Uighur Update: China's mad, so is the UK

A follow up now on Tuesday's post about the United States’ plans to finally release 17 Uighur detainees held at Guantanamo Bay for years after the government decided they were neither terrorists nor posed any threat to the US.

Early reports were that the tiny Pacific Ocean island nation of Palau agreed to take all 17 Chinese Muslims. Palau is in a rare position to take men that China considers to be terrorists since it's one of the few countries in the world that recognizes Taiwan, rather than Beijing, as the legitimate government of China - in other words, Palau doesn't care how much Beijing complains (and they are making quite a stink about the Uighurs release, more on that in a moment).

Concern over China's reaction apparently prompted the United States to hide the fact that they were negotiating with Bermuda to also host some Uighur prisoners. Bermuda agreed this week to take four of the men (with the other 13 going to Palau), a fact that came as quite a surprise to the British government, which still rules Bermuda as an Overseas Territory. American officials said they deliberately hid the negotiations from the British government so that the Chinese government, which apparently has been twisting arms around the world to keep countries from taking the refugee Uighurs, wouldn’t put similar pressure on the Brits. For their part, the British government has said it’s angry the US didn't deal with them directly and that officials in Bermuda overstepped their authority by agreeing to take the four Uighurs since it is an immigration issue and thus something London has to decide about, but they said they will not step in to overturn the decision.

China, meanwhile, is demanding the return of all 17 Uighurs, claiming they're terrorists - even though the US has already cleared them of any terrorism charges. Calling the Uighurs terrorists though is a knee-jerk reaction from Beijing – while the Uighur resistance to Chinese attempts at wiping out their culture in China's far northwest Xinjiang Province has been largely peaceful, China accuses the Uighurs of terrorism to justify their heavy-handed tactics against them. Two weeks ago China claimed it smashed seven "terror cells" in Xinjiang's largest city, Kashgar; a claim the Uighur exile community's leader met with "utmost skepticism", saying China had not offered the "slightest piece of evidence" that these were in fact terror cells and said that the Uighurs struggle has a peaceful one.

Russian Dolls in Need of a Bailout

We've heard of banks, insurance companies and auto manufacturers requesting financial bailouts, now there's another industry in Russia asking for help - Matryoshka makers.

Matryoshkas are the pear-shaped wooden dolls that nest one inside another, painted typically to look like peasant women, though politicians and entertainers have also been depicted in Matryoshka form. They are an iconic symbol of Russia and a popular souvenir for tourists, but they're also a folk industry that is in a lot of trouble. Matryoshka manufacturers say that orders for their crafts are nearly non-existent thanks to the poor economy, many worry that they may not be able to stay in business, possibly spelling the end for a traditional Russian craft in the process.

The Kremlin has promised help, pledging to buy $30 million worth of Matryoshkas and other folk art as a kind of government bailout plan. But Matryoshka manufacturers are doubtful that the politicians will follow through on their promise, since past pledges to help out the folk art sector never panned out. What manufacturers say they really want are cuts in export taxes and government subsidies for folk art producers. Without them, they say that Matryoshkas and other traditional Russian woodcrafts could very well be a thing of the past.

Cuban Ex-pat Punks Castro's Son

It's a modern-day tale, Fidel Castro's son, Antonio Castro Soto del Valle, thought he was carrying on an internet love affair with a Columbian woman named Claudia, but unfortunately for him, 'Claudia' was actually a Cuban expatriate named 'Luis'.

Luis Domínguez, aka Claudia, revealed the scam on a Miami-based TV station. He said he got the idea to try to lure the younger Castro into a phony love affair after seeing Antonio Castro being treated "like a rock star" while touring South America with the Cuban national baseball team. The goal of the scam was to show how the Castros live a far more privileged life than the average Cuban and to "shatter" the image of Cuba's state security apparatus. For example, Domínguez said that while many Cubans were barred from using the Internet, Antonio Castro had his own Apple laptop with unlimited web access and his own BlackBerry.

Castro had 20 chats with 'Claudia' over the space of eight months, with one chat lasting for five hours. He didn't reveal any state secrets, according to Domínguez, but did give her his private phone number and address in Havana.

Was the US Duped Into Afghan Attack?

Meanwhile, Britain's Channel 4 is ready to air a documentary on Monday that alleges the United States military was victim of a scam as well in Afghanistan - only this one lead to the deaths of as many as 90 civilians.

The attack on the small village of Azizabad last August marked a low-point in US-Afghani relations. American aircraft pounded the mud-walled village, killing dozens of civilians in the process. At the time the US Air Force contended they were carrying out operations against Taliban insurgents, that the death toll was only about three-dozen, and that only a handful of those killed were civilians (the US has since upped the civilian casualty count to 33, still far shy of the Afghan estimate).

But in March, and Afghani court sentenced Mohammed Nader, an elder from a neighboring village, to death for passing false information onto American forces about Taliban militants using Azizabad as a base, prompting the fatal air strikes. And this is only the tip of a murky battle between the villages of Kalask and Azizabad with the United States military stuck firmly in the middle.

According to the Channel 4 report, a feud between the two villages erupted over jobs at a United States military base in nearby Shindand. In addition to the air raid against Azizabad last August, the US also got involved after an ambush by Kalask men killed a man from Azizabad, and started a fight between the two villages that was broken up by US and Afghan Army forces. One Azizabad man was taken away in a US-led convoy. Several hours later he turned up dead, his body allegedly showing signs of torture. Local authorities wanted three Afghanis working with the US troops turned over for questioning, a move the US military has so far blocked.

A spokesman for the US Central Command in Afghanistan refused to comment on the Channel 4 report.

Ahmadinejad 'Wins' Election

By now you've probably heard that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won yesterday's election, and that the opposition is crying foul over the results.

Both CNN and the BBC are reporting large-scale demonstrations in the streets of Tehran, one of the power-bases of Ahmadinejad's challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi. For his part, Mousavi is saying that really he won the election and that the results have been falsified. The official tally gives Ahmadinejad 63% of the vote to only 34% for Mousavi, a wild turn of events, considering polling just before the election had the two in a virtual dead heat and that Mousavi's supporters were energized following a wild televised debate two weeks ago.

But on Thursday, EurasiaNet published a detail story on just how Ahmadinejad's supporters could steal the election. Key to the strategy are the thousands of Ahmadinejad loyalists filling the ranks of the Interior Ministry and Guardian Council - the two bodies in charge of running the election. EurasiaNet notes that in 1999, the Guardian Council tossed out 700,000 votes to ensure a victory for a hard-line parliamentary candidate over his reformist challenger, and that the Council was also accused of vote-rigging during Ahmadinejad's first presidential victory in 2005.

Mousavi hoped to counter voter fraud with thousands of volunteer poll-watchers, but Iran's Internet and cell phone services were suffering mysterious slow-downs on Election Day, among the worst hit sites? Those supporting Mousavi.

Unfortunately for Mousavi, it's unlikely that there will be any serious investigation of his vote-fraud claims, so the results will probably stand. The big questions now are whether or not the street protests will continue and whether Iran's Guardian Council, the collection of religious leaders who really run the country, will make any changes to Iran's public policy to appease the newly energized Iranian moderates.

Putin Speaks, Plants Re-open

Last week I wrote this post about the verbal beating Prime Minister Vladimir Putin gave to local officials and billionaire Oleg Deripaska, the owner of a shuttered factory complex in the town of Pikalyovo. Now, less than a week later, Russia's RIA Novosti news service is reporting that the plant was scheduled to reopen on Thursday.

The folks in Pikalyovo got the attention of Putin himself after blocking a highway to protest the shutdown of the Deripaska-owned plant. That closure had a ripple effect that also shut two other plants in town, basically leaving the citizens of Pikalyovo without any jobs at all.

The Guardian took the Pikalyovo protests as a reason to run this piece: "Protests against Putin sweep Russia as factories go broke". While the article makes some good points, particularly that Russia's economy is especially vulnerable because of the hundreds of factory towns across Russia that rely on a single industry for most (if not all) the employment in that town, the problem I had with it was that a large chunk of the article focused on protests against a tax on importing automobiles, that we talked about here last year (recap: to help Russia's ailing auto industry, Putin imposed a 50% tax on all used imported cars sold in Russia, Vladivostok in Russia's Far East, has a booming trade in used Japanese imports, so folks there were not at all happy with the new tax).

The Guardian makes the case that protests like Pikalyovo are far more common than the Russian government would like you to think they are. Fair enough, I just wish they had used stories of some recent wage-driven hunger strikes to back up that claim, rather than a rehash of a story of tax protests that happened seven months ago.

For Sale: Gitmo Detainees, Near Mint Condition

Caught this tonight on the Rachel Maddow Show; the United States is looking for a home for a group of Guantanamo Bay detainees and is willing to pay big bucks to any country that will take them.

The detainees in question are 17 Uighurs - Chinese Muslims - scooped up in Afghanistan by US forces back in 2002. We've been following the saga of the Uighurs here for some time, but briefly - the US decided long ago that the Uighurs weren't terrorists, nor were they trying to become terrorists, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So letting them go should be a no-brainer, right? Yes, except that China is trying to eradicate Uighur culture, just like they're trying to wipe out the Tibetan one, shipping the Uighurs back to China then is not an option since they'd likely be jailed by the Chinese authorities for the crime of being an unfavorable minority.

And even though there's a Uighur exile community in the US, giving them asylum is a non-starter politically. So we've been looking for a third-party to take the 17 men, and while we look, they sit in Gitmo.

Now, according to Maddow and the New York Times, the United States is trying to strike a deal with the tiny South Pacific island nation of Palau to take them; and according to Maddow, we're offering big bucks to Palau, one of the world's smallest countries in both size and population - $200 million in foreign aid.

To put that in perspective, according to the CIA World Factbook, Palau's entire Gross Domestic Product for 2008 was only $164 million; divided among Palau's 20,000 residents, the Gitmo payment would give $10,000 to every citizen in a country where the average salary is just over $8,000.

Should Palau go for the deal, the 17 Uighurs would find themselves in a humid tropical climate, quite a departure from the high desert of their native Xinjiang; and while there is no Muslim population to speak of, there is a Chinese population of roughly 1,000, so at least these 17 Uighurs could have some cultural kinsmen, unlike six other Uighurs released to Albania in 2006.

And if Palau doesn't go for the deal, I have a spare bedroom I'm willing to let the Obama Administration use for a mere $3 million.

Aargh! Pirates in Parliament (and other tales from the Euro elections)

Avast, there be pirates in the Parliament.

Well, one pirate at least, and no we’re not talking about Somalia here, but Sweden and the results from last week’s elections for the European Parliament, the main law-making body of the European Union.

Sweden’s Pirate Party pulled off what many thought was impossible, getting enough votes to actually win a seat in the new Parliament – the Pirate Party just squeaked over the 7% threshold to win themselves a seat in the upcoming Euro Parliament. The platform of the Pirate Party is, well, pro-Pirate you could say: they advocate basically scrapping all intellectual property laws: no copyrights, no patents, just the free flow of information.

Considering some of the other groups who won seats in the new Parliament, the Pirate Party will likely be a welcome distraction. Turnout for the European Parliament elections, held in all 27 European Union nations, were incredibly low – just over a four in ten eligible voters even cast ballots. And that paved the way for a collection of far-right parties, some overtly racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic ones, to win seats.

One of the big winners was the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders who is so virulently anti-immigrant (though he reserves special scorn for the Muslims), that he’s actually been banned from entering Great Britain. His Freedom Party gathered 15% of the Dutch vote, giving them 25 seats in the new Parliament. Not to be out done though, the Brits threw enough support to the British National Party to give them their first-ever seats (eight total) in Parliament. The BNP is strongly anti-immigrant, wants to keep Turkey out of the European Union, along with getting Great Britain to drop out as well. They dispute that they’re racist though, saying they’re just as opposed to white Polish immigrants as they are to black Nigerian ones (great argument guys…). And finally, Italy will be sending members of their own anti-immigrant party, The Northern League, to Parliament, though in the past the groups the Northern League have considered to be foreigners include Southern Italians.

In practice, the far-right groups will make headlines, but it’s unlikely they’ll make much law. Power in the European Parliament comes from coalitions of parties coming together across national boundaries; the far-right parties won’t be able to gather enough support to form an effective coalition. But the rise in support for them, along with the historically low turnout across Europe, is troubling signs that Europeans in general are apathetic about the European Parliament. Critics say its just another level of bureaucracy in an already bloated EU government – even though the European Parliament has broad powers to make laws. At the same time, there has been real reluctance in parts of Europe to adopt changes to the EU’s constitution that would strengthen the Parliament on the grounds that it would mean a loss of national sovereignty among the members of the EU.

What Would George Orwell Think of Twitter?

Sixty years ago today, George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the classic study of a government run amok in the name of ‘safety’, was released. If it’s been awhile since you last read 1984, it presents a barely-recognizable England where its citizens are under constant surveillance by an omnipresent government, humanized in the persona of ‘Big Brother’ the dear leader who stares at them 24/7 from video screens installed in every home, to protect them of course.

The Guardian marks the occasion with this post from Henry Porter who looks at the government’s (in this case the British government) desire for public surveillance through the lens of 1984, he draws some interesting parallels between ‘Oceania’, the nation making war against Big Brother’s homeland Ingsoc, and the threat of global terrorism today, arguing that like Oceania, global terrorism is an equally poorly-defined threat that is used to justify government intrusion into individual liberties under the banner of ‘security’.

It’s interesting to speculate what Orwell would think of the security cameras that stare at us from every grocery store, ATM and, increasingly, street corner, and what he would think of our placid acceptance of these devices in our lives (not to mention how his ultimate symbol of government impression – Big Brother himself – has been used as the conceit for a cheesy reality show).

But the article made me think of something else entirely – Twitter, the latest Internet craze, the site that allows you to tell the world about your life, in 140-character bursts. It reminds me of another concept from Orwell’s 1984 – Newspeak.

Newspeak was the Ingsoc government’s attempt to simplify language – rather than have a collection of words to describe a concept like “bad”: poor, unpleasant, dire, deficient (and about four dozen other synonyms), it was replaced by one word: “ungood”. Something very bad was “plus ungood” or “double plus ungood” if it was absolutely awful. The stated reason for Newspeak was efficiency, the real goal though was the further control of society – to so limit human ability to communicate beyond the simplest constructions, so that fomenting a rebellion against Big Brother would be impossible - people simply would not be able to express the deep concepts and emotions that motivate individuals to oppose tyranny.

And that brings me back to Twitter. Am I saying it is some sort of nefarious government mind-control plot? Of course not. But I do have to wonder if it could not have a similar effect, by limiting expression to 140 character bursts, do we run the risk of losing our ability to clearly express complex ideas? (Let’s not forget text messaging, or TXT MSGNG, which also stresses a similar economy of characters) Just last week, Senator Charles Grassley decided to use Twitter to attack the Obama Administration’s health care proposals. Unfortunately for Grassley, the truncated Twitter-speak made him sound like an idiot – few Tweets or Texts read like fine literature.

But is Twitter the right place for public discourse on a complex issue like national health care in the first place? My answer is no, yet pressure to use the new technology is driving the debate there, and forcing it to conform to the rigid standards of the new media. It makes you wonder though, if we allow the media to dictate the message, will we lose the ability to make complex arguments all together?

It’s certainly a question Orwell would have pondered.

Yes, they actually have elections in Iran

The conventional wisdom on Iran - from the American perspective at least - is that it's a country run by a cabal of religious leaders and one loopy dictator, "President" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But Ahmadinejad was actually elected to the office and stands for re-election this week. And the traits that make the West think he's a bit nuts, might just derail his bid for a second term.

Iran is apparently abuzz over last week's televised presidential debate between Ahmadinejad and his main challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister and once-close confidant to the Islamic Republic's founder the late Ayatollah Khomeini (despite that pedigree, Mousavi is considered a moderate reformer). Ahmadinejad came out in the debate in his usual style, rhetorical guns blazing, essentially accusing Mousavi of treason and corruption, his sons of stealing from the government and his wife, a university professor, of faking her credentials (The Guardian has video highlights of the debate).

But Mousavi shot back - accusing Ahmadinejad of being a bad Muslim for making accusations against his family without offering proof, and slammed the president for ruining Iran's reputation abroad with his claims that the Holocaust never happened, along with his confrontational attitude towards the global community.

According to EurasiaNet, the debate was an eye-opener for many Iranians, since the tightly-controlled, state-run media in Iran usually shies away from showing Ahmadinejad's rants and conspiracy theories. The belligerent Ahmadinejad that appeared in the debate was not the one they were use to seeing. After the debate, watched by perhaps 60% of all Iranians, people took to the streets to talk about what they had just seen, with some impromptu political rallies breaking out.

Ahmadinejad's attack-dog approach to the debate may have backfired. Not only did it spark a surge of interest in the Iranian public, which previously had been fairly apathetic towards the election, but it also prompted some stinging rebukes from Iran's religious leadership. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's supreme religious leader, took Ahmadinejad to task for his unsubstantiated charges against Mousavi saying: "one doesn’t like to see a nominee, for the sake of proving himself, seeking to negate somebody else," basically putting a lid on negative campaigning in the process.

Another of Iran's religious leaders, Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei (himself another Khomeini disciple) went a step further and urged Iranian voters to oust President Ahmadinejad for failing to improve the lives of poor Iranians and, again, for damaging the country's image abroad by failing to live up to a 2003 deal where Iran agreed to suspend its nuclear research program and for his repeatedly calling the Holocaust a 'myth'.

It's worth remembering that Ahmadinejad was actually elected on a platform of making sure Iran's oil wealth helped out the poorest members of their society. But during his reign, little progress has been made in reducing poverty in Iran, while state resources have been diverted to the country's nuclear research program – something that, along with his own belligerence, has helped to isolate Iran from the international community.

But with Ahmadinejad taking flak from Iran's religious authorities and political reformers suddenly energized by last week's debate, Thursday's election could be one to watch.