Gwynne Dyer: The "Unstoppable" Wave

30 September 2005, The "Unstoppable" Wave, Gwynne Dyer

It is rapidly getting worse on the Spanish-Moroccan border. Three times in the past week, mobs of "refugees" have assaulted the fences that surround Ceuta and Melilla in an attempt to break into the European Union, and at least eight of them have died. Organised groups of up to five hundred young African men have been storming the three-metre-high (ten-foot-high) border fences by night with home-made scaling ladders, hoping that in the confusion most will make it across.

Several hundred did, though not without damage: Ceuta's hospitals reported at least fifty refugees with broken limbs or deep cuts. Some didn't make it: one bled to death after his neck was caught on the razor-wire, another was trampled in the crowd, others were allegedly killed by rubber bullets fired by Spanish police.

Spain is rushing extra troops to Ceuta and Melilla -- and on the return trip to the Spanish mainland, the ferries carry some of the successful "refugees" across the Strait of Gibraltar into Europe. With no further border checks, they could be in Stockholm in a week.

They aren't really refugees, of course; they are economic migrants. They are not Moroccans, either. The vast majority come from sub-Saharan Africa, where the poverty is much worse and some desperate people are literally willing to risk their lives to make it into Europe. One young man, typical of those who stormed the fences in Ceuta last Thursday, set out from Guinea more than two years ago and travelled through Senegal, Mali and Algeria to reach Morocco and a chance to crash the border into Ceuta or Melilla. (The two enclaves on the northern Moroccan coast, Spanish for more than four centuries, are the EU's only land frontier with Africa.)

What does this spectacle of human misery and desperation remind you of? Why, the only other place where a developed Western country has a land frontier with a poor country: the border between the United States and Mexico.

That border is hundreds of times longer than the twin fences, only ten km. (6 miles) long, that surround Ceuta and Melilla, so the bands of desperate economic migrants from Mexico and Central America have no need for scaling ladders. They just have to avoid US border patrols and not die of heat and thirst in the desert. Every day, thousands make it. Every week, hundreds die.

Just as the Mexican government promises to try to keep illegal migrants away from its side of the border, Morocco is promising to cooperate with Spain in keeping them away from Ceuta and Melilla. And Morocco, at least, means it. The young Guinean mentioned above was arrested and sent back to Algeria twice by Moroccan police -- but each time he just walked across the border again, and eventually he made it.

Just as the United States is strengthening the border defences in the thickly populated western section between San Diego and Tijuana (and extending the barrier far out into the Pacific Ocean), so Spain is planning to double the height of its border fences to 6 metres (20 feet). But nobody believes that the new US fence will cut illegal immigration seriously; it will just push it further inland. Same for the higher Spanish fences: as a local aid worker said, it is like "putting fences in the sea."

Except that this pose of helplessness is a steaming heap of nonsense. If you put a really serious fence in the sea, as they are now doing off San Diego, it won't stop water, but it WILL stop people in small boats. (The Coast Guard can stop the bigger boats farther out.) And if you build a really serious barrier on land -- like the old one between East Germany and West Germany, or the one that Israel is building today in the occupied West Bank -- it WILL stop 99.99 percent of the people who want to cross.

No barrier will stop people unless you are prepared to protect it by force, of course, but the better the barrier, the fewer the casualties. Nobody knows how many thousands of people die on the US-Mexican border each year, but it is surely many more than the death toll along the Berlin Wall during the whole 27 years of its existence.

The US government could build and man an effective physical barrier along the whole of the Mexican border, allowing only legal immigrants to pass through, for a tenth of what it is spending this year in Iraq. Why does it not do so? Sheer hypocrisy and cynicism: US business and agriculture want the ultra-cheap workers that only illegal immigration provides, but the government must make a show of trying to protect the border (without being too efficient about it). So potential illegal immigrants know that those who survive the crossing will find work, and they keep coming.

At the moment, much the same applies in Spain, where the current (incredibly stupid) law says that the police can only deport illegal immigrants if it proves their identity and nationality before a court within forty days. So the illegals, knowing this, destroy their documents, and after forty days they are free to go anywhere in the "Schengen zone", including France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries and much of Scandinavia. No wonder they keep coming.

Spain will probably change that stupid law one of these days, because its economy does not actually depend heavily on below-minimum-wage illegal immigrants. It will take a lot longer in the United States.

Spiegel: Profiteering from the Arctic Thaw

March 10, 2006, Global Warming, Profiteering from the Arctic Thaw, Erich Wiedemann

Global warming isn't necessarily the catastrophe it's made out to be -- at least not for multinational oil companies. Shrinking ice caps would reveal the Arctic's massive energy sources and shorten tanker routes by thousands of miles.

[photo1 AFP, This NASA handout satellite image shows the minimum concentration of Arctic sea ice in 2005, when the sea ice extent dropped to the lowest level ever recorded.]

Ice-cap melting may be bad news for the polar bears in Manitoba, Canada, but it is great news for Pat Broe of Denver. When the ice melts in the Arctic, the polar predators have to search for new hunting grounds or starve -- but Broe doesn't mind. He figures global warming will make him around $100 million a year.

His friends laughed at him when he bought the run-down port in Churchill -- a tiny outpost of a thousand souls on the Hudson Bay. What could he possibly want with a harbor in one of the most deserted places on the planet that's frozen over a big chunk of the year?

Wait and see, said Broe. He only paid a symbolic price of seven dollars -- not a bad price for a port. He knew that time was on his side. Temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are rising twice as fast as in the southern half. The summers are getting longer and the pack ice is getting thinner. By 2015 the North Pole is expected to be navigable for normal ships six months out of the year. It's then that a golden age will dawn upon Churchill.

Via Arctic waterways, an oil tanker only needs a week to make it from the Russian port city Murmansk on the Barents Sea to the east coast of Canada. That's only half the time it takes from Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf to Galveston, Texas. And from Churchill to Chicago on the Hudson Bay Railway, it's not much further than from Texas to the Windy City. Tankers from Venezuela to Japan can even save some 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) by traveling over the pole.

Of course, with rising ocean temperatures comes an increased danger of icebergs, but at least the Arctic oil fields aren't in a region plagued by political instability. No suicide bombers, no kidnappings, no explosions. What risk there is up north, is nothing big oil companies aren't happy to take on.

The first cargo likely to be transported via the Northwest Passage is Russian oil from Siberia destined for North America. The melting ice will also make it easier to get to oil and natural gas fields that are still blocked by pack ice.

The Arctic is a giant treasure trove for energy multinationals. A quarter of the world's oil and gas reserves are estimated to be hidden underneath its rapidly shrinking ice. At current market values they would be worth $1.5 to $2 trillion. There are even proven oil deposits at the North Pole itself.

No icebreakers needed

The big breakthrough might come even earlier than Pat Broe expects. Last August, the Russian steamer "Akademik Fyodorov" became the first ship to reach the North Pole without the help of an icebreaker. Norway's state-owned energy company Statoil and Russia's Gazprom want to tap the Stockman Field -- with an estimated 3.2 billion cubic meters, the largest natural gas deposit in the world. The gas will be pumped via undersea pipelines to the warm-water ports in Murmansk and Hammerfest in Norway's far north. From there it will be transported onward to energy-hungry Western Europe.

Before the latest oil boom, Murmansk was a dying city, losing 10,000 inhabitants a year. The partial mothballing of Russian northern fleet destroyed the local economy. But the discovery and tapping of new oil and gas fields has given the gray city on the Arctic Circle new hope. The new gas liquefaction plant alone will create thousands of jobs.

The Russian Duma might have ratified the Kyoto treaty on climate change, but only with the disapproval of President Vladimir Putin. Global warming leaves him cold. There's no reason to get excited, he says. If Russia was two or three degrees warmer, parts of Siberia could become blooming landscapes and his citizens wouldn't have to buy such expensive winter coats.

The Norwegian might already be well off, but the northern thaw would also benefit them. In Hammerfest, a €6-billion gas liquefaction facility is already being built to serve the particularly hungry North America energy market. The project is appropriately named Snohvit -- Snow White.

Five Arctic rivals

Five nations are competing for their very own lucrative chunk of the frosty north: Norway, Russia, Denmark, Canada and the United States. The Arctic might be a vast place, but the various rival claims pose plenty of potential for conflict. According to maritime law, the borders of national economic zones are delineated by the continental shelf, however, it's unclear where the shelf ends and the open sea starts.

[photo2 AP, The normal habitat of polar bears continues to shrink.]

The first attempt to draft land-rights of the Arctic, which could divvy up ownership, goes back to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. On a world map he tried to carve out a huge area for the "Soviet Arctic" stretching from Murmansk and the Chukchi Peninsula to the North Pole. But the Russian claims were met by protests -- especially from Norway. The oil fields in the North Sea that form the basis for the Scandinavian country's wealth will dry up in the coming decades, leading the Norwegians to place great hope in new sources underneath the Arctic ice.

The old seafaring dream of the Northwest Passage will also soon be a reality. It will cut the distance between Hamburg and Yokohama nearly in half. Instead of traveling via the Suez Canal, shipping traffic between Europe and the Far East will likely take the polar route off the costal waters of northern Siberia.

The repercussions for Europe's industry could be immense: lower transport costs will only magnify the effects of globalization as cheap goods from Asia flood Western markets. A decade ago, China wanted to build a fleet of icebreakers in order to allow its growing number of cargo ships to take advantage of the shorter route over the Arctic. Now that will no longer be necessary.

Spiegel: Climate Change Sparks Scrap for Arctic Resources

March 31, 2006, Global Warming, Climate Change Sparks Scrap for Arctic Resources, Philip Bethge

While scientists and conservationists worry about the potentially dire consequences of global warming, politicians and businessmen are already battling over how to reap the economic benefits from the Arctic thaw.

[photo1 AP, Arctic ice is melting faster than ever before.]

It's not always easy hoisting a flag on Hans Island. The Canadians even had to bring along their own rocks to weigh down the foot of the mast. But then nothing could stand in the way of the success of operation "Frozen Beaver" -- at least from a Canadian perspective.

It was last July when Canadian soldiers raised the maple leaf banner over the tiny isle between Canada's Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Not long after that, Canada's Defense Minister Bill Graham flew in by helicopter to proclaim that Hans Island will always remain Canadian. The provocation worked: Denmark promptly cabled a note of protest to Ottawa.

The diplomatic spat marked the current highpoint of a bizarre scuffle over who owns a 1.3 square kilometer bit of barren rock in the middle of the Arctic Nares Straits. Its biggest attraction is what is probably the most northern outhouse in the world. Yet for Canada and Denmark -- a country which has also repeatedly planted its flag in the islet's stony ground --the dispute means much more: Hans Island is a test case for the sort of territorial rows which could soon become a lot more common north of the Arctic Circle.

Carving up the frosty Arctic is a hot topic right now for many countries. At stake are the sovereign rights to enormous reserves of natural resources, as well the control of seafaring routes which have until now been blocked by ice. The reason for the newly awakened interest is that the Arctic is rapidly warming. Nowhere else on the planet have such far-reaching consequences of global warming been observed. While biologists and climate researchers fear melting icecaps, rising floodwaters and extinctions of several species, oil and gas companies are hoping the Artic thaw will enable them to access vast new energy sources.

"How our climate will look in the next few decades, is being decided in the Arctic," says Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten, from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam (AWI). This week Hubberten played host to Germany's first "Arctic Science Summit Week" in Potsdam near Berlin. Around 150 scientists from all over the world came to discuss the effects that Arctic warming would have on landmasses, people, animals, plants and the global climate.

"We are noticing a rapid decrease in sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and the permafrost on the ground is melting," says Volker Rachold of the International Arctic Science Committee, an organization that coordinates Arctic research worldwide. Scientists say that air temperatures are higher than they have been for centuries. And as a consequence, Greenland's ice is melting more quickly than ever and Alaska's glaciers continue to shrink rapidly.

Last year was also a record year in many respects. According to data gathered by satellites, there is less sea ice between Greenland and Siberia than ever before: In August, the Russian ship "Akademik Fyodorov" was the first vessel in the history of seafaring to cross the pole without needing ice breakers; There are hardly any ice floes left in the Northwest Passage, which connects the Canadian Arctic to Asia; And even the Northern Sea Route along the Siberian coast, once not entirely navigable, was free of ice for a whole month last year.

The tops of mountains, normally wrapped in thick pack ice, remained free of ice until well into the winter. Scientists at the Norwegian Polar Institute even recorded a balmy 7.7 degrees Celsius at Longyearbyen airport in January. It was a new record high temperature for a place where January temps usually average minus 15 degrees Celsius. Other knock-on effects encourage further melting: When the pack ice melts, rays from the sun hit the sea water. The dark water absorbs the heat much more than the reflective white of the ice and snow. This means that the whole region gets even warmer.

[photo2 REUTERS, Sea ice floats within the the US Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Alaska.]

Ice-free Arctic Ocean?

"I fear that the Arctic Ocean could become completely ice free in the summer by the end of the century," says Georg Heygster, from the Institute of Environmental Physics at Bremen University.

The warming threatens to bring about massive changes in an entire region, where the delicate balance here has already been knocked off kilter by environmental pollution and higher levels of ultraviolet sunrays.

Almost four million people live in this Arctic territory, and it is divided between eight countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Russia and the United States. This land of the summer midnight sun is bordered to the north by the Arctic Circle. Its vast stretches of tundra lie between the ice-covered far north and the wooded sub-Arctic region. The tundra, which is characterized by bleak plains of permanently frozen ground, makes up in total a quarter of the landmass of the northern hemisphere.

In some areas the extreme frost has created deep fissures in the ground. These are soon filled with water, which then freezes over. The network formed by the ridges of ice is easily seen from the air. But now this incredible landscape of permafrost is starting to crack as a result of increased temperatures. Scientists are worried that up to 90 percent of the rock-hard surface could melt by the end of the century, shifting the permafrost border hundreds of kilometers northward.

[photo3 DER SPIEGEL, Yakutsk is built on permafrost.]

"If the subterranean ice melts, then the whole ground could collapse," believes AWI scientist Hubberten. The fear is that streets, pipelines and industrial sites would all sink into the abyss below. In the central Siberian town of Yakutsk, for example, which is built on the permafrost, around 300 buildings have given way. Large residential structures, a power station and a runway at the local airport have all been affected.

The region's water reserves have been hit. Scientists have already noticed that entire lakes have seeped away into the thawed-out ground and rivers have swollen to bursting. The amount of water flowing from Russian rivers, such as the Ob, into the Arctic basin has increased by seven percent over the last 60 years.

The consequences of climate change

A massive study released two years ago, sparked off further rounds of discussion in Potsdam this week. "The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment" lists possible consequences of global warming for mankind and the environment. At the same time, the community of Arctic states doesn't want to miss potential opportunities. The region's governments are hoping for new fishing grounds and tourist destinations, as well as the opening up of Arctic shipping routes. It likely won't be long before cargo ships traveling from Hamburg to Yokohama will be able to sail along the Siberian coast -- instead of through the Suez Canal. The trip through the frosty north would halve the journey. The route from Russia to North America could be similarly shortened: a trip from Murmansk at the moment takes around 17 days. But by going via the Canadian port of Churchill, and transporting the goods south by rail, the journey will be cut to eight days at sea.

The first pioneers are already placing their bets on the new freight connection via Hudson Bay, such as the American entrepreneur and railway magnate Pat Broe, who is now seen as something of a visionary. In 1997 he bought the deserted port of Churchill from the Canadian government for a paltry seven dollars. Broe now calculates that the investment could soon be earning him $100 million a year.

But more than anything else, it is the earth's riches under the rapidly disappearing ice that spark the imagination of many. The US Geological Survey estimates that a quarter of the world's oil and natural gas reserves lie hidden under the Arctic Ocean. If the thaw continues, then excavation could soon become financially viable. Norway and Russia are already bickering with each other over drilling rights in the Barents Sea. The region's gas will soon be being processed in Murmansk and Hammerfest, and then transported to other parts of Europe and America. The size of the Russian Shtokman gas field alone is estimated at 3.2 trillion cubic meters, making it one of the largest known deposits in the world.

The thought of such possibilities has plunged the Arctic nations into a gold rush frenzy. But it's certainly not only good news. The Arctic thaw will also create changes in the environment that bode ill in particular for coastal residents. The livelihoods of many of the indigenous Inuit peoples depend on the sea being frozen. Hunting on the ice is a key part of their cultural traditions.

"In the past we were frozen in by the end of October. Now that doesn't happen until Christmas," says Clifford Weyiouanna from Shishmaref, a village on the island of Sarichef in the Bering Strait. "Normally the ice out there should be about 1.2 meters thick. But when I was out there just now, it barely measured 30 centimeters." The area is also endangered by heavy erosion, because with the ice gone, the sea is able to roll unimpeded onto the coast. The sea has claimed 40 meters of land since 1997. In October 2001 the village was threatened with waves up to four meters high, causing local residents to decide to move to the mainland.

Animals under threat

The fragmented sea ice is endangering Inuit hunting patterns all over the region: whether Sachs Harbor on the western Canadian coast, the small town of Pangnirtung near the Arctic Circle, or Frobisher Bay near Iqaluit. Birds and fish, which don't even have names in local Inuit languages, are now being spotted in these areas. At the same time, animals that depend on the sea ice for survival, such as seals, walruses and polar bears, are becoming rare.

[photo4 REUTERS, Arctic polar bears have to jumps from ice floes to hunt.]

The Canadian town of Churchill has also earned itself a tragic sort of renown: Every autumn the bears of the region gather together to wait for the Hudson Bay to freeze over. Only then can they make their way onto the sea ice to hunt seals. But every year the winter starts later, and the ice thaws earlier, meaning that bears don't have the opportunity to eat what is required to put on the sufficient layer of fat. "If the ice melts just a week earlier, then a female bear is forced to come back to the mainland around 10 kilograms lighter," says the polar bear expert Ian Stirling, from the University of Alberta.

Experts from the World Conservation Union (IUCN) fear the number of polar bears could drop by a third over the next 35 to 50 years. According to the organization, caribou, lemmings and arctic foxes are also at risk from global warming. "The tree line is shifting towards the Pole and animals from the sub-Arctic are already starting to spread northwards," says María Gunnarsdóttir from the organization Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna. "Since the land doesn't go on northward forever, at some point there won't be any room left for the Arctic species."

And it is very likely that the region will get warmer still. The real climate time bomb still slumbers some 1,500 meters below the permanently frozen tundra and is only now starting to show its effects. An estimated 400 billion tons of methane is trapped in the frozen earth of the Arctic. The release of even a fraction of the greenhouse gas could lead to the climate horror scenario in record time: only last week the academic magazine "Science" confirmed that Greenland's icecap was melting.

Less ice on Greenland

[photo5 NASA/NOAA, On Sept. 21, 2005, sea ice extent dropped to 2.05 million sq. miles, the lowest extent yet recorded in the satellite record.]

The massive ice sheet is almost five times the size of Germany and up to three kilometers thick. It contains enough water to create increase the world's sea levels by more than seven meters. The unsettling news from the scientists is that the melting process seems to have already begun. "A further rise of two to three degrees and the melting of the Greenland icecap will be irreversible," says Philippe Huybrechts from the University of Brussels. The ice on Greenland itself could completely vanish within the next 1,000 years, Huybrechts says, estimating that together with melting in the Antarctic, there will be a rise in sea level of up to 90 centimeters by the end of the century.

That means that the quarreling Danes and Canadians need to resolve their testy territorial dispute over Hans Island pretty quickly -- unless they want to find themselves bickering over a stretch of water. At least Copenhagen and Ottawa have agreed to carry on their argument in a more civilized manner: While attending last autumn's UN General Assembly meeting in New York, Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Møller assured delegates that there wouldn't be any more flag-planting contests. Both countries remain adamant about sticking to their territorial claims, but the banner battle has been resolved without a diplomatic incident: It appears, said Møller gleefully, that the Canadian flag has fallen down of its own accord.

Times: The Irish priest who brought Eta killers to peace

The Times March 24, 2006, The Irish priest who brought Eta killers to peace, David Sharrock and Graham Keeley

Barcelona: Just before the IRA hunger strike in 1981 Republican prisoners in the Maze nicknamed Alec Reid “Behind the Scenes” because he constantly assured them that “things are going on behind the scenes” and everything would be all right.

He was wrong. Ten men starved themselves to death and Father Reid, blaming himself, suffered a nervous breakdown.

But in recent years the 74-year-old Redemptorist priest from Tipperary has more than earned the sobriquet, playing a key role in persuading two of Europe’s most ruthless terrorist groups to abandon the gun and embrace politics.

The Basque separatist group, Eta, that will today begin a ceasefire it promises is permanent, having accepted the message brought from Ireland by the priest who laboured for more than a decade to convince Gerry Adams that the only solution to conflict lay in political negotiations.

Speaking from Bilbao, the Basque commercial capital, Father Reid was reluctant to take credit, but acknowledged he had “been here almost continuously for the past four years or so”, preaching the lessons of Northern Ireland. He had been “explaining especially that the only way you can solve such conflicts is through dialogue between all participants.

“There are no military solutions and we would say that the first thing you have to do is to take the violence away from the streets. You can’t solve it while it is on the streets. You have to bring it to the conference table.”

Self-congratulation is not the style of a man who, in spite of his sometimes controversial empathy with the Irish Republican movement, has demonstrated on many occasions the humanity at the core of his Christian mission to end violence.

When, in 1987, he delivered the last rites to two Signals corporals murdered by the IRA after they accidentally drove into a Republican funeral, the image of his stooping frame bent over their bodies went around the world.

A shy man, usually dressed in a black leather bomber jacket and jeans, Father Reid has been described as the inspiration of the Irish peace process.

The author Ed Moloney, an astute observer of the Provisionals for more than 30 years, credits him with having “initiated, devised and nurtured” the IRA away from the cycle of killing and down the road that eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Fr Reid’s Basque mission began four years later when priests there invited him over in the hope that he could help to end their conflict as well.

A meeting in 2003 with the widow of a journalist murdered by Eta was a turning point. “She told me that every day when she wakes up and realises her husband is dead she does not want to go on living,” he told The Times yesterday. “At that moment I realised that we must act here immediately. As we said in Ireland, every second could cost another life.”

It was an encounter that echoed his decision to approach Gerry Adams in 1982 and plead with the Republican leader to intervene on behalf of the family of a British soldier who had been kidnapped by the IRA in South Armagh.

The soldier was subsequently murdered after being tortured, but the dialogue between the two men continued, eventually transforming itself into what became the peace process.

Father Reid has spent the past three years talking to all sides in the Basque country. Using the Bishop of Bilbao’s official residence as a base, he has met Eta leaders across the Pyrennean border in the French Basque country, as well as their political representatives in Batasuna and a range of civic and community leaders.
His inability to speak Spanish or Euskera, the Basque language, was never a handicap: those who met him were immediately impressed with his determination to succeed.

“I have known that the leadership of Eta wanted peace for the past three years but their problem has been convincing their supporters, as was the case with the IRA,” he said.

“People will not like me saying this, but I have a lot of respect for the leadership of Eta as well as the IRA. It is made up of some very intelligent people.”

In fact he has said far worse. Last October he created a furore when he lost his temper with a loyalist during a public debate and accused Northern Ireland Unionists of having treated Catholics as the Nazis treated the Jews.

When the last Eta ceasefire broke down in the late 1990s he told a Basque journalist he believed that the Spanish Government was “the real terrorists” because of its refusal to start a process of open dialogue.

And he has angered politicians on both sides of the Irish border with his ready acceptance of the Provisional IRA’s denial that it carried out the £26.5 million Northern Bank raid in December 2004.

Some mainstream Spanish and Basque politicians have privately voiced their occasional irritation with the priest. But his moral authority and track record has proved its worth with Eta, which tends to regard the IRA as a big brother.

Fr Reid was witness, along with a Protestant clergyman, to the decommissioning of the IRA arsenal last October. It is highly possible that he may soon find himself taking on a similar role in the Basque country. “This is the end of the physical-force tradition in Basque politics,” he said. “It’s the beginning of a whole new era.”

Globe: In lush BC, Jean shares painful secret

In lush BC, Jean shares painful secret, Rod Mickleburgh, Friday March 10 2006, Globe and Mail

VANCOUVER -- Count Governor-General Michaëlle Jean as the latest convert to the seductive charms of the West Coast.

Wherever she has gone on her first official visit to the province, Ms. Jean has proclaimed that if she were to live anywhere else in Canada outside of Montreal, it would be Vancouver.

Her earlier stop in Victoria, complete with its host of daffodils, was also a big hit with the country's viceregal representative.

Maybe the pleasure and comfort she clearly drew from her lush surroundings explain why Ms. Jean chose to speak out with startling candour about her personal life.

Most poignantly, during a speech in Victoria on International Women's Day, the Governor-General shared the pain of seeing spousal violence in her own childhood.

Ms. Jean first recalled witnessing the helplessness of women while working with others to set up a network of shelters for battered women in Quebec.

Then, visibly moved by the memory, she said: "I also saw part of my own story. I was once a little girl who saw her father strike her mother. My younger sister and I lived with the anguish that all children feel when their family unit breaks down."

Ms. Jean, 48, was born in Haiti. After her father, Roger Jean, was savagely beaten by government thugs, the family emigrated to Quebec in 1968. Soon after the move, Mr. Jean abandoned the family, leaving Ms. Jean's mother Lucie to raise her two daughters alone.

"For years, we lived in a small basement apartment in Montreal that had just 1½ rooms," she recalled. "Despite the uncertainty that comes with working odd jobs, my mother held her head high, her pride and dignity never wavering."

Ms. Jean recently reconciled with her father, and these days, she said, he is a changed man.

"My father, who suffered the brutality of torture, is now free from the hell of violent behaviour," she told her Victoria audience. "This is the story of a family that happens to be my family."

In a brief encounter with reporters, she said she decided to speak publicly about spousal violence in her family in order to help other women. "The more you put a human face on those situations, especially from my position now as Governor-General, it helps others who are totally isolated . . . to do the same," Ms. Jean said.

"It's something I feel very free and open to share with other people."

Asked whether she would tell her young daughter about the history of abuse in her family, Ms. Jean replied that what took place was not "a shame. It happens to so many families.

"We have to realize that being silenced about it [spousal violence] is not a good thing to do. I think part of the solution is to speak out and make it known."

Awareness helped her father to change, she pointed out. "I think he is an example to many men by showing that it is possible to overcome this kind of behaviour. He has done that and I am very proud of him."

Later, addressing an official government luncheon presided over by Premier Gordon Campbell, the Governor-General returned to the theme of violence against women.

"The numbers of women and their children who continue to be affected by violence and misogyny are staggering," she said. "And we all bear the costs."

Outside Vancouver City Hall, where Ms. Jean unveiled a display case containing the original 1952 Winter Olympics flag from Oslo, spectator Anne Pearson said she was proud that the country's new Governor-General does not shy away from problems in her own private life.

"I just think she's such a huge asset to bring this out in public at a time when otherwise people might not be aware of it [violence against women]," said Ms. Pearson.

Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan donated $5,000 on behalf of the city to the Women's Information Safe House in the Downtown Eastside as a gift to the Governor-General.

WISH is a safe drop-in centre for sex-trade workers who walk the streets of the city's toughest area.

And another, smaller piece around the same story: Globe: Saturday March 11 2006.

Ms. Jean's example

'It happens to so many families, we have to realize. And being silent about it is not a good thing to do. I think part of the solution is to speak out . . . about it, and make it known."

The speaker was Governor-General Michaëlle Jean, talking this week of domestic abuse and the need to let those who are suffering it know they are not alone. She went further. She told of her own experience as "a little girl who saw her father strike her mother. My younger sister and I lived with the anguish that all children feel when the family unit breaks down."

In her case, the husband left and the smaller family unit went through hardship. But Ms. Jean's very presence showed that triumph can come from adversity, and she had a further message: that her violent father had eventually renounced his violence. Those who have suffered in silence with abuse have been reminded that this is not some anomaly they must live with -- that the problem cuts through all layers of society, and that those who are abused should not hesitate to seek help. The Governor-General has been there, and has borne public witness.

Spiegel: Prostitute Retraining Program

March 14, 2006, Prostitute Retraining Program, From Johns to Geriatrics, Guido Kleinhubbert

A new project in Germany is teaching prostitutes a wholly new bedside manner -- retraining them to become care workers for the elderly. Many experts consider women with experience in the sex trade to be especially well suited to the job.

[Photo1}

She used to call herself "Angie" and described herself to potential customers as "the buxom blonde from Bochum -- without taboos and available around the clock." She satisfied machos and mama's boys, blue-collar workers and ivory-tower academics, old and young. She learned how to adjust to completely different temperaments and needs. She did it six years long four or five times a day. Then she got pregnant, cancelled her ad in the newspaper and changed her job.

Angie, the whore, became Angelika the care worker for the elderly. Employed by a mobile social care service, the one-time blonde now has short brown hair and has traded her stilettos for sensible shoes. Instead of taking care of their sexual needs, she now helps her customers bathe and change their bandages. "It's easy for me," says Angelika, who just finished her training.

What the woman from Germany's industrial Ruhr Valley managed to do on her own is now being considered by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia as a model for other sex trade workers: off the street and into the old folks home. The novel retraining scheme is being financed with over €1 million in state and EU money.

"It was a logical move," says Rita Kühn from Diakone Westfalen, which runs nursing homes across the country and is organizing the project. According to Kühn, prostitutes have "good people skills," aren't easily disgusted and have "zero fear of contact."

Those are all characteristics that can set them apart from trainee nurses and future care workers, believes Kühn. She is so confident that prostitutes are cut out for nursing care jobs that she wants to offer 30 women the chance to have a new career with two years of courses and vocational training.

Hard times in the red light district

For the 56-year-old Gisela Zohren the unusual program comes at just the right time. The former star dominatrix, who works for the prostitute help center "Midnight Mission," is in charge of the project in Dortmund. Founded in 1918, the center has rarely had so much to do. In recent years, she's heard increasing bad news from the red light milieu. Competition has surged at bordellos and among streetwalkers as thousands of women have poured into the sex trade -- and not just from economically depressed Eastern Europe. There are plenty of mothers simply trying to make ends meet, academics who can't find other work, or even schoolgirls trying to make some extra pocket money.

[Photo2]

"The job situation is miserable," says Zohren, who estimates there are at least 50,000 prostitutes in North Rhine-Westphalia alone. The hooker surplus has led to a "dramatic drop in prices," meaning a john can get pretty much anything he wants for €30 these days. The only time any real money is to be made is during big events like a recent hunting trade fair in Dortmund.

Zohren says at least half of her clients want out of the sex business and most of them could imagine working with the elderly. She herself was once a successful strict mistress decked out in leather and latex in her own S&M studio, but managed to make the jump herself in the late 1990s. Once she did, she found the wishes of many of her former customers weren't so different from her nursing home work with bedpans and washcloths. She often used to play the role of nanny -- albeit with a whip. "I learned to listen and to convey a feeling of safety," says Zohren. "Isn't that exactly what's missing so much in care for the elderly?"

The whole concept sounds "very coherent" to Heinz Oberlach from Germany's Federal Labor Agency -- especially since there are few sectors that so desperately need new workers like nursing homes and social services. There are some 6,400 vacancies in the sector nationwide, even though Germany's unemployment rate tops 12 percent. And the country's rapidly aging society will only make the problem more acute in the coming decades. "It all fits together like the pieces of a puzzle," enthuses Oberloch.

Useful skills

[Photo3}

In an attempt to alleviate any concerns of potential employers, Zohren and the project coordinators from the cities of Bochum and Münster will go on a road show around the state in the coming weeks. "The people we talk with need to realize that prostitution can offer true qualifications," says Zohren.

Rita Kühn from Diakone Westfalen is hoping for absolute discretion from nursing managers to avoid elderly men demanding erotic services from their new nurses.

Ex-prostitute Angelika is glad that her new colleagues and customers don't know about her past in the red light milieu. She feels "very comfortable" in her new job -- even though she doesn't earn even half as much as she did as Angie the hooker. And due to cutbacks in healthcare, she doesn't have as much time for her customers as she once did. "I used to be able to listen for a good half hour," she says. "But that isn't really possible now."

NYT: Screen: 'Obsession,' Swedish Import:34th Street Has Movie of Madman's Memory

Screen: 'Obsession,' Swedish Import:34th Street Has Movie of Madman's Memory

By VINCENT CANBY
Published: August 29, 1968

THE young hero of "Obsession," identified only as "You," hikes alone through the beautifully photographed, gray-brown, summer landscapes of Lapland. As he walks, he remembers an earlier trip along the same route with his sweetheart, a pretty, high-strung Jewish refugee.

Although the young man manages to think in well structured chronologically ordered flashbacks, it soon becomes apparent that he is out of his mind. The earlier hike, which had started out as an idyll, ended with the girl's drowning, which may or may not have been murder prompted by the young man's jealousy.

"Obession" is a lovely looking movie, but it is also a superficial drama, guided not by its own internal logic but by the arbitrarily imposed logic of its director, Gunnar Hoglund, who also wrote the screenplay with Bosse Gustafson. The Swedish film, with English subtitles, opened here yesterday at the 34th Street Theater.

Mr. Hoglund tries hard but unsuccessfully to translate into cinematic terms the kind of subjectivity that may only be possible in very personal prose. His camera sees the land and feels the coolness of the Arctic air, but it never records the passion of "You," played by Matthias Henrikson.

The girl (Maude Adelson) also is an enigma, except for one fleeting moment when Hoglund allows us to enter her head. As she watches a Laplander notch the ears of a reindeer, she automatically recoils into a concentration camp memory. Never illuminated, however, is the meaning of her Jewishness and its effect on her lover.

"Obsession" is a very earnest little picture, but watching it is like listening to a stranger recount a dream. It has some vivid moments, but its points of reference remain as secret as prenatal memories.

OBSESSION, screenplay by Gunnar Hoglund and Bosse Gustafson; directed by Mr. Hoglund; produced by Georg Eriksson and Lars Werner; an O.R.P. Company release Presented by Vernon P. Becker and Mel May. At the 34th Street East Theater, east of Third Avenue. Running time: 104 minutes.
"You" . . . . . Matthias Henrikson
Leni . . . . . Maude Adelson
The Other Man . . . . . Lars Lind
The Tourist . . . . . Guy De La Berg

Rex Murphy: Inside the strict faith of unfaith

Inside the strict faith of unfaith, Rex Murphy, Saturday, March 18, 2006

Stephen Harper ended his address to the Canadian troops with what has become a signature salutation: “God bless Canada.”

We must presume that when he says “God bless Canada,” that that is precisely what Mr. Harper hopes for. It is not rote.

Mr. Harper is a Christian. He believes in God. And from everything I've read about the Prime Minister, his is a serious belief, not some decorative shawl worn to court others of similar persuasion, or an item affixed to the campaign bio to signal “community” with the great number and variety of Christians in this country.

For those who have junked religion, passed it by or simply never had time for it, the practice of invoking the Creator can seem quaint, tedious, and utterly passé. For more militant secularists, who are in their fervour and stridency more often than they would wish a mirror of the fundamentalists they frequently deride, the invocation can be positively “offensive.”

I'm not very sympathetic to this latter posture, as I have not often observed the secularists willfully or voluntarily moderating the intensity or expression of their convictions out of deference to the very many others who are not of like mind. Just as one example, people curse and swear (even these words seem dated in these triumphalist secular days) with an ease and abandon, in public and private, at home and at work, without the least thought that there may be others present to whom foul or blasphemous language carries much more than an edge of rudeness and discomfort.

“Too bad” is often the unspoken rider to a good blue streak mingling “Christ” and the “F-word” in all its variations within the hearing of those who have not yet discovered the utility and glee of absolutely uninhibited speech. Those who are still believers, those to whom the name of their Saviour is still sacred, and for whom verbal obscenity is still instinctively repulsive, are more or less told, in another of the elegancies of our age, to “get used to it.”

I can but speculate that Mr. Harper may — in his own way, either mischievously or otherwise — be returning the favour. It may be the Christian imperative to turn the other cheek, but scripture, I think, is silent on the question of whether, when the one side gives you the verbal finger, you may not cock a lexical digit in return.

Ardent non-believers are every bit as squeamish as their opposites.

Perhaps, given the ascendancy and complacency of non-belief in Western culture, and the ever more numerous and thick barricades against any manifestation of belief in the public domain, non-believers think the field is entirely theirs. And so, Mr. Harper's “God bless Canada” may be something more than a mere annoyance to them: It may be the first shadow of a doubt — and nothing is more cruel to a fundamentalist than the approach of doubt — that the ascendancy they assume is complete is a fiction.

That would be intolerable. The faith of unfaith cannot abide a discrepancy between its reality and reality. The thought that religion might have a meaning and significance for a great many of their fellow citizens, beyond its anthropological and historical significance, that it might mean something here and now, and that it should be expressed, is a horror of an insight. In our secular dispensation, God is at best an empty word, a hollow signifier, and the idea of reverence for his Name is at best the reflex of yokels. Time magazine asked the question 40 years ago, Is God Dead? and did not “stay for an answer.”

I am aware that there is another objection to Mr. Harper's habit of asking God to bless our nation, and I'm not sure if this objection has a sectarian basis or not. It is that President George Bush also frequently “signs off” his speeches with the parallel formula of “God bless America.”

In this case, the objection is not so much that Mr. Harper is wearing his faith on his sleeve, as that he is shining a light on his pro-Americanism and, furthermore, that he is miming the zealotry of the “fundamentalist” Mr. Bush. In some quarters, that is a far deeper (it is mortal with a vengeance) sin than the mere public display of an active faith.

Over whole regions of the Western world, otherwise so cleansed of even the vocabulary of religious observance, being pro-Bush may be the last heresy. That position, among those who style themselves progressives, speaks not so much of a failure of intellect; it is a flaw of the spirit, an irrationality so profound that it must have a supernatural (and likely demonic) source.

Still, both Mr. Harper and his critics, at least here, meet on common ground. They are both invoking a higher power to aid them in confronting the world. For the anti-Bushites, any belief in the goodness of Mr. Bush is a tear in the fabric of reality.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with a politician invoking a higher power. I find some comfort in the idea of a leader acknowledging one.

Jeremy Lind: Changing Customary Land Use in Turkana

Changing Customary Land Use in Turkana, Jeremy Lind

The scenery became more and more dreary as we advanced. The barren ground was strewn with gleaming, chiefly red and green volcanic debris, pumice stone, huge blocks of blistered lava and here and there pieces of wood, Samuel Teleki, 1888, Austrian explorer

…great expanse of dusty red broken sporadically by dots of green. Welcome to the land of the living dead, Daily Nation, 22 November 1999

The Turkana people of northern Kenya just sit for hours, silent and powerless, waiting for aid as they have lost everything to the drought, BBC World News on-line, 21 April 2000

Something about the Turkana rangelands in northwest Kenya, colored in alternating shades of yellow, red, and brown, inspires intrigue and a haunting sense of abandon and perversion in many observers. Turkana is violent. Turkana is a victim. Turkana is valorous and vengeful at once. Turkana is typically understood in these ways, a place that is emotional and extreme, and that bears little relation to life in the rest of Kenya and beyond. It is Kenya’s frontier, a place recalled more for its difference and for what does not make sense than for its similarities and for what does. The pejorative metaphors and anecdotes used to represent Turkana are more than entertainment, ‘news’, or a quick and convenient way of understanding an unfamiliar people and place. Rather, they represent a dominant way of seeing and making, of socializing those unfamiliar with the region to accept Turkana as a freak landscape infused with mystery, extremity, and hardship.

The Turkana environment has long been demonized, primarily by visitors curious with the region’s unusual rangelands and nomadic ways of life. Curiosity about the Turkana environment, communicated through countless anecdotes, is molded in part by fascination, in part by alarm. For most, Turkana epitomizes environmental waste and humanitarian crisis. Turkana’s environments are inhospitable. Its natural resource use systems are incapable. Its people are insecure. Knowledge of the Turkana environment is influenced by similar grandiose leaps in judgment, ones encapsulated in anecdotes that indoctrinate, that frighten, and that agonize.

It is challenging to locate alternative meanings of the Turkana environment. This is primarily what interested me: how might the Turkana environment appear differently through the eyes of someone familiar with its contours and shapes than through the eyes of someone from someplace greener, say Vermont, Vienna, or Vancouver? Can there exist multiple ‘realities’ of one place? Can Turkana exist as something different for a nomadic inhabitant than for an urban adventurer, journalist, or scientist? Are there meanings of the Turkana environment that go beyond simple judgments of catastrophe and collapse? Who better to consult than the pastoralist Turkana themselves?

Constructing agony

The dangers of alarmist anecdotes are real: they construct agony as a way of life for the region’s predominately nomadic pastoralists. They leave an impression that pastoralists are helpless against the vagaries of nature, and that pastoralism as a way of life is incapable of meeting basic food security needs. This is nowhere more evident than in the media coverage over the past several months of the ongoing drought and food insecurity situation in Turkana. The identity of food security in Turkana has assumed crisis proportions in the media, in part through alarmist descriptions of the Turkana environment. Images of a bleak and barren landscape, isolated and apart from the rest of Kenya, point to the environment as a problem, and by doing so justify representations of famine popularized in the media. Famine complements ideas of Turkana as a “mass trap of starvation, death, deprivation and poverty”, as Kenya’s leading daily, the Nation, describes the region, providing greater impetus to debates surrounding issues of pastoral vulnerability in the region.

The Nation in particular has actively supported an understanding of Turkana premised on notions of destitution, deprivation, and disaster as a way of life for its people. The Nation introduced its coverage of the Turkana ‘famine’ during the short rains in November of 1999, under the exaggerated headline ‘Agony and death’. A large color picture of a naked young Turkana girl, Aro Koriang, appeared under a bold, large font. It provided the perfect pretext to create Turkana once again as that haunting place, unfamiliar, unknown, and in need. Aro, or “famine girl” as the Nation came to call her, became the poster child for the Nation’s ‘Famine Relief Fund’. The amount raised was updated daily in the Nation. Figures were often accompanied by pictures of Nairobi school children standing with cheques or bags of maize flour bound for Lodwar, Turkana’s administrative center. These images were testimony to the goodwill of Kenya, and to the goodwill of the Nation.

A March 16 article in the Nation updated Aro’s condition. It explained that Aro was ‘found starving in an arid wasteland’, but had since recovered at Gertrude’s Garden Children’s Hospital in Nairobi, courtesy of the Nation Media Group. The Group’s chief executive, Mr. Wilfred Kiboro, claimed, ‘The recovery of this girl shows what we can achieve if we are committed to alleviating poverty.’ It also shows, although Mr. Kiboro would perhaps be loathe to admit, the power of anecdote, the perpetuation of agony as the popular way that Turkana is understood, and the continuation of dependency approaches to address real problems in Turkana.

Real tragedies?

Real food security concerns in the region raise legitimate questions, such as what processes conspire to make pastoralists vulnerable to hunger, what local and non-local systems are in place to mitigate the impacts of hunger, and what further interventions (or non-interventions) may strengthen these systems. A focus on alarming descriptions of the environment serves a strategic purpose in this debate for it suggests that livelihood insecurity in the region is primarily a factor of environmental stress. The allocation of famine relief, irrigation, the drilling of bore holes, and other measures designed to counteract uncertain environmental variables are seen as the most appropriate ways to strengthen Turkana livelihoods. The Nation, for its part, in numerous articles and opinions on the Turkana food security situation, made reference to non-environmental factors, including poor infrastructure in the area to deliver relief supplies, as well as insecurity caused by banditry and cattle raiding. However, the Nation’s unmeasured reference to the ‘tragic’ condition of the Turkana environment slowly indoctrinates people to believe that famine is understandable for the Turkana people, and that tragedy comes with tragedy.

Perhaps more tragic than any objective or ‘real’ tragedy in the everyday lives of the Turkana is the tragic consequence of our own fascination and fright, and of our implacable need to make uncommon environments and ways of life familiar, predictable, and treatable in our own minds. Transforming livelihoods in Turkana is a key objective of most interventions in the region, including those that distribute famine relief maize and those that promote irrigated agriculture as an investment priority. Transformation means making livelihoods different, not necessarily making livelihoods better.

For many, Turkana is an insurmountable problem if it cannot be changed, a place where violence, disorder and danger are more common than not. Investments are subsequently channeled into ways of transforming Turkana, rather than finding ways of sustaining prevailing livelihood systems. It is a place where abandonment of the nomadic pastoral economy is favored over its adaptation and adjustment, and where the ‘powerless’ are empowered through their own self-denigration and through the adoption of different ways of life.

Self-defeat, self-determination

Encouragement is left to the Turkana themselves. Although it is more and more difficult to sustain customary drought responses, there is a substantial local commitment to making nomadic pastoralism both a sustainable and secure livelihood option. At least superficially, it may appear that incapability and inadequacy rightly characterize Turkana drought responses. However, the Turkana are not defeated by the challenges posed by recurring drought, nor by insecurity that complicates customary drought coping strategies. Rather, time and again they show their resilience, determination and capacity to innovate new responses to drought.

In the past, during the akamu, or dry season, south Turkana pastoralists lived and moved in search of water and pasture for grazing livestock in adakar, or small units of one or two families. Each pastoralist grazed his own animals separate from those of others, and at night returned his animals to a separate holding pen. This strategy helped spread grazing pressure and its associated risks over a wider area. In the akiporo, or wet season, pastoralists came together in medium sized units to move in search of grazing resources in the interior Tooma region, or plains. Many resources for grazing are available in this typically arid environment following the seasonal long rains in March and April. Families reunite, and different livestock are grazed near to one another in close proximity to temporary settlements.

However, beginning in the 1980s, south Turkana pastoralists re-organised their customary land use systems. Living and moving in adakar had become risky due to the constant threat of violent robbery and death caused by marauding norokos, or armed bandits. Alternatively, pastoralists formed arumurums. These are extensive, designated areas of the range with mutually observed boundaries, in which pastoralists congregate their livestock together, and share responsibility for grazing livestock. Entrance is tightly regulated and determined by the arumurum leader, a mutually respected elder man from within the community. Animals are grazed in larger congregations, and at night return to larger fortified pens that hold the livestock of many families. Guards patrol the periphery, and are instructed in their movements by the arumurum leader. For the time being, the formation of arumurums is the most prominent local strategy for responding to insecurity. At the same time, these sustain customary drought responses in the absence of other supportive measures.

To many, particularly conservationists, arumurums are viewed as environmentally destructive, and a further proof that nomadic pastoral livelihood systems are not sustainable or viable in contemporary Kenya. It could be argued that grazing livestock in larger units is a mal-adaptation of past systems for managing environmental limitations, which were centered on splitting herds within and between families. Many might quickly conclude that arumurums will inevitably lead to localised environmental degradation. Arumurums could also be seen as an ineffective security measure by grouping greater numbers of animals in one place. However, arumurums prolong individual and ‘household’ participation in the pastoral livestock economy by making areas of the range safe for grazing. As a temporary measure to contend with insecurity, they provide an additional means of dealing with risk, and prevent pastoralists from falling out of reciprocal networks that individual herders depend on to rebuild herds following drought. Arumurums, despite their clear disadvantages, are perhaps less a degradation of the traditional pastoral land use system than they are an innovation.

Ultimately, the Turkana need the liberty to make their own decisions, as well as the self-determination to realize their own ideas of human and natural resource development apart from what is prescribed or reasoned to best for them by outside policy makers, legislators, researchers, and charitable and other non governmental organisations. Norokos, poverty, preventable disease, and drought complicate the ability of many pastoralists to make decisions independent of outside assistance. However, these obstacles are less emergencies than they are manageable challenges (as the Turkana demonstrate in setting up arumurums), which may be worked through with commitment and determination, rather than through quick relief, and through understanding Turkana more as a familiar than as a freak, and as do-able rather than insurmountable.

Beyond agony and anecdote

Standing before a map made to illustrate the current wet season, a group of elder women in Loperot location in south Turkana responded forcefully when asked to explain different features on the map. Two parallel lines consisting of sticks and leaves represent the Kalapata River, the women motion. Sticks are trees and leaves are grass. Rocks piled to represent a nearby mountain, Lokone, are dressed with more leaves. Here the animals are taken to graze, the women add. Beyond the concentration of sticks, leaves, and palm fronds along rivers and on mountains, the remaining areas of the map are littered with pieces of carefully placed twigs and other greenery. During the akiporo, grazing resources can be found everywhere, including the typically arid plains, they say. Now asked how the map would look different if it were made for the akamu, several women quickly clear the area of the map representing the plains of all vegetation and sticks. All that remains are the concentration of sticks and leaves along rivers and on mountains.

In similar focus group meetings in south Turkana in June and July of 1999, Turkana pastoralists communicated the power of landscape through the making of maps, and through the sharing of ideas of an environment long discredited. Pastoralists in south Turkana communicate an environment that is different from conventional, alarmist testimonies popularised elsewhere. Their idea of the environment is neither harsh nor homogenous. They articulate a highly dynamic landscape cut by numerous seasonal small streams and rivers, and framed by mountains, with these diverse habitats supporting substantial reserves of trees and pasture. Water, mountains, pastures, trees, markets, insecurity and conflict are all parts of the environment that the Turkana describe, as are change and uncertainty. As they describe it, the environment is heterogeneous from one mountain or riverbed to the next, as well as one season or year to the next. When asked how the plains appear in the dry season, a young man confided, ‘On the plains there is nothing, only sunshine.’ Asked how the plains appear in the wet season, two women assuredly maintained, ‘Alakarabon’, or ‘there is only happiness’.

Turkana pastoralists are intimately familiar with this landscape. Their familiarity is manifest in a situated knowledge of where to move for specific needs, such as where to graze milking goats, where to collect medicinal plants, where to find weapons of defense, or where to find safety from bandits. Moves are highly strategic and planned according to a host of factors, including the availability of pasture, water and trees, areas of insecurity, and market opportunities. They are familiar with both the doings and the makings of the environment.

Importantly, the Turkana do not view the landscape as an undifferentiated level plain. Rather, the ‘plain’ has many ‘ups and downs’, as the Turkana see it, both in the literal sense, as in the topography of the land, as well as figuratively, such as fluctuations in the market price of livestock products, in climate, and in settlement patterns. First impressions may leave the idea that the south Turkana environment is degraded or harsh. Turkana pastoralists imagine the environment differently, with multiple risks and opportunities associated with different locations in the environment and to different times. The dynamic understanding of the environment they impart offers invaluable lessons for those of us trying to manage change, uncertainty and vulnerability in arid lands like Turkana.

On a short walk through the bush outside of Lokichar, a permanent settlement on the main Turkana road, I could ‘see’ the environment that Turkana pastoralists described. The sand was coarse, cutting into the soles of my feet, a constant reminder of grit and discomfort with each step. The sun reached everywhere, like tentacles, stinging the nape of my neck, bleaching the bark of an acacia tree, reaching underneath stones and volcanic rock. The environment was otherwise ‘soft’, the terrain rising up and down in quick succession as I walked down and across the embankment of one river to the next, and up the slopes of a rapidly rising hill. The vegetation grew dense nearer to streams and rivers. From the top of a hill I observed the variability and micro-level differences in the environment that the Turkana spoke of. The landscape here was rocky, smooth, rising, flat, vegetated, bare, brown, red, green, yellow, the distant ridge of mountains to the west indigo, and the horizon in all directions was uneven and rough. Sitting here above a varied Turkana, wonderful with different colors, lines, and shapes, the words of the two Turkana women came to mind, ‘Alakarabon’.

Reuters: Kenya's arid Turkana region takes brunt of drought

Kenya's arid Turkana region takes brunt of drought, 13 Mar 2006, Reuters, Tim Cocks

LODWAR, Kenya, March 13 (Reuters) - In a community where wealth is measured by the size of a herd, John Ekitela used to be a rich man. With 300 goats and 150 camels, he had prestige few of his tribesmen could dream of and gallons of milk to sell on the local market in Turkana, northwestern Kenya. That was before a drought scorched northwestern Kenya's sparse vegetation and sucked its rivers dry, killing all his animals except six goats. "I haven't seen rain since last May," he said, gesturing towards an expanse of stony sand dotted with dry bushes. "My animals died of hunger and thirst. There's no food or water."

Like much of the Horn of Africa, Kenya's already poor and neglected Turkana region is suffering a drought that has withered wild plants and wrecked crops. Known for its dramatic scenery, Turkana has been further put in the spotlight recently as the setting for some scenes in the Oscar-winning British film "The Constant Gardener."

Nilotic cousins of the more famous Maasai, the Turkana are distinguished by their tall, slender appearance and the reams of colourful beads worn around their necks. These semi-nomadic pastoralists have for centuries wandered the Horn of Africa, settling wherever they find grass for their vast herds of livestock to graze. But the pasture is running out.

Turkana is one of the worst-affected regions of a drought that has killed tens of thousands of livestock and hundreds of across Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia and other parts of east Africa. "Coping mechanisms are so strained that these people have to have external assistance," Rosemary Ngaruro, head of the Kenyan government's nutrition programme, told Reuters on a recent trip to Turkana.

"ISRAEL DRIER THAN THIS"

Coping with east Africa's droughts in the short run means dishing out food aid. Longer term solutions are harder. Scientists suspect climate change to be behind Africa's worsening drought cycles and some urge tougher action to curb global warming from greenhouse gas emissions. But aid workers in Turkana argue that more can be done to save water locally.

"Forget climate," said Father Albert Salvans, a Catholic missionary working on water catchment projects in an area where dried-up rivers stand out like veins in the sand. "Israel is far drier than this and they are exporting fruit all over the world."

One water catchment project involved damming up a section of the usually dried out Lokitaung river. Last week, the dam captured the first rains to hit the area for nearly a year, creating a reservoir of 136 thousand cubic metres of freshwater that would otherwise have run into Lake Turkana, a body too alkaline to sustain plant life. "Normally when it rains one day, you come back the next day and it's all gone," said Francis Angole, a Turkana who managed the building of the dam.

Even harder than catching water will be changing the pastoral ways of life that aid workers say have quickened desertification across the Horn of Africa. Growing herds of cows, goats and camels have gobbled dwindling patches of vegetation. Loyangalani, where "The Constant Gardener" scenes were shot along the shores of Lake Turkana, is as grey and stony as a moonscape photograph. "It's a man-made desert," said Mark Luckhurst of the Constant Gardener Trust, a local charity funded by the film.

"Over-grazing and destruction of trees for firewood created this. (It is) a way of life that is increasingly unsustainable." Persistent banditry adds to the region's woes.

Ekitala Anamat fled to Loyangalani after cattle raiders from a neighbouring tribe attacked his home village. "I've got nowhere to go. I'm afraid to go back home, but there's nothing for us here," he said. "We're going to die here."

MEMRI: Wafa Sultan - Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me.

2/21/2006 Clip No. 1050

Arab-American Psychologist Wafa Sultan: There Is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century

Following are excerpts from an interview with Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan. The interview was aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 21, 2006

.
Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.

[...]

Host: I understand from your words that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?

Wafa Sultan: Yes, that is what I mean.

[...]

Host: Who came up with the concept of a clash of civilizations? Was it not Samuel Huntington? It was not Bin Laden. I would like to discuss this issue, if you don't mind...

Wafa Sultan: The Muslims are the ones who began using this expression. The Muslims are the ones who began the clash of civilizations. The Prophet of Islam said: "I was ordered to fight the people until they believe in Allah and His Messenger." When the Muslims divided the people into Muslims and non-Muslims, and called to fight the others until they believe in what they themselves believe, they started this clash, and began this war. In order to start this war, they must reexamine their Islamic books and curricula, which are full of calls for takfir and fighting the infidels.

My colleague has said that he never offends other people's beliefs. What civilization on the face of this earth allows him to call other people by names that they did not choose for themselves? Once, he calls them Ahl Al-Dhimma, another time he calls them the "People of the Book," and yet another time he compares them to apes and pigs, or he calls the Christians "those who incur Allah's wrath." Who told you that they are "People of the Book"? They are not the People of the Book, they are people of many books. All the useful scientific books that you have today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking. What gives you the right to call them "those who incur Allah's wrath," or "those who have gone astray," and then come here and say that your religion commands you to refrain from offending the beliefs of others?

I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others' right to believe in it.

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: Are you a heretic?

Wafa Sultan: You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural...

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran...

Wafa Sultan: These are personal matters that do not concern you.

[...]

Wafa Sultan: Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people's beliefs are not your concern, whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary, or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their beliefs.

[...]

Wafa Sultan: The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the Holocaust), and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. 15 million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.

Globe: The playwright who talks to terrorists

The playwright who talks to terrorists - Robin Soans looks for answers in sensitive places, Kamal Al-Solaylee, Globe and Mail, Tuesday(?), Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Robin Soans will probably be remembered in theatre-history books as the man who has given voice to terrorists onstage. For that we should all be grateful. The British actor and playwright has been at the forefront of a renaissance in political drama in London and of a subgenre of it increasingly known as verbatim theatre: documentary-style plays based on transcripts of speeches or interviews with those closest to the issues at hand.

In 2004, armed with a pen and a notepad, Soans spent months talking to people whose lives had been marked by terrorist violence, whether as perpetrators or victims, in various parts of the world. The result, a play called Talking to Terrorists, opened at London's Royal Court Theatre last July within days of the bombings there, recasting the entire run in a different, more politically loaded context.

Londoners sought answers to their own 9/11 in Soans's play, which attempted to understand the roots of terrorism in language other than the retaliatory: What makes someone want to blow up innocent commuters, for example, and how does that change his or her society and the world at large?

Soans's previous play, The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, delves into terrorism and sectarian violence through a more specific context and metaphor: the Arab-Israeli conflict and cooking. In 2003, Soans travelled to Israel and the West Bank with two British directors, one Jewish and the other Arab, to conduct interviews with nearly 80 locals. He quickly discovered that the different factions there are almost as passionate about their food as they are about their politics. The Canadian premiere of The Arab-Israeli Cookbook is tonight in Toronto at Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, in an independent production by Studio 180, directed by Joel Greenberg.

In writing both plays -- and the earlier A State Affair, which examined class warfare in a northern England housing estate -- Soans discovered the secret weapon of political theatre: Never start with the politics. "You'll only write a political play by writing a human play, a play about humanity," he says on the phone from his London home. "If you do that, you'll end up with a more political play than the one you wanted, and the politics that you might want to bring into the theatre are going to be deeply personal. They are not going to be dogma, agenda, agitprop. That's a snare for a lot of writers."

It helps, Soans insists, not to have a vested interest in the issues a playwright is examining. Ideally, he says, a verbatim playwright should start with a blank page on the notepad before it gets filled with stories, dreams and fears.

"I don't have an agenda. I simply want to listen to people's stories and present them as faithfully and in the most balanced way I can . . .," he says. "When you reach an opinion, it would come through the emotional, personal and the domestic -- not through preconceived politics, dogma, well-established views that have been trotted out a hundred times."

The ethos of The Arab-Israeli Cookbook is that the people on both sides of the divide are the ones who know most about the reality of the situation in the Middle East and yet are the least consulted. We hear from politicians, academic experts and journalists, but rarely from the Israeli bus driver or Palestinian falafel maker.

"The brief I had for The Arab-Israeli Cookbook is how ordinary people carry on in such a bloody awful situation," says Soans. "How do you have some degree of normality in your life?" To Soans, some answers emerged from simply listening.

"These are the people who are dying to tell you their stories," he continues. "We live in an age where nobody listens to anyone else. Politicians pretend to listen. So when somebody comes and is prepared to listen acutely, it's a huge relief for people. The stories come flooding up. My particular method is to nod, smile and encourage, but to also ask for details. The details are what makes it completely fascinating, funny."

Verbatim theatre, like all art, is naturally subject to a certain degree of manipulation, through editing, juxtaposition and structuring of such details. Yet, it's also a prime example of theatre at its most immediate and democratic. In an age of political and media filtering of information, Soans argues, the stage has become one of the few outlets for presenting an even-handed, objective look at real people in real situations.

At least that's the case in London. The recent postponement of My Name Is Rachel Corrie -- a British verbatim play based on the diary entries and e-mails of a young American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza -- by the normally intrepid New York Theatre Workshop suggests that political theatre is still too hot to handle even in liberal New York. James Nicola, the company's artistic director, argued that his theatre needs time to create a context for Corrie's story, for fear that certain factions may use the play as a platform for their own agendas. His response may betray cautious thinking (or a knee-jerk reaction), but also fails to understand the complicated politics of the region. A few more months means a handful of new stories and contexts emerging out of the Middle East and American reactions to them. As with visiting the region, there's never really a good time to do it. If you want to, physically or dramatically, just do it.

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook opens in Toronto within weeks of the Danish-cartoon controversy and the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, for example -- two developments that its London productions in the summers of 2004 and 2005 did not have to contend with. Can a play about the social significance of making falafel and stuffed vine leaves affect an understanding of the common humanity among Israelis, Arabs and Torontonians of all political and racial stripes with these new realities in mind? There isn't the slightest hint of doubt in Soans's answer. "That's the great power of the theatre: to be able to strike recognition in the heart of the viewer."

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, presented by Studio 180, runs until April 1 at Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, 26 Berkeley St., Toronto (416-368-3110).

Globe Editorial: Back on track on Hamas

Back on track on Hamas, Wednesday, March 8, 2006

After 24 hours of almost farcical uncertainty, it is reassuring that Canada has reaffirmed its tough policy toward Hamas.

Two days ago, after a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Peter MacKay confidently declared that some Canadian aid to the Palestinian Authority would continue as long as it was not diverted for military purposes. Yesterday, the inexperienced minister issued a brief statement that backtracked significantly, reconfirming the original conditions that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other Western governments set last month: that continuation of aid to the Palestinian government hinges on the militant Islamic group's willingness to renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept previous peace agreements.

That is the only way to proceed as long as Hamas continues to defy international pressure to moderate its threatening stance. To the consternation of many governments, Russia invited Hamas leaders to Moscow last Friday for three days of high-profile talks. It was the new Palestinian government's first invitation to a non-Islamic state. Although Russia sternly advocated that it comply with those three conditions, Hamas leaders would not budge. Instead, they grudgingly agreed only to continue the truce with Israel. And although they added that they might accept the internationally brokered road map toward peace, they heaped virtually impossible conditions on Israel before they would comply.

In the circumstances, the only option is for Western governments to hold firm to their demands on Hamas. Instead, after a persuasive session with Russia's Sergey Lavrov, Mr. MacKay abruptly broke ranks, declaring that some aid could continue. "International monitoring can ensure that the money is going to the Palestinian people, that it is reaching its destination, that it will not be subverted or perverted," he asserted confidently. For 24 hours, amid a storm of questions, the Foreign Minister and his government went to ground. No one was able to explain exactly how much aid Canada would opt to continue; it currently allocates $25-million on average annually for the West Bank and Gaza, for Palestinian refugees in the region and for other regional initiatives.

With the issuance of a terse three-paragraph statement late yesterday afternoon, such nitty-gritty questions became irrelevant. The government is back on the course that Mr. Harper had originally set out. Federal aid money to the West Bank and Gaza, which is delivered largely through international organizations on the ground such as Oxfam and the United Nations, is under review. "Future funding will depend on the statements and actions of a new government," the statement added.

It is the only way to maintain the pressure on Hamas. The militant government urgently needs the foreign aid that accounts for at least $1-billion of its $1.6-billion (U.S.) budget. If the United States, the European Union and other developed nations do not hang tough, they will remove the financial stick that hangs over the new government's head and let it continue on its worrisome course. Two days ago, as if to flout Russia's entreaties, the Hamas-controlled parliament cancelled all decisions made during the last session of the outgoing legislature in a calculated insult to its moderate opposition. There is a peace process in place that, if the Palestinians co-operate, could lead to the formation of their own state. That is the carrot. Ottawa was right to reconfirm its commitment to the formidable stick.

Globe: Hugh Graham- Has the lid finally come off?

Has the lid finally come off? Hugh Graham, Saturday march 4, 2006

Since the bombing of their sacred mosque, Iraq's powerful Shiite leaders have been struggling to keep the country from plunging into civil war. Or have they?

The people of Samarra, north of Baghdad, are largely Sunni Muslims even though their city is home to the gilded Askariya Mosque, a shrine especially sacred to their religious rivals, the Shiites of Iraq.

Through the ages, the Sunnis followed caliphs while the Shiites followed imams, and the mosque is the tomb of the 10th and 11th men to lead the sect. Even more important it is dedicated to Mohammed al-Mahdi, known as the 12th or "missing imam," because it was in Samara, in 873, that he vanished, allegedly taken into an ethereal dimension from which he will return to inaugurate a new world during a final apocalypse.

A millennium after his disappearance, "the Mahdi" remains the Shiites' central spiritual figure. Last month, radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr told the Al-Jazeera news network that his own aggressive brand of Islam is required to bring about the Mahdi's return.

Four days later, the sacred shrine in Samarra was destroyed. Terrorists in commando gear expelled its guards and planted explosives to cause a blast that has left Iraq once again on the verge of civil war.

Last week in Baghdad, Mr. al-Sadr's wild militia, called the Mahdi Army, seized several Sunni mosques and draped them with the black flag of Shia radicalism. Even with the bombing in Samarra, this was an outrageous provocation, given the Sunni insurgency, marginalization and anger at Iraq's new Shia-dominated parliament.

Behind the scenes, the Mahdi militia's political masters tried in vain to restrain it, indicating that there is something disturbingly different about this new round of sectarian violence. That the fighting between Sunnis and Shiites has claimed almost 1,500 lives in 10 days is bad enough. But what seems to have brought the conflict from a two-year simmer to a boil is that the Shia religious hierarchy in the holy city of Najaf is losing its power over 62 per cent of Iraq's 25 million people. In short, the Shiites are losing the restraint for which they have become renowned.

With luck, the Shiites will resume their composure, but if there is all-out civil war, the U.S. mission to bring democracy to the country will have been a complete failure.

Nor is there much Washington can do. U.S. troops, according to the Los Angeles Times, have been caught between the two sides, and been asked by both to stay away from their mosques, the prime centres of conflict. With government security forces fuelling rather than quenching the violence, peace now depends on the recuperative powers of the Shia religious organization. Only by understanding that organization and how it influences Iraqi affairs can the world make sense of what is to come.

For the most part, the Shiites are ethnically Arab, and live largely in the south. The word "Shia" means "partisans," as in partisans of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Mohammed, to whom they trace the leadership of Islam, whereas the Sunnis trace the line to Abu Bakr, the Prophet's companion.

The two sects crossed swords and in the mid-seventh century the Sunnis defeated the Shiites in Iraq, killing Hussein, Ali's son and successor, and taking charge of the Muslim world while the Shiites remained a minority, although they later came to form the majority in Iraq and Iran.

Today, they have enormous respect for their head cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and in the past, his orders have always prevailed. Like Gandhi, he has a record of humility, wisdom and firmness tempered with restraint. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he ordered the Shiites to stand aside in a successful move to avoid civil war with Sunnis loyal to Saddam Hussein.

By 2004, the United States had recognized the Ayatollah's power to unleash massive demonstrations. With a few utterances and an edict or two, the laconic, white-bearded old man stood down U.S. administrator Paul Bremer more than once over Washington's manipulation of the electoral process, prompting the United Nations to come in and to help with election planning.

The same year, Ayatollah al-Sistani also stopped Shia retaliation after suicide bombings during Ashura, preventing the civil war Sunni extremists were so desperate to provoke. He used his authority to end two rebellions against U.S. troops by the Mahdi Army and he ensured, in a few decisive words, that Islam would be enshrined as a source of law in the Iraqi constitution.

Now, that record is being tested. The day after the destruction of the mosque in Samarra, he called for peaceful demonstrations. But the following day, he also called in tribal paramilitaries from the central Euphrates region to protect the Shia shrines from further harm, a reminder that, in the Shiite tradition, he is the only religious authority who can call for all-out war.

Ominously, in a release from his office in Najaf, he said, if the government can't "offer the required security, then the faithful must be able to do it, with the help of God."

The sectarian fighting could even affect the Ayatollah's popularity, not to mention his authority. Agence France-Presse reported that last Sunday the unpredictable Mr. al-Sadr signed an agreement with the Sunni Muslim Scholars Association to work for reconciliation. And, according to the Arab news service Al Zaman, members of his Sadr Group have joined Sunnis at communal prayer services.

If Mr. al-Sadr's initiative proves successful, it could bring the volatile upstart prestige in the highly competitive Shia hierarchy. That could cause Shiites outside the al-Sadr orbit to start listening to him instead of Ayatollah al-Sistani.

And that is precisely what Mr. al-Sadr wants. He is descended from a prestigious clerical family that stands for the greater political involvement of the clergy -- the "outspoken seminary" (hawza nakita) in contrast to the establishment's "quiet seminary" (hawza samita).

The radical al-Sadr tradition also calls for less separation of religion and state. In open rivalry, the younger cleric has been known to send his fighters to battle militia loyal to the Ayatollah: in April, 2003, for control of the sacred Imam Ali Mosque, and again in October, 2004, in a bloody running battle over shrines in Karbala. Now, by moving for reconciliation with the Sunnis while his militia exacts reprisals from them, he may even be trying to hold the peace and the war cards in the same hand.

If true, this would be typical. The sly, pragmatic young cleric has proved adept at exploiting every new event to climb another rung on the ladder of power. His base is Sadr City, the poor quarter of East Baghdad that houses two million Shiites. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Sadr Group has grown into a massive network that provides social and medical services as well as security. It appeals to the poor and uneducated with a fiery and mystical brand of religion, and of all the Shia parties, is the most militant, the most violently opposed to the occupation and the most impatient for an Islamist government.

It's not hard to see why the bearded and baby-faced Mr. al-Sadr is using the current civil unrest for self-advancement. As well as being young, he has gone unrecognized by mainstream clergy because of his low clerical standing. Instead, he has traded on the renown of his father, the radical Grand Ayatollah Sadiq al-Sadr, assassinated in 1999, almost certainly by agents of Saddam Hussein.

Like most clerics, Mr. al-Sadr claims a purely religious concern for his flock, and two weeks ago told Al-Jazeera that he eschews a personal role in politics. But his aims have always been political. After hard bargaining, last fall, to get his representatives on the list of Shia religious parties backed by Ayatollah al-Sistani for the Dec. 15 elections, the Sadr Group won 30 of the 130-odd seats claimed by the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) parliamentary bloc, which now controls the 275-seat parliament. But with the Kurds winning 53 seats and the two main Sunni parties 55, the Shia bloc is short of the two-thirds majority it needs to govern. So it has had to woo Sunni parties into a coalition.

Of course, negotiations for a coalition have been hampered by the bombing, leaving Mr. al-Sadr the only Shia leader seriously talking to the Sunnis. Moreover, according to BBC news, he has furiously objected to the presence of former prime minister Ayad Allawi's secular Shia party in the UIA because Mr. Allawi wanted to launch a murderous all-out assault on the Sadr forces during the 2004 rebellion.

Indeed, Mr. al-Sadr has all but broken ranks with the Shia bloc. His goal is to install his own brand of Shia nationalism in Iraq, and Iraqi nationalism is the strange common cause he shares with Sunni clerics linked to the insurgency -- the "enemy" in the current fighting. Like the Sunnis, he adamantly opposes the virtual political and economic autonomy that the Kurdish north and the Shia south have won from the new Iraqi constitution.

What he wants is a highly centralized, unified and radically Islamist Iraq (albeit under Shia authority) that shares the oil and other resources with Sunnis and Kurds, as well as a quick end to the occupation. The Sunnis, who have no region to speak of, save Baghdad, may need someone like him. In a spurt of nationalist rhetoric sure to please them, his organization has blamed the destruction of the Samarra mosque not on Sunni terrorists but on the United States.

Mr. al-Sadr's militia supports him but could also be his undoing. Formed in a rush in the summer of 2004, it has remained poorly organized and untrained. Its large recruitment of impoverished young fighters has been prompted as much by fanaticism as by guaranteed welfare benefits. Now, however, they may be getting beyond Mr. al-Sadr's control. They have ignored a Friday curfew and indulged in sectarian retribution. According to Al Zaman, officials of the Sadr Group are attempting to rein in the Mahdi Army, forbidding the fighters to wear black, the colour of the missing Imam. But there's reason to fear the army may be nothing more than one more element of the enraged, Shia poor who are always hit worst by civil conflict.

In the face of Shia rage, Ayatollah al- has only his moral authority. Indeed, the initiative may be passing not just to Mr. al-Sadr and Shiites in the street but to the major Shia religious parties that now control the government.

With the country on the precipice of civil war, it's ominous, to say the least, that the Shia-dominated government has had to be browbeaten by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad into trying for a coalition with the Sunni parties. The two main parliamentary Shia religious parties -- Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) -- are hunkering down and husbanding power. On Feb. 12, the Shia bloc started by reappointing, to cries of protest from Sunnis and Kurds, Al Dawa leader Ibrahim Jaafari as Prime Minister, the post he held in last year's interim government.

Mr. Jaafari's party, according to Juan Cole, a historian and Shia expert at the University of Michigan, is notoriously secretive. Although it's the only major Shia party not led by a cleric, it has been known to lean toward strict Islamic rule.

Founded in 1957, in order to compete with the Communists, Al Dawa copied their revolutionary-cell structure. With its massive, grassroots organization, the party remains the grandfather of Shia parties, such as SCIRI and the Sadr Group, both of which split away over doctrinal differences. Al Dawa retained its huge membership and status for suffering extreme repression under Saddam Hussein, while its leadership went into exile in Tehran and London. The party's militia, like the party itself, is something of a mystery, but it is believed to be a quiet "armed citizenry" that doubtless would emerge in the event of civil war.

Born in 1947 in the holy city of Karbala and trained as a doctor in Mosul, Mr. Jaafari developed the party and its philosophy outside Iraq, and is one of the exile politicians criticized by ordinary Shiites for not having weathered the storm under Saddam Hussein.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, he has advocated religious law for Iraq, and the United States takes a dim view of his government's recent rapprochement with Iran. Throughout the occupation, however, he has remained a strong supporter of Ayatollah al-Sistani, who has been known to reject Iranian interference.

But respect for the Ayatollah hasn't stopped him from taking some dangerous measures. With the Sunnis enraged and gangs of sectarian gunmen beginning to take over the streets, Mr. Jaafari is staffing the new government ministries with fellow Shiites. The United States has urged him to appoint Sunnis, and the outcry has been so great that the Sunni and Kurd blocs may well refuse the 184 votes needed to ratify him.

By far the most sensitive ministries under Mr. Jaafari's control are those of the interior (the police) and defence, and last year, with a distinct lack of subtlety, he appointed Bayan Jabar, a member of SCIRI, the other big Shia religious party, as head of the former.

SCIRI won the strongest parliamentary representation in the Shia bloc, making it the most powerful party in Iraq. Founded around 1980 to resist Saddam Hussein's war against Iran, it was forced into exile in Tehran. In 1983, Iran's theocratic Shia clerics helped SCIRI become an umbrella for all the Iraqi exile Shia opposition parties. Today, it retains tight ties, coming closest of any Iraqi party to advocating Iranian-style clerical rule.

The SCIRI slant toward Iran and its support of Shia and Kurdish autonomy have helped to stoke Mr. al-Sadr's noisy, nationalist and increasingly Sunni-friendly dissent. Last August, his differences with SCIRI led to gun battles between his Maudi Army and its militia, the Badr Corps, leaving nine dead across southern Iraq.

Meanwhile, SCIRI's tacit support of Ayatollah al-Sistani is little comfort to the Sunnis; they accuse the party of acting as an agent of Iran to inflame the Shiites against them. By effectively running the Interior Ministry, SCIRI is doing little to dispel that suspicion.

The Badr Corps was recently renamed the Badr Organization to play down its militant past. Formed in Iran, the Badr force is by far the best armed and organized of the Shia militias. And since the first Shia government was elected a year ago last January, it has, with the help of Mr. Jabar, infiltrated the Interior Ministry, according to the Washington Post, where it controls the police, commandos and intelligence agencies.

Dressed in police uniforms, Badr members have been carrying out torture and mass executions of Sunnis suspected of supporting the insurgency. Now, with Iraq more than ever on the brink, the Shia-dominated Iraqi police have stood aside so that Shia mobs can take revenge on Sunnis, while Mr. Jabar sends the Badr boys on commando missions to do the same thing.

All this has left the United States in an astonishingly weak position. On Feb. 20, Ambassador Khalilzad threatened to cut off money for police training unless the interior and defence ministries were released from sectarian control, saying that "we cannot invest huge amounts of money in forces that do not get broad support from Iraqis." He also has asked the militias be banned.

But when the mosque was bombed two days later, his requests drew a furious and defiant response from Aziz al-Hakim, the religious head of SCIRI. According to the Los Angeles Times, he argued that Mr. Khalilzad's "statement gave the green light to the terrorist groups and therefore we blame him for part of what has happened."

What is disturbing, in light of the violence, is that Mr. al-Hakim is in a strong position. According to the Washington Post, there is some evidence that the ruthlessness of the Badr-influenced police operations is scaring Baathist members of the Sunni resistance into the political process. There is also the possibility that a SCIRI-dominated police ministry doesn't need the United States because Iran may already be sending money.

Although he, like Mr. al-Sadr, is a Shia opportunist, Mr. al-Hakim is subtler and more respected by the Shia establishment. Phlegmatic and poker-faced, he went into exile in Iran with his party, but also like Mr. al-Sadr, he is a blood relation to a martyr. His brother, the revered Grand Ayatollah Bakr al-Hakim, was head of SCIRI until he was killed in August, 2003, by a car bomb widley believed to be the work of Sunni extremists. This only strengthens the belief that SCIRI has scores to settle in any civil war.

Nor is there much doubt about Mr. al-Hakim's affinity for Iran. Known to conceal a hard-line agenda behind a mask of moderation, he met cordially in 2004 with U.S. Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, and welcomes U.S. journalists. But in an Iranian television interview the previous year, he stated unequivocally that Iraqi democracy and pluralism within a context of Islamic law would inevitably give way to an Islamist theocracy.

That is certainly contrary to the position of his Shia superior, Ayatollah al-Sistani, and what it would mean for the Sunni minority in the event of sectarian war can only be imagined.

With so many competing agendas, the discipline maintained by Ayatollah al-Sistani and the religious hierarchy remains one last bulwark against civil war. Whether it can contain the anger of so many Shiites, only time will tell. After all, that hierarchy was built during 14 centuries of foreign rule.

Now the Shiites have a nation they're calling their own, and their parties and ministries, the tools of politics, may be breaking free from the moderating effect of traditional religious authority. If so, they are as capable, if not more capable than the Sunnis resistance of plunging their nation into civil war.

The Shiites' pecking order

The religious hierarchy of Iraq's Shiites allows for immense energy and variety contained by a framework of discipline. In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, for example, doctrine is open to a degree of debate and interpretation.

That leads to clerical rivalry, which has resulted, most recently, in differences over handling the occupation, civil unrest and relations between faith and state.

Shia mosques can become distinguished by their "star" clerics, such as Moqtada al-Sadr, who rise in the ranks -- from prayer leader to ayatollah to grand ayatollah (Iraq now has five) -- according to popular consensus on their mastery of Islamic law. This popular involvement and the informality of the process account for Shia Islam's passion and turbulence.

Located in Najaf, the Hawza remains the movement's supreme religious authority, with about 5,000 students attending 150 schools, universities and seminaries. It also houses the Marja, or clerical leadership, which comprises four grand ayatollahs and the supreme religious authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose rulings are not law in the traditional sense, but do carry immense moral force.

In the absence of the Imam, clergy cannot become involved in politics. Ayatollah al-Sistani gives opinions on political matters only in so far as they affect matters of faith. This issue of divine authority with the Mahdi missing is the crux of the difference between Iraqi and Iranian Shiite beliefs.

The strongholds

NAJAF -- Located about 200 kilometres south of Baghdad, the Shiites' religious capital is home to the Hawza, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the revered Imam Ali shrine.

KUFA -- Just outside Najaf, Kufa is where the Imam Ali settled, was assassinated and buried. Also here is Moqtada al-Sadr's mosque, where he still delivers his Friday sermons.

KARBALA -- Iraq's second Shia holy city, halfway between Najaf and Baghdad, is where in the seventh century the Sunnis defeated the Shiites. Also it was in Karbala that Mr. al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fought a militia loyal to Ayatollah al-Sistani and the U.S. military.

SADR CITY -- The big slum in northeastern Baghdad has virtually become the domain of Mr. al-Sadr. The U.S. military has fought repeated battles with the Mahdi Army here but found the district's maze of alleys impossible to control.

SAMARRA -- Home of a Shia minority north of Baghdad where the mosque of the "missing Mahdi" was destroyed on Feb. 22.

NASSIRIYA -- The home in central southern Iraq of the Al Dawa party was the scene of a massacre by forces loyal to Saddam Hussein while snuffing out the Shia rebellion that followed the 1991 Gulf War.

BASRA -- In the far south near the Persian Gulf, this largely Shia city of 1.5 million is second in population only to Baghdad. Although governed by British forces, it too has seen its daily affairs increasingly come under the control of Mr. al-Sadr.

Hugh Graham