Kathryn Bolkovac was a police officer in Lincoln, Nebraska when she signed up to help keep the peace in Bosnia in 1998. DynCorp, the military contractor that hired Bolkovac, was working in Bosnia to do everything from keep airbases in shape to running mess halls. Bolkovac worked with other Americans to train local law enforcement officers, some of whom she had to teach how to drive. But that wasn’t the hardest part of her time abroad. Below, Bolkovac, author with Cari Lynn of The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman’s Fight for Justice, explains how she discovered human trafficking operations, what she did about it, and whether, ten years later, whistleblowers have it any  better than she did.

Q. How did you come to discover human trafficking?

A. I was from Middle America. Human trafficking, in the 1990s, wasn’t a term that was widely used by American police forces. That term has come much more to the forefront in the last ten years. The process of learning what human trafficking was, and recognizing it, was my first challenge. Then to find out that my fellow officers were involved in the trade and solicitation of prostitutes – that was a shock.

Q. How did you find yourself becoming a whistleblower – at what step did you realize that’s what you were doing?

A. There really are no steps. The term itself – the idea that there should be steps to take – has really only come forward in the last decade. Because of my outspokenness on this issue, I was demoted and ultimately terminated by the company I was contracted through. It wasn’t until I sued this company in the United Kingdom and brought all these facts to light that what I was doing was termed “whistleblowing.” I had made a disclosure in the public interest and for that reason I was fired. Many, many people have been in similar situations, without having a hotline or a set of steps that they knew to follow. Countries need to have steps in place for employees of such companies to report wrongdoing, and those companies should take steps to protect the employee and make sure to investigate.

Q. How have these countries and companies changed since your experience?

A. I’m not sure they have. There has been a lot of lip service paid to this dilemma. I think many companies, including DynCorp, claim to have made changes in their corporate standards. But if you read the news, of course, you’ll find they haven’t changed a thing. The same thing happens over and over: someone reports wrongdoing, they’re fired, and possibly they bring up a lawsuit, or they simply leave. DynCorp takes a hit in the press, but they still get new contracts. The U.S. and the E.U. have passed whistleblower protection acts – they do recognize the problem. But there’s still not enough done to protect people.

Q. How is WikiLeaks changing things for whistleblowers and for these companies?

A. This is quite interesting – one of the cases I discuss in my book is now being released through WikiLeaks. It’s a sad situation. I don’t condone the release of all these confidential documents. I think this should not in any way be considered an act of whistleblowing, which is constituted by someone who knows, most importantly, that there is legitimate wrongdoing and illegal activity within an organization. This isn’t about opinions and name-calling. Of course, it’s helpful that some issues related to DynCorp, especially their behavior in Afghanistan, is coming out through WikiLeaks. That only lends credibility to the fact that this is happening and the State Department knows about it. There are several items in the leaks that are credible. But whether it’s right to release it like this is a difficult question.

Q. Why do you think DynCorp keeps getting contracts – do they have a particular expertise and ability that other companies don’t in this complex line of work?

A. That’s an excuse that’s been thrown out there by DynCorp and their supporters. I just don’t believe it. Based on my experience working on these missions, the job being done by these contractors, particularly extremely large companies like DynCorp, is in shambles. Smaller companies and organizations could potentially do a much better job, and be more efficient and accountable. And when it comes to policing, that’s just a function that should never be outsourced to a private organization. I certainly understand companies going in and building roads and bridges, but to send U.S. police officers under the guise of a private corporation is wrong. When I first went, I thought it seemed acceptable because DynCorp portrayed itself as representing the State Department. That was in their flyers – that’s what attracted me, that I would be part of a group of elite officers representing the U.S. But they simply aren’t managing their missions properly.

Q. What can Americans do about the problems whistleblowers face, and about human trafficking?

A. I think the first thing we have to do is really take a long, hard look at how our missions are being carried out and what government contractors are doing for us overseas. Congress, and anyone else who is involved in the procurement of these contracts, needs to be really keyed into this. Contacting your government representatives is a good first step.

In regard to human trafficking, we need to make sure we educate anyone we send abroad on these missions – whether they’re going as government contractors or part of a diplomatic or military corps. They need to be trained, and I don’t mean given a piece of paper to read or sign, but actually trained on what human trafficking is, how it occurs and why. There are a lot of PR campaigns in Europe about human trafficking, but I’m not sure they’ve made any change in how missions are actually run.

Buy the Book: Powell’s, Amazon, Borders.

*Photo of Kathryn Bolkovac by Jan G.H. Van der Velde, courtesy Palgrave MacMillan. Photo of the American Embassy in Bosnia courtesy speckledyen.

The post Blowing the Whistle on Human Trafficking appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Unions in America aren’t what they used to be. As membership fell dramatically over the last 60 years, labor leaders went from household names to obscure and often negatively stereotyped small players in the national story. But as Philip Dray reveals in There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America, labor has been an integral part of American history. “It’s an incredible campaign that went on for decades, that involved our grandparents and great-grandparents and achieved so many things we take for granted,” Dray said. Below, Dray chats about the farm girls who kicked off the labor movement, why labor lost its steam last century, and whether the recession will help unions pick up again.

Q. Where does the story of unionization in America begin?

A. I start my book with the industrialization of America, which begins in the 1820s up in New England, with the textile mills. It has an interesting back story. The founders of our country were a little divided about whether or not it was a good idea to have industry here. They thought that the U.S., because it was such a large landmass with strong farming traditions, might not need industry. They didn’t like what they had seen of it in England and Europe. But others thought that because we have all these natural resources, we should have industry.

The owners of these New England textile mills sought to create a paternalistic environment that would protect workers. This was appropriate in their minds particularly because many of these workers were young women, farm girls, many of them in their teens. The system actually worked for about a generation. They called it the Lowell miracle. People actually came to see it – Charles Dickens, Andrew Jackson – to see that you could have industry that was profitable, and you could have workers who were treated well. They had boarding houses with den mothers watching over the girls. They had lectures and reading circles.

But the women began to realize their pay was low, and the conditions were harsh. They worked 12 to 14 hours a day. It was a tough way to make a living. That was where unionization began on a large scale, with these women organizing and striking. Their first demand, which became a broad campaign, was for a 10 hour day.

Q. Why did that paternalistic, protective attitude go away? Was it economic circumstances or a philosophical change?

A. Partly it was economic. Eventually, when their profits weren’t as good as they hoped, the mill owners began to cut some of the niceties they extended. They increased production quotas. They lengthened hours, they tried to cut pay a few times. This is a lesson we know well today – the enlightened attitude of management will only carry you so far. Management can give and management can take away. That’s why unions are wary of benign corporate outreach. They know it’s only temporary.

When the workers rebelled, the owners were shocked. They thought the workers were ingrates. That was a basic misunderstanding between labor and capital that would prove enduring. As would the question of who is producing the profits and how much labor is entitled to. The workers felt they were the ones, aside from the raw materials, who were creating the goods. They felt they should be getting paid better. But capital thought, you’re lucky you have this job at all. We’re putting up all the investment and taking all the risk.

Q. How did unionization spread, and did it require militancy to win the gains it did?

A. The 10-hour movement went regional. Just as America was growing and capital was becoming more expensive, railroads were spreading across the country. By the Civil War, you had national markets – shoes made in Massachusetts were being sold in Chicago, that kind of thing. The unions felt they had to catch up, so they also went national. After the Civil War you saw the arrival of a couple of different national labor federations that sought to address these issues on a national scale. They did become more militant because they realized that along with capital getting more widespread, their American dream – that they would work and save and open their own businesses and be prosperous – began to wane. Workers realized that they were cogs in this large industrial mechanism, these steel mills and mines and railroads. There’s no quick exit. The whole mentality of labor began to shift a bit. Once workers began to realize that they were workers and not individuals, they became more militant. They insisted they needed more safety, more income.

Q. What are some of the gains made then that we take for granted?

A. This is another reason I wrote the book. No one ever gave workers anything – they demanded things. Management was very resistant. Government kept a hands-off attitude for many decades. The only thing the government did was to send troops to put down workers, and later, to use court injunctions to suppress workers. The workers would strike for better work conditions, longer meal times, safety measures, rules about hiring and firing, grievance procedures, a five-day work week, and ultimately the very right to bargain with employers. Collective bargaining has been guaranteed since the New Deal, but for years it was not. Unions had to fight for that right – just to be recognized as the union that represented the workers.

Q. How did labor’s reputation start to wane in the 20th century?

A. It’s hard to generalize. Labor unions got a bit soft after the New Deal, when they won a lot of important rights, guaranteed by the government. When the government stepped in, it took some moxie out of the unions themselves.

There were a number of other factors as well – the loss of jobs due to technology, the decentralization of labor away from large industrial capitols like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago. You had big business unionism, like the AFL-CIO, that took union leadership away from the rank-and-file. Unions also turned on themselves over communism in the 1950s, which was a sad episode. The unions were so frightened by the taint of radicalism that was used so effectively that unions began to police themselves. In doing so they ate out the heart of their own movement. Many powerful active unions were expelled. Members were purged for being left-leaning or suspected communists.

Then you had globalization, which we’re all familiar with. This has undermined American labor because it makes labor global. If you have a job in Toledo, your wages are competing against workers in Indonesia and Thailand and Mexico. Right away, that gives a huge advantage to capital in dealing with workers. All these things ate away at unions.

Q. Why are unions so often regarded as corrupt today?

A. The thing with corruption, and that taint that unions have – I think it’s a little unfair. The reason it sticks to unions so much is that, just like a nonprofit organization, the public looks to unions to be better than the average organization. They think of unions as good organizations that fight for social and economic justice, so when there is corruption, people are very disappointed and angry. They feel cheated. Those headlines tend to stick with people more than when they read about corruption in show business or sports or politics or even the church. There is no sector of American society untainted by corruption. The other thing I’ll say is that for every headline about a corrupt union leader, there are hundreds of local unions functioning legally and responsibly. Unions get tainted, tarred with this one brush.

Unions are still valid, and many operate very conscientiously and do what they were designed to do. They give workers a unified voice in dealing with management. Otherwise, what are you left with? The individual worker facing a company or employer. The odds are not in the worker’s favor necessarily. That’s where we are today, really. Union membership is down from 35 percent in 1955 to 7 percent of the American workforce now. People don’t take unions seriously anymore. I’m old enough to remember when union leaders were on TV or on the radio – today they’re relegated to the sidelines a bit. Our country has seen in the last 15 or 20 years these hugely powerful corporations that no one can really bridle, not even Congress. That’s not a good situation. The idea that we can just trust corporations to work in our interests has proven to be a fallacy. I do think unions were asleep at the wheel for a while. I think they’ve awakened – they’re organizing types of workers that were not organized before, like janitors, hospital workers, in Los Angeles they organized car wash workers. There is a lot of strong unionization.

The other thing that unions have to do is go global – they have to work in concert with laborers abroad. That’s a tall order and labor is behind. Corporations are way out in front. It’s very difficult for labor, which is why a lot of labor’s efforts on the world stage involve human rights groups, environmental groups, anti-sweatshop consumer leagues. It’s a different kind of labor movement.

Q. How successful have unions been in politics, particularly their relationship with the Democratic Party?

A. The writer Mike Davis has called the relationship between labor and the Democratic Party the barren marriage. It has been a disappointment. It has always been a big question in labor history whether unions should affiliate with a political party. In other countries, labor has its own party. That never happened in America. Many of our labor leaders warned against political affiliation. What happened is, starting with Woodrow Wilson, the Democrats showed themselves to be a bit more friendly to labor. The monumental triumph of that relationship was the New Deal. The Roosevelt administration, facing horrendous economic oppression, knew that normalizing relations between industry and labor was critical to getting the economy back on track. The New Deal established workers’ rights as nothing had before – collective bargaining rights, the minimum wage, ending child labor. That tended to bind labor even more firmly to the Democratic Party. But Harry Truman proved unable to defend labor’s New Deal achievements when Republicans attacked them. That was the beginning of the Democratic Party failing to come through for labor. It continued down and on. The party stepped up a bit with John Kennedy and the Manpower Development and Training Act. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and even Barack Obama have had trouble. They’ve tried and they are not always successful; labor thinks they haven’t tried hard enough. But labor has nowhere else to turn. Republicans are openly hostile to workers. But the relationship with Democrats has been frustrating. It has evolved that way.

Q. Do you think the recession will revitalize unions?

A. When I read the paper today, I think to the early Depression, when the unemployed considered themselves workers. Unions and the unemployed were unified. That created a very powerful block of protesters and people to go to rallies and even strikes. If there was a strike, legions of the unemployed would show up to support. Nowadays you don’t have that alliance anymore. Now we have something like 15 million unemployed Americans, but I don’t believe there is any organization. They’re sort of voiceless in a way.

I’d like to say, and I think you see this with some recent unionization, that economic hard times illuminate to people the fact that they are vulnerable, that the safety net is not what it once was, and they have to be more active about it. Unions are a perfect vehicle for that, as they have been historically, despite their retreat in recent years. I still believe you earn more and have better benefits if you’re a member of a union. That has been upheld statistically. I don’t know how extensive it is, but I do think that the recent organization of very low-wage workers is a reaction to economic hard times.

Buy the Book: Skylight, Powell’s, Amazon, Borders.

*Photo courtesy cliff1066.

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The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?
by Linda Polman

–Reviewed by Erica E. Phillips

The Red Cross set the standard for humanitarian aid one and a half centuries ago: that it is to be “impartial, neutral, and independent…irrespective of the people involved and the situation on the ground.”

But in 1995 at Goma, a camp for Rwandan refugees, the Red Cross and more than 300 other aid organizations – including big names like UNICEF, Oxfam, and the World Health Organization – had a difficult time upholding these principles. In The Crisis Caravan, journalist Linda Polman paints a grim picture of this and a handful of other humanitarian missions that raise the question of whether aid is ever or even if it should be impartial.

Through extensive interviews with aid workers, law enforcement, civilian refugees, and doctors on site, Polman tells quite a different story of Goma than those that appeared in the press at the time. As a firsthand witness, Polman describes how Hutu militias would cross into Goma to hunt Tutsis. Some refugees at Goma were in fact Hutu militants who had international warrants out for their arrest – for crimes of genocide. Suspected Hutu “traitors” would arrive at the infirmary with missing arms and legs. But when an epidemic of cholera broke out at the camp, horrified media reports drew more and more funding to the site. “The Hutus were presented to the public in the West mainly as innocent victims of the cholera bacterium,” Polman writes. “What the aid organizations and journalists failed to mention was that some of the dead in Goma had not succumbed to cholera but had been murdered by Hutu militias, on suspicion of disloyalty.” Meanwhile, many Tutsi refugees remained without aid or access to the international community.

Goma isn’t the only aid project that Polman indicts. She recounts her 2002 travels to Sierra Leone, which had then received the most humanitarian aid money per capita for three years running, yet was still named the world’s poorest country by the United Nations Development Program. In Freetown she dined with donors and NGO managers, who, anticipating still more funding for their organizations, raised glasses of champagne to celebrate the UNDP’s designation.

In Liberia that same year, Polman traveled through villages outside the capital of Monrovia. Along the way, her transport vehicle was stopped at checkpoints where she had to pay food or money to pass. “No access to war zones without payment, whatever form it may take,” she writes. “Especially if you’re a humanitarian.” According to Médecins Sans Frontières, the president of Liberia required 15 percent of aid be paid to him, in cash. In Somalia, there were “entrance fees” of nearly 80 percent, which had to be paid to warlords. And in 2006, the U.N. mission in Afghanistan reported that aid groups in the province of Uruzgan directed one-third of their support directly to the Taliban.

Polman headed to Afghanistan in 2007 to find the aid community in hiding. After former Secretary of State Colin Powell called aid workers “an important part of our combat team” in 2001, many groups found themselves in constant danger. As they told Polman, “Since the start of the war on terror and the military-humanitarian reconstruction projects in frontline states, people can no longer tell the difference between ‘real,’ neutral humanitarians and reconstruction troops disguised as humanitarians.” Because of this confusion, aid workers often had to delegate the funds and management of their project to local partners, often losing track of where the money went. Polman quotes one U.N. investigator who tells the story of a $150 million housing project: the funds exchanged hands so many times, with each person taking a cut of the money, that it ultimately ended up buying only a bit of firewood.

With 37,000 NGOs and nearly $120 billion in annual funds in their hands, it is nearly impossible to track accountability in the humanitarian aid system. Polman puts the burden for review on journalists and donors. “Most donor governments and private donors give money based on newspaper headlines, not the extent and urgency of human suffering,” she writes.

After what happened in Goma, hundreds of NGOs developed a handbook of standards – the Sphere Project – and another NGO network began publishing an annual Review of Humanitarian Action. But as recently as May 2008, the publication again lamented the lack of “a systematic and regular means of assessing…overall performance,” saying aid groups ought to function more as a collective than what has become, in practice, an unregulated free market industry. The limited number of contracts creates antagonism between groups, Polman argues, and puts every altruistic dollar at risk for manipulation and misuse.

Ultimately, she says, regulation among humanitarian aid groups is imperative. “If the aid industry is left to control itself instead of being controlled,” Polman laments, “then reforms aren’t going to happen any time soon.”

Buy the Book: Metropolitan Books, Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon, Border’s.

Further Reading: A Bed for Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis by David Rieff and Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen.

*Photo of a refugee camp courtesy Western Sahara.

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Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland
by Stephan Salisbury

–Reviewed by Angilee Shah

The introduction to Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Stephan Salisbury’s investigative memoir Mohamed’s Ghosts is titled “How to Take Down A Mosque.” It’s an eye-grabber for anyone who is watching closely the controversy around the Park51 Islamic community center and mosque slated to be built in Lower Manhattan.

But Salisbury’s book takes us to another mosque in a rundown neighborhood in Philadelphia. Ansaarullah was created in January 2002 and closed in 2008 after years of FBI surveillance and deportation, forced or self-imposed, of the mosque’s top leaders. Salisbury forces us to question our values as Americans, our national security and cherished freedoms. His is a book about the nature of fear – what it gives us license to do and say, how it colors our understanding of entire groups of people. In Mohamed’s Ghosts, we also find an answer to the question on many minds today: why are so many people so uncomfortable with the idea of Muslims worshipping two blocks from Ground Zero?

As Salisbury argues through the case of Ansaarullah, America’s fear of terrorism has morphed into a general distrust of Islam. Probable cause has been replaced with a policy of domestic preemptive strikes. Ansaarullah’s imam Mohamed Ghorab was arrested in high drama while his daughter looked on from the front of her school. His mosque was raided with dogs and weapons in tow. The media coverage and the FBI’s informant strategy destroyed trust within the community that once benefited greatly from the mosque. Even as investigations into alleged tax fraud and terrorism training turned up no leads, at least six members of the mosque were arrested for immigration violations, six were detained and released, and more were questioned and blackmailed to provide information about terrorist activity that never actually happened. “My sense is that once a suspect is identified, authorities are reluctant to let go, no matter what,” Salisbury explains.

Salisbury narrates the broader picture of domestic counterterrorism around the country after 9/11. He explains how the FBI monitored Middle Easterners, South Asians and Muslim groups, and drew information from within their ranks. In one devastating chapter, he lists hate crimes – murders, beatings, arson – committed in the name of 9/11 against immigrants and Americans, many of whom saw little to no justice. He draws parallels with the FBI’s infiltration of the Communist Party during the Red Scare, when informants were used not against a specific criminal activity but against a set of beliefs. Salisbury also gives voice to prosecutors and law enforcement, who say they have to pursue leads and suspects with whatever tools they have, while keeping information about them confidential for national security.

It becomes difficult to justify the human cost of our domestic war on terror, however, when, thanks to Salisbury, we get to know the people affected. What does it mean to be interrogated or held in solitary confinement, or put on a confidential watchlist that cannot be altered? The costs are much greater, it turns out, than just time. The individuals profiled in Mohamed’s Ghosts are ruined; they lose their homes, their families, their health. They suffer severe psychological effects, untenable damage to livelihoods and relationships, sometimes by a mistaken keystroke or minor error in a visa application. One mosque member who lost his family after he was imprisoned and deported says at one point, on the phone from Jordan, that torture or death would have been better than the personal destruction he endured.

This is not a typical arms-length work of journalism. Salisbury chronicles his own journey as an American watching his country make choices he does not agree with. “It was a shock of familiarity that finally awakened me to the cultural continuity represented by the war on terror,” he writes. “Freedom threatened leads defenders to threaten freedom.” In truth, Salisbury is haunted by the stories of the Muslims he reported on in Philadelphia. The import of this book is clear: before we rush to judge, we should allow ourselves to be haunted as well.

Excerpt: “I was drawn to this spot, the corner of Wakeling Street and Aramingo Avenue in Philadelphia’s old working-class community of Frankford Valley, by an easily overlooked whitewashed cinderblock building across from the Baptist Center — a one-time auto body and repair shop, in recent years converted to a mosque. There were no worshippers on this day, however. The central bay door was pulled shut. A chain-link fence, tangles of weeds growing up through its interlacing loops, surrounded by buildings and parking lot. A dirty yellow Abco Auto Body Sign teetered over the barbed wire atop the fence, and a metal gate stood chained and padlocked shut. The windows were boarded up… Emptiness soread now like a durable stain down Wakeling, but for a moment, an instant in the life of Frankfurt Valley, this spot had been one the dramatic focal points of the Global War on Terror.”

Further Reading: A Mosque in Munich by Ian Johnson and Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves by John R. Bowen.

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy Angela Rutherford.

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Stephen Kinzer has reported from over 50 countries on five continents, including those with some of the most vexing relationships with the U.S. In his latest book, Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future, Kinzer argues that the U.S. should look to some unexpected partners for a smarter Middle East strategy – Iran and Turkey, the only Muslim countries with deep democratic roots. “Iran, although it has this repressive theocratic government, is a tremendously vibrant society,” he said. “This is a country that has had a constitution for a hundred years.” Kinzer also argues for a reconsideration of our tight ties with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Kinzer stopped by Zócalo’s offices to chat about the history of democracy in the Middle East and what Americans miss in all the media hype about Iran.

*Photo courtesy h de c.

The post How Democratic is Iran? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism

–Reviewed by Saskia Vogel

Each of us in the West may well have a reason to carry around a guilty conscience, considering our history of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. But are we taking this guilt too far? Pascal Bruckner thinks so.

The Tyranny of Guilt examines how the Western guilt complex may in fact be a major hurdle in fighting today’s atrocities. Bruckner, a prize-winning French essayist and novelist, tackles the subject mostly from the French or European perspective and says that unending guilt is in fact vain and ineffective. The West wallows more than it repays debts, makes amends, or fully understands its role in the world. And in the case of France, Bruckner argues, guilt is also a symptom of the West’s dwindling importance relative to increasingly dynamic “Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Arab, and Hispanic” cultures.

Western Democracies are populated, as Bruckner memorably puts it, by “self-flagellants” whose masochistic expressions of guilt border on the “suicidal.” He cites as examples the response to the July 7, 2005 bombings of the London transport system. Le Parisien’s headline read, “Al-Qaeda Punishes London.” Then-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s responded, “The suicide attacks would probably not have happened had Western powers left Arab nations free to decide their own affairs after World War I.” As with the European response to 9/11, which Bruckner summarizes, there was sympathy for the victims, but the attacks themselves – well, we had it coming. Bruckner’s shows that public discourse in the West is rife with self-hatred and self-blame, which he argues is a threat to clear thinking. How can Western nations assess current affairs if the West by default positions itself as sinners begging for punishment?

Bruckner widens his view from headlines to filmmakers, saints, thinkers, and world leaders, weaving together Western narratives in an eerily effective way. He quotes, for example, Jean Baudrillard giving an “utterly religious justification of the vengeance” of the terrorists against the US in 9/11. Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust film “Life is Beautiful”, which shows a sanitized version of Auschwitz, indicates that Europe is like a murderer trying to “erase the evidence of his crime.” Bruckner reaches back to Immanuel Kant and St. Thomas and forward through Jacques Derrida and President George W. Bush to support his argument, and shows how we choose to narrate ourselves. The power of storytelling is undeniable – is a story of guilt and punishment the most responsible way to chronicle our history?

This is just the tip of Bruckner’s text. Bruckner goes on to discuss the “blunders of the [West’s] disproportionate” focus on Israel, democracy as a religion, and tensions and dependence between the US and Europe. He concludes by setting out a task for the early 21st century: “Reconciling Europe with history and the United States with the world.” He suggests Europe must learn that battles are not won by “compromise” and “incantation” alone, and that the U.S. cannot continue “trying to do good for people no matter what they want.” Bruckner is optimistic about the power of Euro-American cooperation, feeling that in the past it has yielded “marvelous results.” Bruckner calls for extending such cooperation into this century.

Although The Tyranny of Guilt is spellbinding in its practically poetic repetition of key concepts, as political commentary it frequently amounts to argument ad nauseam. Bruckner writes, “There is no doubt that Europe has given birth to monsters, but at the same time it has given birth to theories that make it possible to understand and destroy these monsters.” And then again Europe “is a machine both for producing evil and containing it” – a concept he rephrases several more times. Bruckner also makes sweeping generalizations that beg for closer attention – that, for example, the U.S. was born “from a collective commitment to regard everything as possible,” whereas Europe “was born out of its weariness with sacrifice.” Still, The Tyranny of Guilt is a landmark exploration of the myopia that comes with Western guilt.

Excerpt: “On the whole, the Old World prefers guilt to responsibility: the former is easier to bear; we get on well with our guilty conscience. Our lazy despair does not incite us to fight injustice but rather to coexist with it. Despite our intransient superego, we delight in our tranquil impotence, we take up permanent residence in a peaceful hell.”

Further Reading: The Temptation of Innocence: Living in the Age of Entitlement by Pascal Bruckner and Guilt about the Past by Bernhard Schlink.

*Photo of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial courtesy Vectrus. Homepage photo courtesy Andreas H. Lunde.

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Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Isobel Coleman traveled across the Middle East, Africa and Asia for her book, Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East. Touching down in conflicted, struggling cities around the globe, Coleman finds women working for reform, adapting feminism to their particular cultural and religious mores. In the excerpt below, Coleman, a past Zócalo guest, reveals how Somali women kept Mogadishu fed during a brutal and ongoing civil war.

Across the dusty Mogadishu courtyard, the Somali women shouted instructions to each other as they cooked, adding their voices to the already considerable din – dogs barking, babies crying, the occasional staccato of distant machine-gun fire. The temperature hovered around a hundred degrees, and although a tattered tarp provided some meager cover from the searing sun, it also trapped the scalding heat from the kitchen fires. Orange flames licked the bottom of the giant makeshift pots provided by the Red Cross – fifty-gallon drums cut in half, with handles welded onto the sides for maneuvering. The women used long poles, like broomsticks, to stir the mush inside, a bland but nutritious concoction of rice, beans, and oil. Sweat poured down their faces. The smell of perspiration, food, and woodsmoke was pungent.

Outside the burned-out building, a guard stood by the doorway. The drooping flags of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent stirred occasionally in the faint breeze off the Indian Ocean. By late afternoon, a line of people began to form, and soon it was hundreds deep – mothers with babies on their backs, gaunt-faced children waiting listlessly by their parents’ sides, a few young men chewing khat leaves, a natural stimulant that suppresses hunger but also makes them high. When the guard blew his whistle, the line moved slowly forward, flip-flops shuffling in the dust. The poorest were barefoot. The guard made the young men leave their Kalashnikovs at the door.

Inside the courtyard, the volunteer “kitchen mamas” worked efficiently, slopping the mush into whatever containers people carried – a cup, a plate, a ripped carton. Dipping in with their hands, the Somalis ate quickly. The bold colors of the women’s direhs – their long, billowing traditional dresses – brightened the otherwise dismal surroundings. Remarkably, they somehow managed to keep their petticoats out of the dust.

It was the summer of 1991, and Somalia was embroiled in a full-blown civil war, a war that tragically continues today. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the fighting, and as drought compounded the already tenuous situation, famine ran rampant. Relief groups struggled to provide aid, but thousands of people were dying by the day. Red Cross efforts to feed the hungry were largely thwarted by widespread looting. Convoy trucks were routinely attacked and robbed by rival clans who used the food to feed their own militias, or to barter for weapons, while the women and children starved. By some estimates, a quarter of Somali children under the age of five perished during the famine. As Geoffrey Loane, the director of Red Cross efforts in Somalia at that time, recalls, “This was not the finest hour for Somali men.”

Somali women, however, rose to the challenge. Loane, a soft-spoken Irishman, smiles remembering how the women of Mogadishu came to him with a plan to get food to the starving people. “They proposed a solution, a practical solution totally in keeping with their local culture. Rather than transporting big shipments of food to large feeding centers, which only encouraged the looting, the women suggested we help them set up communal kitchens in neighborhoods across the city. The Red Cross would supply them with firewood and water, and run a constant stream of small loads of food to them via donkeys. They would immediately cook the food and serve it to the hungry, averting starvation and eliminating the food’s cash value. We thought it was worth a try. Before we knew it, the women had totally taken charge. They set up more than three hundred of these communal kitchens, run by kitchen committees comprised of twenty to thirty women. Each of these kitchens was dishing out between one and two thousand meals, twice a day. They became the lifeline of Mogadishu.”

The kitchens took shape in the rubble of destroyed buildings – what was left of the whitewashed villas that once graced Mogadishu’s palm-tree-lined streets. Even the city’s elegant mosques, a tribute to its historic past as a great trading port, had not escaped the ransacking. Once the Red Cross was on board, the women negotiated with the warlords to appropriate space for their communal kitchens. Some of these kitchens even had links with local schools, where meals provided an incentive for both students and teachers to continue attending classes even during the brutal chaos of the war.

Andrew Natsios, the United States’ special coordinator for Somalia relief efforts at the time, remembers going into Mogadishu at the height of the fighting and, to his amazement, stumbling upon a functioning school in the middle of the civil war. There were at least ten classrooms full of grammar-school children. How is that possible, he wondered? Though he had been told that all the schools in Mogadishu had been shut down due to the fighting, in truth some thirty thousand kids were still attending classes. The formal education system had collapsed along with the government, but the women had devised a way to keep the schools functioning. The kitchen mamas were using some of the food aid to pay the teachers in a makeshift food-for-work program. Natsios recognized the effectiveness of this grassroots effort, and the United States started giving small grants not only to the Red Cross, but to several women-led local organizations that were focused on keeping the schools running. The results were spectacularly successful for many months until the warlords caught wind of the transactions and began robbing the women’s groups to finance their militias.

“These women were incredibly determined and courageous,” remembers Loane, the Red Cross director. One in particular stands out in his memory: Dhabo Issa, a tall Somali woman with a commanding presence and fiery temper. The Red Cross hired her to manage the complicated logistics for the kitchen program in the southern part of the city. Loane’s eyes sparkle recalling Dhabo Issa’s grit: “She was a pearl of pearls.” But when I ask him what became of her, his smile fades. As the famine receded and the kitchens were closed, the women lost what little power they had garnered. After the “Black Hawk Down” fiasco, when U.S. troops were fatally dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, international support for the peacekeeping effort disappeared. “The last I heard,” sighs Loane, “Dhabo Issa had become a refugee in London, working as an office assistant. I felt like saying to her boss, ‘Man, don’t you know who you have photocopying for you? This woman deserves a Nobel Prize for her kitchen work.'”

On the Front Lines of Development

The efforts of the Somali women to keep their children in school, despite the violence, chaos, and famine, are inspirational but by no means unusual, as anyone who has worked in a disaster area or a war zone knows. Although women are often the victims of violence and oppression, by dint of their child-rearing responsibilities they are also the backbone of society – the ones responsible for keeping families intact, feeding and educating the children, and raising the next generation.

Poor women’s suffering has long been a surefire way to pull on the heartstrings of rich donors, but in recent years there has been a newfound appreciation for the role that these women play in breaking the cycle of poverty and stabilizing fragile societies. Development experts now widely recognize women’s role as critical to economic progress, healthy civil society, and good governance, especially in developing countries. Providing women with more and better opportunities to fulfill their social, economic, and political roles is now deemed so essential for reducing poverty and improving governance that women’s empowerment has become a development objective in its own right. The key levers for change, from the ground up, are clearly female education and women’s access to income. Top down, women’s leadership – at the local and the national level–is also important.

In 2000, all the world’s countries and top development institutions agreed to an action plan to eliminate extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by 2015. The resulting UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) include the promotion of gender equality and the improvement of maternal health as two of its eight targets–not simply as a nod to social justice, but in recognition that women’s empowerment is a driver of poverty alleviation. (Progress on the gender equality/women’s empowerment MDG is measured by increases in girls’ access to schooling, improvements in women’s access to wage-paying jobs, and increases in the share of women within national parliaments.) Across the MDGs, women’s empowerment is considered so essential that it underpins all of the other goals.

Unfortunately, too little progress has been made on all the MDGs, and on the ones that focus on women in particular. In fact, of all the MDGs, the least progress has been made on the goal of improving maternal health. More than half a million women die each year and several million more are severely disabled from childbirth. These grim maternal health statistics give an all too clear picture of the low status of women in parts of the world.

The good news is that with concerted government efforts, women have made progress in many countries: Gender gaps in infant mortality rates, calorie consumption, school enrollment, literacy levels, access to healthcare, and political participation have narrowed steadily in many developing countries in recent decades, particularly in East Asia and Latin America. Those changes have benefited societies at large, improving living standards, increasing social entrepreneurship, and attracting foreign direct investment.

Yet significant gender disparities continue to exist, and in some cases to grow, in three regions of the world: South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Although the conservative, patriarchal constraints on women living in these areas are increasingly recognized by the international community as a drag on development, empowering women is nonetheless still considered a subversive proposition by many who live in these regions.

In some societies, women’s rights are at the forefront of a protracted battle between religious extremists and those with more moderate, progressive views. In the name of Islam, numerous women leaders have been assassinated; hundreds of girls’ schools have been destroyed in Pakistan and Afghanistan; across South Asia, the Middle East, and even in Muslim communities in Europe and North America, thousands of young women – mothers, wives, sisters, daughters–have been murdered by close male relatives for supposed “honor crimes”; in Somalia in 2008, in front of a crowd of a thousand people, a thirteen-year-old girl was stoned to death for adultery after her family told local authorities that she had been raped; in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Islamic vigilantes throw acid on women’s faces for not fully covering themselves. In Palestine, Sunni extremists belonging to shadowy groups like the “Swords of Islamic Righteousness” threaten to slit the throats of female broadcasters “from vein to vein” if they do not wear strict Islamic dress. All these acts of violence are justified by their perpetrators as upholding sharia, as conforming to the will and rule of God. Yet moderate Muslims condemn this violence as perverted extremism that flies in the face of Islamic values.

The debate over women’s rights within Islam is not a new one. For centuries, Islamic scholars, thinkers, and activists have been pondering this question of women’s rights, and reaching very different answers. In today’s increasingly global world, however, the stakes are higher than ever – for everyone. Societies that invest in and empower women are on a virtuous cycle. They become richer, more stable, better governed, and less prone to fanaticism. Countries that limit women’s educational and employment opportunities and their political voice get stuck in a downward spiral. They are poorer, more fragile, have higher levels of corruption, and are more prone to extremism.

Womenomics

There is a familiar self-help aphorism, “If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.” A veteran development expert once quipped to me: If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime, but if you give a woman title to the fish pond, she will clean it up, preserve it for the next generation, stock it with new fish, and create a fish farm to employ the village.

When I repeated this saying to the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and one of the architects of the global microfinance movement, he smiled knowingly. Grameen now focuses almost exclusively on women borrowers, although in its early days, Grameen’s goal was to have a 50/50 split between male and female borrowers. And then something happened:

We started noticing something new. Money that went to the family through the woman brought so much more benefit to the family than the same amount of money going to the family through the man. It was very clear. Women took very good care of it. And being a poor woman, she had an amazing skill, the skill to manage a scarce resource . . . And she brought this excellent skill of managing a scarce resource to the little money we gave her. She got the largest, biggest mileage you can ever think. And if mother is earning money, children become the first beneficiary of it and everybody else gradually benefits from it. She is the last person to benefit. So we saw those things and we kept talking about it and we changed our policy. We said: Forget about 50/50. Who says 50/50? Let’s concentrate on women. And that’s when we came to this. And gradually we moved from 70 to 80 percent, 90 percent and stayed like that.

When Yunus launched Grameen in the early 1970s, the microcredit concept–providing loans to very poor people with little or no collateral – was simply revolutionary. Grameen’s mission of making loans to the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh, most of whom had virtually no formal education, little previous business experience, and certainly no collateral, broke all the rules of banking. Moreover, to focus on rural Muslim women, who, bound by their traditions, had rarely left their homes nor spoken to a man outside their family, pushed the limits of common sense. How could they know how to put the loans to good use to be able to pay them back? At the time Grameen started, 85 percent of Bangladeshi women were illiterate; many abided by purdah – a range of practices that seclude women as a way of ensuring modesty. In its most conservative form, purdah restrictions prevent women from being seen by any man outside her immediate family.

Yunus persevered in his commitment to lending to women, but not without arousing the hostility of the establishment. Early on, he received a threatening letter from the central bank demanding to know why such a high percentage of Grameen’s borrowers were women – this was simply too radical a departure from convention. After debating how to reply, he sent back a letter demanding an explanation for why all the other banks had such a high percentage of male clients. Not surprisingly, his letter went unanswered.  (The bankers’ reluctance to give women any financial control was certainly not unique to Bangladesh.)

Excerpted from Paradise Beneath Her Feet by Isobel Coleman Copyright © 2010 by Isobel Coleman. Excerpted by permission of Random House Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

*Photo of Somali women courtesy mwanasimba.

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I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced
Nujood Ali and Delphine Minoui

–Reviewed by Saskia Vogel

High-profile divorces are usually thrilling tabloid fodder. But in Nujood Ali’s case, the act of asking for a divorce – not to mention getting it – shook the Muslim world, caused the Yemeni parliament to raise the age of consent to 17 for boys and girls, and earned the then-10-year-old international press attention, including being named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year in 2008. It also gave Ali a chance to attend school, escape subjugation to sharaf – a patriarchal Bedouin honor code – and nourish dreams of one day becoming a lawyer and helping girls like herself.

Nujood is not only the subject of the story, but the narrator. She tells her tale with the assistance of co-author Delphine Minoui, a Le Figaro reporter who covers the Middle East. But the text does not go beyond Nujood’s childlike impressions of the world, sketching a general impression of an impoverished family with loving but strict parents. When one sister brings an unnamed shame upon the family, they move from their village to the capital. For Nujood, though she takes simple joy in the smells and bustle of Sana’a, it is all confusion and vague acceptance.

Poverty drives the family to turn to begging, and eventually, to arrange Nujood’s marriage. Her husband is three times her age, hails from the same village as her family but is still essentially a stranger. He promises not to touch the girl until after her first period; Nujood’s father repeats the thinly-veiled lie to console his wife. Nujood’s wedding night resembles nothing like her fantasies of a lush dress, celebration, and henna tattoos. She speaks of the comfort she would take in writing the one word she knows – her name-  during the cruel time with her husband. Throughout, the book repeats the Yemeni tribal proverb: “To guarantee a happy marriage, marry a nine-year-old girl.”

Unfortunately, the book’s childlike perspective doesn’t do the complexity of the story justice. I Am Nujood reads like an extended women’s magazine article. Its simplicity – and its attachment of the young Nujood to a broad and complex phenomenon – make the story accessible. It is well-suited for a young adult audience looking for an introduction to the subject of feminism in the Islamic world. But one wishes for even a fraction of Anne Frank’s power of perception (though of course, Frank was older when she wrote her famed diary).

A redeeming point, at least, is that proceeds from the book go to supporting Nujood’s education and her family. If for this reason alone, I Am Nujood and its author, whom Hillary Clinton has called “one of the greatest women I have ever seen,” deserve support.

Excerpt: “Looking around, I spy a group of men in olive-green uniforms. They must be policemen, or else soldiers. I’m shaking – if they see me, they might arrest me. A little girl running away from home, that just isn’t done. Trembling, I discreetly latch on to the first passing veil, hoping to get the attention of the unknown woman it conceals. Go on Nujood! It’s true you’re only a girl, but you’re also a woman, and real one, even though you’re still having trouble accepting that.”

Further Reading: Sisters in War and Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes.

Saskia Vogel writes a lot. Visit her at http://SaskiaVogel.com.

*Photo courtesy eesti.

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Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity
by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

–Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen made quite a splash when he blamed ordinary Germans for the Holocaust in Hitler’s Willing Executioners. His newest effort isn’t quite as controversial, though it aspires to be equally dramatic. “Hundreds of millions of people are at risk of becoming the victims of genocide and related violence,” warns the first sentence of Worse Than War. But if we can make sense of these mass killings, Goldhagen argues, and build upon that understanding to develop an effective response, we “will save countless lives and also lift the lethal threat under which so many people live.”

To that end, Worse Than War begins expanding genocide to the concept of “eliminationism.” The core of Goldhagen’s argument is that the “the desire to eliminate peoples or groups should be understood to be the overarching category and the core act.” To the perpetrators, the means – repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, and extermination – are more or less functional equivalents. In the course of a review of the horrors of the 20th century, Worse Than War makes the argument that eliminationist assaults, like wars, are ultimately political acts. Political leaders – and genocides always have leaders – perpetrate genocide for the same reason they go to war: to achieve a political outcome. Just as we can create disincentives for instigating war, and fight defensive and protective wars, so to can we meet genocide head on. In Goldhagen’s words, “Mass elimination is always preventable and always results from a conscious political choice.”

Goldhagen’s passion is admirable. But the take-no-prisoners tone of Worse Than War can be a bit overwhelming. The word “must” appears with striking frequency; Goldhagen’s moral outrage seems to have translated into a moral certainty that can come across as bullying. Larger messages get lost in the condemnatory language the book frequently uses. For instance, he argues that the Genocide Convention, ratified in 1948, has “severe and ridiculous” definitional problems, suffers from an “even more problematic” failure to define genocide, and has not only an “even more crippling aspect” and “another grave problem,” but also another “colossal problem.” Even though it was an “immense failure,” it was also “immensely important” because it is the only formal convention empowering military intervention against genocide. In other words, the convention was a seminal moment in the history of efforts to end genocide – something that can be developed, in spite of its flaws. Goldhagen is analytically perceptive, and his research is precise and detailed, but he tends to shed perspective in the face of righteousness.

The last section of Worse Than War, titled “Changing the Future,” starts with modest suggestions like hounding the media into better covering genocides. The resulting awareness will create a “new, more accurate, more powerful anti-eliminationist and pro-human discourse about mass murder and eliminations.” But what Worse than War is really about is more war. Genocide must be met head on, “with a single-minded effort and full force…. Humanity must engage a war against humanity with all possible military means to safeguard itself.” Goldhagen argues that the current international system, based on sovereignty and therefore inhospitable to nondefensive war, “effectively and as a practical matter sanctions mass murder.”

Scrapping the existing international system in order to turn nondemocratic regimes out of power before they can commit genocide is certainly an ambitious project, to say the least. Like his previous works, Goldhagen’s Worse Than War will certainly stimulate debate about how genocide can be prevented, and about how far we should go to prevent it. But the author’s dream solution will, sadly, probably remain just that.

Excerpt: “Mass murder is a political act. It is not a frenzied outburst of crazed individuals. It is not the lashing out of a psychically or materially wounded collectivity. It is not a suprahuman or historically determined occurrence caused by prior acts of people long dead or continents away. It is not the mere expression of modernity’s conditions or bureaucracies, or the explosive result of social psychological pressures. It is not driven by the darker, barbaric self supposedly within us all…. Because mass murders and eliminations are political acts, to understand and account for them, we must reinsert them into our understanding of politics and fundamentally change or expand our conception of politics to include them.”

Further Reading: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed and A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

Adam Fleisher is a law student at the University of Virginia.

*Photo courtesy hamsterschreck.

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Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space
By John R. Bowen

–Reviewed by Angilee Shah

Americans share with the French an ideal of religious freedom. But last month, France considered a law that would be unlikely to gain much traction here: A parliamentary commission recommended that France draft and pass a law banning burqas – the loose cloak, headscarf and veil donned by some Muslim women –  in public service spaces, including government offices, public hospitals and public transportation.

Considering the news, it’s a good time to revisit John R. Bowen’s book Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves. It’s an inquisitive work of social anthropology, combining history, documentation and summaries of media reports with first-person accounts and interviews.

Bowen consistently resists the impulse to make snap judgments about people’s motivations as he explores the rationale behind a prior French law, restricting students from wearing clothing with clear religious affiliation in public schools. He lays bare France’s distinct concept of republic. Unlike its American counterpart, the French republic is integrative, emphasizing shared values and behaviors over individual identities. It shudders at communalism, when groups turn inward to create enclaves rather than turning out to the nation. It remembers its struggle with the Catholic Church and treats Islamism as a similar threat. Of central importance is the evolving concept of laïcité, or secular society. Where headscarves are concerned, the concept came to mean that France, rather than allowing any religious expression anywhere, must eliminate religion from public spaces all together.

As Bowen explains, “Organized religion, as I will now translate le culte, is supposed to remain just that: organized, bounded, orderly, confined in its buildings and defined by worship practices in those buildings.” Indeed, France supported the buildings of mosques, even at the height of the headscarf debate. But for the French, Islam by its very nature puts this version of laïcité in danger. The veil came to stand for all aspects of Islam that seemed contrary to supposed French norms, from a Muslim woman requesting a female doctor in a medical emergency to questions about women’s rights in a Muslim marriage. It came to represent communalism and often overshadowed discussions about the unemployment and ghettoization that isolate French immigrants and minorities.

Bowen presents the headscarf debate in France with nuance and empathy, but ultimately sides against laws restricting dress. He concludes that France’s Republic is based on “faith in the possibilities of sharing a life together” which “liberates citizens to explore their differences, not conceal them.” The strength of this analysis comes from the openness with which Bowen explored different sides, and the willingness to understand where France’s religion anxiety originates.

Excerpt: “Given that relatively few debates over scarf-wearing ever went beyond the classroom and that virtually no one accused scarf-wearing girls of presenting a serious danger to French society, why would a law that forced them to choose between leaving their scarves at home or leaving school be seen as such a palliative for France’s social ills and such an important step for women everywhere? Why focus on this issue above all others? The French actions puzzled most of the world; many people saw it at best a misplaced concern and at worst a violation of religious freedom.”

Further Reading: Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women, Can Islam Be French?: Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State, and Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning

Angilee Shah is a freelance  journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy JonnyL.

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