Lessons from a Decade of Conflict

Looking back at the last ten years, it is tempting to wonder if the world has not learned anything at all about conflict and conflict resolution in that time.

Afghanistan may have been a war of necessity after 9/11, but the international community continues to under-value the need for functioning government institutions to deliver services and justice free from corruption, and consequently the insurgency is now stronger than ever. Pakistan, where millions of people have been displaced by militancy and counter-terrorism activities, enjoys no more stability than ten years ago. Iraq, a thoroughly avoidable war justified through a political abuse of the memory of 9/11, took the lives of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,400 US military, far more Americans than were killed on that fateful day in September 2001.

In monetary terms, these wars alone have cost trillions of US dollars and played no small part in the crippling government debt crisis in America today.

Equally worryingly, universal values took a serious hit over the past decade. We witnessed extrajudicial renditions and imprisonment at the hands of Western governments supposedly dedicated to universal human rights. Even worse, torture became an issue of public debate rather than a moral red line.

Sri Lanka's Killing Fields (Channel 4)

Last night, Channel 4 in the UK aired a chilling program on the final days of Sri Lanka’s long civil war, and thankfully, they have made it available for viewing worldwide for the next few days.

"Sri Lanka's Killing Fields" is disturbing. It is revolting. It is horrific. It is also without question one of the best pieces of television journalism on conflict I have ever seen. And I’ve seen a fair bit over the years.

Friends, Followers and Policy Makers

Social Media and High-Level Advocacy in International Affairs

Facebook and Twitter are impacting even the last bastion of the traditional power establishment, the world of international affairs and diplomacy. This is not simply the wishful thinking of some new media guru a few years ahead of the curve. I'm not dreaming about the future; I'm looking at real numbers today. And no, I don't mean the counts of those who have signed up to ambassador X or Y's stream of fairly dull Tweets. "Followers" is vanity, web stats are sanity.

The specific example I'll use to prove my case comes from the International Crisis Group's recent work on Libya, but really I could use just about anything current, as we've had identical lessons from other cases, ever more so as time goes on. The following represents a trend we've seen building over the last two years.

Congratulations, Mr Karimov!

I wrote this piece for the European Voice on 17 January 2011, just before the visit of Uzbek President Islam Karimov to Brussels. It deals with a serious subject, of course, but I have to admit I greatly enjoyed writing it in this sardonic tone. The article got a lot of attention (for a piece about Uzbekistan), and I was particularly happy to receive emails from inside the country from people who had heard it translated and broadcast via shortwave.

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On the eve of your first official visit to Brussels in years, President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, you deserve high praise. You have played the long game expertly and outmanoeuvred European foreign-policy makers so deftly that you have become a model of how to shrug off international pariah status.

Any old authoritarian ruler can dismiss UN reports of “systematic” torture in police custody and human-rights groups' long lists of political prisoners. But you managed to overcome so much more and win yourself a welcoming reception by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, which is far more than the average tin-pot dictator from, say, Africa or Belarus ever gets.

Worrying about Wikileaks

I originally wrote this for my blog at Reuters AlertNet, where it ran on 3 December 2010.

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With the number of pages of media commentary about WikiLeaks now possibly exceeding the original 250,000 cables in question, we seem to have almost every possible angle in play. Still, amid all the chatter, one consideration is missing.

Thoughts on the leaked cables themselves have been a mix of amusement, embarrassment, boredom and excitement. Opinions of Julian Assange and his actions have ranged from simplistic tributes to primitive calls for his assassination.

With Media Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

I posted this on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 10 September 2010, following a Florida-based pastor's threats to burn a copy of the Koran. The whole thing was a downward spiral of stupidity: the hateful ignorance of a book-burner, the lunacy of the world media for giving Terry Jones any attention at all, and then, six months later when the act finally happened, the mob violence that killed several UN workers in Afghanistan in some bizarrely conceived retaliation. Altogether, you might call it one of humanity's more embarrassing moments of recent years... But while you may not expect any different from religious extremists, it was the role of the world media that most shocked me. I received some criticism for attacking the media response like this, but I stand by the argument in full: news outlets have power and therefore responsibility.

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Looking at the dismal output of the international media in recent days, the only thing one can say is, shame on the lot of you.

The international media has elevated a non-entity lunatic to the heights of worldwide stardom in nanoseconds. Someone with a near-zero base of public support who wants to upset as many people as possible has been given multiple tribunes from which to incite hate and possibly violence.

Every even moderately sane public figure has spoken out against the preacher's intentions -- and with the media pushing the story at full bore, this has meant top-level political leaders, who presumably have better things to do, having to waste time damning the obviously damnable. Are they now expected to do this for every nutter who raises his head?

About the only public figures who didn't take this clear and sensible stand were the editors in newsrooms around the world. Why didn't they dismiss this story out of hand like most of the world managed to?

"But it was a story, so we had to cover it", will be the reply.

Nonsense. You made it a story.

Dining with al-Qaeda

I penned this book review for my Reuters AlertNet blog on 28 May 2010.

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Let’s start with full disclosure: I work with the author of this book. So, yes, I’m likely to say good things about it.

But, to be honest, I would anyway, because what my colleague Hugh Pope has done in Dining with al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East, is at once revealing, convincing and, um, sort of fun.

The first two adjectives won’t surprise anyone who knows Hugh or who is familiar with the reputation he earned for serious reporting from the Middle East over decades. The third, well, let’s save that for now...

PAX: A New Idea in Conflict Prevention?

Another blog post I wrote for Reuters AlertNet, this 24 May 2010 piece describes a project with some fascinating potential. I've been loosely involved with them as a kind of advisor ever since.

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I had a fascinating meeting at Google in London this morning. Attended by some very senior journalists, former top-level government officials, and representatives of NGOs, universities, and think tanks, the three- or four-hour session looked at a proposal for a new way to approach conflict prevention.

Called "PAX", the idea is to gather SMS, images and video from the general public in areas of conflict (in the style of FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi), and combine that with satellite imagery to form a massive open database that could be accessed to help pressure key governments and others into preventative action.

HIV/AIDS Foundation Working with a Regime That Locks Up AIDS Activists?

This post originally appeared on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 16 May 2010, and it was then updated a couple times.

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On 10 May, the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) was one of many organisations that signed a public letter to US and UN officials protesting the Uzbek government's wrongful imprisonment of Maksim Popov, an HIV prevention educator, psychologist, and director of a small NGO in Uzbekistan. As is typical for this oppressive regime in its approach to any independent activity whatsover, Popov was sentenced to seven years imprisonment as a result of his HIV prevention efforts.

Strange then that amfAR is organising the high-profile Cinema Against AIDS 2010 next week with event co-chair "H.E. Amb. Gulnara Karimova" -- ie, the daughter of the Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov and currently Uzbekistan's ambassador to Spain. Karimova's name disappeared from the amfAR web page for Cinema Against AIDS 2010 for a short time -- perhaps in response to contacts by other organisations who signed the letter -- but it is somewhat strangely back again.

Forgetting a Massacre

This short piece appeared on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 12 May 2010.

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Tomorrow, 13 May, marks the fifth anniversary of the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan, when state security forces opened fire on mass demonstrations, killing some 750 civilians. The regime in Tashkent would like everyone to forget about it, of course, and they spent a long time after the event hunting down witnesses and threatening them and their families into signing false confessions in a series of show trials.

The EU's record shows they are willing to forget, dropping sanctions over the years without any of their initial criteria being met, including the call for an independent investigation into Andijan.

The High Price of Five Years of Forgetting

This article appeared in the European Voice on 29 April 2010.

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"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting". Milan Kundera's words should haunt Europe on 13 May. The fifth anniversary of the massacre in Andijan, a town in eastern Uzbekistan, ought to remind decision-makers, particularly those in Berlin, how the EU first raised the hopes of the victims, and then dashed them.

Today's Unknown Dissidents

I originally wrote this for my Reuters AlertNet blog on 28 April 2010.

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In the Boston Globe today, columnist Jeff Jacoby asks an interesting question: "Why aren't democratic dissidents as well-known in the free world today as the dissidents who challenged the Soviet empire were in the 1970s and 1980s?" But the answers offered only go part of the way to explaining the phenomenon.

Inevitably, the issue arises of competition for space online: in a 72-zillion-Tweets-per-minute world, today's dissidents "struggle to be heard". It sounds a reasonable argument at first, but it quickly breaks down under analysis.

Somalia: No-win Military Scenario Leaves Engagement as Only Option

This piece was published in The National on 22 December 2009.

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At the beginning of this year, Somalia was experiencing a rare moment of optimism. The desperate country looked as if it might just start to turn itself around. The disastrous Ethiopian invasion and two-year occupation were ending, and the new president of the transitional federal government, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, had broad Somali and international support. The hope was that he would be able to form coalitions with other moderate Islamists and isolate the extremist al Shabaab elements.

Now, at the end of the same year, all traces of optimism are gone. The civil war is increasingly brutal and destructive. Almost half of the population, 3.6 million people, are dependent on food aid, and half a million refugees are scattered across the Horn of Africa.

Never Again? What the Holocaust can't teach us about modern-day genocide

After a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, I wrote this piece for Foreign Policy on 2 December 2009.

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It was cold, misty, and miserably wet the day we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, but no one wished for better weather. My companions -- mostly mid-level diplomats from more than a dozen countries around the world -- all seemed to agree that sunshine would have been almost offensive. We had come to this corner of Poland as part of a weeklong seminar on preventing genocide, which included such outings so that the participants could learn more about the details of the Holocaust. And yet, I wondered if this field trip was having its desired effect.

Sex and War

This is a book review I originally wrote for my blog at Reuters AlertNet on 16 September 2009, which also appeared in much shorter form in the European Voice.

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Biology is not destiny. But it sure explains a whole lot of human activity, as Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden describe in their book, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World (Benbella Books, 2008), which I strongly feel is a must read for anyone dealing with conflict prevention and resolution today.

Chimpanzees, our closest cousins, share more than 98 per cent of our DNA, and many of our social, and antisocial, behaviours. Most disturbingly, we are perhaps the only two species that deliberately torture and kill their own kind. The evolutionary success of genes that enhance team aggression by small groups of males on others, both male and female, have bequeathed both species' descendants a dark side.