Lagos: Everyday they’re hustlin’

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I’ve been in Nigeria for several days and I’m just now finding the mental space and time to offer a few brief reflections. 

At least half the time I’ve spent outside the place where I’m staying in Ikoyi has been in traffic, so naturally that will play a big role in the observations I make. And the most obvious observation in Lagos is that daytime finds the streets teeming with people, and it’s impossible to know what all of them are doing based on appearances.

It’s definitely the city of a thousand hustles. There are the mainstream economic activities based in the professional districts on the islands — the city is divided between more upscale islands and the “real Lagos” of the mainland. Here, you find banks, hotels, telecomm companies and other air-conditioned offices. On the mainland, many roads arec logged with semis moving to Lagos two ports, plenty of them loaded with oil tanks. The newspaper offices — with which I have become intimately familiar — are also on the mainland. Continue reading →

Pointless allegiance to Israel

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Following a smear campaign by pro-Israel groups, Charles W. Freeman, a former U.S. diplomat, has been forced to withdraw from being nominated to be the head of the National Intelligence Council. Article here.

This is really disturbing, and seems to be yet another event proving Harvard professors’ Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis of an ideologically driven Israel Lobby playing a disproportionate role in our foreign policy. Even when it would be better for America, better for the Middle East and even better for the Israeli people, our government stupidly aligns itself with a particular right-wing, Israel-is-the-key-to-all-Middle-East-progress ideology. It’s affecetd all levels of our discourse. This is why a number of Palestinians have told me it is actually much easier to criticize Israeli policy in Israel than it is in the United States.

The worst thing about this is that it shows Obama may not be deeply reevaluating our troubling, uncritical and constant support for all things Israeli — or at least all things that Israel’s American neocon, evangelical and right-wing Jewish lobbyists tell us are pro-Israeli.

As Freeman put it:

It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.

Interesting comparison: Darfur and Rio De Janeiro

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The ICC issued its arrest warrant for Sudanese president for Omar al-Bashir today. I won’t add to the cacophony of voices (including in yesterday’s Times: read for and against arguments) weighing in on where this is going. Suffice it to say, there is plenty of hope and maybe even more anxiety about what the arrest warrant means for peace, stability and justice in Sudan.

In poking around for more info on the conflict, though, I came upon an interesting discussion of violent deaths in Darfur in the first three-quarters of 2008. Analyzing UNAMID and Genocide Intervention Network figures, Alex de Waal at the Social Science Resource Council estimates that between 1,200 and 1,500 violent deaths occurred in Darfur between January 1 and September 8, 2008. Between 359 and 720 and civilians died violently in that period. Continue reading →

Afghanistan: Ain’t no time to wonder why

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On a sweltering day at Woodstock in 1969, the band Country Joe and the Fish did something that every Eighties Baby born to hippies knows well.

First, they led the crowd in a rousing chant of the word “fuck”, just for the heck of it. Nowadays, when soft-porn club bangers saturate the radio, the fact that shouting “fuck” was a show-stopper seems downright quaint.

But Country Joe’s second moment of lasting fame—a rousing, angry anthem condemning the Vietnam War—should continue to give us pause today.

“Ain’t no time to wonder why,” he sang. “Whoopee, we’re all gonna die!” Continue reading →

2 million dead in Darfur??

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Wooooah, this allegation by the Save Darfur Coalition — that 2 million people have been killed in the Darfur conflict — is way, way above even the highest estimates of deaths in Darfur that I have ever seen. Nicholas Kristof has said 400,000 have died. The U.S. Government Accountability Office says that the World Health Organization’s estimate of a maximum of 150,000 dead is more on track. And those WHO figures include people who have died of sickness and starvation, not being killed in the strict sense (that calls to mind a violent death, I think).

Can anyone shed some light on this figure? Is it just an egregious typo?

SDC already got in trouble in Britain a couple years back for lack of truth in advertising in saying that 400,000 had died in Darfur. You’d think they’d be extra careful with their death estimates at this point.

Gaza Schools on the Brink

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Cross-posted from The Morningside Post.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a story for a class on the situation of schools in the Gaza strip. I was astounded to find how dire the situation is there for schoolkids.

“There is a great deal of difficulty concentrating because there’s a lot of trauma,” said Saahir Lone, a New York-based employee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which runs 221 schools for 200,000 children in Gaza. “It will be some time before some kind of routine can be established.”

Gaza’s educational system—already in a dire state before the recent hostilities—is all but crippled. Israel’s 22-day assault on Gaza killed 400 children and injured many, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. With empty chairs haunting classrooms, schools damaged and an estimated 14 percent of all buildings in Gaza destroyed, the United Nations says that there is no easy way to establish a normal learning environment for students. Read more.

Afghanistan: why ask why?

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The dedication of 17,000 more troops — with no real explanation about what they are to accomplish, or what the long-term plan for Afghanistan is — is possibly my first real beef with Obama’s policy.

The news comes at the same time that we are learning NATO has killed an astounding number of civilians in Afghanistan in the last year (not to mention Pakistan). In fact, NATO forces have killed nearly as many civilians as the “Taliban insurgents”. If our mission in Afghanistan was not already shaky enough, these facts certainly blur the morality of our presence there even more.

What I want is for people to ask why. Why are we sending thousands of young people abroad with guns to a rural country with a widespread insurgency that we still seem to barely understand? What can we accomplish with bombs in a country that has already been bombed into submission a million times? How can we fight militants who are clothed, fed and sheltered by civilian populations, militants who apparently enjoy some kind of broad support base that allows them to keep coming back? How long will we be there?

What’s our plan for Afghanistan?

It’s time to start hearing some questions like these in our press. We didn’t ask them sufficiently before Vietnam, or Iraq. And look what happened.