Warming waters may lead to unprecedented biodiversity shifts across world’s oceans

Climate Central reports: The world’s oceans could face a massive reshuffling by the end of the century – the likes of which hasn’t been seen in as many as 3 million years – due to warming waters.

Changes are already afoot in the oceans. Roughly 93 percent of the heat trapped by human greenhouse gas emissions is ending up in the world’s seas and already contributing to changes from slowing plankton growth to recent incursions of tuna near Alaska, thousands of miles from their normal range.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue to build, that heat could create wholesale changes for the vast majority of the world’s oceans (which, of course, make up the vast majority of the world).

The findings come from a new study published in Nature Climate Change, which looks at future climate projections and the distant past when 60-foot sharks prowled the oceans, sea levels were 100 feet higher and the globe was about 11°F hotter. Oh, and humans weren’t around, either. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqis recount their lives under the ISIS: Cheap food, endless rules

McClatchy reports: There are few signs of life in central Ramadi, the Islamic State’s latest prize in the vast western badlands of Iraq.

Photos and videos posted on the Internet show battle-scarred streets littered with rubble and blood-stained clothing, but devoid of inhabitants. Many once-vibrant commercial districts are shuttered or in ruins from airstrikes. The black flag of the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, flutters atop what’s left of public buildings.

But the images of Ramadi that have emerged since it fell to the Islamic State don’t tell the whole story. Quietly, quickly, the jihadists also are working to provide fuel for heavy generators, ordered shopkeepers to reopen, and have begun demolishing old checkpoints to make it easier to get around the city, according to telephone interviews with residents.

The Sunni Muslim extremist group appears to be following the same blueprint as it has in other conquered parts of Anbar province: seize territory, execute “apostates” and “traitors” in a bloodbath, and then reassure terrified civilians by producing goods and services that surpass those provided by the Shiite Muslim-led government in Baghdad.

Even the photos the Islamic State approved for release served that goal – displaced homeowners rejoiced when they spotted their houses intact, waiting for them if they’d only return and submit to the medieval rules of the self-proclaimed caliphate.

For many, that’s hardly an inviting option, and not just because of the group’s totalitarian control over virtually every aspect of life. There are also U.S. planes overhead and a counteroffensive promised by the fearsome Shiite militias that have stepped in for the overwhelmed Iraqi military.

But other options aren’t much more appealing. Anbar residents can gamble on fleeing to contested towns that are under the fragile hold of anti-Islamic State tribes. Or they can strike out for Baghdad, which might as well be the capital of another country, because Shiite authorities have instituted heavy restrictions on Sunni families wanting to enter the capital. [Continue reading…]

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Washington insists Syrian rebels receiving U.S. support must not use weapons against Assad regime

Michael Weiss reports: A centerpiece of the U.S. war plan against ISIS is in danger of collapsing. A key rebel commander and his men are ready to ready to pull out in frustration of the U.S. program to train a rebel army to beat back the terror group in Syria, The Daily Beast has learned.

The news comes as ISIS is marching on the suburbs of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. Rebels currently fighting the jihadists there told The Daily Beast that the U.S.-led coalition isn’t even bothering to respond to their calls for airstrikes to stop the jihadist army.

Mustapha Sejari, one of the rebels already approved for the U.S. training program, told The Daily Beast that he and his 1,000 men are on the verge of withdrawing from the program. The issue: the American government’s demand that the rebels can’t use any of their newfound battlefield prowess or U.S.-provided weaponry against the army of Bashar al-Assad or any of its manifold proxies and allies, which include Iranian-built militias such as Lebanese Hezbollah. They must only fight ISIS, Washington insists.

“We submitted the names of 1,000 fighters for the program, but then we got this request to promise not to use any of our training against Assad,” Sejari, a founding member of the Revolutionary Command Council, said. “It was a Department of Defense liaison officer who relayed this condition to us orally, saying we’d have to sign a form. He told us, ‘We got this money from Congress for a program to fight ISIS only.’ This reason was not convincing for me. So we said no.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS captured 2,300 Humvee armoured vehicles from Iraqi forces in Mosul

AFP: Iraqi security forces lost 2,300 Humvee armoured vehicles when the Islamic State jihadist group overran the northern city of Mosul, the prime minister Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday.

“In the collapse of Mosul, we lost a lot of weapons,” Abadi said in an interview with Iraqiya state TV. “We lost 2,300 Humvees in Mosul alone.”

While the exact price of the vehicles varies depending on how they are armoured and equipped, it is clearly a hugely expensive loss that has boosted Isis’s capabilities.

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The Northern Bald Ibis is extinct in the Middle East — but we can’t blame it on ISIS

Northern-Bald-Ibis

Gianluca Serra writes: A few days ago the BBC reported that the capture of Palmyra by Islamic State (IS) threatens to propel the oriental population of Northern Bald Ibis (Geronticus eremita) into extinction. Sadly they are wrong – because sadly this iconic and unique population already went extinct in Syria a few months ago.

The Northern Bald Ibis vanished from the wild as a breeding species due to known threats along the migratory route, including hunting and habitat degradation. One of our tagged birds, named Julia, was shot in northern Saudi Arabia in 2009.

Three birds, including Zenobia, had been observed at the wintering site in Ethiopia during winter 2013-14, but only she came back to Palmyra in spring 2014, alone for the second year in a row. That made 2014 the last year she was seen at the Palmyra breeding site.

So this year, for the first time in millennia the Bedouin nomads of the Palmyra desert saw no Northern Bald Ibis in late February, at the beginning of the spring, as I was informed by my contacts in Palmyra. The bearded and black-clothed extremists were only the unaware funereal witnesses of the ibis’s absence. [Continue reading…]

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The diplomatic repercussions of John Kerry’s broken leg

The official response to news that Secretary of State John Kerry broke his leg in France on Sunday is: business as usual.

“The secretary continues to be in great spirits and active,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “He has done a range of phone calls including with the president.”

Buried at the end of an AP report comes this:

The prospect of a lengthy rehabilitation could hamper the nuclear talks [with Iran] and other diplomatic endeavors. Even if Kerry does not need surgery, it was not immediately known when he could fly again after returning to the United States.

Kerry has been the lead negotiator in several marathon sessions with Iran going back to 2013.

And Kerry’s injury comes just days after this news:

President Obama’s chief negotiator with Iran, Wendy R. Sherman, said on Wednesday that she planned to leave the administration shortly after the June 30 deadline for a final deal on limiting the country’s nuclear program.

“It’s been two long years,” Ms. Sherman, the under secretary of state for policy, said in her office on Wednesday. With her departure, all the top officials who have negotiated with Iran over those two years will have left the administration, leaving questions about who will coordinate the complex process of carrying out a deal if one is struck by the deadline.

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Can Turkey survive Erdoğan?

Graham E. Fuller writes: On 7 June Turkey’s democratic system will be deeply tested in a fateful parliamentary election; at stake is preservation of rule of law and liberal democracy against an increasingly authoritarian-minded President.

Bottom line: if President Erdoğan’s AKP party is able to win big, the entire system of separation of powers in Turkey will likely reach breaking point. Erdoğan will have gained the carte blanche he seeks to mold, shape and steer the state any direction he wants in a semi-legal form of one man rule. And this comes at a time when his presidency has become ever more erratic, arbitrary, error-prone, corrupt, vengeful and out of touch.

I find it surprising to be writing this. My book published one year ago, “Turkey and the Arab Spring: Leadership in the Middle East,” examined the extraordinary first decade of the AKP party in Turkey under Prime Minister Erdoğan’s leadership. Up until 2011 it may have been the best government Turkey has ever had since it adopted democratic rule in the 1950s. Erdoğan’s successes can be measured in terms of deeper democratization, astonishing economic growth and prosperity, expansion of social services, the successful removal of the military from politics, the forging of an expansive and visionary foreign policy (with new emphasis on independence from failing US policies in the Middle East), and a modern reconsideration of what an Islamic-leaning government can mean in a democratic order. At that time Turkey became the preeminent model of success for a region that possessed little leadership, vision or progress.

A great degree of the credit for Turkey’s foreign policy successes — a huge expansion of the range of Turkish ties, interests and outreach — belongs to Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, the chief architect of these policies. Under Erdoğan’s AKP Turkey underwent profound, and, I argue, irreversible change in reinventing itself as a major regional power extending its activities and interactions across all of Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa and even into Latin America. Turkey accepted and normalized its Islamic heritage. The AKP had won three successive elections with growing proportion of votes each time — unprecedented in Turkish political history due to broad public satisfaction with the party’s accomplishments.

But it was not to last. After ten years in power, few governments anywhere can remain immune from corruption. [Continue reading…]

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New dawn of freedom in America

The day millions of Americans have been eagerly awaiting — they can once again enjoy their lost freedoms:

The New York Times reports: For the first time since the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans will again be free to place phone calls — to friends, lovers, business associates, political groups, doctors and pizza restaurants — without having logs of those contacts vacuumed up in bulk by the National Security Agency.

And for the first time in nearly 14 years, if government agents identify new phone numbers that they suspect are linked to terrorism, they will have to subpoena phone companies for associated calling records and wait for the response to see if anyone in the United States has been in contact with that number. The N.S.A. can no longer simply query its database for the information.

This unusual situation may last only a few days, until Congress can reach an accommodation over three counterterrorism laws that expired at 12:01 a.m. Monday.

Nonetheless, the fact that Congress allowed the laws to lapse — the most important of them is the purported legal basis for the bulk records collection program — is an extraordinary moment in the story of the tensions between post-9/11 policies and privacy rights. It has led to heated warnings in the political realm about exposing the country to heightened risk of attack.

A few hours before the Senate convened on Sunday, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, warned on the CBS program “Face the Nation” that if lawmakers let those laws lapse, the F.B.I. would “not have the ability then to track these various elements that we are looking at who are trying to carry out attacks here in the homeland.”

But interviews with law enforcement and intelligence officials about what they will do in the interim suggest there are multiple workarounds to the gap.

One of the expired laws permitted wiretap orders of “lone wolf” terrorism suspects who are not part of a foreign group, a provision that has apparently never been used. A second permitted “roving” wiretap orders that follow suspects who change phones, a provision that apparently has been used only rarely.

The third permitted court orders requiring businesses to turn over records that are relevant to a national security investigation, the provision known as Section 215 of the Patriot Act. In addition to the bulk phone records program, the F.B.I. used Section 215 about 160 times last year to obtain particular business records, like suspects’ Internet activity logs.

All three of the expired laws contained a so-called grandfather clause that permits their authority to continue indefinitely for any investigation that had begun before June 1.

Law enforcement officials have made it clear that the F.B.I. has long-running, open-ended “enterprise” investigations into groups that pose a threat to public safety, like Al Qaeda. A senior intelligence official recently told The New York Times that the administration was open to invoking the grandfather clause to get the records if a need arose during any lapse. [Continue reading…]

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Barbara Myers: The unknown whistleblower

Rambo! In my Reagan-era youth, the name was synonymous with the Vietnam War — at least the Vietnam War reimagined, the celluloid fantasy version of it in which a tanned, glistening, muscle-bound commando busted the handcuffs of defeat and redeemed America’s honor in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Untold millions including the Gipper himself, an inveterate Vietnam revisionist, were enraptured.

Many years later, studying war crimes in Vietnam, I would come across a real Rambo — or maybe you’d call him an anti-Rambo. To the best of my knowledge, this Rambo didn’t fire a machine gun one-handed or use explosive-tipped arrows. But his work was a powder keg with a short fuse and his conscience a bright flame. While conducting research for a Pentagon-funded project on refugees, A. Terry Rambo turned up evidence that South Korean troops, functionally serving as America’s mercenaries in Vietnam, had massacred a large number of civilians. That Rambo “presented the findings” to, he said, “a whole slew of colonels — 10 or 12” of them. He thought the American brass would take action. Instead, a U.S. officer instructed him to leave that information out of his report. “I told [the officer] as a civilian I didn’t feel myself bound by [U.S. military] orders and that I was going to submit a report on it.” Rambo eventually went public with the story.

He was far from alone.

The criminality, the madness of the Vietnam War seemed to compel many to act in similar ways even when it put them at great peril, threatened to upend their lives, sink their careers, and leave them at odds with their families. Many took to the streets; many who knew secrets spilled them; and the phenomenon spread. It became a golden age of whistleblowing: veterans exposing U.S. atrocities, civilians exposing FBI dirty tricks and domestic surveillance, governmentofficials exposing White House crimes and NSA spying. Truth-telling seemed to be in the air. And, of course, a former Pentagon analyst and employee of the military-funded RAND Corporation, Daniel Ellsberg, rocked the world with his exposure of the U.S. military’s secret history of the Vietnam War — known as the Pentagon Papers — laying bare decades of lies foisted upon Congress and the American people. Today, in another great age of whistleblowers, only Ellsberg’s name remains.

The real Rambo, Ron Ridenhour, Jamie Henry, Perry Fellwock, Peter Buxtun, and so many others are known only to a tiny minority. In 1970, A. Terry Rambo told the New York Times that he had heard about a RAND study that also found evidence of South Korean atrocities. A RAND spokesman said they had turned up “rumors about Korean troop behavior… but since they did not involve RAND research, we can only regard them as hearsay.” Decades later — no thanks to RAND — it’s well-documented that South Korean forces slaughtered large numbers of Vietnamese civilians. It might never have been so if the real Rambo hadn’t had the courage to come forward.

Without whistleblowers, citizens are at the mercy of massaged truths and fine-crafted fictions spun by officials who prefer shadows to sunlight. If you can imagine a world in which the Pentagon Papers were never leaked, in which the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office by President Nixon’s “Plumbers” was never uncovered, in which decades of blood-soaked lies were kept secret from the American people, then you can imagine a world in which the late Anthony Russo, another former RAND analyst and whistleblower in danger of evaporating into history’s mists, never had a crisis of conscience.

Today, Russo has been reduced to a footnote and his shining accomplishment assumed to be, as he put it, as a “Xerox aide” to Ellsberg, a man who did little more than help physically copy documents. As Barbara Myers writes in her inaugural (and epic) TomDispatch piece, Russo was far more instrumental in the leaking of the Pentagon Papers than most know — and that may have been only his second most important act of whistleblowing. With news of a final Rambofilm starring Stallone on the horizon, the time seems ripe to remember the real Rambos and Russos who took great risks to tell hard truths, exposing misery, malfeasance, and murder that the powerful would rather have kept hidden. Nick Turse

The other conspirator
The secret origins of the CIA’s torture program and the forgotten man who tried to expose it
By Barbara Myers

The witness reported men being hung by the feet or the thumbs, waterboarded, given electric shocks to the genitals, and suffering from extended solitary confinement in what he said were indescribably inhumane conditions. It’s the sort of description that might have come right out of the executive summary of the Senate torture report released last December. In this case, however, the testimony was not about a “black site” somewhere in the Greater Middle East, nor was it a description from Abu Ghraib, nor in fact from this century at all.

The testimony came from Vietnam; the year was 1968; the witness was Anthony J. Russo, one of the first Americans to report on the systematic torture of enemy combatants by CIA operatives and other U.S. agents in that long-gone war. The acts Russo described became commonplace in the news post-9/11 and he would prove to be an early example of what also became commonplace in our century: a whistleblower who found himself on the wrong side of the law and so was prosecuted for releasing the secret truth about the acts of our government.

Determined to shine a light on what he called “the truth held prisoner,” Russo blew the whistle on American torture policy in Vietnam and on an intelligence debacle at the center of Vietnam decision-making that helped turn that war into the nightmare it was. Neither of his revelations saw the light of day in his own time or ours and while Daniel Ellsberg, his compatriot and companion in revelation, remains a major figure for his role in releasing the Pentagon Papers, Russo is a forgotten man.

That’s too bad. He shouldn’t be forgotten. His is, unfortunately, a story of our times as well as his.

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The neuroscience of a sense of place

Rick Paulas writes: Comedian Eddie Pepitone once said — and I’m paraphrasing here — that there are no great neighborhoods in Los Angeles, only great blocks. The stretch of Echo Park on Sunset Boulevard between Glendale and Logan is one. The establishments on that short stretch include an upscale wine bar, a hipster concert venue, a vegan restaurant, a deep dish pizza place, cheap thrift stores, not-so-cheap “vintage” stores selling roughly the same stuff, a check-cashing joint, a few fast food chains, and even a supermarket for time travelers.

While it’s not the most diverse cross-section you’ll find in the city, the block can be used as a social barometer when brought up in conversations. Mention the stretch, and whatever landmark the other person’s familiar with tells the tale of the socioeconomic sphere they inhabit; the landmark that puts a gleam of recognition in the other person’s eye says everything about their story.

Blocks and neighborhoods aren’t concrete concepts that mean the same thing to everyone, unlike, say, things like “apple” or “sky.” Points of reference shift depending on the person that’s using that reference, so blocks/neighborhoods are more like alternate realities laid atop one another, like plastic sheets on an overhead projector. There’s even a phrase for the study of this murky concept: mental maps. They can help us understand why some neighborhoods thrive, others die, and how changes are made.

The theory of mental (or cognitive) maps was first developed in 1960 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Kevin Lynch in his book The Image of the City. Rather than relying on how cartographers saw a city, Lynch asked residents to draw a map, from memory, depicting how their city was arranged. He found that five elements compose a person’s understanding of where they are: landmarks, paths, edges, districts, and nodes. Landmarks are reference points, paths connect them, edges mark boundaries, and the other elements define larger areas that contain some combination of each of those designations.

Neuroscience backs up Lynch’s findings. In 1971, Jon O’Keefe discovered “place cells” in the hippocampus, neurons that activate when an animal enters an environment. The neurons calculate a current location based on what the animal can see, as well as through “dead reckoning” — that is, accounting based on subconscious calculations using previous positions in the recent past and how quickly it traveled over a stretch of time. In 2005, husband-and-wife team Edvard and May-Britt Moser discovered “grid cells,” neurons that fire in a grid-like pattern to measure distances and direction. O’Keefe and the Mosers all won Nobel Prizes in 2014 for their discoveries. [Continue reading…]

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Norway fund could trigger wave of large fossil fuel divestments, say experts

The Guardian reports: Norway’s decision to dump all coal-focused investments from its $900bn sovereign wealth fund could unleash a wave of divestment from other large funds, according to investment experts. The fund, the largest in the world, is one of the top 10 investors in the global coal industry.

The move, agreed late on Wednesday, is one of the most significant victories to date for a fast-growing and UN-backed fossil-fuel divestment campaign. It will affect $9bn-$10bn (£5.8-£6.5bn) of coal-related investments, according to the Norwegian government.

“Investments in coal companies can have both a climate risk and a future financial risk,” said Svein Flaatten of the governing Conservative party, which made a cross-party agreement to implement the selling of coal investments.

A series of analyses have shown that the world’s existing reserves of fossil fuels are several times greater than can be burned while keeping the temperature below the 2C safety limit agreed by the world’s governments. Furthermore, authorities such as the World Bank and Bank of England have warned that fossil fuel reserves will be left worthless if the action needed to cut carbon emissions kicks in. [Continue reading…]

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Resilient societies in the Middle East are guided by strong women

Jomana Qaddour writes: This decade has revealed the scores of women leading protests in Egypt, insisting on constitutional freedoms in Tunisia, and supporting Syrian families when men have joined armed groups. It has become an unspoken rule in the international aid and policy community that resilient societies in the Middle East are guided by strong women. The reality is that even if the international community has only just taken notice of Middle Eastern women and their capabilities, it does not mean those women have been absent. On the contrary, women in the Middle East have always been dynamic actors in their communities; and since the Arab Spring women have facilitated significant societal change that has forever altered the region.

My grandmother is an illiterate, petite, 70-year old Syrian woman living on the outskirts of Damascus, yet she is the heart of her family — the lifeline — and what has kept the family together in the midst of a war that has uprooted and displaced over 11 million Syrians. She, like many Syrian women, has planted a garden big enough to feed her extended family, ensuring that they are not dependent on international aid groups to survive. She rushed to seize my uncle from a checkpoint in Damascus — arguing with regime soldiers — moments before the Syrian army shipped him off to Aleppo to fight against the rebels. My maternal aunt is the sole breadwinner in her immediate family, working as an accountant and traveling almost four hours a day to and from work because her family’s survival depends on her. [Continue reading…]

Khaled Hosseini writes: I recently returned from Jordan with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, meeting Syrian refugees and hearing about their experiences. Each encounter reminded me anew of the role of stories, why sometimes they can be more useful than numbers, why we need the tale of a Tom Joad to understand a Great Depression, why Rudyard Kipling said: “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”

Let me introduce you to Khalida, a bespectacled 70-year-old woman with jutting cheekbones and a schoolgirl’s laugh. Before the war, she lived a Syrian mother’s dream, surrounded, loved and supported by her nine grown children. But then war broke out, and Khalida learnt that armed groups were forcing young men to fight for them by threatening to assault and abuse their mothers. Khalida made a painful, and to me, stunning choice. She decided to deny the militants this leverage.

“I didn’t want to be the reason my sons had to fight,” she says, “so I left everything I had.”

She left her children, her home, her city. Alone and illiterate, Khalida tore herself from Syria and now lives on the outskirts of Amman, renting a nearly empty one-room apartment at the bottom of a steep hill.

In this new, tabula rasa existence, she is forced to fend for herself entirely. Her greatest expense is rent, and she pays for it with help from a kind Jordanian woman – though soon Khalida will be receiving help through UNHCR’s cash assistance programme, an initiative targeting the most vulnerable Syrian refugees.

Every day, Khalida climbs steep, battered steps uphill to the main road. She travels to a community centre in Madaba, a 40km trip taking over an hour, requiring her to hitch two car rides and board two buses, where she takes literacy classes in a room full of other Syrian women and young girls.

Khalida is the oldest and most enthusiastic student in the class, because for her, literacy is now an indispensable survival skill. She needs to read street signs, bus destinations, her medication labels. Despite a marked hand tremor, she has diligently filled entire notebooks.

Khalida misses Syria. She misses her home, and most terribly, her children. But she would rather live alone, with nothing, in a foreign country, than go back to Syria and put her sons at risk. [Continue reading…]

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Flight attendant claimed can of Coke could be used as a weapon by Muslim woman

Al Arabiya reports: A Muslim traveler aboard a United Airlines flight was denied an unopened can of diet coke and was told “it’s so you don’t use it as a weapon,” just after handing an unopened can to another passenger.

Tahera Ahmad, 31, director of interfaith engagement and associate chaplain at Northwestern University was travelling Friday from Chicago to Washington when the incident occurred aboard the flight, according to her Facebook post.

Ahmad, who wears an Islamic headscarf or hijab was heading to Washington for a conference on promoting dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian youth.

Ahmad had requested an unopened can of diet coke as a hygienic precaution to which the flight attendant reported responded to by saying “we are unauthorized to give unopened cans to people because they may use it as a weapon on the plane.” [Continue reading…]

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What if no one wins the war in Syria?

Aron Lund writes: Regardless of who is or is not losing the war in Syria, it is safe to say that no one seems to stand any chance of winning it. It is a lazy pattern of thought, but a strong one: wars are always discussed in terms of winners and losers, first shots and capitulations. But what this perspective misses is that many conflicts have no discernible end at all. They simply drag on until readers yawn and reporters leave, and go on to mutate into new forms, settling into spheres of influence and establishing stateless violence as the new normal.

The Syrian war may be one of these conflicts. With half of the population driven from their homes, the economy in irreparable ruin, multisided foreign intervention, and sectarianism at a fever pitch, neither President Bashar al-Assad nor any constellation of rebel groups seems able to put a country called Syria back together again.

At this point, it is almost impossible to envision a realistic and stable (never mind democratic) end state dominated by one of the three major contenders for power in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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How Colombia plans to turn 32,000 ex-jungle-dwelling guerrillas into useful members of society

Jack Aldwinckle reports: A bloody civil war has gripped Colombia for over fifty years. The conflict has pitched left-wing guerrilla groups such as the FARC, right-wing paramilitary groups, and government security forces against one another. Over 220,000 people have been killed and 6.7 million have been officially recognised as victims—most of them civilians. In 2003 president Álvaro Uribe entered negotiations with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the country’s largest paramilitary group, which led to its disbanding. Thirty-six thousand paramilitaries demobilised in the following three years. In 2012 Uribe’s successor, Juan Manuel Santos, began peace negotiations with the FARC, which are continuing in Havana.

Since the reintegration programme started in 2003 57,082 combatants have demobilized (pdf), of whom 47,944 (84%) decided to take part in the reintegration process. Of those, 8,916 people have now graduated from the program, which can take up to six-and-a-half years to complete. 27,451 fighters are currently part of the scheme — attending classes and meetings in the 120 municipalities where the ACR has a presence.

Attention is now focused on Havana, where the Colombian government is locked in fragile peace negotiations with the FARC. An agreement would bring a formal end to the country’s civil war and would vindicate president Santos, who has staked his reputation on the peace process. It would also involve demobilizing up to 32,000 former guerrillas. That presents the ACR with arguably the biggest challenge it has faced. [Continue reading…]

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Thanassis Cambanis on Egypt’s unfinished revolution

Cicero Magazine: In your new book, Once Upon a Revolution, you tell a well-known story from a previously unexplored perspective—that of the revolutionaries themselves, before, during, and after Tahrir Square. Why did you choose that approach?

Thanassis Cambanis: I wanted to follow the progress of the idealistic project at the heart of the January 25 Revolution: the quest to develop new politics, new ideas, and new, more accountable forms of power. There was a comparatively small group of people who were determined from the start of the uprising to build an enduring political project. I sought out and followed members of this core group as they embarked on what was always a quixotic experiment. Against them were arrayed all the status quo powers—the state, the bureaucracy, the military, the police, the old regime cronies—as well as other regressive but organized forces, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Their story was inherently personal: the unfolding history of an idea as it played out in the struggles of individuals. I believe this story contains much of the potential for transformative change, a change sadly still unrealized in Egypt. We have witnessed remarkable transformations at the individual level, however, and I expect that many of these activists and thinkers will play a role in Egyptian life and politics for decades to come.

What missed opportunities were there to put Egypt on a better path in the first year after Tahrir Square?

Firstly, it’s important to emphasize that revanchist old regime forces defeated the uprising. A concerted campaign to restore military-authoritarian role won out. Even had the revolutionaries made fewer mistakes, or smarter strategic moves, they might well have been foiled by the machinery assembled by Egypt’s new dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—who built his comeback on the scaffolding of military intelligence. [Continue reading…]

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