Móðuharðindi af mannavöldum

Ég verð að segja að mér þykir þessi frétt nokkuð skrýtin og skringilega orðuð.

"Zimbabwe hefur glímt við efnahagskreppu í rúm sex ár og er verðbólgan í landinu ein sú mesta í heiminum eða yfir 1200%. Jafnframt er yfir helmingur vinnufærra manna án atvinnu.", segir í fréttinni.  Vissulega rétt sagt frá, en þó nokkur einföldun.  Það er sömuleiðis rétt að segja að það sé hætta á hungursneyð vegna gjaldeyrisskorts, þar sem vissulega er erfitt að kaupa mat án peninga, en það er sömuleiðis ákaflega mikil einföldun í frásögn.

Líklega má segja að á Zimbabwe hafi skollið á móðuharðindi af mannavöldum.  Fyrst og fremst má segja að ófremdarástandið og vargöldina megi kenna Robert Mugabe og undarlegri og afleitri efnahagsstjórn hans.

Sósalískar efnahagsaðgerðir, ógnarstjórn og spilling  hafa leitt landið á barm glötunar.

Nú eru einhverjir af brottreknu bændunum á leið til baka, en líklega er það of seint

Ef menn vilja leita sér frekari upplýsinga um ástand mála er Google eins og oft áður besta lausnin, en lýsingar frá landinu eru margar skelfilegar:

"Under the weight of the general economic meltdown — the economy has shrunk by 40% since 2000 and is still contracting — the health system has collapsed and a populace now weakened by five consecutive years of near-starvation dies of things which would never have been fatal before. A staggering 42,000 women died in childbirth last year, for example, compared with fewer than 1,000 a decade ago.

A vast human cull is under way in Zimbabwe and the great majority of deaths are a direct result of deliberate government policies. Ignored by the United Nations, it is a genocide perhaps 10 times greater than Darfur’s and more than twice as large as Rwanda’s.

Genocide is not a word one should use hastily but the situation is exactly as described in the UN Convention on Genocide, which defines it as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

Reckoning the death toll is difficult. Had demographic growth continued normally, Zimbabwe’s population would have passed 15m by 2000 and 18m by the end of 2006. But people have fled the country in enormous numbers, with 3m heading for South Africa and an estimated further 1m scattered around the world. This would suggest a current population of 14m. But even the government, which tries to make light of the issue, says that there are only 12m left in Zimbabwe.

Social scientists say that the government’s figures are clearly rigged and too high. Their own population estimates vary between 8m and 11m. But even if one accepted the government figure, 2m people are “missing”, and the real number is probably 3m or more. And all this is happening in what was, until recently, one of Africa’s most prosperous states and a member of the Commonwealth. "

"“The women suffer the most. At a certain point the men just walk away but the women are left with their children, watching them starve. We used to have universal schooling but 50% of the children are now out of school because the parents cannot afford even the smallest fees.

“Such children have no future. The only hope lies in the end of Mugabe. Some people pray for him to die but they are very scared. In any meeting of 20 people there will always be two informers.

“Mugabe is a murderer and also a traitor — he is selling the country to the Chinese. It is lonely to be the only one to say that,” Ncube says. “People tell me they pray for me but they are too frightened to speak out themselves. For myself, I shall not stop speaking out. I am perfectly willing to die.” "

"From 2000 on, it destroyed commercial agriculture because it saw the white farmers and their workers as opposition to Mugabe. This led to the first wave of killing, as some 2.25m farm-workers and their families were thrown off the farms, many after being beaten and tortured. An unknown number died. The eviction had the effect of collapsing the economy and cutting the food supply far below subsistence in every subsequent year.

What scarce food there was left, along with seeds, fertiliser, agricultural implements and every other means to life, was made dependent on possession of a Zanu-PF party card. Campaigns of terror followed in 2000 and 2002-03. The population has since been kept in a continuous state of anxiety by a series of military-style “operations”, of which Murambatsvina and Maguta are merely two particularly murderous examples."

" Gideon Gono, governor of the central bank, orders in the Green Bombers (young Zanu-PF thugs) to enforce his diktat and bakers are jailed for exceeding the subeconomic bread price set by government. In this — as in the programme for forced re-ruralisation — there are reminders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

World Health Organisation figures show that life expectancy in Zimbabwe, which was 62 in 1990, had by 2004 plummeted to 37 for men and 34 for women. These are by far the worst such figures in the world. Yet Zimbabwe does not even get onto the UN agenda: South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, who has covered for Mugabe from the beginning, uses his leverage to prevent discussion. How long this can go on is anyone’s guess."

Sjá greinina í heild hér. 

Zimbabwe timeline á BBC.

Hungursneyð vofir yfir í Zimbabwe

Mýtan um fylgistapið

Hún hefur lengi og víða heyrst sú mýta að flokkar tapi á því að vera í samstarfi við Sjálfstæðisflokkinn.  Þetta hefur verið fært upp á Alþýðuflokkinn sáluga og einnig Framsóknarflokk.

En ef sagan er skoðuð er það alls ekki einhlýtt.

1959 byrjuðu Sjálfstæðisflokkur og Alþýðuflokkur í samstarfi, með 39.7 og 15.2% atkvæða á bak við sig.  Í kosningunum 1963 vann Sjálfstæðisflokkur 1.7% en Alþýðuflokkur tapaði 1%.

Aftur var kosið 1967, þá tapaði Sjálfstæðisflokkur 3.9% en Alþýðuflokkur vann á, 1.5%.  Þegar hér er komið í sögu Viðreisnarstjórnarinnar hefur Alþýðuflokkur því unnið á um 0.5% frá upphafi hennar, en Sjálfstæðisflokkur tapað 2.2%. 

Enn er kosið 1971 og þá tapar Sjálfstæðisflokkur 1.3% til viðbótar en Alþýðuflokkurinn tapar 5.2%.

Á meðan þeir tóku þátt í Viðreisnarstjórninni, þá tapar Alþýðuflokkur því 4.7% en Sjálfstæðisflokurrinn 3.5%.  Það er allur munurinn.  Sé horft til þess að nýr flokkur var kominn fram á sjónarsviðið á vinstri væng stjórnmálanna, Samtök frjálslyndra og vinstrimanna sem fékk 8.9% 1971, þá getur það varla talist stórundarlegt þó að Alþýðuflokkur hafi tapað örlítið meira.  Enginn talar þó um að Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn hafi tapað á því að vera í samstarfi við Alþýðuflokkinn.

1974 vinnur svo Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn á um 6.5%, en Alþýðuflokkurinn heldur áfram að tapa, þá 1.4%, án þess að hafa verið í stjórn, hvað þá með Sjálfstæðisflokki.

Þá tekur við stjórn Sjálfstæðisflokks og Framsóknarflokks.

Þegar kosið er svo 1978, tapar Framsóknarflokkur 8% en Sjálfstæðisflokkur tapar 10%.  Sjálfstæðisflokkur tapaði sem sé 2% meira heldur en Framsóknarflokkurinn.  Samt talar enginn um að Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn hafi tapað á því að sitja í stjórn með Framsókn.  Alþýðuflokkurinn vinnur stórsigur, A-flokkarnir leiða Framsókn til öndvegis, vegna þess að þeir geta ekki komið sér saman um hvor þeirra eigi að fá forsætisráðuneytið.

Enn er kosið 1979.  Þá tapar Alþýðuflokkurinn 4.6%, en Framsóknarflokkur vinnur á 8%.  Engan man þó eftir að hafa talað um að það hafi verið Alþýðuflokknum sérstaklega slæmt að vera í stjórn með Framsókn.

Þá tekur við ríkistjórn Gunnars Thoroddsen.  Framsóknarflokkur, Alþýðubandalag og lítill hluti Sjálfstæðisflokks.

Síðan er kosið 1983.  Sjálfstæðisflokkur vinnur á, 3.3%, en Framsóknarflokkur tapar 5.9%.  Þeir mynda saman stjórn.

1987, Sjálfstæðisflokkur tapar 11.5%, en Framsóknarflokkur tapar aðeins 0.1%.  Rétt er þó að hafa í huga að í þessum kosningum bauð Borgaraflokkurinn fram og fékk 10.7%.  Þó að það sé tekið með í reikninginn, þá tapar Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn meira heldur en Framsóknarflokkurinn.

1991. Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn endurheimtir fyrri styrk og eykur fylgi sitt um 11.4%.  Framsóknarflokkur stendur í stað og Alþýðuflokkur eykur fylgi sitt um 0.3%.  Viðeyjarstjórnin er mynduð.

1995.  Sjálfstæðisflokkur tapar 1.5% af fylgi sínu en Alþýðuflokkur tapar 4.1% af fylgi sínu. Framsóknarflokkur eykur fylgi sitt um 4.4% og fær 23.3%  Það verður þó að hafa í huga þegar þessi úrslit eru skoðuð, að Alþýðuflokkurinn hafði klofnað, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir hafði stofnað Þjóðvaka og fengið 7.2% atkvæða. Tap Alþýðuflokksins hlýtur því frekar að skrifast á Jóhönnu Sigurðardóttur heldur en samstarfið við Sjálfstæðisflokkinn.  Það er ekki alls ekki ólíklegt að ríkisstjórnin hefði haldið velli, og haldið áfram samstarfi ef Alþýðuflokkurinn hefði ekki klofnað, en vissulega er engan veginn hægt að fullyrða um slíkt.

Þá hefst það ríkisstjórnarsamstarf sem enn er við lýði.

Kosið er 1999.  Þá vinnur Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn á um 3.6% fær 40.7% atkvæða en Framsókn tapar 4.9% og fær 18.4%.  Nýtt flokkakerfi er komið til sögunnar, Samfylkingin fær 26.8%, VG 9.1% og Frjálslyndi flokkurinn 4.2%.

Komið er að kosningum 2003.  Þá fær Sjálfstæðisflokkur 33.7%, tapar 7% og Framsóknarflokkur 17.8% og tapar 0.6%.  Hvor flokkurinn er að tapa meira?

Síðan þá hefur leið Framsóknarflokks legið stöðugt niður á við, það er að segja í skoðanakönnunum og ekki er ólíklegt að það verði hlutskipti hans í kosningunum í vor.  En ég held að skýringanna fyrir því gengi sé að leita í öðrum hlutum heldur en samstarfinu við Sjálfstæðisflokkinn.  Líklegra er að finna orsakirnar hjá flokknum sjálfum og svo þeim breytingum sem hafa verið að gerast á Íslandi, sérstaklega í búsetumálum.

En ef rennt er yfir þessa samantekt, get ég ekki fundið nokkur rök fyrir þeim fullyrðingum sem heyra má síknt og heilagt, jafnvel á virðulegum fréttastofum að þeir flokkar sem séu í samstarfi við Sjálfstæðisflokkinn tapi á því fylgi umfram samstarfsflokkinn.

 

 

Að þekkja vinstri frá hægri, eða snýst allt i hringi?

Ég fékk senda í tölvupósti í dag tengingu á dálk í Breska blaðinu Guardian.  Dálkur þessi er útdráttur úr bók eftir blaðamanninn Nick Cohen, sem er víst væntanleg snemma í febrúar.

Það er þó nokkuð langt síðan ég hef lesið eitthvað sem ég er meira sammála eða hefur fengið mig til að bíða útkomu bókar, ég held að þessa bók verði ég að lesa.  Það sem lesa má í útdrættinum er feykilega vel skrifað og hittir vel í mark, í það minnsta að mínu mati.

Það er fjallað nokkuð um "pólítíska rétthugsun" og síðan er Íraksstríðið í þungamiðjunni.  Afstaða vinstri manna til baráttunnar í Írak hefur valdið höfundi miklum heilabrotum og skilar hann þeim frá sér að einkar skýran og aðgengilegan hátt.  Hvernig Cohen gerir skýran greinarmun á stuðningi við við stríðið í Írak, og stuðningi við við uppbyggingu í landinu eftir stríð, eða stuðningi við "uppreisnarmenn" í Írak er líka vel þess virði að gefa gaum að.  En best er að lesa útráttinn úr bókinni og mynda sér sínar eigin skoðanir.

En grípum aðeins niður í útdrættinum:

"In the early Seventies, my mother searched the supermarkets for politically reputable citrus fruit. She couldn't buy Seville oranges without indirectly subsidising General Francisco Franco, Spain's fascist dictator. Algarve oranges were no good either, because the slightly less gruesome but equally right-wing dictatorship of Antonio Salazar ruled Portugal. She boycotted the piles of Outspan from South Africa as a protest against apartheid, and although neither America nor Israel was a dictatorship, she wouldn't have Florida or Jaffa oranges in the house because she had no time for then President Richard Nixon or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

My sisters and I did not know it, but when Franco fell ill in 1975, we were in a race to the death. Either he died of Parkinson's disease or we died of scurvy. Luckily for us and the peoples of Spain, the dictator went first, although he took an unconscionably long time about it.

Thirty years later, I picked up my mother from my sister Natalie's house. Her children were watching a Disney film; The Jungle Book, I think.

'It's funny, Mum,' I said as we drove home, 'but I don't remember seeing any Disney when I was their age.'

'You've only just noticed? We didn't let you watch rubbish from Hollywood corporations.'

'Ah.'

'We didn't buy you the Beano either.'

'For God's sake, Mum, what on earth was wrong with the Beano?'

'It was printed by DC Thomson, a non-union firm.'

'Right,' I said.

I was about to mock her but remembered that I had not allowed my son to watch television, even though he was nearly three at the time. I will let him read Beano when he is older - I spoil him, I know - but if its cartoonists were to down their crayons and demand fraternal support, I would probably make him join the picket line.

I come from a land where you can sell out by buying a comic. I come from the left.

I'm not complaining, I had a very happy childhood. Conservatives would call my parents 'politically correct', but there was nothing sour or pinched about our home, and there is a lot to be said for growing up in a household in which everyday decisions about what to buy and what to reject have a moral quality."

"Looking back, I can see that I got that comforting belief from my parents, but it was reinforced by the experience of living through the Thatcher administration, which appeared to reaffirm the left's monopoly of goodness. The embrace first of monetarism and then of the European exchange-rate mechanism produced two recessions, which Conservatives viewed with apparent composure because the lives wrecked by mass unemployment and business failure had the beneficial side-effect of destroying trade-union power. Even when the left of the Eighties was clearly in the wrong - as it was over unilateral nuclear disarmament - it was still good. It may have been dunderheaded to believe that dictators would abandon their weapons systems if Britain abandoned hers, but it wasn't wicked.

Yet for all the loathing of Conservatives I felt, I didn't have to look at modern history to know that it was a fallacy to believe in the superior virtue of the left: my family told me that. My parents joined the Communist Party, but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left-wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the 'root cause' of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals."

"There were many moments in the Thirties when fascists and communists co-operated - the German communists concentrated on attacking the Weimar Republic's democrats and gave Hitler a free run, and Stalin's Soviet Union astonished the world by signing a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. But after Hitler broke the terms of the alliance in the most spectacular fashion by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, you could rely on nearly all of the left - from nice liberals through to the most compromised Marxists - to oppose the tyrannies of the far right. Consistent anti-fascism added enormously to the left's prestige in the second half of the 20th century. A halo of moral superiority hovered over it because if there was a campaign against racism, religious fanaticism or neo-Nazism, the odds were that its leaders would be men and women of the left. For all the atrocities and follies committed in its name, the left possessed this virtue: it would stand firm against fascism. After the Iraq war, I don't believe that a fair-minded outsider could say it does that any more."

"It is hard to believe now, but Conservative MPs and the Foreign Office apologised for Saddam in those days. Tories excused Farzad's execution with the straight lie that he was an Iranian spy - and one reptilian Thatcherite declared that he 'deserved to be hanged'.

By contrast, Saddam Hussein appalled the liberal left. At leftish meetings in the late Eighties, I heard that Iraq encapsulated all the loathsome hypocrisy of the supposedly 'democratic' West. Here was a blighted land ruled by a terrible regime that followed the example of the European dictatorships of the Thirties. And what did the supposed champions of democracy and human rights in Western governments do? Supported Saddam, that's what they did; sold him arms and covered up his crimes. Fiery socialist MPs denounced Baathism, while playwrights and poets stained the pages of the liberal press with their tears for his victims. Many quoted the words of a brave Iraqi exile called Kanan Makiya. He became a hero of the left because he broke through the previously impenetrable secrecy that covered totalitarian Iraq and described in awful detail how an entire population was compelled to inform on their family and friends or face the consequences. All decent people who wanted to convict the West of subscribing to murderous double standards could justifi ably use his work as evidence for the prosecution.

The apparently sincere commitment to help Iraqis vanished the moment Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and became America's enemy. At the time, I didn't think about where the left was going. I could denounce the hypocrisy of a West which made excuses for Saddam one minute and called him a 'new Hitler' the next, but I didn't dwell on the equal and opposite hypocrisy of a left which called Saddam a 'new Hitler' one minute and excused him the next. All liberals and leftists remained good people in my mind. Asking hard questions about any of them risked giving aid and comfort to the Conservative enemy and disturbing my own certainties. I would have gone on anti-war demonstrations when the fighting began in 1991, but the sight of Arabs walking around London with badges saying 'Free Kuwait' stopped me. When they asked why it was right to allow Saddam to keep Kuwaitis as his subjects, a part of me conceded that they had a point."

"I got to know members of the Iraqi opposition in London, particularly Iraqi Kurds, whose compatriots were the targets of one of the last genocides of the 20th century. They were democratic socialists whose liberal mindedness extended to opposing the death penalty, even for Saddam Hussein. Obviously, they didn't represent the majority of Iraqi opinion. Equally obviously, they shared the same beliefs as the overwhelming majority of the rich world's liberals and leftists, and deserved our support as they struggled against fascism. Not the authoritarianism of a tinpot dictator, but real fascism: a messianic one-party state; a Great Leader, whose statue was in every town centre and picture on every news bulletin; armies that swept out in unprovoked wars of foreign aggrandisement; and secret policemen who organised the gassing of 'impure' races. The Iraqi leftists were our 'comrades', to use a word that was by then so out of fashion it was archaic.

When the second war against Saddam Hussein came in 2003, they told me there was no other way to remove him. Kanan Makiya was on their side. He was saying the same things about the crimes against humanity of the Baath party he had said 20 years before, but although his arguments had barely changed, the political world around him was unrecognisable. American neoconservatives were his champions now, while the left that had once cheered him denounced him as a traitor.

Everyone I respected in public life was wildly anti-war, and I was struck by how their concern about Iraq didn't extend to the common courtesy of talking to Iraqis. They seemed to have airbrushed from their memories all they had once known about Iraq and every principle of mutual respect they had once upheld.

I supposed their furious indifference was reasonable. They had many good arguments that I would have agreed with in other circumstances. I assumed that once the war was over they would back Iraqis trying to build a democracy, while continuing to pursue Bush and Blair to their graves for what they had done. I waited for a majority of the liberal left to off er qualified support for a new Iraq, and I kept on waiting, because it never happened - not just in Britain, but also in the United States, in Europe, in India, in South America, in South Africa ... in every part of the world where there was a recognisable liberal left. They didn't think again when thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered by 'insurgents' from the Baath party, which wanted to re-establish the dictatorship, and from al-Qaeda, which wanted a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals. They didn't think again when Iraqis defi ed the death threats and went to vote on new constitutions and governments. Eventually, I grew tired of waiting for a change that was never going to come and resolved to find out what had happened to a left whose benevolence I had taken for granted."

"Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

A part of the answer is that it isn't at all clear what it means to be on the left at the moment. I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left wing than ours would look like and how its economy and government would work (let alone whether a majority of their fellow citizens would want to live there). Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone. Disgraced by the communists' atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government. Even the modest and humane social democratic systems of Europe are under strain and look dreadfully vulnerable.

It is not novel to say that socialism is dead. My argument is that its failure has brought a dark liberation to people who consider themselves to be on the liberal left. It has freed them to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically, America."

"On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini's old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery. In Greece, where the previous generation had overthrown a military junta, the police had to fire tear gas at leftists who were so angry at the prospect of a fascist regime being overthrown that they armed themselves with petrol bombs. "

"Saddam Hussein was delighted, and ordered Iraqi television to show the global day of action to its captive audience. The slogan the British marchers carried, 'No war - Freedom for Palestine', might have been written by his foreign ministry. He instructed the citizens of hdad to march and demand that he remain in power. Several thousand went through the streets carrying Kalashnikovs and posters of the Great Leader.

No one knows how many people demonstrated. The BBC estimated between six and 10 million, and anti-war activists tripled that, but no one doubted that these were history's largest co-ordinated demonstrations and that millions, maybe tens of millions, had marched to keep a fascist regime in power.

Afterwards, nothing drove the protesters wilder than sceptics telling them that if they had got what they wanted, they would, in fact, have kept a fascist regime in power. They were good people on the whole, who hadn't thought about the Baath Party. Euan Ferguson, of The Observer, watched the London demonstrators and saw a side of Britain march by that wasn't all bad:

'There were, of course, the usual suspects - the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Socialist Workers' Party, the anarchists. But even they looked shocked at the number of their fellow marchers: it is safe to say they had never experienced such a mass of humanity. There were nuns, toddlers, barristers, the Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War. Walthamstow Catholic Church, the Swaffham Women's Choir and "Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against Bristol would be Nice)". One group of SWP stalwarts were joined, for the first march in any of their histories, by their mothers. There were country folk and lecturers, dentists and poulterers, a hairdresser from Cardiff and a poet from Cheltenham. I called a friend at two o'clock, who was still making her ponderous way along the Embankment - "It's not a march yet, more of a record shuffle" - and she expressed delight at her first protest. "You wouldn't believe it; there are girls here with good nails and really nice bags."'

Alongside the girls with good nails were thoughtful marchers who had supported the interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan but were aghast at the recklessness of the Iraq adventure. A few recognised that they were making a hideous choice. The South American playwright Ariel Dorfman, who had experienced state terror in General Pinochet's Chile, published a letter to an 'unknown Iraqi' and asked, 'What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the ousting of Saddam Hussein?'"

"In fairness to all of those who didn't want to think about the 'occasional genocide' or ask heaven's forgiveness for recommending that the Baath party be left in power, they were right in several respects. The protesters were right to feel that Bush and Blair were manipulating them into war. They weren't necessarily lying, in the lawyerly sense that they were deliberately making up the case for war - nothing that came out in the years afterwards showed that they knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and thought, 'What the hell, we'll pretend he does.'

But they were manipulating the evidence. The post-mortem inquiries in America convicted the US administration of 'collective group think': a self-reinforcing delusion in the White House that shut out contrary information and awkward voices. Lord Butler 's inquiry in Britain showed the Prime Minister turned statements that the Joint Intelligence Committee had hedged with caveats into defi nite warnings of an imminent threat. Before the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook resigned in protest against the war, he pointed out to Blair that several details in his case that Saddam had chemical weapons couldn't possibly be true. Cook told his special adviser David Mathieson after the meeting that Blair did not know about the detail and didn't seem to want to know either.

'A half truth is a whole lie,' runs the Yiddish proverb, and if democratic leaders are going to take their countries to war, they must be able to level with themselves as well as their electorates. If Blair had levelled with the British people, he would have said that he couldn't be sure if Saddam was armed, and even if he was there was no imminent danger; but here was a chance to remove a disgusting regime and combat the growth in terror by building democracy, and he was going to take it. Instead, he spun and talked about chemical weapons ready to be fired in 45 minutes. If the Labour party had forced Blair to resign, there would have been a rough justice in his political execution.

The war was over soon enough, but the aftermath was a disaster. Generals, diplomats and politicians covered their own backs and stabbed the backs of their colleagues as they piled blame on each other, but for the rest of the world pictures released in 2004 of American guards with pornographic smirks on their faces standing beside the tortured and sexually abused bodies of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison encapsulated their disgust. To those who knew that the Baathists had tens of thousands of people tortured and murdered at Abu Ghraib, the pictures were evidence of sacrilege. It was as if American guards had decided to gas a prisoner in Auschwitz, while their superiors turned a blind eye.

Just as dozens of generals, politicians and diplomats shifted the blame, so journalists and academics produced dozens of books on the troubles of the occupation of Iraq. One point demanded far more attention than it got. Hard-headed and principled Iraqis, who knew all about the ghastly history of their country, failed to understand the appeal of fascism. The y worried about coping with the consequences of totalitarianism when the Baath party was overthrown. They talked about how many people you could reasonably put on trial in a country where the regime had made hundreds of thousands complicit in its crimes against humanity, and wondered about truth and reconciliation commissions and amnesties. They expected the invaders to be met with 'sweets and flowers' and assumed Baathism was dead as a dynamic force. They didn't count on its continuing appeal to the Sunni minority, all too aware that democracy would strip them of their status as Iraq's 'whites'. They didn't wonder what else the servants of the Baath could do if they didn't take up arms: wait around for war crimes trials or revenge from the kin of their victims? Nor did they expect to see Islamist suicide bombers pour into Iraq. Despite vocal assurances from virtually every expert who went on the BBC that such a pact was impossible, Baathists and Islamists formed an alliance against the common enemy of democracy."

"Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, wasn't against elections because he was worried they would be rigged or because he couldn't tolerate American involvement in the political process; he was against democracy in all circumstances. It was 'an evil principle', he said, as he declared a 'fierce war' against all those 'apostates' and 'infidels' who wanted to vote in free elections and the 'demi-idols' who wanted to be elected. Democracy was a 'heresy itself', because it allowed men and women to challenge the laws of God with laws made by parliaments. It was based on 'freedom of religion and belief' and 'freedom of speech' and on 'separation of religion and politics'.

He did not mean it as a compliment. His strategy was to terrorise Iraq's Shia majority. To Sunni Islamists they were heretics, or as Zarqawi put it in his charac teristic language, 'the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom'. Suicide bombers were to murder them until they turned on the Sunni minority. He explained: 'I mean that targeting and hitting them in [their] religious, political, and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies and bare the teeth of the hidden rancour working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death.'

Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffi ng up Zarqawi's role in the violence - as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy - but they couldn't deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the United Nations's bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.

How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed."

"When a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein came, the liberals had two choices. The first was to oppose the war, remain hypercritical of aspects of the Bush administration's policy, but support Iraqis as they struggled to establish a democracy.

The policy of not leaving Iraqis stranded was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice. I did have an eminent liberal specialist on foreign policy tell me that 'we're just going to have to forget about Saddam's victims', but I thought he was shooting his mouth off in the heat of the moment. From the point of view of the liberals, the only grounds they would have had to concede if they had stuck by their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgement that the war had a degree of legitimacy. They would still have been able to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to al-Qaeda and all the rest of it. They would still have been able to condemn atrocities by American troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis, who wanted international support to fight against the American insistence on privatisation of industries, for instance. All they would have had to accept was that the attempt to build a better Iraq was worthwhile and one to which they could and should make a positive commitment.

A small price to pay; a price all their liberal principles insisted they had a duty to pay. Or so it seemed.

The second choice for the liberals was to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. To look at the Iraqi civilians and the British and American troops who were dying in a war whose central premise had proved to be false, and to go berserk; to allow justifi able anger to propel them into 'binges of posturing and ultra-radicalism' as the Sixties liberals had done when they went off the rails. As one critic characterised the position, they would have to pretend that 'the United States was the problem and Iraq was its problem'. They would have to maintain that the war was not an attempt to break the power of tyranny in a benighted region, but the bloody result of a 'financially driven mania to control Middle Eastern oil, and the faith-driven crusade to batter the crescent with the cross'.

They chose to go berserk."

1. hluti greinarinnar er hér og 2. hlutinn hér.

Allar feitletranir eru blogghöfundar.

 

 

Mergur málsins

Það er óhætt að segja að bankar og sparisjóðir greiði vel til samfélagsins á Íslandi, það munar um minna en 11.3 milljarða í tekjuskatt.  Þá eru ótalin margfeldisáhrifin sem hljótast af fjölda vellaunaðra starfsmanna, skattgreiðslur af þeim launatekjum og svo framvegis.

En 60 földun síðan 1993 er ekki svo lítið.  Var það ekki sömuleiðis 1993 árið sem hið opinbera þurfti að leggja fram fjármagn til að bjarga ríkisbanka frá því að leggjast í duftið? 

Það er því óhætt að segja að einkavæðingin hafi læst úr læðingi mikið afl sem er að skila sér, ekki aðeins í því að skattgreiðslu bankann hafi aukist svo um munar, heldur sömuleiðis fríað Íslendinga frá því að leggja bönkunum til fé.  Pólítíkusar ráðstafa ekki lengur fjármagninu.

Að lokum má svo minnast á að þó að eitthvað kunni að bjáta á í yfirstjórnum bankanna, einhverntíma í framtíðinni, er sárlítil hætta á því að það hafi í för með sér stofnun nýrra stjórnmálaflokka.

Það er líka ávinningur.

Tekjuskattur banka og sparisjóða sextíufaldaðist

Hernám, ekki frelsun

Það er líklega óumdeilanlegt að Sovéski herinn átti stærsta hlutann í því að nazistar höfðu sig á brott frá Eistlandi og öðrum ríkjum Austur-Evrópu.

En málið er flóknara en það.  Sovéski herinn fór ekki úr landinu aftur.  Rétt eins og Sovéski herinn hernam landið 1940. Allt að 60.000 Eistlendingar voru drepnir eða fluttir til Síberíu af hernámsliðinu.  Þetta olli því að þó nokkuð margir Eistlendingar litu á Þjóðverja sem frelsara þegar þeir hernámu landið, litu jafnvel á þá sem skárri kostinn af tveimur illum.

Eistlendingar tóku því þátt í heimstyrjöldinni með þremur herjum, ýmist sem sjálfboðaliðar, eða með nauðung og hótunum.  Þeir börðust með Sovéska hernum, með þeim Þýska og mikið af sjálfboðaliðum barðist með Finnska hernum.  Þetta leiddi af sér hefndir og hreinsanir frá bæði Sovétmönnum og Þjóðverjum, sitt á hvað eftir hvor hersat landið.

Í stríðslok voru Baltnesku löndin þrjú, Eistland, Lettland og Litháen einu ríkin sem ekki endurheimtu sjálfstæði sitt.  Vissulega voru flest lönd Austur-Evrópu undir járnhæl Sovétmanna, en þessi þrjú voru þau einu sem voru innlimuð í Sovétríkin.

Eistlendingar reyndu að lýsa yfir sjálfstæði sínu, en Sovétríkin hlustuðu ekki á yfirlýsinguna og stuðning var hvergi að finna.

Eistland missti yfir 280.000 menn í stríðinu með einum eða öðrum hætti, u.þ.b. 25% af íbúum sínum, ríflega 200.000 af þeim létust, en flóttamenn voru taldir ríflega 70.000.  U.þ.b. 10. hver Eistlendingur bjó utan heimalandsins í stríðslok, en þá voru Eistlendingar taldir á milli 7 og 800.000, 97 til 98% Eistlendingar.

Fljótlega hófu Sovétmenn að "flytja inn" fólk frá Sovétríkjunum og á milli 1945 og 1950 komu tæplega 200.000 innflytjendur frá Sovétríkjunum til Eistlands.

Þegar litið er til sögunnar, er því ekki skrýtið þó að Eistlendingar vilji taka niður styttu þá sem ræðir um í fréttinni.  Þeir líta flestir svo á að ekki hafi verið um frelsun að ræða, þó að þeir hafi fagnað flótta Þjóðverja, þeir líta svo á að þeir hafi skipt á einu hernámi fyrir annað.

 

Eistnesk stytta veldur úlfaþyt í Rússlandi

Sjálfstæðisflokkur og Samfylking - Endurtekur sagan sig?

Menn  eru mikið farnir að spá fyrir um hvernig stjórn verði mynduð að loknum kosningunum í vor.  Kaffibandalagið er með meirihluta í könnunum, en æ fleiri hafa trú á því að sá "bolli" verði ekki drukkinn í botn.

Þá er líklegast að Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn geti valið hvorum hann starfi með, Samfylkingu eða Vinstri grænum.  Hvor um sig er nokkuð líklegur til að vilja legga nokkuð á sig til að verða fyrir valinu. "Eyðimerkurgangan" er búin að vera það löng.  Margir leggja ennfremur á það áherslu að Samfylkingin væri líklega tilbúin að leggja mikið í sölurnar, formaðurinn megi ekki við því að koma flokknum ekki í ríkisstjórn, að öðrum kosti verði henni ekki lengi til setunnar boðið.  Sumir hafa jafnvel tekið það sterkt til orða í mín eyru að segja að ef Samfylkingin komist ekki í ríkisstjórn sé stór hætta á að flokkurinn klofni niður.

Mér er sagt að í viðtali í Morgunblaðinu í dag, viðurkenni Ingibjörg Sólrún að viðræður hafi verið á milli Samfylkingar og Sjálfstæðisflokks.  Það eykur vissulega líkurnar á því að einhverjum öðrum svelgist á kaffinu.  En Samfylking og VG keppast um það þessa dagana að láta hvorir aðra vita, að kaffi fáist á fleiri stöðum.

Hitt er svo vissulega möguleiki að Framsókn fái "herbergi" í parhúsinu sem VG og Samfylking búa í þessa dagana.  Það væri þá endurtekning á því sem gerðist 1978, þegar A-flokkarnir unnu glæstan sigur, gátu ekki komið sér saman um hvor þeirra ætti að fá forsætisráðherraembættið (hljómar kunnuglega ekki satt?) og sem málamiðlun varð úr að Framsókn fékk embættið.  En þessi ríkisstjórn fékk snautlegan endi, þannig að það er ekki ólíklegt að sporin hræði.  En þetta er auðvitað dæmi um það að það hefur engan vegin verið órjúfanleg hefð að stærsti flokkurinn í samstarfi fái forsætisráðuneytið.

Í þessum vangaveltum hef ég látið Frjálslynda flokkinn liggja "utangarðs". Ég tel hann enda ekki "stjórnarmateríal", ekki nú um stundir.  Enn það er vissulega enn langt til kosninga.

Sorgir kommúnismans, sorgir uppljóstrarana

Þetta hljómar auðvitað skelfilega, sálusorgari fólksins var hendbendi kommúnista og hugsanlega framseldi eða sagði frá fólki í söfnuði sínum.  En þetta er langt í frá einsdæmi.  Það eru mýmörg dæmi um að prestar hafi verið í þjónustu leyniþjónusta í kommúnistaríkjunum.

En því miður var þetta snar þáttur í lífi í ríkjum sósialista/kommúnista.  Börn voru hvött til að segja til foreldra sinna, eiginmenn njósnuðu um konur sínar, vinnufélagar fylgdust með hvor öðrum.  Engin var óhultur.  Enginn vissi hver var uppljóstrari, enginn vissi hverjum var treystandi.

Ef til vill var það stærsti glæpur sósialistanna, það að etja þegnunum endalaust á móti hverjum öðrum, fjölskyldumeðlimum gegn fjölskyldumeðlimum, vinum gegn vinum, samlöndum gegn samlöndum, vinnufélögum gegn vinnufélögum.  Þannig brutu þeir vísvitandi og kerfisbundið niður samfélagsmynstrið, vináttu og fjölskyldubönd.

Þess vegna hefur uppgjörið við þessa helstefnu verið svo erfitt, þess vegna hefur það í svo mörgum löndum ekki farið fram, vegna þess að svo stór partur var samsekur, vegna þess að svo stór partur viðkomandi þjóða skammast sín, vegna þess að hann er samsekur, stundum vegna frjáls vilja, oft vegna kúgunar, en skömmin situr jafn stór eftir.

En það er líka erfitt að dæma þetta fólk, sem sumpart lifði í eilífum ótta, óttaðist um líf sitt og sinna nánustu.  Fólkið sem langaði í stöðuhækkun, bara að færast upp um "eina tröppu", langaði að tryggja börnunum sínum menntun, langaði til að komast af.

Ég tengi þessa frétt við grein sem ég las nýverið við grein sem ég las á vef The Times.  Þar sagði frá eiginmanni sem njósnaði um eiginkonu sína.

Þar mátti lesa m.a. eftirfarandi:

"There can be few marriages quite as strange or as burdened by history as that of the German politician Vera Lengsfeld and her former husband, who spied on her for the East German secret police. “I have forgiven him,” the 54-year-old former dissident said. But she made it clear that personal forgiveness was as complex as the uneasy unification of Germany.

This, after all, was no conventional marital betrayal — no fling with a neighbour or office romance. Every halfway political conversation, every dinner with friends became the subject of a report to the Stasi. "

"“Now we have to see if he wants to meet me again,” she said. We are sitting in a corner of the high-walled Hohenschönhausen prison in Berlin, one of the most notorious of Stasi jails that is now an open museum. Ms Lengsfeld has just shown me her old cell and the exercise yard, seven paces long, five paces wide. Prisoners were deliberately subjected to radiation. “Thousands were psychologically destroyed,” she added.

“When we were fingerprinted, we had to sit on a piece of fabric. This was later placed in an airless jar because they wanted to capture our smell. Can you tell me why?” The jars were later discovered in the Stasi cellars. Ms Lengsfeld’s husband, Knud Wollenberger, codenamed Donald by the Stasi, had tried to warn her not to attend a peace rally in 1988. Today it is clear that he knew from his Stasi masters that the woman he claimed to love, the mother of his two children, was about to be arrested.

After a humiliating month in the jail, Ms Lengsfeld was expelled from the country and spent time as a philosophy student in Cambridge. Only after the Berlin Wall collapsed did she discover that her husband had been informing on her during much of their marriage. They divorced and have not spoken since. "

"The old East German state refuses to lie down and die, and that angers the likes of Vera Lengsfeld. She may be ready to make her peace with a husband who was manipulated by the regime — but not with her former jailers.

Watching you, watching me

• The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the Stasi, was founded in 1950 with the motto “Shield and Sword of the Party”

   

• In its 40-year history it employed 274,000 people; it had a staff of 102,000 in 1989 and infiltrated almost every part of East German life

   

• After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 angry citizens stormed its offices and arrested officials, who had by then shredded hundreds of thousands of incriminating documents

   

• Thousands of archivists have attempted to piece together the documents

   

• A decade after the fall of Communism, 3.4 million citizens had asked to see their files

   

• Since 1989, 180,000 people have been identified as informers, although the real figure is likely to be higher"

Greinina í heild má finna hér. 

Pólskur biskup viðurkenndi að hafa átt samstarf við leyniþjónustu

Varðmenn vítis

Nú er að styttast að hefjist réttarhöld yfir Rauðu Khmerunum í Kambódiu.  Það verður fróðlegt að fylgjast með því hvað kemur út úr þessum réttarhöldum, ef það verður þá eitthvað.  En það var ágætis grein sem ég las nú nýverið á vef Spiegel sem fjallaði um þessi réttarhöld.

Eins og þar kemur fram eru þessi réttarhöld ef til vill ekki síst merkileg fyrir þær sakir að líklega eru þetta fyrstu réttarhöldin þar sem reynt að taka með lagalegum hætti á framferði kommúnisma einhversstaðar í heiminum.  En það er í raun ekki síður eftirtektarvert hvað Sameinuðu Þjóðirnar og hið svokallaða "alþjóðasamfélag" er ófært um að taka á málum sem þessu.  Þetta er   "Alþjóðadómstóll", en samningaferlið sem fara þurfti í til að fá einhverja lögsögu er það flókið og erfitt að úr verður einhver óskapnaður.  Nafnið á dómstólnum segir líklega flest það sem segja þarf, en það er: Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea."

Svo ég reyni að snara þessu yfir á Íslensku, "Sérstök réttarhöld fyrir dómstólum Kambódiu, vegna glæpa sem framdir voru í stjórnartíð lýðræðisríkisins Kampútseu".

Það má því segja að dómstóllinn viðurkenni stjórn Pols Pots sem lýðræðisstjórn.  Hvað meinar fólkið með þessu?

En hér eru nokkir bútar úr grein Spiegel:

"Pol Pot and his minions committed mass murder against their own people. Now, an international tribunal is to judge the regime -- what some people call the first legal reckoning with communism. Can justice be served, 30 years on?"

"A year ago, authorities came to his yard and told Nhem Sal he'd been chosen to serve as a witness for the international human rights tribunal, officially known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Finally, in early 2007, after years of difficult talks between the government of Hun Sen and the United Nations, the last survivors from the so-called "Democratic Kampuchea," the regime of the communist mass murderer Pol Pot, will stand before an international court in Phnom Penh. For a quarter century, state prosecutors have been sifting through trial documents, and now they want to take depositions from the first witnesses.

The crimes committed were monstrous. Almost half of Cambodia's population of 7 million died in Pol Pot's barbaric attempt to turn his country into the ultimate communist society, says Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Foreign experts consider 1.7 million to be a more probable figure for the number killed. Nhem Sal's visitors said only seven of the approximately 20,000 inmates of S-21 survived the torture camp. Five are still living, and Nehm Sal is one of them."

"White letters announce over the entrance: "Genocide Museum." On the ground floor are long rows of boards affixed with photos. All prisoners had been photographed by Pol Pot's guards upon their arrival at this tropical gulag, and their personal data noted.

Nhem Sal spends some time examining the walls of photos, searching in vain for his own image. Suddenly his memories overwhelm him and he runs outside.

Why did the Khmer Rouge exhibit such barbarity? Who gave the order to commit mass murder of their own people? French scholar Philippe Peycam has tried to answer such questions. "Indirectly, the catastrophe began with us, the French," says the director of the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap, which is located near the world-famous site of the temple Angkor Wat, which also had housed the Khmer Rouge."

"When the French colonial army crossed into Indochina in the middle of the 19th century, Cambodia was under the rule of Thailand and Vietnam. In 1863, the colonial rulers turned it into a protectorate. The French first permitted Cambodia's independence in 1953 under King Sihanouk. But by the end of the 1960s the country became entangled in the Vietnam War. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, left-wing guerrillas emerged -- the Khmer Rouge -- which fought against the government and finally came to power in 1975.

The communists combined their ideology with an extreme xenophobia, says Peycam. The more people they killed, the surer they felt that they would rid themselves of every foreign influence. A murderous nationalism had taken over.

Nhem En, 46, a member of the staff of S-21, lives near Siem Reap, in the border region of Anlong Veng. He took most of the photos now on display at the Genocide Museum. He, too, joined the Khmer Rouge as a child soldier. It was a decision he has never regretted. "The B-52 bombers shattered our country," he says."

"The tribunal will begin its work at the start of this year. The trial is likely to take years, and it must be limited to handling human rights violations committed during the period of the Pol Pot dictatorship between April 17, 1975, and Jan. 6, 1979.

Most Khmer Rouge leaders have already been pardoned; others have reached high positions in Cambodia's current government. The contract between the UN and Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party determines who can be charged: "Upper ranks of leaders and those who bear the greatest responsibility for the crimes." Pol Pot, "Brother No. 1," bore the greatest responsibility.

In July, Ta Mok, military head of the Khmer Rouge, died at age 80 in the military hospital of Phnom Penh. Nuon Chea, 79, "Brother No. 2," lives in the last retreat for the former communists. Both the former foreign minister, Ieng Sary, and head of state Khieu Samphan also live there in luxurious villas. Only Duch, the feared head of the torture center S-21, is sitting in jail.

Claudia Fenz, 48, is one of 13 international judges and attorneys who will sit on the 30-member court. The Viennese attorney is no longer sure whether the case is more about justice or politics. Cambodian judges can overrule their UN colleagues at all levels of jurisdiction. Then, of course, there is the court's unusually cumbersome name: "Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea."

Even so, expectations are high. At the opening reception for the diplomatic corps, the South Korean ambassador summoned the foreign judges and urged them to take their historical responsibility seriously, "because the trial is the first legal reckoning with communism."

Gregory Stanton, law professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, is skeptical. He's been dealing with the genocide in Cambodia for years. He first came to the country in 1980 as a member of a humanitarian organization, just after the arrival of troops from Hanoi. At the time, there were only 30,000 people still living in Phnom Penh: The capital was like a ghost town.

Stanton saw rice fields overflowing with corpses. He heard stories of how babies were smashed against trees; he heard about mothers asphyxiated with plastic bags.

When Stanton returned to the United States, though, no one was interested in Cambodia. Says Stanton: "It was none other than Vietnam, which had delivered a shameful defeat to the USA, that would liberate Cambodia from the mass murderer Pol Pot, with help from its vassal, Hun Sen."

He was trained as a photographer in 1976 in China, and then assigned to Tuol Sleng. "I heard the people screaming, but my hair grew on my head." In other words: To survive, worry about yourself first. "Every day they brought in new ones," he says. "We had to take drastic measures." When Pol Pot fled in 1979, pursued by Vietnamese troops, Nhem En followed him and became his private photographer. "He was not a bad man," he says of the dictator. "He always took care of his comrades. Without him, we would have been an American province.""

""This court will never bring justice," says Youk Chhang, 46. He's a kind of Cambodian Simon Wiesenthal. If he and his documentation center had not sought written documents on the mass murder, and if they hadn't preserved eyewitness testimony about the horrors, the tribunal would not have been established.

Pol Pot's minions murdered many members of Chhang's large extended family. They slit his older sister's belly open -- before her children's eyes -- after she was accused in the work camp of stealing rice. When one of her daughters wouldn't stop crying, an executioner handed over her mother's rice bowl and said, "If you keep this, your mother will one day return to you from heaven."

The child is now grown and has her own children in the United States. When they ask about the meaning of the bowl, she usually says: "Ask your uncle in Cambodia."

To this day, Youk Chhang has not yet managed to tell the story. But he won't keep it from the judges."

Feitletranir eru blogghöfundar.

Greinina í heild má finna hér.

Nú árið er liðið í ....

Það tíðkast að líta til baka á áramótum og "melta" árið sem er að líða.

Það verður að segjast eins og er að árið sem nú nýverið kvaddi var okkur að Bjórá ákaflega gott.  Það sem stendur auðvitað upp úr er að í fjölskyldunni fjölgaði um einn, Jóhanna Sigrún Sóley fæddist 9. ágúst og kom hingað heim að Bjórá fáum dögum síðar.

Leifur Enno sem var þar með hækkaður í tign, upp í "Stóri bróðir" átti líka gott ár, náði þeim merka áfanga á árinu að fara yfir meterinn í hæð, tók hálfan mánuð í að venja sig af bleyjum og kopp og hélt áfram tilraunum sínum við að stjórna fjölskyldunni.

Það var einnig stór atburður fyrir okkur persónulega þegar við festum kaup á Bjórá 49, fyrsta húsinu sem við eignumst.  Það fylgir því ákveðin vellíðan að vera í eigin húsnæði.  Það fylgir því mikil vinna og mikill lærdómur, það eru mörg "projectin" sem eru á hugmyndastiginu. Fyrr á árinu seldum við  þá íbúð í Reykjavík sem fylgdi með mér í okkar búskap.

Þeir atburðir sem sitja í minninu úr fréttum á árinu eru eftirtaldir.

Hér var skipt um stjórn í Kanada.  Minnihlutastjórn Íhaldsflokksins tók við af skandalahlöðnum Frjálslyndaflokknum.

Lögreglunni tókst að koma í veg fyrir áætlanir um hryðjuverk hér í Kanada.

Michael Ignatieff náði því ekki að verða formaður Frjálslynda flokksins.

Hvað Íslenska atburði varðar er eitt og annað sem kemur upp í hugann.

Sveitarstjórnarkosningar og afsögn Halldórs Ásgrímssonar í kjölfarið á þeim.  Ágætis kosningar en líklega einhver afleitasta skipulagning afsagnar sem sést hefur lengi.

Varnarliðið ei meir.  Líklega það sem stendur upp úr á árinu til lengri tíma litið.  Þetta bitbein sem hefur verið til staðar frá því að ég man eftir mér (og gott betur) er bara farið, búið, hættir, farnir heim.

Hálslón, fylling þess, Kárahnjúkavirkjun og allt það dót.  Hugmyndin um að láta stífluna standa sem minnismerki að mínu mati bæði geggjaðasta og heimskasta hugmynd ársins.  Ýmsir fjölmiðlamenn lýstu því yfir á árinu að hér eftir yrðu þeir ekki hlutlausir í umfjöllun sinni um virkjunina, líklega með það að markmiði að fá almenning til að trúa því að þeir hefðu verið það hingað til.

NFS ei meir. Lokað og að lokum kom í ljós að "Kæri Jón" réði þessu öllu.  Fréttamennirnir á NFS þó líklega með þeim seinustu að uppgötva þá staðreynd.  Óneitanlega á elleftu stundu, en betra seint en aldrei, eða hvað?

Auðvitað er hellingur til viðbótar, hvalveiðar, prófkjör, leyniþjónusta og hleranir og lengi mætti sjálfsagt upp telja.

 En viðburðaríkt og skemmtilegt ár er liðið nú gildir hins vegar að horfa fram veginn.

Það þarf þá ekki fleiri vitnana við?

Ekki hef ég séð viðkomandi ritdóm, en mér þykir þetta nokkuð sérstakar upplýsingar.

Ekki ætla ég að efa að Sovétmenn hafi sagt þetta, en er einhver ástæða til að taka það trúanlegt, frekar en eitthvað annað?

Þó að ekki komi fram í fréttinni um hvaða tímabil er verið að ræða, þá þykir mér Sovétmenn ekki endilega trúverðugasta heimilidin um umsvif þeirra hér á landi, þó að vissulega megi segja að þeir þekki málið vel.

Eru ekki sendiráðsmenn Sovétmanna og Tékka þeir einu sem hafa orðið uppvísir að njósnum, eða að hafa reynt að fá Íslendinga til að njósna fyrir sig á Íslandi?

Svo er það einnig alþekkt að KGB lét "dótturfélögum" sínum eftir ákveðna hluta starfsemi sinnar, STASI var til dæmis vel þekktur undirverktaki.

En fullyrðingar Sovétmanna um "sakleysi" sitt, eru varla til að byggja mikið á.

Engin „óeðlileg" starfsemi