Killian Clarke is a Senior Editor of the Features section of the Harvard International Review. He is joint-concentrating in Social Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
Seeking Freedom, Darfuris find Imprisonment
Over the past three years, the genocidal conflict plaguing the Darfur region of Sudan, in which between 200,000 and 400,000 people have died, has motivated many of the world’s nations to reach out to the Darfur’s suffering people. Such help has often taken the form of direct assistance to the conflict’s refugees who have been offered new homes in places from N’Djamena, Chad to Portland, Maine.
And yet, some refugees are not so lucky as to be offered homes in foreign states, and are forced to take matters into their own hands, fleeing to whatever country they imagine would be most likely to welcome them. In the past two months approximately 500 of these fleeing refugees have attempted to start their lives anew in Israel, which, given the recent deterioration of conditions for Darfuris living in Egypt, has become a prime destination for those seeking to escape the genocide.
And yet their reception in Israel has been far from welcoming. Indeed, instead of being met with sympathy and assistance, as they expect, these refugees are quickly hunted down and sent to Maasiyahu Prison in central Israel, where some of them have been living for over a year and a half. Most have already survived harrowing journeys before they arrive in the country, suffering the loss of many family members, waiting for days at the Egyptian-Israeli border fearing that they might be shot by Egyptian police, then finally slithering under the fence only to be immediately captured by the waiting Israeli authorities. They are then brought to the Israeli prison where they have no right to appeal against detainment due to their official status under Israeli law as ‘enemy nationals.’
According to the enemy infiltrators law of 1957, under which the Sudanese refugees are being arrested, Israel can arrest and detain any members of an ‘enemy state’ indefinitely and without judicial review. Sudan, with which Israel has no official relations, has long been considered one of these ‘enemy states’ and the Israeli government has thus far refused to differentiate between the official Sudanese government (which is believed to be supporting the violent campaign against the people of Darfur) and the fleeing Sudanese refugees. And yet, it is interesting to note that, in 1949, the fledgling Israeli state insisted on a clause in the Geneva Conventions mandating that countries treat refugees from enemy countries differently from true enemy nationals, citing the experience of Jews fleeing the holocaust to Great Britain.
The hypocrisy of Israel’s current policy is admirably highlighted by these two pieces of legislation. Israel was founded by a group of people who had just suffered a devastating genocidal massacre and who fled to a new home in the hope of starting a fresh, better life. Now, sixty years later, another group of suffering individuals are seeking the same new life—but rather than being met with sympathy and understanding by a people who once underwent similar hardships, they are being thrown in prison to await deportation. Israeli citizens and human rights organizations have recognized the inhumanity of these policies and are pressuring the Israeli government to relent and begin granting the refugees at least temporary resident status. But so far, there has been no softening on the part of Olmert’s administration (which has announced that it will send all Sudanese refugees back to Egypt, from where most of them have just fled, and begin construction of a 132-mile fence along the border of Israel and Egypt). Let us hope that as internal opposition increases and the stream of refugees continues, the administration will realize the profound inhumanity and hypocrisy of such policies and will begin to welcome these suffering refugees into a new life in Israel.
A New Hope for a New Kyoto
Almost one week ago, the United Nations dealt a decisive blow to the dying remnants of what was once a robust group of global warming skeptics. On Friday, February 2 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which consists of hundreds of the world’s top environmental scientists, released a report claiming that it was 90 percent certain that human activity had contributed to the rapid increases in global warming over the last century. The language of the report was unnervingly urgent: do something now, or else.
In the days following the report, responses from around the world dominated the headlines of the world’s newspapers. China was quick to condemn the lack of action on the part of developed countries. Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, echoed this sentiment, saying that Western nations were in no position to lecture Brazil about their deforestation problems. And in Europe, the European Commission proposed a sweeping measure that would limit carbon dioxide emissions in automobiles.
The desire to take action has also manifested itself within the United Nations. International actors have begun to pressure Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to call an emergency summit on global warming to address the pressing issue. The real question is, would such a summit do any good? Or would the result be simply a rehashed and recycled version of the already existing, and largely ineffective, Kyoto Protocol?
Bu the change in international attitudes regarding global warming certainly lead one to hope that such an outcome would not be the case. Indeed, initial responses to such a summit have been positive, even from some of the world’s worst polluters: Japan, Germany, China, and India. In my opinion, such a change in attitude is crucial for creating an atmosphere in which real and enforceable promises can be made.
Evidence of this can be found not in the manner in which Kyoto was developed, but in Kyoto’s predecessor: the Montreal Protocol. There has, of course, been endless analysis as to why Montreal succeeded where Kyoto failed—but in the end it all comes down to attitude. The Montreal Protocol was implemented to limit CFC emissions that were leading to the creation of a gaping hole in the ozone layer. While there was certainly strong opposition from certain countries and private actors to the treaty, there were two elements to the formation of the Montreal Protocol that were conspicuously absent from Kyoto—conclusive and undeniable evidence that CFCs were leading directly to ozone depletion, and a strong atmosphere of cooperation and willingness to take on the problem among the summit’s participants.
But now, following this most recent development, there has been a fundamental change in the terms of debate. Indeed the report may have created both of the necessary conditions for decisive action to be taken: it has rendered the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming almost uncontestable, and it has created an atmosphere that may allow swift, decisive, and comprehensive action. Even the United States, a country that releases 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and which has also vehemently condemned the Kyoto Protocol and refused to sign it, may be forced to comply.
The months ahead will either confirm or deny this suspicion. But I suspect that it may not be long until the world finally decides it is ready to confront global warming head-on.
America’s Hydra: Fighting Al-Qaeda
In ancient greek mythology the Hydra is a terrifying monster with the body of a serpent and nine different heads which Hercules is charged to kill by the goddess Hera. The catch, of course, is that every time one of this creature’s heads is severed another grows back in its place rendering the beast almost impossible to kill.
But what does this have to do with Al-Qaeda, one might ask? Recently, the United States succesfully killed the leader of Al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The terrorist leader had been on the United State’s most wanted list for some time and his death has been hailed as one of the few successes in an occupation that has seen little in the way of positive progress over the last twelve months.
But the United States may be celebrating its success too soon. Today, US military spokesmen identified Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian Al-Qaeda leader who had helped to establish the Al-Qaeda terrorist cell in Baghdad following the US-led invasion, as the likely successor to Zarqawi. Like the Hydra Al-Qaeda has quickly grown another head which is likely to be equally as menacing as the previous one.
The announcement that Zarqawi has been replaced can come as no suprise to the United States, for surely it could not be so naive as to expect that with the death of their leader the terrorists in Iraq would simply pack up and go home. On the contrary it seems likely that Zarqawi’s death will only fuel their hatred further and incite them to even greater violence. The United States claims, of course, that the assassination was a major step in the fight against the terrorists in Iraq: that with the death of Zarqawi Al-Qaeda has been left with a power vacuum and that it will likely fracture into a number of different autonomous cells.
However, I am skeptical. Even if Masri does not assume full control over Zarqawi’s network of terrorists in Iraq the fact that the group is simply fracturing into a numbe of different cells should still be quite worrisome for the United States. In one version of the Hydra myth a severed head will not simply be replaced by one head but by two. Is this not the kind of development that we are seeing currently in Iraq? The point is that whether one or twenty leaders emerge from the power vacuum left by Zarqawi’s death, their goals will still be the same and their resolve just as strong. The United States can continue to sever heads for as long as it wants (or can). But until it begins to deal with some of the root issues at stake in this “war on terror” it will continue to see these heads growing back, with each one all the more eager to exact revenge.
A recurring debate: patents or treatment?
The movement to bring effective HIV drug treatment to the developing world saw an interesting development this week, the outcome of which could be significant for drug companies and developing nations alike. Two patients-rights groups in India are in the process of suing to halt an American drug company, Gilead Sciences, from patenting the drug Viread. This drug, which is a brand-name form of the antiretroviral drug tenofovir, is produced on a widespread basis in India at a much lower cost than in the United States, which allows it to be sold for more affordable prices.
Gilead Sciences has issued statements in its defense, claiming that “Viread represents innovation and is patentable under Indian law.” Fair enough. But if we take a look at the facts, we see that the cost of Viread is $5,718 per patient per year whereas the tenofovir sold in India costs only $700. On top of this, the chairman of Cipla, the Indian drug company responsible for the manufacturing of these drugs, has stated that in the future the company will be able to make the same drugs available in Africa for $350 per patient per year.
Now, I am certainly a proponent of international patent laws and intellectual property rights. After all, what good is it to innovate at home if these innovations are simply going to be copied abroad?
But when we are talking about making available antiretroviral drugs to help curb a worldwide epidemic that has quite literally crippled dozens of developing nations, I find it difficult to sympathize with the US drug companies. I see the outsourcing of drug production to India as no different than the outsourcing of programming jobs or nanotechnology development. And this time, such outsourcing is not going towards making products and services cheaper to US consumers, it is reducing the cost of life-saving drugs to poverty-ridden AIDS victims who cannot afford the US-produced versions. Are we really willing to forego this possibility to use globalization in such a positive way in order to protect the intellectual property rights of a multi-billion dollar US drug company?
The Effects of Torture on Terrorism
In a recent speech to the Harvard community, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, discussed both the ethical and practical implications of torture. His point was simple: not only is torture inherently wrong, but it also has the opposite effect than is intended.
Functional arguments regarding torture have typically taken a back seat to moral and ethical discussions. And when the practicality of torture is discussed it is often with regard to torture in general rather than specific situations. Torture doesn’t work, its critics say, because the information acquired through torture is often times false. Victims will simply admit to whatever their torturers want in order to stop the pain, and thus the information culled from such practices is never truly verifiable.
However, there has been little analysis of how torture affects dynamics between Arabs and Americans in the Middle East and what its larger implications are for the War on Terror. Some of the strongest proponents of the practice defend it on the grounds of the “ticking time bomb” scenario. Torture, they say, should not be a widespread practice but should be used in situations when it can save a large of number of lives that are immediately at risk (a ticking bomb, for example). This argument is particularly applicable to the case of terrorism, since stopping an imminent terrorist attack is a perfect example of a situation dire enough to warrant the use of torture. Torture, then, by this argument will serve to curb terrorism and will thwart future terrorist attacks.
The flaws with this line of reasoning are numerous. Without going into too much depth, these arguments fail to clearly specify what exactly constitutes a “ticking time bomb” situation. What if the attack is likely to occur tomorrow? What about next year? What if the prisoner doesn’t know anything directly about the imminent threat but knows the whereabouts of someone who does? What if he simply knows the cousin of the friend of the neighbor who might have some information about an upcoming attack? Clearly the dilemma of the slippery slope is a primary one in this model.
Yet the more profound flaw with this justification is that it fails to account for the effects of torture on the opinions and mindsets of Arab citizens. The discovery of the United States’ use of torture in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib provoked something of a public outcry among many Arab citizens. The perceived hypocrisy and racism of such practices increased the already existing hostility between American forces and Arab locals. Such hostility is much more likely to foster further terrorism than torturing is likely to thwart future attacks. Intelligence regarding terrorist plans is rarely acquired from forced confession but more often from anonymous tips or willing admissions given in a spirit of good faith. But the use of torture completely undermines the development of any sort of positive relationship between Americans and Arabs and in this way decreases the likelihood that such willing admission will occur. In addition, heightened hostility and increased tensions will induce more Arabs to resort to terrorism or guerilla warfare as an outlet for their anger and frustration. Such a response is quite contrary to what we ought to be working toward in the region and, as such, we ought to completely relinquish the use of torture against Arabs, whether they be terrorists or not.