Month: April 2005

Potential Good News In A Place That Badly Needs It

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by hilzoy

From the South Africa Broadcasting Company:

“Rwanda’s main Hutu rebel group announced yesterday they were ending their war against Rwanda and for the first time denounced the 1994 genocide of Tutsis that has been blamed on many of their members. A delegation representing the rebel organization, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), made the announcement after secret negotiations at the Sant’Egidio religious community in the heart of Rome. “The FDLR condemns the genocide committed against Rwanda and their authors,” Ignace Murwanashyaka, FDLR President said, reading from a statement. “Henceforward, the FDLR has decided to transform its fight into a political struggle.”

Hutu rebels are accused of taking part in the massacre of 800 000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. Until yesterday, many FDLR fighters had denied genocide occurred, calling the killings tit-for-tat attacks. Murwanashyaka said his group was ready to cooperate with international justice and would lay down its arms in a bid to end the “catastrophic humanitarian” situation in the region.

The Hutu rebels were chased out of Rwanda following the genocide, taking refuge in the jungles of neighboring Congo. Since then they have been at the center of tensions in the vast country’s eastern region where violence, hunger and disease have killed millions of people. A representative of the Democratic Republic of Congo hailed the FDLR move, saying it was an historic moment for Africa.”

Background and context below the fold.

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Three Deaths and a Presumption

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by Charles

Eleanor Clift is not a pundit I admire (and that’s putting it mildly), but I respect the compassion and dedication she had in handling the final months with her husband, who succumbed last Wednesday to cancer. Her role, unpleasant and painful as it was, was as it should be in a husband-wife relationship. They were as one flesh, living under the implicit premise within the bonds of marriage that each would act in each other’s best interest. Ms. Clift did everything she could to make the waning days of Tom Brazaitis’ life as comfortable and noble as possible, and I pray that she can find comfort in the loss of "the person I have been closest to for more than 20 years."

And that is exactly what has bothered me about Michael Schiavo choosing to end the life of his wife, Terri Schiavo. While the courts consistently ruled that Mr. Schiavo had the authority–because of the marital relationship–to act on behalf of Terri, the presumption that he would act in her very best interests does not and cannot hold (I’m speaking on a moral plane here, not a legal one). In effect, Mr. Schiavo is either a bigamist or he is a widower who became de facto married to Jodi Centonze, whom he has lived with since 1995, has called her his fiance since 1990 and now has children with Ms. Centonze aged one and 2½. Michael Schiavo emotionally, spiritually and physically moved on over a decade ago. Three years into his effective marriage with Ms. Centonze, Mr. Schiavo petitioned the court to starve Terri to death in 1998, based on hearsay evidence that Terri would have wanted it that way. The age-old phrase "you cannot serve two masters" applies here, or in this case a man cannot serve two wives because one of the spouses is going to get the short end. Tragically and wrongly, Terri got the short end, and the fatal end as well.

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The Hatyevs and the McCoyakovs Raise Eyebrows in Beijing and DC

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By Edward

Vigils past and present are making the headlines around the world, but the most currently volatile democracy in the world is still worth watching. In fact, it may soon be very much the center of quite a bit of conflict.

Since we last left our players in the small Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan, exiled president Askar Akayev has been told not to rush home, unjailed northerner Felix Kulov has quit southerner Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s interim government (amid rumors he has his eye on the presidency); folks have begun to recognize that it was poverty, much more than any thirst for democracy (or anything our President said) that fueled the revolution; and the US has been assured by the new Kyrgyz government that we can keep our air base there. So, relatively speaking, all is well, no?

Actually, not even close. More pressing than who will succeed Akayev is the very real threat of a Kyrgyz civil war. The Agonist’s Sean-Paul Kelley offers an excellent analysis of the issues and players in his essay on Global Politician titled "Kyrgyzstan: Why Tulips Are Not Roses (Or Oranges)." As Kelley notes, the potential for war is due to a strong divide between those in the north and those in the south:

Most ethnic Kyrgyz who live in the north are drawn from a cultural milieu of clan-based nomadic horse shepherds loosely affiliated with Islam, whereas Southern Kyrgyzstan is full of Islamized Uzbeks dependent upon the rapidly deteriorating cotton monoculture of the Ferghana Valley. Here it is not uncommon to see women donning the veil, Wahhabist relief organizations and the occasional Saudi built Mosque. Indeed, the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) derived most of its support from the Ferghana.

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The problem of Kyrgyzstan cannot be reduced into prettified sound bites. It’s not enough to equate developments in Kyrgyzstan as a fight between ‘free peoples’ and ‘despots.’ It is a divided nation sandwiched between several larger, thirstier and hungrier powers, all of who are competing for its attention. While other nations in similar historical circumstances have turned such a geopolitical situation to their advantage, cohesion and shared goals were the rule internally. One resource Kyrgyzstan needs but doesn’t have is stability. It also needs time. It doesn’t have much of that either.

The thirstier and hungrier powers include, Russia, the US, Uzbekistan, and the very worrisome behemoth next door, China:

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Ashtray Monument

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For all the endless cigarettes, cups of coffee, wrenching blog posts, and television talking heads taken in and tossed aside in the past few weeks, here is the true lesson of the Schiavo case: In the three decades since the Karen Ann Quinlan case, there have been only a few big legal battles over the … Read more

Berger

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–Sebastian I can’t tell if it is lack of information or bad reporting, but it seems to me that the important details of the Berger document stealing story aren’t accessible.  (See for example The Seattle Times or ABC News).  From what I can tell, Berger was supposed to be helping the 9-11 Commission get information … Read more