Marian's Blog

Gaza: Reading Robert Fisk on The Independent.co.uk

Some readers of Marian's Blog may be aware that I'm a former journalist (and press secretary, etc.) myself. And yet, being briefly outside the United States, I am experiencing culture shock. In this case the shock is good, due to once again being surrounded by so much news and so many free and readily available (televised & broadcast) news sources. Many of these are sources which, back in the States, most Americans and those living in the U.S. 1) are not offered via U.S. media & U.S. cable TV distribution systems, and 2) which, quite often, Americans will not discuss, quite often even when they may be aware of certain events going on in the world outside (or even within) the USA.

And so it was thanks to a long interview seen (more than once) on Al Jazeera's English-language TV that I learned of one experienced and rather outspoken British observer, Robert Fisk, and his columns in the British paper The Independent. 

This entry is short, and yet for today perhaps it's enough. 

August 7, 1998: Julian Bartley and many other lives

I will never forget that August 7, 1998 was a Friday. In Croatia I finished a report for work. My colleague-friend Melinda and I had taken a day of leave and arrived on Croatia's beautiful, rocky, pine-scented Dalmatian coast to spend a weekend away from our human rights work with OSCE. We unlocked the door to our little hotel room. Which of us happened to turn on the TV? We saw the images of devastation and knew something dreadful had occurred. Then the little lightbox told us that what we were observing had taken place in the city centre of Nairobi, Kenya. Something told me I'd soon learn more about this tragedy. So many paths in my life eventually seem to converge. In August 1998 and in spite of my family's distinctive African ancestry, I had never yet had the opportunity to venture anywhere in Africa other than northern Africa. Back in Washington I did have an acquaintance named Julian who, like Melinda and many of my friends, shared my affinity for the world. While on loan from his State Department career, I'd met Julian Bartley when he was doing foreign policy work on the congressional staff of U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson. A few years later, ten days after my trip to the Croatian coast with Melinda, the other piece of news arrived from my friend "A" back in Washington.

March Madness? Bombing, from Belgrade to Baghdad

It's just days after the "Ides of March" - the date when the emperor Giulio Cesare was assassinated in Rome. In English we call him Julius Caesar. In English we also have a saying about March, that it "comes in like a lion," and "goes out like a lamb." We also talk casually about something called "March madness." Does anyone know where that started? I don't know its origin but looking at U.S. foreign policy in the past nine years the idea of "madness" in March seems worth another look. I was part of a group at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria in March 1999, when on the first or second evening we got word that the NATO bombing of Belgrade had begun. Four years later and it was Baghdad. Is there method to madness in March?

Darfur: do Arab governments care? The Doha Debates on BBC

When I think of the Arab League usually I think of Somalia. I recall the League's presence and involvement in the 2002-2004 Somali peace talks in Eldoret and Mbagathi, Kenya. If you have real access to BBC TV, and not what I can only regard as the mostly pandering, mind-numbing soap opera, real estate and auction fare still being passed off as BBC America, make sure you catch the Doha Debates' segment on Sudan's genocide in Darfur. This originally aired on BBC 26-27 January 2008. The segment focuses on the Arab world's relationship to the Government of Sudan and its genocide in Darfur. I'd never before seen this series. It was taped in Qatar with a studio audience of maybe sixty, several of whom also asked a few questions of the panel aloud. The motion debated was "This House believes Arab governments couldn't care less about Darfur."

40 years into the 1967 War and a woman's blog from Gaza

From time to time in the late 1960s my high school pen pal, Abderrahman, mailed me PLO records. PLO songs. Certainly I remember the brief but devastating war that Israel launched in June 1967 yet as a young person I was clueless about its metastatic import that continues today. As decades go by, consequences of the '67 War keep growing worse. Today from what remains of Gaza Dr Mona El-Farra writes her blog entitled From Gaza with Love. I find women's and young people's voices particularly illuminating, when I can locate them.

"Embedded" in Iraq

Recently GOP "maverick"(?) Colin Powell labelled the reality in Iraq a civil war. Knowledgeable journalists and others say what we see in the press does not begin to convey how bad it is. It's almost two years since my Jan 19, 2005 entry when I wrote about what to some of us already looked like a tragic, inexorable descent into hell. I contrasted it with George Bush's grand, lavish and self-congratulatory 2005 re-entry into the White House on the same day. Two years on I'm still trying to comprehend the U.S. media's "approach" to reporting Iraq and the kind of place it has become since Bush & Co.'s 2003 unilateral invasion.

This led me to search for the meaning of the term 'embedded' via Merriam Webster's dictionary online. As in "to have embedded virtually all journalistic coverage of Iraq inside the military". Here's what I found: "... to enclose closely in or as if in a matrix"; "to make something an integral part of"; "to prepare [a specimen] for sectioning by infiltrating with and enclosing in a supporting substance"; "to surround closely"; and the use of the intransitive verb: "to become embedded". How will journalists and historians chronicle this still-unfolding story of the way so many are covering Iraq?

The American assassinations, part 2 - 1964, 68: Malcolm, Martin and John's brother Bobby

On the Web I found a photo taken in Washington, at Richard Nixon's January 1969 inauguration. A notation says ten thousand people came out in the cold for this event. Two thousand were protesters. In the foreground, above the crowd, a young woman holds her handpainted sign. "PEACE IS NOT SUBVERSIVE". I read those words and forty years later they make me ask myself what exactly is different today? Is America a sleepwalking society? Quite often that's how it feels. I started blogging this thread, "the American assassinations", before reading that this week BBC News has alleged U.S. CIA involvement in the 1968 murder of Robert Kennedy. The report by Shane O'Sullivan appeared November 21, 2006 on BBC Newsnight. It is possible some in the US still really do not want to think of such things. The evening he was murdered Bobby Kennedy had just won California's Democratic Party primary and was on the verge of becoming the party nominee for president of the United States. How many of us ever stop to consider the implication of these multiple assassinations in the US? All the victims were male political figures and not one of them right wing. All this violence and death. The violent reversal of the politically possible. All in less than five years, from 1963 to '68. The Boomer generation. My generation. Multiple political murders shaped my generation of American youth. In the face of serial murders and assassinations, wouldn't coming-of-age somehow change? One devastating death followed by another and another. All in barely half a decade. All with deep social and political effects that remain today. Who talks about how these killings in the U.S. marked the baby boomer generation? Many of us weren't even 18 by the time we'd lived through all this. How many people, Americans and everyone, ever think about that? Had Robert Kennedy not been shot in the recesses of an L.A. hotel it is possible, even likely, he'd have become the 37th U.S. president. Is this the real reason he died? Indeed this 'alternate reality': had Bobby Kennedy been allowed to live, at the very least would have spared us who we got instead: Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon. Some of us remember -only too well- his other "name", "Tricky Dick". Tricky Dick Nixon. Before Robert it was his brother, our president, on a routine political visit to Dallas where he, too, was assassinated in November 1963. Fewer than nineteen months later it was Black American leader Malcolm X (Malcolm Little), shot so many times, by multiple gunmen, in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. It was Sunday, 21 February 1965. In Pennsylvania my family heard the news on our car radio. This moment in my parents' car stays frozen in my mind. A sunny, early Sunday afternoon, right after church. I am in the back seat as we ride. The news comes on the radio as we're stopped at the light at East Market Street, heading north on South Queen. So much violence. And then barely three years later Martin Luther King is shot and killed, Thursday, April 4th, in Memphis, Tennessee. Then Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles on June 8th. Two more American assassinations less than eight weeks apart.

The American assassinations: John Kennedy, 22 Nov 1963

Today, Wednesday, 22 November 2006, is the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the US. In the wake of yesterday's terrible, reminiscent shooting of Lebanese government minister Pierre Gemayel, so far today I've heard no mention of President Kennedy's horrific death. I was a kid at Southern University Lab School in Scotlandville, Baton Rouge, but like Americans older than me, I remember exactly where I was when the news came. It was music class at school. I seem to remember we were learning to sing "The Peanut Vendor's Song." And then somehow everyone is outside along the breezeways at school. People falling and crying and moaning. It's hard to imagine a thing that could bring to tears every single adult around you. But that's exactly what happened on a November Friday in 1963. It still makes me cry, too, and it's still hard to allow oneself to really think about even today. What is equally sad and seems too incredible to admit is John Kennedy's death was destined not to be the only 20th century assassination of a political figure in my country, and in my life.

It's Iraq, the economy AND the Constitution, "Stupid"

I'm certainly not calling anyone "stupid". That was part of a very accurate and effective Democratic campaign slogan a few elections back. But mid-term Election 2006 is about Iraq. It is about the U.S. and global economy - which also partly is about Iraq, especially for the U.S. economy already in the toilet - and it is about whether the U.S. Constitution is worth the paper it was written on. Even Alice in Wonderland never went to a tea party like the one all of us are at. In spite of assessments of many, many Americans, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld tells us again: he doesn't plan to go anywhere. Could someone, anyone, please show Mr. Rumsfeld to the District of Columbia line? Who is taking marching orders from whom? If, like me, you're an American, for God's sake vote - and vote progressive. Everyone else in the rest of the world, please pray, or just send some good energy our way.

September 11th

On Friday, Feb. 26, 1993, I was sitting at my desk in the Washington congressional office of my boss, Central Brooklyn, NY representative Major R. Owens. My office partner, Braden, and I noticed we were unable to reach our New York office by phone. Eventually we heard "a fire" (we thought minor) had broken out at the World Trade Center. We then learned smoke from the WTC could be seen from the office in Brooklyn.

Another Friday, this time August 1998. In Croatia, my friend and work colleague Melinda and I arrive for a few well-deserved days on an island in the Jadranska Mora - the Adriatic. We turn on the t.v. as we walk into the hotel room and become witnesses to bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. Somewhere inside I feel that for me there is more to this news, but I don't know what it could be. Ten days later I hear from Andrea in Washington that our friend and mutual colleague Julian Bartley, U.S. consul general at the embassy in Nairobi, has been killed, along with his 20 year old son "Jay" - Julian, Jr. Many, many Kenyans and other innocent people are killed and injured. Julian - a Black American diplomat - and his son are the two Americans who die who are from the same family.

Julian, Sr. and I had met and had a working lunch while he was on loan on the staff of another member of Congress.

Three years on from August 1998 - barely a month after September 11 - our family relocated to Nairobi. There I learn that one of my new friends was Julian's neighbour. Her sons attended school with Jay.

We will continue to do our best to fear no evil; no matter where it comes from, no matter the "logic" claimed by those responsible, regardless of which side.

From the Quran (39:53): "O my servants who exceeded the limits, never despair of God's Mercy. For God forgives all sins. God is the forgiver, most merciful." God forgives. So can we.