Point/Counterpoint: "Conflict Minerals Law Will Have No Effect in Eastern DRC" vs "Conflict Minerals Law Will Have Little to No Effect in Eastern DRC"

The Christian Science Monitor's excellent Africa Monitor page currently has posts up from Jason Stearns and Laura Seay on the U.S.'s recently passed conflict minerals legislation.

The CSM post-naming elves (creators of my personal favorite: "Why Somalia would make Afghanistan seem like Mr. Rogers' neighborhood for US troops") have titled these posts:

"Why recent US 'conflict mineral' legislation is a good thing for Africa" (Stearns)

"Why recent US 'conflict minerals' legislation may not help in eastern Congo" (Seay)

It's like a little debate, see?

Except as I see it, the difference between Stearns's and Seay's positions is not where the action on this issue is. Neither of them agrees with the central premise of the conflict minerals campaign, which assumes that competition over control of minerals is a primary driver of the conflict. One of them thinks the legislation might have some marginal positive effect despite being epiphenomenal to the sources of conflict and the other believes it probably won't. Frankly, there's not a lot of daylight between these viewpoints. (Hence the post title homage to the Onion's classic post-9/11 Point/Counterpoint: "We Must Retaliate with Blind Rage" vs. "We Must Retaliate with Measured, Focused Rage.")

The more interesting debate here is the division between the advocacy community, led by Enough, and the expert community. As far as I can tell, Enough has not yet managed to get a single serious researcher of the eastern DRC to sign on to their analysis of the conflict. (Would anyone like to dispute this? I am willing to lower the bar to anybody who has spent more than six weeks straight in the Kivus.)

Stay tuned for Amanda's analysis of the legislation itself...

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WTF Friday, 6/4/10

• Hadley Freeman of the Guardian does a nice job lampooning certain media outlets for giving Madonna credit for the release of the Malawian couple mentioned here. After a lot of soul searching I am finally able to accept that this one isn't satire. And still, as tinarussell pointed out to me, no one can seem to get it right that the couple is not two men, but a man and a transgender woman. A commenter and transgender activist named Natacha had to set Freeman straight.

• Worst/Best sentence of the day: "A founder of the Irish Republic, Eamon de Valera, famously idealized Ireland 70 years ago as an innocent land of saints and scholars, whose villages were joyous with the laughter of happy maidens. If he came back today he would be shocked to find that a village in Ireland is just as likely to contain a brothel, populated by sex slaves from Africa." (Via Feministing)

• So it seems as though the fashion police are working double time in Tehran. The interior minister has spoken of a "chastity plan" and women have been arrested for wearing short coats and even having sun tans. Maybe the "1 Million Shirts guy" can organize some sort of "Coppertone for Iran" initiative.

• Three Namibian women are suing the state for allegedly sterilizing them without their knowledge them because they are HIV positive. "The women say the doctors and nurses should have informed them properly about what was happening." I'd say so.

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Pissed Off By Kristof

Sorry about the light posting lately, folks. My day job is taking up a ton of mental energy these days, as are my attempts to arrange a new day job for when this one ends in September.

I think Nicholas Kristof definitely missed me, because two days ago he dangled this irresistible Amanda-bait on the NY Times Op-Ed page:

There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:

It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

In a pleasing turn of events, Mr. Kristof actually has a legitimate source to cite for this, in addition to his usual anecdotes and photos of Miserable African Children. Well, sort of:

Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found that the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.

File this one under "things that make you go 'hmmm.'" For one thing, Duflo & Banerjee say exactly nothing about spending on prostitution in their article, which makes the last line of that paragraph extremely misleading. (They don't specifically discuss soft drinks, either, but do spend a while discussing sugar and other empty calories, so I suppose I can give him a pass on that.)

And while you're at it, file it under "RYFSM," too. (That would be "Read Your Fucking Source Material.") Kristof seems to have done some awfully targeted reading of the article in question. While it is true that Duflo and Banerjee did find that the poor in many countries spent significant sums on alcohol and tobacco, this is in fact what they had to say about spending on education:

The extremely poor spend very little on education. The expenditure on education generally hovers around 2 percent of household budgets: higher in Pakistan (3 percent), Indonesia (6 percent), and Cote d’Ivoire (6 percent), but much lower in Guatemala (0.1 percent), and South Africa (0.8 percent). [...] This low level of expenditure on education is not because the children are out of school. In 12 of the 13 countries in our sample, with the exception of Cote d’Ivoire, at least 50 percent of both boys and girls aged 7 to 12 in extremely poor households are in school. In about half the countries, the proportion enrolled is greater than 75 percent among girls, and more than 80 percent among boys.

The reason education spending is low is that children in poor households typically attend public schools or other schools that do not charge a fee. In countries where poor households spend more on education, it is typically because government schools have fees, as in Indonesia and Cote d’Ivoire. However, mounting evidence, reported below, suggests that public schools in these countries are often dysfunctional, which could explain why even very poor parents in Pakistan are pulling their children out of public schools and spending money to send them to private schools.

So, not so much the "ubiquitous problem" Kristof describes, then: most poor parents are sending their children to school, and the low education expenditure is at least partly a good sign, because it's the result of free or heavily-subsidized primary education. Kristof is, presumably, in favor of that. Did he stop reading before he got to that paragraph, or what?

Moreover, as xpostfactoid notes, Duflo & Banerjee's study didn't include data from the Congo Republic, from whence Kristof draws this week's Miserable African Child anecdotes. However, if one did want to draw an inference from the article's findings, and if the schools there do all charge fees, as Kristof claims, then the more reasonable inference to draw would be that spending on primary education there is probably higher than the 2% average, and closer to the 6% observed in Cote D'Ivoire and Indonesia. (Not to mention that, if the schools were charging fees when they were supposed to be free, then they were either (a) corrupt, (b) critically under-resourced, or (c) all of the above. None of which are necessarily a good sign with regard to the quality of education on offer there.)

In fact, far from concluding that an exchange of spending on food for spending on education would "transform" children's prospects, Duflo & Banerjee are hardly complimentary about the education available to poor children:

The low quality of teaching in public schools has clear effect on learning levels as well. In India, despite the fact that 93.4 percent of children ages 6–14 are enrolled in schools (75 percent of them in government schools), a recent nationwide survey found that 34.9 percent of the children age 7 to 14 cannot read a simple paragraph at second-grade level (Pratham, 2006). Moreover, 41.1 percent cannot do subtraction, and 65.5 percent cannot do division. Even among children in grades six to eight in government schools, 22 percent cannot read a second-grade text.

In countries where the public provision of education and health services is particularly low, private providers have stepped in. In the parts of India where public school teacher absenteeism is the highest, the fraction of rural children attending private schools is also the highest (Chaudhury, Hammer, Kremer, Muralidharan, and Rogers, 2005). However, these private schools are less than ideal: they have lower teacher absenteeism than the public schools in the same village, but their teachers are significantly less qualified in the sense of having a formal teaching degree.

And, in considering why the poor don't seek out better education for their children:

One reason is that poor parents, who may often be illiterate themselves, may have a hard time recognizing that their children are not learning much. Poor parents in Eastern Uttar Pradesh in India have limited success in predicting whether their school-age children can read (Banerjee et al., 2006). Moreover, how can parents be confident that a private school would offer a better education, given that the teacher there is usually less qualified than the public school teachers? After all, researchers have only discovered this pattern in the last few years. As for putting pressure on the government, it is not clear that the average villager would know how to organize and do so.

Huh. I didn't see anything in there about "maybe if they spent less on booze and hookers," did you?

Kristof doesn't spend much time imagining why people might want to spend money on things like alcohol or tobacco - or cell phone credit, which he mysteriously places in the same category. He clearly assumes that they are luxury items that ought to be cut from the budget. However, I'm not sure that's reasonable. A cell phone might be a luxury here in New York, where residents have myriad other reliable communications systems to choose from. (USPS, land lines, FedEx, Interwebs...) But without knowing why the people he interviewed spend that much on credit each month, I can't begin to speculate about whether it should be considered a luxury, a necessity, or somewhere in between. Likewise, while alcohol and tobacco are not the healthiest of products, how can Kristof be sure that a dollar spent on beer is buying the beer, and not some less-tangible good, like the social standing in the community that comes of buying your friends a drink? And that kind of social standing isn't necessarily a luxury item. Also from the Duflo & Banerjee article:

In principle, social networks can provide informal insurance. For example, Udry (1990) shows that poor villagers in Nigeria experience a dense network of loan exchanges: Over the course of one year, 75 percent of the households had made loans, 65 percent had borrowed money, and 50 percent had been both borrowers and lenders. Almost all of these loans took place between neighbors and relatives. Both the repayment schedule and the amount repaid were affected by both the lender’s and the borrower’s current economic conditions, underlining the role of these informal loans in providing insurance. Munshi and Rosenzweig (2005) argue that the same process happens in India through the jati or subcaste networks.

Gosh, I wonder if access to that sort of informal social insurance is affected by one's relationships with others in the community. Like, perhaps, how often one socializes with others, possibly in contexts that involve buying the occasional beer or cigarette? Or how fully one participates in important festivals, "extravagant" or otherwise? Yeah, you're right. Probably not.

And, finally: how is it acceptable to insist that poor people sacrifice the few small pleasures within their reach in order to comply with a random American journalist's view of what is Really Important? That kind of supercilious morality seems to me to be a particularly judgmental form of cruelty. Color me unimpressed. (Texasinafrica too, apparently.)

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WTF Friday, 4/9/10

• "Let's not be sensational, guys. Let's just go to the statistically hungriest place in the world and take pictures of emaciated babies. Because as Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal say, 'Photogenic starving children are hard to find,' but this has got to increase our odds."

• In case you haven't heard (I know you have), protests resulting in violence have forced Kyrgyzstan President, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, to flee the capital. Because the U.S. apparently has a military base there, the protest seems to have caused many Americans to "hear of" Kyrgyzstan. No word if this has affected American's ability to pronounce Kyrgyzstan, spell Kyrgyzstan, or find Kyrgyzstan on a map. Will follow these stories as they progress.

• Another one bites the dust as the Umma party, one of the main opposition parties in Sudan, has said that it will boycott the upcoming elections. As the Sudan People's Liberation Movement has said it will only contest in the South, this leaves only minor parties to oppose in the North. What gives? Maybe these guys just need some encouraging words from a mock inspirational poster with a catch phrase from a Tim Allen movie from 1999. Got it. I think we can salvage this election, yet.

• Gawker had two good pieces on Kim Jong-Il this past week. One focuses on an LA Times article about a new book by his former personal shopper. The man, Kim Jong Ryul, describes purchasing luxury goods such as Benz's, weapons, and some Star Trek futuristic-type thing called a 'mass spectrometer' that could be used to identify uranium and plutonium, or even the dreaded protomatter. Gawker also highlights some made-up report from Rodong Sinmun, the North Korean Communist newspaper, that the Dear/Supreme/Great Leader's suit is becoming a global fashion trend. Talk about a one-person trend story. Damn, if Gawker keeps running Kim Jong-Il stories through the snark machine, I may be out of an (unpaid) job.

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How Not to Elevate the Political Discourse

Worn down by the constant confusion over whether to castigate your government for being socialist, fascist, or god forbid, Muslim? Consider moving to Zimbabwe, where a simpler dynamic prevails. If you've ever been to the 4th grade, you'll feel right at home.

Last week, the Sunday Mail newspaper (controlled by Robert Mugabe's party, Zanu-PF) published a report that Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC party supports the extension of constitutional rights to gays. Apparently, them's fighting words; the MDC categorically denied the claim and fired back with the rough equivalent of "I know you are, but what am I?"

"For the record, it is well-known that homosexuality is practised in Zanu PF where senior officials from that party have been jailed while others are under police probe on allegations of sodomy. It is in Zanu PF where homosexuality is a religion."

So there you have it. Mugabe's party is totally gay. You heard it here first.

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Jeffrey Gettleman on "Africa's Forever Wars" - Your Thoughts?

I don't want to let Jeffrey Gettleman's article in the latest issue of Foreign Policy, "Africa's Forever Wars: Why the Continent's Conflicts Never End," go by without comment, but I'm having a pretty crazy week, so I'm opening this one to the floor. (That would be you guys, dear readers.)

Points will be awarded for excellence in commenting, on the usual lucky-charms based system.

An excerpt:

"Even if you could coax these men out of their jungle lairs and get them to the negotiating table, there is very little to offer them. They don't want ministries or tracts of land to govern. Their armies are often traumatized children, with experience and skills (if you can call them that) totally unsuited for civilian life. All they want is cash, guns, and a license to rampage. And they've already got all three. How do you negotiate with that?

The short answer is you don't. The only way to stop today's rebels for real is to capture or kill their leaders. Many are uniquely devious characters whose organizations would likely disappear as soon as they do. That's what happened in Angola when the diamond-smuggling rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was shot, bringing a sudden end to one of the Cold War's most intense conflicts. In Liberia, the moment that warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor was arrested in 2006 was the same moment that the curtain dropped on the gruesome circus of 10-year-old killers wearing Halloween masks. Countless dollars, hours, and lives have been wasted on fruitless rounds of talks that will never culminate in such clear-cut results. The same could be said of indictments of rebel leaders for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. With the prospect of prosecution looming, those fighting are sure never to give up."

(I guess just saying "exterminate all the brutes" would have been plagiarism?)

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Museveni Realizes Uganda's Anti-Gay Bill Is a Gigantic Embarrassment, Backs Away Slowly

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has apparently connected the dots between the hideously repressive Anti-Homosexuality Bill under consideration in Parliament and the gajillion dollars in assistance that Uganda receives annually from liberal western governments.

The bill (which I posted on previously here) would expand the repertoire of Uganda's institutionalized homophobia considerably and embroil snarky bloggers everywhere in a race to coin a catchy slang term for the act of failing to report another's gayness "to the relevant authorities within twenty-four hours of having first had that knowledge."

As recently as two months ago, Museveni seemed to be on board with neutralizing the gay menace, cautioning Uganda's youth to watch out for "European homosexuals [] recruiting in Africa." However, the Ugandan government has come under substantial pressure from both NGOs and donor governments, including the U.S. (motto: "America - A Marginally Better Place to Be Gay than Uganda").

Museveni's comments today, as reported by AFP, suggest that he's gotten the message:

"Because it is a foreign policy issue, it is not just our internal politics, and we must handle it in a way which does not compromise our principles but also takes into account our foreign policy interests."

The bill's sponsor, Parliament Member David Bahati, has so far refused to withdraw it. However, as this letter to the New York Times points out, Museveni undoubtedly has the power to compel Parliament to get rid of the bill. So cross your fingers that we can soon all settle back into complaining about Uganda's corrupt government and lack of democratic process and forget this whole thing ever happened.

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Open Letter to Twitter

Dear Twitter,

It's wonderful that you wanted to raise awareness about World Aids Day yesterday. Really, it is. But um, are you sure turning the text of all posts mentioning the word "Africa" red was the best way to do it?

It's just that it made some of us think you might be suggesting that Africa = AIDS. And we all know that Africa is so much more than just the HIV/AIDS epidemic: There's also rape and lions!

Just saying...

Hugs,
-Kate

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"A selfish desire for equality": Israeli Police Arrest Woman For Wearing a Tallit and Reading From the Torah at the Western Wall

This shit makes me glad to have Birthright Virginia, not just Birthright Israel. From Haaretz:

"Police on Wednesday arrested a woman who was praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, due to the fact that she was wrapped in a prayer shawl (tallit).

The woman was visiting the site with the religious women's group "Women of the Wall" to take part in the monthly Rosh Hodesh prayer.

Police said they arrested the woman in the wake of a High Court ruling, which states that the public visiting the Western Wall is obligated to dress in accordance with the site's dress code."

According to Israel's conservative rabbis, the real problem here is that uppity women don't know their place.

"Last week Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Shas party's spiritual leader, said during his weekly sermon that the women in the feminist movement are "stupid" and act the way they do out of a selfish desire for equality, not "for heavens' sake."

Rabbi Ovadia also said about the groups' custom to pray at the Western Wall that "there are stupid women who come to the Western Wall, put on a tallit (prayer shawl), and pray," and added that they should be condemned."

Gee, aren't the Jews lucky to have their own state? I don't know about you, but as a woman who has more than once wrapped myself in a prayer shawl and read from the Torah in public, without getting even a little bit arrested for it, I sure am reassured to know that the Land of Israel is there to protect us Chosen People if the going should get rough.

Or maybe that's just my "selfish desire for equality" speaking.

hat tip: Goldblog.

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Creepy Christian Evangelicals, Godless Liberal Hippies Agree: Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill Is Bad News

Well, it's official. Absolutely nobody thinks Uganda's proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill is a good idea.

The bill, which would double-plus-criminalize (yes, that's the technical term for criminalizing something that's already criminal) homosexuality, criminalize failure on the part of a relevant authority to report another's homosexuality (!!), and mandate the death penalty for acts of"aggravated homosexuality," has already been decried by France, the U.S., Human Rights Watch, and a bunch of people outside the Ugandan mission to the U.N. today.

But now gay-conversion-superstars Exodus International (motto: "Jesus is the antidote to gay") have added their voices to the chorus of condemnation. According to the gay intarwebbers at queerty.com (warning: site's ads may be NSFW) Exodus's concern is just business: If Uganda's gays are executed, they lose a major market for Jesus-based conversion.

Our old pal (Ugandan Ethics and Integrity Minister) Buturo blames human rights for the resistance to the bill, noting that he is "really getting tired of this phrase human rights." You and me both, buddy.

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Have We Met?

Dear Anonymous Commenter to the Gambia post,

You must be new here.

Welcome to our blog! We make humorous remarks about terrible, terrible things. (Occasionally we pick up the mainstream media's investigative reporting slack, or perform a public service, but mostly it's just non-stop jokes about war crimes.) We talk a lot about challenging dominant narratives around here and we think pointing out absurdity wherever we find it is one of the best ways to do that. Also, we love a good chuckle.

That said, we know that our site isn't to everyone's taste. If it's not to yours, we have two suggestions: (1) start your own blog, where you can attempt to enforce your remarkably specific guidelines on the appropriate use of humor, and (2) stop reading ours. It's only going to make you unhappy.

Cheers,

Katmanda*


*Hat tip to Chris Blattman for naming our joint alter-ego.

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WTF Hollywood?, or A Play in One Act for Two Bloggers

Amanda: This whole Polanski thing is beyond ridiculous.

Kate: I like Melinda's take.

Amanda: Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Jackasses.

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Things That Annoy Me, 8/20/09 Edition

Today my "war crimes" Google News Alert coughed up this gem from the New York Daily News: "Stop the world court from hauling Israelis off to the Hague" by Jay Sekulow and Brett Joshpe.

My first thought was "Wow, Jay and Brett, you have clearly fallen victim to the same sort of irresponsible headline writers that got Jeffrey Gettleman in so much trouble a few weeks back."

After all, surely anyone contributing a guest column on the topic of the International Criminal Court to a newspaper with over 600,000 daily readers would know that (1) the ICC is not the "World Court" and (2) that it is famously incapable of hauling anyone anywhere (see, e.g., Omar al-Bashir).

Sadly for Jay and Brett's reputations, however, it turns out an ill-informed headline writer was not at fault. Midway through the piece, they opine: "Before long, the International Criminal Court could very well drag Israelis into The Hague and put them on trial for defending themselves from terrorists."

Let's review, shall we? The ICC has an Office of the Prosecutor; a Registry; a Presidency; Pre-Trial, Trial, and Appellate divisions; and some space down at the Scheveningen cellblock. You know what it doesn't have? A "dragging people into The Hague" unit.

So, even if the current controversy regarding ICC jurisdiction over alleged war crimes in Gaza gets resolved in favor of allowing a prosecution, the Court would rely on State Parties to enforce its warrant. Israel is not a State Party to the Rome Statute and would therefore have no obligation to hand over its commanders. (Although it's worth noting that if there is clear evidence of war crimes, Israel could preempt an ICC prosecution by holding its own trial.)

Of course, there's always the possibility of an accused getting picked up while traveling abroad, but somehow I doubt that the U.S. government is going to look too favorably on any of its allies or aid recipients handing over Israeli military commanders for prosecution. And it shouldn't be too difficult for said commanders to avoid beach holidays in the countries that are not susceptible to such pressure. So really, short of getting tangled up in the wheel spokes of a Dutch person's bicycle and being unable to extricate themselves prior to arrival within city limits, the likelihood of anyone getting "dragged into The Hague" is pretty minimal.

So there.



*Photo of ICC exterior from wikimedia.

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Oh Noes

Thanks to Rob Crilly, I am no longer living in blissful ignorance of the existence of the Save Darfur thong (pictured below).

It was a happy life, one untroubled by questions like: "Really? This is how we signal our support for the victims of mass atrocities? By pasting their forlorn children's faces on our crotches?" But that's all over now. My only comfort is that now you're all suffering along with me.

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Things That Suck: The Manila City Ban

I'm pretty good about keeping tabs on viciously stupid domestic policies (all-time favorites include the anti-prostitution pledge and the merciless application of the material support bar to asylum) but I rely on experts in the field to keep me apprised of other countries' bullshit legislation and executive orders. Recently, via a tip from the very wonderful Payal Shah at the Center for Reproductive Rights, former Mayor of Manila Jose "Lito" Atienza's Executive Order 003 made it onto the list.

EO 003, which was issued in 2000 and remains in force, deprives women in Manila of access to contraception and family planning information. Although the order did not impose an outright ban, its call to "promot[e] the culture of life" by "discouraging the use of artificial methods of contraception" has resulted in an effective prohibition. Since its issuance, city clinics and hospitals have not provided contraception.

Unsurprisingly, the policy hits poor women, who cannot afford private healthcare, the hardest. In its 2007 report "Imposing Misery: The Impact of Manila's Ban on Contraception" CRR chronicles the plight of impoverished women struggling to feed children they would have preferred not to conceive. As the aforementioned Payal and a colleague explain in their op-ed at ABS-CBNnews.com today:

"For a woman who cannot afford contraceptives, the harsh effect of the ban is felt every day - when she is forced to limit the amount of rice she can provide for her children, when she is abused by her husband for declining sex to avoid pregnancy, or when she is forced to endanger her health with high-risk pregnancies that she could not prevent."

But, the good news is that the Philippine legislature is currently considering a new Reproductive Health Bill. If enacted, the bill will overturn EO 003 and make it a prohibited act for a public official to "prohibit[] or restrict[] personally or through a subordinate the delivery of legal and medically-safe reproductive health care services, including family planning."

Debate over the bill has stalled, amid allegations that it would legalize abortion. ABS-CBN reports that "the average number of Filipino women who die yearly due to childbirth and pregnancy complications has doubled in the last four years" with 3500 pregnancy-related deaths occurring in 2008 while lawmakers sat on the bill.

So, um, on the off chance that you have a Filipino Congressperson, you should call him or her and push for passage of this law. And if you doubt the necessity of the measures contained therein, consider watching this excellent BBC piece (I've included the first third from YouTube below) on the effects of the Manila City Ban:

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Uganda's Ethics and Integrity Minister Continues Fighting the Not-So-Good Fight

You guys remember Ugandan Ethics and Integrity Minister Nsaba Buturo, right? I posted last year about his fearless battle with the forces of evil; namely, women in mini-skirts.

Well, now he's back, pitting himself against a far more insidious foe. Yes, that's right, Minister Buturo is going up against homosexuality (gay menace depicted at right) and the morally degraded donor governments / organizations who believe it should be legal.

Stating that he would rather forgo aid money than accede to demands for greater tolerance towards Uganda's gay community, Buturo explained:

"I have been pressured by some donors to allow homosexuality, but I have told them they can keep their money and the homosexuality because it is not about charity at the expense of our moral destruction."

I'm sure it is a great comfort to the people currently starving in northern and eastern Uganda to know that their government is protecting them from moral destruction.


*Photo is of Sacha Baron Cohen as Bruno.

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People Like Me Are the Reason Nothing Ever Changes

I have a very (embarrassingly) small amount of money invested in a Vanguard Group fund. A couple of months ago I received my proxy ballot for the annual shareholders meeting along with notice that a genocide-free investing proposal was up for vote. Aimed at precluding investments to companies that support genocidal regimes, the measure would have forced divestment of shares in Chinese oil companies that do business with Sudan's government. "That sounds important," I thought, and then promptly forgot about it.

Well, the Vanguard shareholders meeting was yesterday, and according to AP, the proposal was overwhelmingly rejected. Vanguard's management had opposed the measure, arguing that it was already adequately anti-genocide. I'm not sure whether most shareholders (a) trusted this statement; (b) didn't care; or (c) were, like your idiot blogger, too complacent to vote.

So now I'm left to decide whether my minimal life savings should remain with a company whose current policies mandate "regular reporting to the trustees on portfolio companies whose direct involvement in crimes against humanity or patterns of egregious abuses of human rights would warrant engagement or potential divestment" but stop short of requiring divestment. Let that be a lesson to me.

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Grumblecakes

In honor of the anniversary of Congolese independence (June 30, 1960), I bring you along on a journey into my inner monologue, provisionally titled "Argh! Why is coverage of the Congo always so f***ed up? (Part XVIII)."

My Google news alert for the DRC spat this out for me the other day: "DR Congo: UN calls for urgent reform after women raped during attempted prison-break." Of course I clicked through, because nothing compliments a breakfast of ibuprofen and coffee like tales of sexual assault in the Congo.

Tragically, however, the linked UN News Centre article provided little in the way of information beyond "Some rapes occurred during a rape by rapists. Also the Congo has prisons." A follow-up the next day added that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was "deeply distressed" by the rapes. Finally, a few days later, I was assured that the UN is totally on top of things and is, even as we speak, in the process of reforming the Congolese prison system so that the events vaguely described in earlier coverage don't happen again. Phew.

Meanwhile, an attempt to find more information via mainstream media sources yielded pretty much nothing, other than a few regurgitations of this IRIN article explaining that approximately 20 female inmates in a Goma prison were raped during a failed escape attempt by a bunch of militia members. According to Reuters, this incident is part of "a growing wave of attempted jail breaks and mutinies" that can be attributed to the abysmal state of the Congolese prison system:

"With small budgets and poor facilities, Congolese prisons are generally overcrowded. Malnutrition and easily preventable illnesses are common. In many cases, soldiers, women, and children are mixed in with the general inmate population."

So the country's prisons are a mess and the only way it can get any attention for its mass rapes is if they're perpetrated against children or involve the use of broken bottles. Happy Independence Day, Congo!

P.S. Can somebody please send me some nice news about the Congo? Or even just something about what Nkunda's goat is up to these days?

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No Utopians Here, Man. Only Lawyers.

Aid Watch's Bill Easterly* posted a comment on my Magical Thinking post last week that I think deserves further discussion:

"The only thing that left me a little uncomfortable was the statement 'I express my frustration at authors who fail to answer such questions, but spend an awful lot of time criticizing the way other people did.' If you are thinking of authors like Mamdani, I think his criticisms of the way others answer 1-5 IS his own answer to 1-5 on Darfur. I know from experience that a classic way to attack critics of infeasible, utopian schemes is to demand that the critic come up with their own utopian scheme to solve all the problems. I doubt very much you were doing this, but I just wanted to flag the issue. All the best, Bill Easterly"

He makes a very good point. I actually didn't mean to imply that I was looking for some sort of utopian regime, or a universal answer to the five questions I posed. I was trying to do the opposite: to show how difficult it is to come up with any kind of one-size-fits-all framework for humanitarian intervention, and to point out that we skip over a lot of important questions when we try.

In fact, I think that the post was partly a reaction to the same annoying rhetorical technique that Easterly describes. In the debate earlier this year over the ICC warrant for President Bashir's arrest, for instance, I was frustrated at how often people in favor of the warrant responded to those who criticized it by demanding to know what those critics proposed to do instead. That assumption -that we not only should be doing something, but that there must be something we can do- is exactly the kind of magical thinking that I was talking about.

I really, really hate how that kind of response shuts down debate. By personalizing the conversation -"what would you do differently"- it shifts it away from policy analysis and towards questions of motivation. The demand to know what the person on the other side would do differently is also a demand that they justify having an opinion at all. Which can seem -at least to me- like a move away from "is this a good idea?", towards "if you don't think this is a good idea but you can't come up with something better, perhaps it's because you are a self-interested jerk who only cares about oil and cell phones, and doesn't really want to help people who are DYING."

So, anyway: here at Amanda HQ you'll find a wholehearted embrace of doing nothing, when all of the proposed somethings to do are crummy. If a proposed policy doesn't pass my "is enacting this policy more likely to reduce suffering and end conflict than staying in to watch Love Actually again?" test,** then I for one would vote for movie night.

*Good lord, Bill Easterly reads our blog?!?! Stay cool, Amanda, stay cool. This kind of thing totally happens to you all the time. You hardly even notice any more. Totes normal, really. I said stay cool!

** What? That always reduces MY suffering. Especially the scene where the guy who is in love with Keira Knightley plays a tape of "Silent Night" and holds up signs to silently tell her how he will love her until she looks like a 3000-year-old mummy and she kisses him and...

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Militaries, Mamdani, and Magical Thinking

So here's the thing: I have approximately 8 draft posts, written over the last 9 months or so and saved at various stages of incompletion, that address the following questions:

1. Is it ever appropriate for foreign citizens, governments, or international institutions to intervene in crises overseas?

2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," then when is it appropriate?

3. Do we know to do it? That is, do we understand the technological means that will allow us to accomplish our stated goals?

4. If so, are those means available to us?

5. If they are, are we willing to expend the resources necessary to use those means?

I never finish the posts, because I always get frustrated. Usually they're prompted by some call for action in some crisis or another -Darfur, Congo, N. Uganda, Sri Lanka- that's long on yuppie guilt and short on specifics for whatought to be done beyond "act now." (Act like what, exactly?) Several are book reviews, in which I express my frustration at authors who fail to answer such questions, but spend an awful lot of time criticizing the way other people did. In all of them, I start writing, and then get bogged down in trying to address in the gaps in analysis, and then take a break from it and never come back. So now I'm going to try to exorcise my blogger's-block with one big, theoretical post. Here's hoping that it clears the air, my head, and the be-cluttered list of draft posts.

Anyway, back to the questions. As far as I'm concerned, no intervention can be appropriate unless all of those questions have been answered in the affirmative. Unfortunately, arguments for (or, in fairness, against) interventions almost never consider all of them.

In particular, #3 and #4 get very short shrift. The fact is that humanitarian interventions of almost any kind, from food aid, to peacekeeping "boots on the ground," to the ICC- are extremely hard to execute with any kind of success. It is not clear to me that we have learned how to intervene in ongoing atrocities and resolve them in any meaningful way. Questions like "who should do it?", "how long it will take?", "how hard it will be?", and "what will be lost in the process?" are technological questions before they are moral ones; but we tend to approach them as if they are the other way around. We presume that we must "do something," and only then consider how do it, and if we actually can.

Question #5, of course, comes up more often, usually held up as the main impediment to effective action. Many advocacy organizations center their efforts it, building coalitions of citizens to support politicians as they devote funds, energy, and political capital towards addressing atrocities around the world. And they have been quite successful in creating their constituencies and drawing attention to their causes -we've all got the bracelets, concert tickets, and t-shirts to prove it. But without good answers to the previous questions, it is impossible to really commit to supporting the necessary action. How can we, if we don't know what it will be?

Instead, we start from the assumption that we have the ability to intervene, and that therefore we must lack the willingness to do so. This magical thinking has parallels in other political sectors, like the Rumsfeldians in the Bush administration, who were certain that a light, quick American military force would be able conquer and administer Iraq with ease. The spectacular U.S. military failure in Iraq has forced the latter group to reconsider itse assumptions, but there hasn't necessarily been anything similar amongst us humanitarian types. Recent books like Conor Foley's The Thin Blue Line: Humanitarianism Goes to War, and Mahmoud Mamdani's Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror are deeply critical of humanitarian interventions, but don't go very far in actually answering the questions above. Foley's book is a detailed catalogue of past interventions' failures, but he never explains what should be done differently. Mamdani starts with an interesting premise -that the conflicts in Darfur and Iraq had similar death rates, but vastly different international reactions- but chalks this difference up to Americans having the wrong sorts of prejudices against Iraqis (Bad Muslims in the War on Terror!) and wronger sorts of prejudices against Sudanese "Arabs" (Even Badder Muslims in the War on Terror, Oppressing Black People Which is Something We Have Done In The Past and Feel Guilty About!).

I'm inclined to think that the explanantion is simpler: that we prefer to believe that the United States (or NATO, or the U.N. Security Council, or the E.U.) is callous than to believe that it is weak. The callousness theory is comforting, in a way, because we get to preserve our own personal sense of superiority. (Sure, those hard-hearts up in DC won't intervene, but if it was up to me, then I sure as hell would.) Even more importantly, it means that we can preserve the comforting narrative of our own omnipotence, and therefore our own safety. Weakness is altogether scarier.

The Iraq war can be viewed through a similar lens. Instead of presuming callousness, the hawks in the Bush administration presumed squeamishness and an unwillingness on the part of lazy generals to embrace their vision of military strategy. Reality turned out ot be much different. Though that war wasn't a humanitarian intervention, they still had the same questions to answer as the list above, and they got them wrong. #1 we all know -no WMD, and #2 they just sort of skipped. But it was #3 and #4 that really caused the trouble. They were flat wrong on how the war could be fought, had no idea if the resources would be available (and in fact they basically weren't - stop loss, anyone?), and have thus saddled the American public with a war that we are not really willing to pay for. In short, we've fallen for one of the classic blunders: Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Fail, Fail, Fail, Fail, and Fail.

So, since Wronging Rights has the most smartest readers around: how would you answer questions #1-5? And why?

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