Does the Holocaust teach us anything about modern-day genocide? (Oh, and happy new year)

Things are quiet on this blog while we’re preparing for a server transfer and redesign. But here’s a nice graph from a piece in Foreign Policy last month, on whether the Holocaust is the right tool for teaching us about genocide (or helping us identify early warning signs, etc.). The whole piece is worth a read, but I thought this bit was particularly compelling:

“Genocide” is too limiting a term in any case. In recent years, governments have not necessarily been exterminating entire subgroups en masse with crystal-clear intent. Yet some governments show no qualms about shelling huge numbers of ethnic minority civilians trapped in confined war zones, as we saw in Sri Lanka earlier this year. More common still are governments that kick one ethnic group off its land and force the people into displacement camps where they become permanent wards of international humanitarian agencies — think Darfur, for example, to mention just one place commonly labeled a “slow-motion genocide.”

Sketches from the Liberia notebooks…

A farmer on the outskirts of Saniquellie, Liberia, itself on the outskirts of the town Ganta, itself near little but Guinea…

I ask, “Do you stay in town?”
“Yes, I stay in town with my wife and my children.”
“With your wife?”
“Yes.”
“And how many children?”
“I have…I am trying to figure out my children.” Long pause. “Sixteen. I was a very strong man.”

And, belatedly, Madame President (in English or Dutch)

Sorry for the silence; writing about Liberia has taken over my life since…Liberia.

A few weeks ago, Newsweek ran a Q&A I did with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the country’s president and Africa’s first female elected head of state. (Glenna and I wanted to know why people always put it that way, so we looked into it; it turns out there was once a female appointed head of state. Where? Liberia. Oh, you!)

No idea why Glenna’s photo does not appear on the website. A cookie for anyone who can guess which questions I wanted to ask, and which ones Newsweek put me up to.

And a Belgian friend just informed me that the story ran in Knack.de, “the best qualitative Dutch-speaking magazine in Belgium.” Hey, in Belgium, that’s a big deal. So if you want read it een Nederlands…well, you have to go to Belgium, because it’s not online.

Meanwhile, watch this space for a totally sexy feature on land reform policy across Africa.

Vexed by the King of Liberia

Glenna Gordon has a fantastic story about trying to take the photo of George Weah, massive soccer star and one-time presidential candidate, whose narrow loss to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf surprised some folks. Weah was in town for the recent senate elections, lending some celebrity to his political party.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Geogre Weah is the king of Liberia! If he say to Liberia, ‘lay down,’ they will lay down!” the PRO told me with pride. “I promise you that today, TODAY, you will see George Weah! You are with me so you have to see George Weah TODAY.”

When we drove past the Governance Commission, the PRO belted out, “That Amos Saywer! He eating all the money!” (Amos Sawyer is one of the more respected members of the political elite in Liberia.) When we drove past a new hotel, he said, “Ellen built that hotel and when George Weah is President, we will seize this building for the people!”

Closer to George Weah’s house in a neighborhood called ELWA, just past Rehab Junction (no relation drug problems) he said, “Everyone wants to live here because this is where George Weah lives!”

At his compound, at first I was requested to “wait small” since George Weah was resting. “You will see George Weah today!” and then in quickly became clear I wouldn’t see him at all. Having now wasted several hours, taxi fare, and way too much phone credit, and would soon disappoint my editor, I was, as the PRO called me, “vexed.”

“You can wait! You will see George Weah today!” I refused to wait, and got ready to leave. The PRO seemed personally insulted. He gave me back my business card. I accepted. I think this was supposed to be symbolic, but I’m not sure of what.

Voting yesterday was apparently as disorganized as my trip to see George Weah. Ballots were missing, polling stations closed, and people unsure of when to vote. The results of the elections have still not been announced, but I’m told they will be announced TODAY.

Read the

A look at loving and hating the French in Africa

Kudos to Adam Nossiter, the New York Times’ man in Dakar, for today’s piece on mixed feelings about the French across Francophone Africa. (He even pulled it off without mentioning Rwanda, whose relationship with France is so troubled it skews the curve.) France is often seen as quietly backing, well, the bad guys — Mobutu comes to mind, as does Habyarimana, the president whose underlings committed the Rwandan genocide. And those are just two countries….Adam has more.

It’s a great piece that takes the temperature of a compelling question…which, alas, has no easy answer. To strong man, or not to strong man? C’est la question.

“I swear, that is SO legal,” or, why the man in charge of fixing Liberia’s justice sector “owns” all the laws

A piece of investigative reporting that took Glenna Gordon and I the better part of our month together in Monrovia, and lots of her time before that, is finally in the world. The story is about Philip Banks, by my impression a genial and very smart man, who claims to own the copyright to Liberia’s laws. That would be weird and a little shady on its own, what with him being the former Minister of Justice and the current head of law reform.

But because of his cowboy copyright claim, no one in Liberia can actually get their hands on the laws. Not lawyers, not judges, not even the national parliament.

For more, check out the story. Meanwhile, never doubt that there can be a juicy bit of journalism in a big fat gold-embossed edition of a national tax law.

Justice and rape in Liberia

Glenna Gordon and I have a couple posts up on the Pulitzer Center blog focused on justice and rape in Liberia. The first gives some background on the difficulties of prosecution here and the second gives two different takes (hers and mine) on how to handle the confidentiality of victims.

On confidentiality in genera, here’s a post script. There’s a glossy pamphlet the UN mission here, called UNMIL, puts out. Goes over all the issues, has pretty glossy pictures. The confidentiality thing at hand in these pages is about ex-combatants. There can be stigma, so the publication seems to err on the side of caution.

There’s a sidebar that profiles a 15 year old who was a slave laborer for some soldiers, with the photo of a young-looking man sewing. The text is all about the skills training he’s gotten and rebuilding his new life. They don’t use his name. In fact, in the first sentence where they “name” him, there’s an asterik, and this footnote: “Name has been changed to protect identity. The person in the picture is not related to the story.”

This isn’t journalism, of course, so it’s a different ball game. But… if the person in the picture has nothing to do with the story…why’s the picture there?

Point is, it’s all about the context.

Softly softly catches monkey

This is a Liberian proverb, the meaning of which we’re still not certain of. We learned it on our week-long trip up country, vernacular meaning “way out in the middle of rural nowhere” and a phrase which confused the hell out of my mother. (“Which country were you in? And why is it up?”)

I thought that it must mean, “Move quietly and you will catch even something so quick and super-sensory as a monkey.” No, I was told, that’s not it at all. “Softly softly” is an animal, a nickname for something that the storyteller could not name in English. Glenna somehow heard, or inferred, that softly softlies actually eat monkeys. Could be…but what is this mysterious creature?

One of Glenna’s magical photos, cropped to avoid my nasty sweaty greasy face…

This moment of adorableness brought to you by the Pulitzer Center.

I’m not gonna lie. The softly softly was so friggin’ cute, and I kind of loved wearing it on my wrist like a sleepy little bangle. I very nearly did pay the $10 the boy who introduced me to it wanted. I protested that I didn’t know what to feed it. “Banana,” one man insisted. (“Monkeys,” Glenna countered later. She says she believes this because that shit is funny. I think that, in this matter at least, that’s a reasonable standard for truth.) Either way, it’s not gonna make it through customs.

More about the up country trip — land conflicts, mud pits and pumpkin stew so good we told the President of Liberia about it personally — soon.

Farewell to the Nile?

Well the rapids, anyway. I had a hell of a good time rafting them last year (and have since heard from people unknown to me that my guide has picked up my joke about safety kayaks; it was repeated back to me, nearly verbatim, and I said, “Ah, you had the guide from Zimbabwe?” “How did you know?!”)

Last year, I wrote a story about the Bujagali jumpers, four (and sometimes more) guys who make a living hurling themselves into the whitewater of the Nile in Uganda. It’s a treacherous way to earn a living, to put it mildly, but it’s also an endangered job: When the Bujagali dam is finished (soon, soon, they say), the rapids won’t exist any more.

Here’s the skinny on that dam — and the controversy it sparked. Environmentalists were never fans, but the government said it desperately needed the new power supply. The World Bank, in the mean time, did what critics say it does best: Pretend to listen to local concerns, and then plow on ahead with whatever it wanted to do in the first place.

“…Okay, now tell me where he put his hands”

This is, unhappily, the sequel to my earlier taken-down on major media coverage of rape in conflict. Turns out I have a little bit of a thing about this…

So the New York Times’ new West Africa guy is covering the violence in Guinea. (Missed it? Here’s the Twitter version: Government soldiers killed more than 150 political demonstrators last week; now reports are emerging that many women were raped.) It starts out fine — a lead about cell phone pictures that prove crimes the government is trying to deny, a quick recap of what happened, some diplo-info.

It’s all well and good until he talks to the rape victims. Here’s an excerpt of his interview:

“We heard gunfire,” she said. “I tried to flee.” With weapons going off, suddenly “it was like a henhouse.”

She ran, but a soldier barred the way.

“He hit me,” she said. “And he tore my clothes off. He ripped my clothes off with his hands.”

Then, she said, “he put his hand inside me.” The soldier hit her on the head with his rifle, requiring stitches, she said. She also had large welts from the beating.

A reporter I respect once pointed out to me that there’s a growing trend in African atrocity journalism — to use sparse, declarative language, preferably quotes, to retell the narrative of the atrocity. That sort of narrative stance and pacing can be powerful. It can also be foolish.

This strikes me as the latter case. Did he really have to include the quote about where the rapist put his hands? (I’m also not sure we need the literal frame-by-frame on this rape, but let’s concede it for the moment.) What purpose does it serve? Do I, as a reader who does not know Guinea or (presumably) rape, understand something better? I don’t think so. Does it create some kind of empathy or broader understanding for this woman? I don’t think so. In fact, she disappears from the story.

So what does it do? It “adds color,” sure. But to what end? My personal reaction is to feel kind of repulsed; I don’t feel empathy for this woman, I feel pity for her. Insert Representational Stereotype Number One: The Pitiful African.

The article continues to rehash several other women’s rapes in rather intimate detail, in some cases not by the women themselves but by men who witnessed the crimes.

Amanda Taub has been writing some pretty powerful stuff about the theft of voice and story in Darfur. This article raises similar questions for me: I know poor Adam needed some quotes, and he wrote early in the story that there’s stigma for women who admit surviving rape, and even doctors wouldn’t talk about the rape cases, so I sympathize with quoting, as he does later, a male doctor about what he witnessed.

Two things: One, do we need it? Do we need those quotes to understand what’s happening? There are times when the brutality of violence shouldn’t be hidden; I certainly was blunt and unforgiving in my descriptions of what happens when someone is tortured. But I don’t think this is one of those times.

Two, whether we need it or not, are we complicit? As readers of details that most women themselves wouldn’t share complicit in the theft (by a man, no less) of a story?

I’m not saying Adam, or any other worthy reporter, would quote someone without consent. I believe the women he quoted consented; but getting consent is only half of the question. The other half is how and why we think they’re consenting to talk to us, to give us the details they do; that’s a deal only the journalist knows and can make. And I’m not indicting Adam’s deal.

This may be too academic; this may be a case of me doing precisely what I remind others is so easy, armchair criticizing an article reported in chaos and difficulty. But that’s the best time for me to ask my questions, so that when I’m in Adam’s seat, I what I think I should be doing.