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Blame the Lebanese for this
19 minutes ago
Monday, June 29, 2009
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Arab Democracy
Voting in Aley, southeast of Beirut
Lebanese voters in Baabda district, southeast of Beirut.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Pabbo Camp
Pabbo Camp
September 1, 2009
by Tim Fitzsimons
You can hear darkness coming at Pabbo. By 7 pm, life there slowly lowers to a whisper as the sound of crickets grows and distant thunder thuds dully across the plains. When darkness falls, the women—tired from spending their day hunched over their washing, cooking, and cleaning—retire to their round huts where they sleep side by side with their children.
Life at Pabbo Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, in Amoro district in Northern Uganda, is a lesson in waiting. The camp was created by the Ugandan government in 1995 near the height of the violence caused by the Lord’s Resistance Army as it rampaged across Acholiland, kidnapping children and forcing them into military service and sexual slavery. A 2006 ceasefire ended the violence, but thousands of children still remain in captivity with Joseph Kony’s LRA.
Most Pabbo residents receive little dependable information about the operations of the LRA and as such live in a state of continued paranoia of what life is like outside the camp. Some in Pabbo venture so far as saying that the strength of the LRA is in the millions, while the majority of outside observers peg the number of combatants from several hundred to five thousand. Still, the LRA’s successful twenty-year-plus campaign of violence has altered the landscape and the psychology of the north and has forced many of its residents away from their farms and into these camps.
The people of Pabbo occupy a strange position politically: they express an intense fear of LRA violence, yet they also voice their deep distrust of the Kampala government headed by President Yoweri Museveni, who took control via a military coup in 1986 by overthrowing Tito Okello, a member of the Acholi tribe. The Lord’s Resistance Army was, until the 1990s, one player in the greater insurgency fueled by the political tension of this north/south divide.
But by 1994, with little success to show for in its campaign to overthrow the government, the LRA turned its brutality on its own people, accusing them of sympathizing with Kampala. The deep emotional and physical toll of a barbaric campaign waged by conscripted children on their own parents and brethren means that the LRA and its victims are often connected by more than the crimes committed, and that blame is muddled and intertwined. The people of the north are both terrified of their own kin and fearful of any attempt to extinguish them, which feeds the tense limbo that pervades camps like Pabbo.
Pabbo is a bleak and boring place. Unlike many of the other IDP camps in northern Uganda, this sprawling settlement is poorly planned and overcrowded. Huts are jumbled too closely together, which causes streams of sewage and rainwater to cut half-meter deep gorges through the camp’s paths. Latrines and water pumps are well maintained, but only after cholera and other diseases swept through the camp and rallied international NGOs to swoop in. The Catholic health clinic next to the church is no longer packed, but little else of Pabbo’s day-to-day life has changed since the violence ended.
Located just 30 miles from the Sudanese border, Pabbo was once a small village along the main highway to Juba. After seeing its population swell to over 60,000 during the height of the conflict, the camp today still has limited access to running water, sanitary facilities, and scant electricity is powered by pricey solar panels, diesel generators, and car batteries. A private company installed two cell phone towers in the camp, and the residents lucky enough to procure a cell phone rely on charging stations where it can cost up to 1,000 Ugandan shillings ($0.60) to replenish their batteries. Aside from these phones, most Pabbo residents have little two-way contact with the rest of Uganda, or the rest of the world. Most information comes from radio stations that broadcast English-language news updates and government HIV prevention advertisements.
Fire swept Pabbo in 2004 and burnt down many of the huts, leaving six thousand residents homeless. Some have replaced their thatched roofs with UN tarps, leaving the landscape of the camp a hodgepodge of shredded plastic, grass, and tin. According to Pabbo residents, the fire—which was fueled by the camp’s congestion—was caused by witchcraft.
More than just the physical infrastructure of the camp is in disrepair. The ancient bond between the Acholi people and the land of northern Uganda has been broken, perhaps permanently, as many are unlikely to go back to their ancestral homes where their families farmed for centuries. In fact, many IDP camp residents no longer remember where their homes once were. The problem is so pervasive that the subcounty office in Pabbo runs a land wrangling court to settle border disputes for those who have chosen to return home.
While some older residents remember life before the LRA, they are outnumbered by the large number of Pabbo residents born in the camp during the conflict. These young Acholi boys and girls have been totally removed from the agrarian upbringing that their parents knew. The population of the camp is young and has little connection to the land.
While LRA violence has been on hold for several years and some people have left for satellite camps and farms, most of Pabbo’s 40,000 remaining residents seem to be in no great hurry to leave. Although life as an internally displaced person is squalid, camp residents enjoy religious congregations (including a large and active Catholic church), relatively accessible medical facilities, and a thriving market. Several prominent NGOs have offices in Pabbo and the World Food Programme still occasionally distributes cooking oil and food. Many Pabbo residents say that the threat of random violence keeps them in the cramped camp conditions, but others theorize that the aforementioned community services, which are not easily accessible to rural farmers, exert the greatest pull on IDPs to stay put.
The appeal of these services can be best observed on Sundays, when a thousand of the camp’s residents change out of their torn rags for ruffled pink polyester dresses and white Oxford shirts adorned with sashes bearing the cross. Parades of children march proudly while singing the songs of Jesus. For many camp residents, this is by a long measure the most exciting event of the week.
In addition, residents can purchase much of the same food they once had to work the land to obtain. Millet, maize flour, greens, cassava, beans, and other staples are today readily available at Pabbo’s market – a stark comparison to the recent past when regional violence and acute overcrowding caused severe food shortages in Uganda’s camps.
As the oft-cited exemplar of Uganda’s IDP camp “problem,” Pabbo has served as a barometer for problems that afflict other camps, as disease outbreaks have tended to strike Pabbo first. Yet today the camp is thriving, with commerce seeing an uptick over the past year even while thousands of residents have left Pabbo for satellite camps closer to their ancestral lands. Conspiracy theories fly among Pabbo residents, Western NGO workers, and others about why more are not leaving (and even why Uganda’s camps exist in the first place), but for many camp residents, the reason is simple: Pabbo is safety and the bush is danger.
Traffic continues to bounce along the one lane dirt road to Sudan, and life in Pabbo trundles on. Signs of urbanization and stability are growing in the camp, linked as the place is to the brutal conflict that confined the IDPs in such terrible conditions for so long. But as time passes over Pabbo, its residents may look back and wonder when their IDP camp—a product of chaos and violence—ceased to be a temporary refuge and began to be their home.
September 1, 2009
by Tim Fitzsimons
You can hear darkness coming at Pabbo. By 7 pm, life there slowly lowers to a whisper as the sound of crickets grows and distant thunder thuds dully across the plains. When darkness falls, the women—tired from spending their day hunched over their washing, cooking, and cleaning—retire to their round huts where they sleep side by side with their children.Life at Pabbo Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, in Amoro district in Northern Uganda, is a lesson in waiting. The camp was created by the Ugandan government in 1995 near the height of the violence caused by the Lord’s Resistance Army as it rampaged across Acholiland, kidnapping children and forcing them into military service and sexual slavery. A 2006 ceasefire ended the violence, but thousands of children still remain in captivity with Joseph Kony’s LRA.
Most Pabbo residents receive little dependable information about the operations of the LRA and as such live in a state of continued paranoia of what life is like outside the camp. Some in Pabbo venture so far as saying that the strength of the LRA is in the millions, while the majority of outside observers peg the number of combatants from several hundred to five thousand. Still, the LRA’s successful twenty-year-plus campaign of violence has altered the landscape and the psychology of the north and has forced many of its residents away from their farms and into these camps.
The people of Pabbo occupy a strange position politically: they express an intense fear of LRA violence, yet they also voice their deep distrust of the Kampala government headed by President Yoweri Museveni, who took control via a military coup in 1986 by overthrowing Tito Okello, a member of the Acholi tribe. The Lord’s Resistance Army was, until the 1990s, one player in the greater insurgency fueled by the political tension of this north/south divide.
But by 1994, with little success to show for in its campaign to overthrow the government, the LRA turned its brutality on its own people, accusing them of sympathizing with Kampala. The deep emotional and physical toll of a barbaric campaign waged by conscripted children on their own parents and brethren means that the LRA and its victims are often connected by more than the crimes committed, and that blame is muddled and intertwined. The people of the north are both terrified of their own kin and fearful of any attempt to extinguish them, which feeds the tense limbo that pervades camps like Pabbo.
Pabbo is a bleak and boring place. Unlike many of the other IDP camps in northern Uganda, this sprawling settlement is poorly planned and overcrowded. Huts are jumbled too closely together, which causes streams of sewage and rainwater to cut half-meter deep gorges through the camp’s paths. Latrines and water pumps are well maintained, but only after cholera and other diseases swept through the camp and rallied international NGOs to swoop in. The Catholic health clinic next to the church is no longer packed, but little else of Pabbo’s day-to-day life has changed since the violence ended.
Located just 30 miles from the Sudanese border, Pabbo was once a small village along the main highway to Juba. After seeing its population swell to over 60,000 during the height of the conflict, the camp today still has limited access to running water, sanitary facilities, and scant electricity is powered by pricey solar panels, diesel generators, and car batteries. A private company installed two cell phone towers in the camp, and the residents lucky enough to procure a cell phone rely on charging stations where it can cost up to 1,000 Ugandan shillings ($0.60) to replenish their batteries. Aside from these phones, most Pabbo residents have little two-way contact with the rest of Uganda, or the rest of the world. Most information comes from radio stations that broadcast English-language news updates and government HIV prevention advertisements.
Fire swept Pabbo in 2004 and burnt down many of the huts, leaving six thousand residents homeless. Some have replaced their thatched roofs with UN tarps, leaving the landscape of the camp a hodgepodge of shredded plastic, grass, and tin. According to Pabbo residents, the fire—which was fueled by the camp’s congestion—was caused by witchcraft.
More than just the physical infrastructure of the camp is in disrepair. The ancient bond between the Acholi people and the land of northern Uganda has been broken, perhaps permanently, as many are unlikely to go back to their ancestral homes where their families farmed for centuries. In fact, many IDP camp residents no longer remember where their homes once were. The problem is so pervasive that the subcounty office in Pabbo runs a land wrangling court to settle border disputes for those who have chosen to return home.
While some older residents remember life before the LRA, they are outnumbered by the large number of Pabbo residents born in the camp during the conflict. These young Acholi boys and girls have been totally removed from the agrarian upbringing that their parents knew. The population of the camp is young and has little connection to the land.
While LRA violence has been on hold for several years and some people have left for satellite camps and farms, most of Pabbo’s 40,000 remaining residents seem to be in no great hurry to leave. Although life as an internally displaced person is squalid, camp residents enjoy religious congregations (including a large and active Catholic church), relatively accessible medical facilities, and a thriving market. Several prominent NGOs have offices in Pabbo and the World Food Programme still occasionally distributes cooking oil and food. Many Pabbo residents say that the threat of random violence keeps them in the cramped camp conditions, but others theorize that the aforementioned community services, which are not easily accessible to rural farmers, exert the greatest pull on IDPs to stay put.
The appeal of these services can be best observed on Sundays, when a thousand of the camp’s residents change out of their torn rags for ruffled pink polyester dresses and white Oxford shirts adorned with sashes bearing the cross. Parades of children march proudly while singing the songs of Jesus. For many camp residents, this is by a long measure the most exciting event of the week.In addition, residents can purchase much of the same food they once had to work the land to obtain. Millet, maize flour, greens, cassava, beans, and other staples are today readily available at Pabbo’s market – a stark comparison to the recent past when regional violence and acute overcrowding caused severe food shortages in Uganda’s camps.
As the oft-cited exemplar of Uganda’s IDP camp “problem,” Pabbo has served as a barometer for problems that afflict other camps, as disease outbreaks have tended to strike Pabbo first. Yet today the camp is thriving, with commerce seeing an uptick over the past year even while thousands of residents have left Pabbo for satellite camps closer to their ancestral lands. Conspiracy theories fly among Pabbo residents, Western NGO workers, and others about why more are not leaving (and even why Uganda’s camps exist in the first place), but for many camp residents, the reason is simple: Pabbo is safety and the bush is danger.
Traffic continues to bounce along the one lane dirt road to Sudan, and life in Pabbo trundles on. Signs of urbanization and stability are growing in the camp, linked as the place is to the brutal conflict that confined the IDPs in such terrible conditions for so long. But as time passes over Pabbo, its residents may look back and wonder when their IDP camp—a product of chaos and violence—ceased to be a temporary refuge and began to be their home.Monday, March 30, 2009
Memo to Iraq
MEMO TO IRAQ
by Tim Fitzsimons
May 17, 2008
This month we celebrated the five-year anniversary of George W. Bush’s triumphant landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off of California, where, a mere six weeks into the War in Iraq, he declared in front of a staged rally of sailors that “[i]n the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
Mr. Bush was correct; the goals had been realized: we had quickly toppled the government of Saddam Hussein, established control over the country, and few at home in America had been asked to do more than bat an eye.
Since we won that first fight, however, we have lost the war of words and images. In the wake of “Mission Accomplished,” we have seen the horrifying pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, a cell phone video of Saddam Hussein’s botched and barbaric hanging, and front page after front page plastered with images of decapitations and blood running through the streets of Baghdad.
Somehow, despite the fact that this war has gone on for longer than the Civil War and both World Wars, we as a nation have failed to seriously question its continuation. One of the two main candidates for president seeks simply to end American casualties, since he has rightly identified that as the only factor that concerns most of us. We have not been paying close enough attention to the war over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, the one that we are losing most terribly. They will always remember.
But we won the War for Iraq. Mission accomplished.
Nine months ago, as I was rumbling down the "green tunnel," a tree-lined main throughway in the Kashmir valley, my translator Shabir pointed down a road that flicked by and told me that it led to his village.
I had heard about that village before. He had already explained to me what life was like when the Indian army would conduct a "crackdown," the English word that embodied the brutality of the conflict in that beautiful region of northwest India. In a crackdown, the army would surround a village, corral all of its residents, line up the men old enough to be "insurgents," blindfold them, and then walk down the line with an informer, who would silently finger the accused. Those unlucky enough to be chosen would be whisked away and “disappeared,” never to be seen again.
Recently, the BBC reported that mass graves had been discovered in the valley, suspected to be some of the sites where those disappeared people were finally put to rest.
Kashmir was my introduction to India. Before my flight from New Delhi even touched down on the tarmac at Srinagar airport, I could see hundreds of camouflaged tents behind tall fences surrounding the airport. When I stepped off of the plane, I saw military trucks and barbed wire, and men with machine guns in hand. We were frisked twice before we were permitted to leave the airport, and we were the only ones there. The height of the conflict has long since passed, but so much remains.
As we drove around Srinagar pursuing our story, our car would be pulled over every few hours by the Central Reserve Police Force, and we would both be frisked. Shabir would always get particularly incensed, but never to the police. He would wait until we were speeding away before letting slip some of the rare four letter words he reserved for the “occupiers.”
When Shabir and I would talk about the conflict between Kashmir, India, and Pakistan, he would gaze out of the car window and his mannerisms would change. His emotions would deaden, and he would speak in a sort of robotic way that showed he found the question too difficult to answer fully:
"I think Kashmir should be part of Pakistan," he would say, looking away.
"Why? You already said that you think being part of India makes Kashmir prosperous," I would ask, slowly.
"But you know," (and here he would begin to get especially uncomfortable), "I can't want to go to India. Pakistan is a country for Muslims, and we in Kashmir are Muslim."
But his true feelings shone through his explanation. A day or two before, when he had explained what a crackdown was, I had asked him if it had ever happened in his village when he was a kid. "Yes," he had said simply, "many times." His employer had told me that his village was a hotbed of insurgent activity in the 1990s, so I already knew. Shabir remembered the conflict well. India to him was forever seared into his mind as the force that disappeared all those people from his village, causing so much pain to so many people.
And with that, I learned that the cost of insurgency and counter-insurgency is not one that fades with age. Pay close attention.
This article was published on May 17, 2008 in the Tufts Daily.
by Tim Fitzsimons
May 17, 2008
This month we celebrated the five-year anniversary of George W. Bush’s triumphant landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off of California, where, a mere six weeks into the War in Iraq, he declared in front of a staged rally of sailors that “[i]n the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”Mr. Bush was correct; the goals had been realized: we had quickly toppled the government of Saddam Hussein, established control over the country, and few at home in America had been asked to do more than bat an eye.
Since we won that first fight, however, we have lost the war of words and images. In the wake of “Mission Accomplished,” we have seen the horrifying pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, a cell phone video of Saddam Hussein’s botched and barbaric hanging, and front page after front page plastered with images of decapitations and blood running through the streets of Baghdad.
Somehow, despite the fact that this war has gone on for longer than the Civil War and both World Wars, we as a nation have failed to seriously question its continuation. One of the two main candidates for president seeks simply to end American casualties, since he has rightly identified that as the only factor that concerns most of us. We have not been paying close enough attention to the war over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, the one that we are losing most terribly. They will always remember.
But we won the War for Iraq. Mission accomplished.
***
Nine months ago, as I was rumbling down the "green tunnel," a tree-lined main throughway in the Kashmir valley, my translator Shabir pointed down a road that flicked by and told me that it led to his village.
I had heard about that village before. He had already explained to me what life was like when the Indian army would conduct a "crackdown," the English word that embodied the brutality of the conflict in that beautiful region of northwest India. In a crackdown, the army would surround a village, corral all of its residents, line up the men old enough to be "insurgents," blindfold them, and then walk down the line with an informer, who would silently finger the accused. Those unlucky enough to be chosen would be whisked away and “disappeared,” never to be seen again.
Recently, the BBC reported that mass graves had been discovered in the valley, suspected to be some of the sites where those disappeared people were finally put to rest.
Kashmir was my introduction to India. Before my flight from New Delhi even touched down on the tarmac at Srinagar airport, I could see hundreds of camouflaged tents behind tall fences surrounding the airport. When I stepped off of the plane, I saw military trucks and barbed wire, and men with machine guns in hand. We were frisked twice before we were permitted to leave the airport, and we were the only ones there. The height of the conflict has long since passed, but so much remains.
As we drove around Srinagar pursuing our story, our car would be pulled over every few hours by the Central Reserve Police Force, and we would both be frisked. Shabir would always get particularly incensed, but never to the police. He would wait until we were speeding away before letting slip some of the rare four letter words he reserved for the “occupiers.”
When Shabir and I would talk about the conflict between Kashmir, India, and Pakistan, he would gaze out of the car window and his mannerisms would change. His emotions would deaden, and he would speak in a sort of robotic way that showed he found the question too difficult to answer fully:
"I think Kashmir should be part of Pakistan," he would say, looking away.
"Why? You already said that you think being part of India makes Kashmir prosperous," I would ask, slowly.
"But you know," (and here he would begin to get especially uncomfortable), "I can't want to go to India. Pakistan is a country for Muslims, and we in Kashmir are Muslim."
But his true feelings shone through his explanation. A day or two before, when he had explained what a crackdown was, I had asked him if it had ever happened in his village when he was a kid. "Yes," he had said simply, "many times." His employer had told me that his village was a hotbed of insurgent activity in the 1990s, so I already knew. Shabir remembered the conflict well. India to him was forever seared into his mind as the force that disappeared all those people from his village, causing so much pain to so many people.
And with that, I learned that the cost of insurgency and counter-insurgency is not one that fades with age. Pay close attention.
This article was published on May 17, 2008 in the Tufts Daily.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Iraqi Refugees in Jordan
Iraq Refugees in Jordan from Institute For Global Leadership on Vimeo.
This video was presented to the Tufts University ALLIES (Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services) Second Annual Intellectual Roundtable on October 30, 2008.
As a postscript to the video, Asel and his family were resettled in Massachusetts in December 2008. Asel and his brothers are currently enrolled in school, and looking forward to applying to college.
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