Lebanon’s struggle to move forward
November 19, 2009
After months of negotiations, Lebanon has a new unity government comprising several factions but, as Natalia Antelava reports, many people there now view any government as largely irrelevant.
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  While Lebanese people are good at looking after themselves, looking after the country has been a bigger challenge  |
The noise was becoming unbearable. From all sides, dozens of drivers blared their horns, waved their fists and shouted at the person in front of them.
“It’s all his fault,” my taxi driver spat out, pointing straight ahead. I ducked out to look.
There, in the middle of the sea of honking cars, stood a thin young man in an oversized policeman’s uniform.
Helplessly he waved his skinny arms trying to steer angry drivers. The problem was that he was steering them in all directions at the same time.
“He is the one who created the jam, he should just mind his own business,” my taxi driver said. The fact that traffic was the policeman’s business did not seem to cross his mind.
Ask anyone in Beirut and they will tell you that, if there is a really bad traffic jam, chances are there is a policeman behind it. It is not always true, of course, but it is certainly indicative of how Lebanese people approach authority.
“The best thing that the government can do is stay out of my life,” a friend recently told me.
Political paralysis
The attitude is not surprising. For decades, Lebanon’s politicians have done nothing but drive the country into deadlock.
The new government’s first meeting was on 10 November 2009
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The country’s current crisis is just the latest episode of its chronic political paralysis.
The most recent one lasted for five months. That is how long it took for Lebanon’s rival politicians to divide up ministerial portfolios.
In a country where in the past political stalemate has often led to violence, many Lebanese sighed with relief when politicians finally came to an agreement.
But just as many, like my neighbourhood shopkeeper Vartan, simply shrugged their shoulders.
“What difference will it make?” Vartan said. “We will carry on with our lives, and they will carry on fighting each other. It never changes.”
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Lebanon’s private sector works so well that many Lebanese like to say that they do not need the government at all |
Frighteningly little, it seems, has changed in Lebanon since the civil war which started in the 1970s and lasted for almost 20 years.
Many of the former warlords are now the country’s top politicians. They still recruit supporters into privately run militias.
Buildings destroyed in the fighting still scar the Beirut skyline. Power cuts are still part of everyday life. There is no functioning public transport here, and in many neighbourhoods there is no running water.
‘Tribal society’
Beirut may boast state-of-the-art shopping malls but its streets cannot even handle the changing weather. The drainage system is so weak that every time it rains, roads turn into rivers.
“Fixing this mess would mean doing something for the public good and here we don’t do that,” a friend commented sarcastically the other day, as we made our way through the flooded streets.
The unity government will be led by Prime Minister Saad Hariri
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Behind the glitz and urban sophistication of Beirut, he said, hides a truly tribal society, whose leaders are preoccupied with fighting for the interests of their communities, not the nation as a whole.
In Lebanon, he added, you first identify yourself by the sect you belong to: Sunni, Shia, Christian, Armenian or Druze. Only then are you Lebanese.
People who visited Lebanon in the last five months would hardly notice that the country was living through a major political crisis. Life here was carrying on as usual.
Over the years – and out of necessity rather than belief – the Lebanese seem to have created the ultimate laissez-faire society.
They do not rely on the government. When water runs out, they ring their neighbourhood water man who fills their rooftop tanks.
They buy electricity from neighbourhood generator men. Even rubbish collection in Beirut is privatised.
Lebanon’s private sector works so well that many Lebanese like to say that they do not need the government at all.
‘Stuck in the present’
But while Lebanese people are good at looking after themselves, looking after the country has been a bigger challenge.
Lack of regulation is taking its toll.
Mountains of garbage are piling up along the Mediterranean, Lebanon’s famous cedar forests are dying and no-one is trying to stop the construction that is wiping out the historic buildings of Beirut.
And however joyful and robust people here are, they too are affected by this never-ending political uncertainty.
“We have learned how to live the moment, how to take life day at a time,” a friend recently told me.
“But the problem with that,” she said, “is that we are stuck in the present. We don’t know what will happen next, we can never plan ahead.”
But now, with the government in place, could Lebanon finally move forward, I asked her. She shook her head.
“The system is still the same – and it simply doesn’t work,” she said.
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Army braking the maternity law-Hutchinson’s superiors told her she would have to deploy anyway and place the child in foster care
November 17, 2009
Soldier mom refuses deployment to care for baby
AP – This undated self-portrait provided by Army Spc. Alexis Hutchinson shows Spc. Hutchinson and her son, … 
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Play Video SAVANNAH, Ga. – An Army cook and single mom may face criminal charges after she skipped her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her infant son while she was overseas.
Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, 21, claims she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only family she had to care for her 10-month-old son — her mother — was overwhelmed by the task, already caring for three other relatives with health problems.
Her civilian attorney, Rai Sue Sussman, said Monday that one of Hutchinson’s superiors told her she would have to deploy anyway and place the child in foster care.
“For her it was like, ‘I couldn’t abandon my child,’” Sussman said. “She was really afraid of what would happen, that if she showed up they would send her to Afghanistan anyway and put her son with child protective services.”
Hutchinson, who is from Oakland, Calif., remained confined Monday to the boundaries of Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, 10 days after military police arrested her for skipping her unit’s flight. No charges have been filed, but a spokesman for the Army post said commanders were investigating.
Kevin Larson, a spokesman for Hunter Army Airfield, said he didn’t know what Hutchinson was told by her commanders, but he said the Army would not deploy a single parent who had nobody to care for his or her child.
“I don’t know what transpired and the investigation will get to the bottom of it,” Larson said. “If she would have come to the deployment terminal with her child, there’s no question she would not have been deployed.”
Hutchinson’s son, Kamani, was placed into custody overnight with a daycare provider on the Army post after she was arrested and jailed briefly, Larson said. Hutchinson’s mother picked up the child a week ago and took him back to her home in California.
Hutchinson, who’s assigned to the 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, joined the Army in 2007 and had no previous deployments, Sussman said. She said Hutchinson is no longer in a relationship with the father.
The Army requires all single-parent soldiers to submit a care plan for dependent children before they can deploy to a combat zone.
Hutchinson had such a plan — her mother, Angelique Hughes, had agreed to care for the boy. Hughes said Monday she kept the boy for about two weeks in October before deciding she couldn’t keep him for a full year.
Hughes said she’s already having to care for her ailing mother and sister, as well as a daughter with special needs. She also runs a daycare center at her home, keeping about 14 children during the day.
“This is an infant, and they require 24-hour care,” Hughes said. “It was very, very stressful, just too much for me to deal with.”
Hughes said she returned Kamani to his mother in Georgia a few days before her scheduled deployment Nov. 5.
She said they told her daughter’s commanders they needed more time to find another family member or close friend to help Hughes care for the boy, but Hutchinson was ordered to deploy on schedule.
Larson, the Army post spokesman, said officials planned to keep Hutchinson in Georgia as investigators gathered facts about the case.
“Spc. Hutchinson’s deployment is halted,” Larson said. “There will be no deployment while this situation is ongoing.”
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Russ Bynum has covered the military based in Georgia since 2001.
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Les Enfoirés-le monde est stone
November 5, 2009
On January 26, 1986, French humorist Coluche, who had set up Les Restos du Cœur a few months earlier, invited a number of artists and public figures to appear on television as a promotional move. The band, whose line-up was never the same, was dubbed “Les Enfoirés” in reference to one of Coluche’s catchwords. After Coluche died in a motorbike accident (June 19, 1986) his widow, Véronique Colucci, called on those who had participated to continue his actions, and the band was revived for a further television show. The concept has since evolved into an annual concert, bringing together up to forty artists and celebrities from various backgrounds. The funds raised by the concerts and derived records under the name “Enfoirés” are donated to Les Restos du Cœur. One of the key features of Les Enfoirés is “La Chanson des Enfoirés”, a song which became a sort of hymn to the charity, written by Jean-Jacques Goldman, a long-time supporter of the organisation.
Indira Gandhi 3,000 members of India’s Sikh community were massacred after her assassination
November 1, 2009
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Nearly 3,000 members of India’s Sikh community were massacred after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984. Rahul Bedi, one of the first journalists to reach the affected areas in the capital, Delhi, recalls events.
The 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s assassination revives stark memories of some 3,000 Sikhs killed brutally in the orderly pogrom that followed her killing.
The wave of ethnic cleansing which raged unhindered across the country, especially in Delhi, after Mrs Gandhi was shot dead ended only with her cremation on 2 November.
During these three days droves of Sikhs were determinedly hunted down by Hindu mobs from their homes, corralled and slaughtered like animals.
The trigger for Mrs Gandhi’s killing was the storming of the Golden Temple in Sikhism’s holy city Amritsar four months earlier to flush out Sikh militants fighting for an independent homeland of Khalistan or Land of the Pure.
Sikh shops and establishments were targeted and burnt
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The heavily-armed militants – many of them former soldiers – had barricaded themselves inside the temple and were dislodged only after three days of bitter fighting. Some 1,000 people, including women and children pilgrims and about 157 soldiers, died.
Tanks too were employed to end the siege, leaving Sikhs highly aggrieved.
The eventual and possibly avoidable storming of the Golden Temple generated a wave of violence leading to Mrs Gandhi’s assassination, the anti-Sikh riots and a vicious insurgency across Punjab that was eventually stamped out by the military around 1993, although not without widespread human rights abuses.
But the 1984 Delhi riots rocked the world, more so for the state’s direct involvement and public justification of the blood-letting.
‘Earth shakes’
Reacting to the continuing Sikh killings in Delhi and other places, newly appointed Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi declared at a massive rally in the capital that “once a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it shakes”.
One of the worst massacres took place in two narrow alleys in the city’s poor Trilokpuri colony where some 350 Sikhs, including women and children, were casually butchered over 72 hours.
The charred and hacked remains of the hundreds that perished in Trilokpuri’s Block 32 on the smoky and dank evening of 2 November 1984 were stark testimony to the unimpeded and seemingly endless massacre.
Soon after news of Mrs Gandhi’s killing by her Sikh bodyguards spread, Hindu mobs swung into action – like they did elsewhere in the city armed with voters’ lists – in Trilokpuri against the low caste Sikhs inhabiting one-roomed tenements on either side of two narrow alleyways barely 150 yards long.
With local police connivance they blocked entry to the neighbourhood with massive concrete water pipes and stationed guards armed with sticks atop them.
For the next three days marauding groups armed with cleavers, scythes, kitchen knives and scissors took breaks to eat and regroup in between executing their bloodthirsty mission.
Sikhs were killed in the main railway station (Photo: Ashok Vahie)
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When as a reporter then with the Indian Express newspaper I along with two other colleagues visited the area on the eve of Mrs Gandhi’ funeral, both lanes were littered with bodies, body parts and hair brutally hacked off, forcing us to walk precariously on tip-toe.
It was impossible to place one’s foot flat on the ground for fear of stepping on either a severed limb or a body.
Earlier in the day two policemen on a motorcycle had emerged from Block 32 and reassured us that shanti or calm prevailed inside it and no untoward incident had occurred.
A few hours later on returning to the spot we saw that the entire area was awash with blood, a large proportion of it black coagulated mounds over which flies buzzed lazily.
Abject terror
It was also piled high in the open drains on either side of the tenements, never efficient at the best of times, alongside other human remains.
As we walked through this implausible slaughter in the light of hurricane lamps provided by some residents, the complete silence despite the large mob surrounding us was eerie.
No one spoke and nothing, except the bizarre, dancing shadows moved during this surrealistic interlude.
Even one of the only survivors – a young polio-afflicted mother – holding her new born in her arms gazed sightlessly upon us.
Her blank look momentarily changed into one of abject terror as we bent down to take her child to whom she fiercely clung.
She probably took us to be the butchers who had massacred her entire family piled up high in the room behind her.
A whimper led us to a barely conscious young Sikh, hiding under a heap of bodies, his slashed stomach wrapped crudely around with a turban.
All he wanted was water, parched after over 36 hours of concealing himself under the mound of corpses and bleeding steadily. He died soon after in hospital.
Some doors down a two-year-old girl, unmindful of the bodies, walked lazily over to us holding out her arms asking to be taken home.
Unfortunately, she was home; but one littered with the bloated bodies of her parents and siblings killed two nights earlier.
Police arrived in Trilokpuri 24 hours later when the Indian Express revealed the horrific massacre.
Sadly, there were no Sikhs left to protect.
Two inquiry commissions and seven investigative committees into the 1984 Sikh riots later no one has been held guilty for the Trilokpuri killings.
Of the 2,733 officially admitted murders, only nine cases have so far led to the conviction of 20 people in 25 years; a conviction rate of less than 1%.
But Manmohan Singh’s elevation to India’s prime minister in 2004 was looked upon by the flamboyant Sikh community as the vindication of its destiny of being born to rule.
Previous transgressions by his Congress party were forgiven but not forgotten and his casually tied trademark blue turban represented a collective crown for the enterprising but persecuted Sikh community.
Mr Singh, they said, was king.
Rahul Bedi is based in Delhi and works as the India correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly and the Irish Times. During the 1984 riots he was with the Indian Express.
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