceans are rising again after thousands of years of stability. As scientists who study sea level change and storm surge, we fear that Hurricane Sandy gave only a modest preview of the dangers to come, as we continue to power our global economy by burning fuels that pollute the air with heat-trapping gases.
This past summer, a disconcerting new scientific study by the climate scientist Michiel Schaeffer and colleagues — published in the journal Nature Climate Change — suggested that no matter how quickly we cut this pollution, we are unlikely to keep the seas from climbing less than five feet.
More than six million Americans live on land less than five feet above the local high tide. (Searchable maps and analyses are available at SurgingSeas.org for every low-lying coastal community in the contiguous United States.) Worse, rising seas raise the launching pad for storm surge, the thick wall of water that the wind can drive ahead of a storm. In a world with oceans that are five feet higher, our calculations show that New York City would average one flood as high as Hurricane Sandy’s about every 15 years, even without accounting for the stronger storms and bigger surges that are likely to result from warming. [Continue reading…]
Ian Birrell writes: Once again, the apparently insoluble struggle between Israel and Palestine has flared up before flickering into uneasy standoff. As usual, world leaders issued fierce warnings, diplomats flew in and the media flooded the region to cover the mayhem as both sides spewed out the empty cliches of conflict. After eight days of fighting, nearly 160 people lay dead.
Meanwhile, 2,300 miles further south, events took a sharp turn for the worse in another interminable regional war. This one also involves survivors of genocide ruthlessly focused on securing their future at any cost. But the resulting conflict is far bloodier, far more brutal, far more devastating, far more destructive – yet it gains scarcely a glance from the rest of the world.
Such is the cycle of despair in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – scene of massacres, of mass rape, of children forced to fight, of families fleeing in fear again and again, so many sordid events that rarely make the headlines. It can seem a conflict of crushing complexity rooted in thorny issues of identity and race, involving murderous militias with an alphabet of acronyms and savagely exploited by grasping outsiders. But consider one simple fact: right now, there is the risk of another round breaking out in the deadliest conflict since the Second World War.
If you missed the fleeting news reports, a rebel army of 1,500 men waltzed into Goma, a city of one million people, on Tuesday. In doing so, they humiliated not just the useless Congolese government but also the hapless blue helmets of the biggest United Nations peacekeeping mission, costing nearly £1bn a year. There are so many peacekeepers and development agencies in Goma it has become a boom town, home to some of the most expensive housing in Africa. Yet again, all these people proved impotent.
The leaders of this insurgent force, the M23, have declared their aim to march across this vast country to capture the capital, Kinshasa. Since it is backed by Rwanda and Uganda, which used proxy armies to do this once before in 1997, such threats cannot be dismissed. Joseph Kabila, the Congolese president, who, through fear of a coup, corruption and incompetence, castrated his own military, is reported to have responded by asking Angola to send troops to save him.
It is all a dismal echo of the Great African War, which officially ended in 2003 but dribbled on for another five years. This began when Rwanda and Uganda invaded in 1998, saw 11 countries from Angola to Zimbabwe involved and left more than five million dead and millions more displaced. There were war crimes on all sides as armies brutalised those unfortunate people living above the fabulous seams of minerals that fuelled the fighting. [Continue reading…]
Melanne Verveer and Peter Westmacott write: Nearly 40,000 people have died already in Syria’s civil war, and close to 100 are still being killed each day. Homes, hospitals, water infrastructure, and sanitation systems have been destroyed. But one element of this ongoing brutality has been largely overlooked in the media: the appalling sexual violence being visited on the Syrian people by government and militia forces. Such use of sexual violence as a tactic of war is shocking — yet depressingly familiar.
Today, Nov. 25, marks International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the beginning of the 16 days of Activism Against Gender Violence. These awareness-raising campaigns are vital, both because, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeated time and again, women’s rights are human rights; and because, without accountability for sexual violence and other acts of severe violence against women and girls—which are often designed to humiliate and degrade victims and the groups with which they identify — security and development are impossible.
William Hague, the British foreign secretary, has referred to sexual violence as the “silent scourge of war.” The sheer scale of the brutality, and the lack of accountability surrounding it, is nothing short of sickening. During the Bosnian War, between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped, many of them in camps specifically designed for the purpose. But this tidal wave of systematic brutality has resulted in only 30 convictions. All this took place in Europe within the past two decades.
Elsewhere the numbers are even starker. In the 100 days of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, up to half a million women are estimated to have been raped, a staggering figure in a total population of only 6 million people at the time. Of the 14,200 cases of sexual violence recorded in neighboring South Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 2005 and 2009, fewer than 1 percent were ever heard in court. It has been estimated that in some conflicts as many as 90 percent of cases of sexual violence go unreported because of stigma, weak legal and judicial systems, or fear of retribution. Gender-based violence constitutes a global epidemic that persists today in both conflict and nonconflict settings. [Continue reading…]
Adam Shatz writes: The ceasefire agreed by Israel and Hamas in Cairo after eight days of fighting is merely a pause in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It promises to ease movement at all border crossings with the Gaza Strip, but will not lift the blockade. It requires Israel to end its assault on the Strip, and Palestinian militants to stop firing rockets at southern Israel, but it leaves Gaza as miserable as ever: according to a recent UN report, the Strip will be ‘uninhabitable’ by 2020. And this is to speak only of Gaza. How easily one is made to forget that Gaza is only a part – a very brutalised part – of the ‘future Palestinian state’ that once seemed inevitable, and which now seems to exist mainly in the lullabies of Western peace processors. None of the core issues of the Israel-Palestine conflict – the Occupation, borders, water rights, repatriation and compensation of refugees – is addressed by this agreement.
The fighting will erupt again, because Hamas will come under continued pressure from its members and from other militant factions, and because Israel has never needed much pretext to go to war. In 1982, it broke its ceasefire with Arafat’s PLO and invaded Lebanon, citing the attempted assassination of its ambassador to London, even though the attack was the work of Arafat’s sworn enemy, the Iraqi agent Abu Nidal. In 1996, during a period of relative calm, it assassinated Hamas’s bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash, the ‘Engineer’, leading Hamas to strike back with a wave of suicide attacks in Israeli cities. When, a year later, Hamas proposed a thirty-year hudna, or truce, Binyamin Netanyahu dispatched a team of Mossad agents to poison the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman; under pressure from Jordan and the US, Israel was forced to provide the antidote, and Meshaal is now the head of Hamas’s political bureau – and an ally of Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi.
Operation Pillar of Defence, Israel’s latest war, began just as Hamas was cobbling together an agreement for a long-term ceasefire. Its military commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, was assassinated only hours after he reviewed the draft proposal. Netanyahu and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, could have had a ceasefire – probably on more favourable terms – without the deaths of more than 160 Palestinians and five Israelis, but then they would have missed a chance to test their new missile defence shield, Iron Dome, whose performance was Israel’s main success in the war. They would also have missed a chance to remind the people of Gaza of their weakness in the face of Israeli military might. The destruction in Gaza was less extensive than it had been in Operation Cast Lead, but on this occasion too the aim, as Gilad Sharon, Ariel’s son, put it in the Jerusalem Post, was to send out ‘a Tarzan-like cry that lets the entire jungle know in no uncertain terms just who won, and just who was defeated’.
Victory in war is not measured solely in terms of body counts, however. And the ‘jungle’ – the Israeli word not just for the Palestinians but for the Arabs as a whole – may have the last laugh. Not only did Hamas put up a better fight than it had in the last war, it averted an Israeli ground offensive, won implicit recognition as a legitimate actor from the United States (which helped to broker the talks in Cairo), and achieved concrete gains, above all an end to targeted assassinations and the easing of restrictions on the movement of people and the transfer of goods at the crossings. [Continue reading…]
Patrick Cockburn writes: No sooner was Israel’s bombardment of Gaza over than Israeli and US officials started to ratchet up the prospects of an Israeli air attack on Iran in the next few months.
This is scarcely surprising. The threat has served Tel Aviv and Washington well in the past because it enabled them to persuade the rest of the world to impose swingeing sanctions on Iran as the only alternative to war. Even so, claims that a final confrontation with Iran is only months away are looking a bit dog-eared, given that this must be one of the most frequently postponed wars in history.
Within hours of the ceasefire being announced, anonymous Israeli and American sources were claiming that the air strikes on Gaza were a dry run for an assault on Iran. Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, compared what happened in Gaza this month to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. He said that “in the Cuban missile crisis, the US was not confronting Cuba, but rather the Soviet Union. In Operation Pillar of Defence [Israel’s name for its Gaza operation] Israel was not confronting Gaza, but Iran.”
This flatters the Iranians who, at best, are only a regional power and nowhere near a superpower like the old Soviet Union. And even as a regional power it is in retreat as its main ally in the Arab world, Syria, collapses into civil war. The backers of Hamas in Gaza these days are not Iran and Syria but a powerful array of Sunni states including Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Tunisia and others. [Continue reading…]
The Ma’an News Agency reports: The Hamas government in the Gaza Strip on Sunday indicated they would free prisoners affiliated to their West Bank rivals Fatah, giving further momentum to reconciliation efforts since the Israeli war on the coastal enclave.
Government spokesman Taher al-Nunu said the government would grant an amnesty to all suspects and prisoners related to its conflict with Fatah in 2006.
The government will set up a committee to implement this measure, he said.
Al-Nunu said the government decided to leave the period of the division behind them out of respect for national unity.
The parties fought bitterly after Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006, splitting into separate governments in Gaza and the West Bank a year later.
Reconciliation talks have repeatedly stumbled, but Israel’s eight-day war on the Gaza Strip which ended Wednesday gave political impetus to ending the division. [Continue reading…]
Issandr El Amrani writes: There is a legend about how Alexander the Great solved an intractable problem he came across during his conquests. An ox cart in the ancient kingdom of Phrygia (in today’s Anatolia) had been attached by a knot to a post by Zeus. The man who could untie the knot, an oracle had prophesied, would have the approval of the gods to rule. When Alexander arrived in Phrygia, like previous would-be conquerors, he struggled to untie it. His solution, ultimately, was to draw his sword and cut the rope.
This parable is alternatively interpreted as being about ingenuity and thinking outside the box, or as an argument that might makes right. This is also the debate now raging in Egypt after President Mohammed Morsi, in an extraordinary executive decree, took the right to rule without constraints.
Mr Morsi and his supporters – mostly Islamists – argue that the step was a necessary solution given an intractable problem: Egypt’s transition has languished far too long, hostage to politicking and the whims of an unreformed judiciary hostile to the new president.
The courts’ power to cancel the results of elections, like June’s disbanding of the lower house of parliament, or possibly dissolve the assembly now drafting a new constitution, was too disruptive to restoring normality and order in a country that sorely needs to move forward.
The presidential decree announced on Thursday evening also offered some welcome moves. The deadline for the writing of the constitution has been extended by two months, offering an opportunity for the third of the constituent assembly’s members who walked out last week to return and negotiate. Mr Morsi has also appointed a new public prosecutor, replacing an unpopular official he had tried to sack last month, and ordered retrials in cases of police violence in the 2011 uprising, including the case of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.
The decree was preceded by cryptic leaks to the press that Mr Morsi would be taking bold measures. The Muslim Brotherhood dispatched its cadres to hold a demonstration at the Cairo High Court – a stand-in for the judiciary – and rumours spiralled as to what Mr Morsi might do. In the local and international press, praise was lavished on him for his handling of the Gaza crisis and his reconciliation with a US president who only two months ago was unwilling to describe the new Egypt as an ally.
Mr Morsi’s administration may have been in trouble over its handling of various issues, from the constitutional debate to transport disasters, but personally Mr Morsi was on top of the world. This, it was expected, would have been his chance to pivot from a foreign-policy success and break the deadlock in Egypt’s domestic politics.
Reuters adds: Egyptian share prices plunged on Sunday, with the main market index falling by nearly 10 percent in the first trading session since President Mohamed Mursi ignited a political crisis by expanding his powers.
The price falls were the biggest since March 2011, when the market reopened after the popular uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak, with the EGX30 index down 9.45 percent by 0945 GMT.
“We’re not the same Egypt. Investors know that Mursi’s decisions will not be accepted and that there will be clashes on the street,” said Osama Mourad of Arab Financial Brokerage.
Reuters reports: Syria’s new opposition leaders are struggling to win over powerful Islamist rebel combat units, whose radical elements question whether the “hotel warriors” of the fledgling coalition can offer their fighters any real support.
Islamists have established themselves as the most effective, best armed and fastest growing units in the 20-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
Many of them are wary of the National Coalition for Syrian Opposition and Revolutionary Forces, set up earlier this month in an attempt to unify Assad’s fractured opponents and win greater international support.
“They are the hotel warriors, we are the men in the trenches. No one should be allowed to marginalize us, politically or militarily. These coalitions are just fighting over us and not for us,” said Yassir al-Karaz, a leader in the rebel Tawheed Brigade in northern Aleppo province.
Most rebels are conservative but politically moderate and willing to work with diverse opposition groups. But they were left to their own devices for months in an uprising they dubbed an “orphan revolution” and the challenge to bring them into the fold is made bigger by the rising role of radicals, including al Qaeda-style fighters in Syria.
The problem for the new coalition is maintaining the backing of this crucial bloc of Syrian fighters on the ground while bolstering support from Western powers wary of funding a movement that may be linked to extremist groups.
While the coalition has won formal recognition from Turkey, France, Britain and Gulf Arab states, the response from many Islamist fighters has been skeptical or downright dismissive.
“We are with the coalition – for now. We want to see what it is going to do for us,” said a fighter from one of the biggest Islamist brigades in the capital Damascus.
“It is known that we want weapons, we want a no-fly zone. Can it do that? We will see. We are not going to wait forever. With or without them, we are fighting and we are going to win.” [Continue reading…]
Christian Science Monitor reports: Syrian opposition fighters have long decried their lack of anti-aircraft weapons and called on the international community to arm them with something that can counter the the Syrian regime’s military’s jets and helicopters. Such support has yet to come – and there are few indicators that it will arrive anytime soon.
Still, those in the Free Syrian Army fighting for control of Aleppo province say that they’re making some progress in the battle for the skies. Using truck-mounted, DShK heavy machine guns, more commonly referred to as dushkas, FSA fighters say that they’ve managed to establish anti-air defenses capable of challenging jets.
Dushkas are one of the more difficult weapons for FSA fighters to acquire and in almost all cases must be captured from the regime forces or brought over by defectors. The anti-air defense network has grown slowly over the last several months, but many now say it’s reached a point where it can effectively challenge airplanes and helicopters.
“We control 70 percent of the sky, because if you compare the situation now to two months ago there are a lot less airplanes,” says Khlief Abu Allah, a dushka gunner who worked in an anti-aircraft unit in the Syrian Army during his obligatory military service before the revolution started.
While airstrikes remain a major threat in Aleppo, residents and FSA fighters say there’s been a noticeable drop in the number of attacks in recent weeks. [Continue reading…]
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