tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81194316848679105572024-02-23T10:44:24.622+03:00Mark MacKinnon's blogWritings from the road by the author of The New Cold Warmarkmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.comBlogger207125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-1082905552543664302015-04-13T13:45:00.000+03:002015-04-13T13:59:25.669+03:00Of Calvin, Hobbes and Saddam Hussein's swimming pool<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<i>One from the archives...</i><br />
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<b>Tikrit, Iraq -</b> There’s a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that I refer to whenever I’m in need of guidance. In this particular adventure, etched in my brain, Calvin is doing his homework — math, I think — but staring out the window at the falling snow. He discusses his options with his orange, black and ever-present tiger/swami.<br />
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Ditching the homework and running outside to build a snowman, Calvin opines, would be far more pleasing than sitting at his desk learning to carry the one while he adds and subtracts. Simple enough. But he thinks about it some more.<br />
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In the long run, surely, he’d be better off having doing his assignment, getting good grades, graduating with honours, going to a good college and getting some fabulous job afterwards.<br />
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Calvin considers this too for a moment, then looks out the window again.<br />
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“In the really, really long run,” he tells Hobbes. “I’ll remember the snowman.”<br />
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Standing on the edge of Saddam Hussein’s swimming pool, the strip once more jumped into my brain. Here I was, in the Iraqi strongman’s hometown of Ouja, inside a palace built on the place of his birth, and all I wanted to do was go for a dip in the figure-eight shaped indoor pool. It was 35 degrees Celsius outside after all, and my shirt was sticking to my back.<br />
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One side of my brain, the one I usually consult during working hours, was telling me several things. First and foremost, I was in the midst of an Important Assignment, and shouldn’t be wasting time on water sports. Second, there were men outside with guns. They were angry at people for stealing things from the palace. They’d already shot at a few looters. They might not enjoy the idea of an infidel splashing around in the presidential pool.<br />
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On the Calvin-o-meter, however, it was no contest. In the really, really long run — after the deadlines had passed and the vigilantes had gone home and become shopkeepers again — I’d remember the naughty feeling of swimming in Saddam’s pool. I wound up on the diving board (it had a nice spring to it) and gave the lukewarm water a Stittsville, Ont.-style cannonball. It seemed the method of entry Mr. Hussein would best appreciate, were he there to take in the moment.<br />
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Nihad, a young man my own age I’d met in the nearby town of Tikrit the day the fighting there stopped, was appalled and overjoyed at the same time. He’d spent his adult life in Mr. Hussein’s Baath party, and told me earlier that day that he’d been ready to sacrifice his life for the president, until the last minute when he realized that Mr. Hussein and his cronies had no intention of dying for Iraq.<br />
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The expression on Nihad’s face as he took in the scene of a Canadian reporter cannonballing in Saddam’s pool was both indescribable and priceless. He was appalled and loving it at the same time.<br />
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It’s these little victories over the madness of it all that keep one sane in a war zone.<br />
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Some times it’s something big and memorable, like standing on the belly of the toppled statue of a dictator while you call your parents on a satellite phone. Or playing a game of soccer with the kids at the Baghdad orphanage, ignoring for a moment, the gunfire and the looting on the street outside.<br />
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Other times it’s a smaller outlet, like leaning out the window and swearing a blue streak at the snipers that have kept you up all night with their deadly game of tag. A useless (and perhaps dangerous) gesture, to be sure, but fulfilling nonetheless.<br />
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Having plunged into the water at Saddam’s palace pool, I floated there for a moment, taking it all in. The glass doors shattered by the U.S. bombing, a black telephone that somehow ended up in the deep end.<br />
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Just then, a wave splashed over me. Nihad had plunged in feet first, and was laughing deliriously as he came to the surface. He climbed out, and took a run at it, and plunged back in, head first this time.<br />
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A medical student and good Baathist who had spent his whole life doing his homework, he had finally started thinking about the really, really long term.<br />
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<i>Originally published April 18, 2003 on www.globeandmail.com</i><br />
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</div>markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-50618606976439137252015-01-23T17:45:00.000+03:002015-01-23T17:52:25.401+03:00The king is dead. Long live the king. And the Saudi "queen scene"...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<i>(As the world rushes to Riyadh to attend the funeral of the late King Abdullah, I find myself reminiscing about being there the last time a Saudi king died. Oddly enough, I ended up at one of the best parties I've ever attended...)</i><br />
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<b>Jeddah, Saudi Arabia</b> -- It's 4:45 a.m., and Faisal is trying to encourage a little romance among his guests. Slipping through the crowd of partygoers assembled in his living room, he reaches the CD player and puts on a slow, sensual track.<br />
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Two young men respond to the change by moving to the centre of the makeshift dance floor in Faisal's ornately decorated living room. One, a thin twenty-something in tight blue jeans, grabs a purple head scarf and wraps it flirtatiously around his waist before thrusting his hips at his partner in an imitation of a female Egyptian belly dancer.<br />
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His gender-bending turn wins whistles and laughter from the other partygoers, who are packed tight onto the plush couches that surround the dancers. A pair of thickly rolled hashish cigarettes travel through the gathering.<br />
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"Bet you never thought Jeddah had a queen scene," laughs Ra'ed, a colleague who invited me to this most unlikely of Arabian nights intent on demonstrating that there is more to his country than oil, al-Qaeda and repressed women.<br />
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The party isn't strictly gay, either. The thing that shocks me most as I enter the room is the presence of young women with cascading black hair and blue jeans instead of the headscarves and abayas demanded by the country's ruling clique. They're the first bare-headed women I've seen in nearly a week in Saudi Arabia, and two respond to my surprised look by casually sliding over to make room on the couch. "Welcome to Saudi Arabia," smiles Samar, a professional in her 30s, wearing a tight white dress. "Is this what you expected?"<br />
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No, it certainly isn't. This is a side of the country rarely glimpsed by outsiders: bored, Westernized young people who live in this strictly religious society and who, desperate for entertainment, break stereotypes, taboos and the law almost every weekend at such gatherings. Like Ra'ed and Samar, most at the party are young professionals who went to colleges and universities in the United States and Britain and find it hard to adjust to the same old repression that they grew up with now that they're back home.<br />
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Cans of Pepsi, 7-Up and Red Bull energy drink mingle with dripping candles on a glass table in the centre of the smoke-filled room, which is dominated by a mirrored pole that looks as though it were borrowed from a Las Vegas strip club. There's no alcohol on this Thursday night, but much moaning at the currently exorbitant black-market price of whisky. A 750-millilitre bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label is running at upwards of $200 (U.S.) this week.<br />
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The party is campy, fun and would be unremarkable on any university campus in the West. But because of its location -- Faisal's two-storey home in an upper-class neighbourhood of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia's second-largest city -- this is a party with a definite edge to it. There are innumerable things going on around me that could draw the attention and ire of the muttawa, the feared religious police.<br />
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As I've been warned countless times since arriving in the kingdom, the penalty for being in the same place as narcotics is death. Homosexuality and the mingling of unrelated men and women are also treated as serious crimes and affronts to Islam. In recent months, the muttawa have rounded up hundreds of suspected gay people; most have received jail terms ranging from six months to two years, as well as 200 to 2,000 lashes with a rattan cane. Women caught in the company of men who are not their immediate relatives are often treated as prostitutes and receive jail terms and lashes as well.<br />
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I seem to be the only one concerned about such matters, perhaps because I'd been to visit the place in Jeddah where the weekly beheadings are, a place known locally as "chop-chop square." Among the more minor offences being committed by the partiers is having the music up so loud that the muezzin's call to go to mandatory Friday morning prayers goes unheard in the din.<br />
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"Don't worry," laughs Mohammed, a 17-year-old student, pausing between long drags of hashish. "In Saudi Arabia, a man is king of his own home. They can't come in here."<br />
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Though I'm sure the muttawa can and do raid private homes, I'm comforted to learn that many at the party are sons and daughters of the Saudi elite, and therefore considered close to untouchable by the police. Ra'ed tells me he's been at secret parties where some of the younger princes from the ruling House of Saud have been in attendance. (Despite this, I was allowed to attend and write about the party only on condition that no one there would be named. None of the names above are real.)<br />
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"Life in Saudi is like a prison, so we need to escape," Mohammed tells me. "Sometimes we have a party in a house like this, sometimes we go to a private beach and there are even women in bikinis."<br />
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In a country where an estimated 60 per cent of the population is under the age of 18, analysts say the disaffection that many young people feel is a challenge that King Abdullah will have to move fast to head off if the government wants to keep them and their talents.<br />
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In the country that spawned Osama bin Laden, the biggest concern has long been that poor education and high youth unemployment outside the urban centres are creating a pool of bored young people that are easy recruits for groups such as al-Qaeda. But at Faisal's party, the obvious contempt for the country's laws poses other, less violent, dangers to Saudi Arabia's future.<br />
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"The young people are going in one of two directions: extremely into religion, or extremely away from it," according to Sami Angawi, an architect and historian from nearby Mecca. He says that while he opposes wholesale Westernization of Saudi culture, the country needs to find a less repressive balance between its Islamic roots and modernity that allows young people to experience both.<br />
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"It's not just that we're making criminals out of our young people, it's creating a feeling that if I can't do this here, I'll go outside Saudi Arabia and do it elsewhere. We'll lose all of our new energy this way."<br />
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A few kilometres north of Jeddah, in the walled courtyard of another private home on the same night as Faisal's gathering, another party is also well under way. It's a semi-public concert given by a quintet of young Saudis who form Panjiah, the country's first heavy-metal band. There are no women or alcohol here, but the crowd is nonetheless in a rebelliously un-Saudi mood.<br />
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As 24-year-old lead guitarist Khaled Abdulmannan thrums the first bars from the band's Metallica- and Megadeath-influenced nine-song catalogue, the nearly 50 people in the courtyard begin to bang heads and jump about. It's a made-for-MTV scene being played out by young Saudis who were supposed to have been studying the Koran, not the wildest in Western music.<br />
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Saudi society is governed by a strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law, and the religious establishment has banned many websites and books that are either critical of the regime or that are seen as promoting Western culture. The national television channels play recordings of sung Koranic verses for hours at a time, though most affluent Saudis can now bypass those controls through satellite television and even satellite Internet connections.<br />
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Other efforts to force youth to follow the strict Wahhabi school of Islam are also being defeated by technology. Sit in a Jeddah restaurant or even a traffic jam with a modern mobile phone and you're likely to receive wireless invitations to swap photographs from others within range. If two people like what they see of each other in the high-tech exchange, they often plot to meet at a restaurant and feign being married so that they can sit together in the "family" sections of the country's gender-segregated public establishments. One of the unintended side effects of the gender-segregation policies imposed by the Wahhabis is that it's far easier for Saudi gay people to meet and date than it is for heterosexuals.<br />
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Like the youths at Faisal's place, the members of the band Panjiah speak English as well as they do Arabic, and two members lived in the United States. In a story shared by many of the country's disaffected youth, drummer Yazeed Nazer said he returned to Saudi Arabia in the face of heightened discrimination following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Fifteen of the 19 suicide plane hijackers that day were Saudi nationals.<br />
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"I felt the mood change," the 27-year-old said. The band sings in English and many of its lyrics are about the need to overcome discrimination and hate. The name Panjiah is a riff on "Pangaea," the single land mass that existed before the world broke up into continents.<br />
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Though hesitant to openly attack the country's system of government -- one of the band members is related to a minister in King Abdullah's cabinet -- they're clearly frustrated by the lack of opportunities for musicians to promote themselves in Saudi Arabia.<br />
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Back at Faisal's, it's well past dawn when the party breaks up. Samar and another woman who stayed late leave before their male friends, slipping wordlessly into headscarves and abayas before they head out into the street.<br />
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Afterwards, Ra'ed and I chat about the evening, and the risks people are forced to take just to have an evening of fun. I confess to him that I was most surprised by the presence of drugs at the party, given the Draconian punishments on the books.<br />
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"I never took drugs before I came back to Saudi," he says. "But there's just nothing else to do here. We're just so bored.<br />
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"I think things are going to start opening up a bit more with King Abdullah," he adds, scrambling to inject a positive note. "At least, I really hope so, because I'm getting really tired of living here."<br />
<i><br />
This article was initially published in <a href="http://www.globeandmail.com">The Globe and Mail</a> on Aug. 8, 2005, one week after the death of King Fahd, and the ascension of King Abdullah.</i><br />
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</div>markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-70897895899385151992013-03-20T19:34:00.001+04:002013-03-20T19:35:32.274+04:00Ten Years Ago.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
</div><i>Here's the report I filed from Baghdad on the day the Iraqi capital fell to US troops. It ran in <a href="http://www.globeandmail.com">The Globe and Mail</a> under the headline "Fear melts away at last in the heart of Baghdad."<br />
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You can read what I wrote when I returned to Baghdad five years later, in 2008, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/we-cant-live-like-this/article669172/?page=all">here</a>.</i><br />
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BAGHDAD -- Suddenly, in the heart of Baghdad, it was okay to laugh.<br />
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For 19-year-old Zara, the moment came yesterday morning, when from behind her headscarf she let slip a derogatory remark about Saddam Hussein.<br />
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"His heart," the young woman said, still afraid to give her surname to a reporter. "It was like an air conditioner."<br />
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She looked momentarily stunned by what she had just said, until her 16-year-old sister Sara started to giggle. Zara also began to laugh, and soon the sisters were doubled over in gales of hysterical, alleviating, laughter.<br />
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And so, it seemed, was the heart of Baghdad, where for much of yesterday statues and posters of Mr. Hussein were toppling, crowds were cheering U.S. soldiers and people were laughing, often at the man they had feared for so long.<br />
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The dictator was gone, they knew, and life in Baghdad was different.<br />
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Though it may take longer to erase from people's memories, Saddam Hussein's 24-year reign over the Iraqi people came symbolically crashing down before noon, three weeks from the start of the war, with the screech of twisting metal and the roar of an elated crowd, as American troops seized the centre of Baghdad and toppled a signature statue of the tyrant.<br />
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Groups of Iraqis loyal to Mr. Hussein continued to fight in other parts of the capital and the country -- as they may for weeks or months to come -- but those living in the centre of Baghdad gradually began to get the sense that the worst of the war was over, and their long nightmare finished.<br />
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After enduring concussive air strikes day and night, they awoke this morning from the first night without U.S. bombs dropping on the city in three weeks.<br />
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Fighting resumed today, however, as U.S. troops battled Iraqi fighters at a palace to the north of the capital and at a mosque in the city. Marines later were searching the mosque, believing that Mr. Hussein might be hiding inside, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported.<br />
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At first, the coming together of the U.S. soldiers and the people of Baghdad yesterday was a nervous one. Like two teenagers at a high school dance, unsure of how the other felt, they watched each other from afar -- the Iraqis daring only to peek from the balconies of their homes, the Americans looking back cautiously over the barrels of their raised guns.<br />
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But early yesterday morning, as a column of U.S. tanks and armoured personnel carriers rolled down National Theatre Street, toward Mr. Hussein's statue on the square, the mood began to lighten.<br />
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In those early hours, when Iraqi defences seemed to evaporate in the spring heat, only a few Iraqis dared to appear on the street. Some hurled debris at the statue, which featured Mr. Hussein in a business suit with his right arm raised. Their actions emboldened a few more, and within minutes the square was filled with perhaps 200 Iraqis chanting for the statue to come down.<br />
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The first attempt to topple the statue with a sledgehammer failed, as did a subsequent try with ropes.<br />
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A U.S. armoured vehicle, fitted with steel cables and a pulley, intervened and soon, the monument fell, sparking a gush of joy in the crowd. Some danced. Some sang. Some threw flowers and kisses at the American soldiers.<br />
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Dhaffar al-Mansuria, a 25-year-old university student whose father had been killed in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, rushed to stomp on Mr. Hussein's likeness, nearly falling over several times in his enthusiasm to kick at what he saw as a symbol of evil.<br />
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"Saddam killed many, many Iraqis. He raped many girls. He is a very bad man and now he is gone," Mr. Mansuria said, panting to catch his breath.<br />
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"Even though my father was killed by Americans, I am not angry with them. I am angry only at Saddam. He did this to us."<br />
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Hassid Nouri, a 55-year-old who stood back from the crowd, said he was thinking of a friend who disappeared in 1978, shortly after taking part in a protest against the regime, and has not been heard from since.<br />
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"Everybody was waiting for this day to come," Mr. Nouri said. "We want to build a statue for Bush in the middle of Baghdad, for freeing us from Saddam."<br />
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There were an angry few, however, watching the scene from the sidelines and warning those around them that they would pay for their displays of dissent.<br />
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"You are not allowed to do this. This man is Iraq," a woman in a business suit told a group dancing on the pedestal where the statue once stood.<br />
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She was wearing a badge that identified her as a government official.<br />
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"This man is not Iraq," a man wearing a tattered jogging suit shot back. The crowd cheered. "Iraq is food and water and electricity and all the things we don't have. This man is just Saddam."<br />
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The scenes of jubilation had vanished by this morning, but the anger against Mr. Hussein had not. Without a crowd to encourage him or a media throng to record the display, a lone Iraqi walking in the early hours past the empty pedestal where the dictator's statue once stood stopped to give the base a swift kick before continuing on.<br />
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American soldiers caught up in the jubilation the day before seemed surprised at their reception, and at the easy time they had moving into the middle of the city. A day earlier, they had been locked in fierce urban warfare on the outskirts of Baghdad, but by yesterday morning it seemed the resistance had almost completely melted.<br />
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"There was nothing today, we just rolled straight in," said Sergeant Grant Zaitz of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, the unit that seized a large swath of central Baghdad yesterday morning, including the square where the statue once stood.<br />
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Nodding at the crowd, he smiled. "It's better than down south, better than getting shot at. I guess we should have got here sooner."<br />
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Soon after the statue was toppled, however, the crowd began to ask tough questions of the U.S. forces suddenly in control over much of their city. One man approached a marine standing guard on the square and asked him how quickly his electricity -- knocked out earlier this week in the midst of fighting -- would be switched back on. "One day? One week? More? And the water pressure is very poor," the man said.<br />
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The marine, who moments before had been signing autographs for the crowd, appeared dumbfounded. "I'm sorry, that's not my job, sir," he eventually responded.<br />
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Many Iraqis said they wanted the U.S. forces to stay only as long as it took to restore services and set up an Iraqi-led, government.<br />
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"I hope the American soldiers will stay for one year, then go," said Furat abd-Algamy, a 24-year-old engineering student. "If they stay longer, there will be trouble. I know this will happen, and there's nothing we can do about it."<br />
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In Saddam City, a poor Shia Muslim neighbourhood that had borne the brunt of several of Mr. Hussein's crackdowns, crowds swarmed out to meet a group of foreign journalists, showering them with kisses and flowery words as if they were the liberators. Moments later, however, a rock crashed through our back window.<br />
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"They are killers of my people," seethed Mejdee Abdul Khadr, glaring at the passing troops. "They bomb anywhere, they kill everybody."<br />
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The civilian death toll -- one measure by which coalition efforts to oust Mr. Hussein will be judged -- also continued to climb, with one Baghdad hospital reporting it had received 30 dead and 300 injured Tuesday night alone.<br />
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For much of the morning, however, the streets were simply empty. One man estimated that three-quarters of the people he knew had fled the city, seeking refuge in small towns and villages around the country. Of the few civilians we saw, some waved at us, while others looked on grim-faced, gripping their Kalashnikov rifles.<br />
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Such scattered militia units were the only defenders left in evidence as we weaved through the north and west of the capital. Very few uniformed Iraqi soldiers could be seen, and certainly nothing that could pass as a fighting unit. The only Iraqi tanks or defensive positions that we saw were either destroyed or, more commonly, deserted.<br />
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There was looting in many parts of the city, especially government office buildings that all seemed to be stripped of their computers and furniture by midday. At the Iraqi Olympic Committee headquarters, which Mr. Hussein's son Uday had turned into a torture centre, one man was seen leaving with a refrigerator. The base of the Mukhabarat secret police was being looted by the time U.S. Marines arrived and took it over.<br />
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While much of the city was surrounded by U.S. forces, free entry and escape was still possible to the north, toward Mr. Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.<br />
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While rumours about Mr. Hussein's whereabouts, or his existence, continued to ripple through the city last night, most residents seemed content to know that his days as leader were over.<br />
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Shortly after watching Mr. Hussein's statue fall, Fousi al-Hasseini made a phone call to his sister, who now lives in Toronto. His young nephew answered.<br />
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"Did you see? Did you see it?" Mr. al-Hasseini asked in English, dabbing at his eyes while his own children wept openly around him. "Today we got freedom."markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-48205029737343706042013-03-05T19:21:00.000+04:002013-03-05T19:29:55.831+04:00"He's Still With Us"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i> </i><br />
<i>(Here's an article I wrote in March 2003, about how Russians were treating the 50th anniversary of Stalin's death. Sadly, much of it - although obviously not the lead paragraph - could be published again today.)</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDWH34MrT68GQ3sxVPPRff6aGObGvUtrXXUUidcGxo9xNqt7e-84TIUPiBwh7c1n718zgVF8a2Z5o5HMVIF2BkAFWe8CWioDZ5dy8gm9LYA2FqKD5KkygTKSmeuFj3DHQvzB7oc5Msn4c/s1600/Stalin-Gulag-Memorial.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDWH34MrT68GQ3sxVPPRff6aGObGvUtrXXUUidcGxo9xNqt7e-84TIUPiBwh7c1n718zgVF8a2Z5o5HMVIF2BkAFWe8CWioDZ5dy8gm9LYA2FqKD5KkygTKSmeuFj3DHQvzB7oc5Msn4c/s320/Stalin-Gulag-Memorial.jpg" /></a>
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<b>MOSCOW</b>
<br /><br />
In his palace in Baghdad, increasingly isolated from the rest of the world as war looms, Saddam Hussein is said to seek inspiration on his bookcase -- from the many volumes he treasures that contain the writing of another infamous mustached dictator.
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Joseph Stalin, the legend goes, is one of the few people Mr. Hussein looks up to. He sees his own story as linked to the former Soviet leader's -- Stalin survived famine and war and accusations that he was killing his own people to remain in power until the day he died.
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Half a world away in North Korea, as the sabre-rattling Kim Jong Il pushes his country toward a confrontation with the West, the Dear Leader basks in the constant adulation of his citizens -- a cult of personality consciously built on the Stalinist model. He has gone much further in his hero worship than erecting a few statues; since assuming power in 1994, Mr. Kim has imitated everything from Stalin's labour camps to his penchant for nuclear brinkmanship.
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It's perhaps no surprise that Mr. Kim, famously linked to Mr. Hussein in George W. Bush's "axis of evil," looks up to Stalin. His father was installed by Moscow in 1945.
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In her two-room Moscow apartment, 85-year-old Galina Ionova hugs a book praising the man she says saved the Motherland, and explains why she thinks that Stalin is still having an impact five decades after his death.
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"Stalin was a genius. None of us common people can understand what he was guided by," the retired history professor says, eyes glowing with an almost religious fervour. "Stalin is not our past. He's our present and our future."
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Next Wednesday will mark 50 years since Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili -- also known as Koba the Dread and Joseph Stalin -- died peacefully at his countryside dacha near Moscow, ending one of the more violent periods in Russian and world history.
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To most of the planet, Stalin's legacy is clear. He was a monster. The number of people executed by the secret police and other government organs during his 29-year reign is still being counted, but is known to be in the millions. Tens of millions more died during mass famines that he organized from his Kremlin office, ranking him with Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong as one of the bigger murderers in recent world history. Among his more minor crimes, Stalin bulldozed churches and sent entire ethnic groups into exile.
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But in Russia, the anniversary of Stalin's death will be remembered with deeply mixed feelings. He may have terrorized this country and killed millions of its citizens, but he also presided over a period that saw the Soviet Union transformed from a backward peasant state into an economic and military superpower, a time that inspires nostalgia for many.
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Many here believe that Stalin's crimes have been exaggerated by his enemies. Many, many more see him as the heroic figure who rallied the country when the Nazi army was at the edge of Moscow, and led the Soviet Union to victory in what is known here as the Great Patriotic War. That single accomplishment, many say, balances or perhaps outweighs all the evil Stalin wrought.
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"We fought the war for the Motherland, for Stalin," Ms. Ionova's war-veteran husband, Alexander, says solemnly. "If he repressed so many millions, who was fighting in the war?"
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The centre of next week's celebrations will be the dictator's sleepy hometown, Gori, an hour's drive outside Tbilisi, capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Although Stalin, who grew contemptuous of his fellow Georgians while in power, is believed to have visited only once after leaving the place as a teenaged troublemaker, the entire town has become a shrine to its famous native son, the only place in the former Soviet Union where a statue of Stalin still stands on the town's main square.
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But it is Gori's renowned Stalin Museum, housed in a marble neo-Renaissance palace near the centre of town, that will be the target of many a pilgrimage in the next few days. Its exhibits include poetry written by Stalin in his youth, the furniture from his Kremlin office, and the death mask that covered his face for his public funeral, when weeping millions converged on Red Square.
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What's missing from the museum's collection is any mention of the purges. Not one exhibit makes even passing reference to the millions who suffered in what author Alexander Solzhenitsyn later dubbed the Gulag Archipelago that stretched across the barren land mass of Siberia and present-day Kazakhstan.
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That suits Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin's grandson, just fine. A retired military colonel who cultivates his resemblance to his grandfather to the point of trying to grow an identical mustache, Mr. Dzhugashvili dismisses the charges that Stalin was a mass murderer as "all lies." The real culprit, he says, was Leon Trotsky, his grandfather's rival in the fight to take over the Bolshevik party after the death of Vladimir Lenin. Stalin later had Trotsky assassinated.
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"They always call them Stalin's repressions. Yes, there were mass repressions and the best people of the country were killed or exiled, but they were organized by Trotsky and his gang. It's not Stalin who blew up the churches, it was Trotsky," argues Mr. Dzhugashvili, who tried to become Georgia's president, but couldn't because he's a Russian citizen.
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Instead of being condemned, he says, his grandfather should be praised for tracking down the "Trotskyists and Jews" behind the purges, and bringing them to justice in the infamous show trials of the 1930s.
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"Stalin punished them for those repressions and he did it with open trials, publicly," he explains. "If they were not guilty, they were released, gradually. [Stalin's] enemies don't have any conscience and they invent any figures, like Solzhenitsyn, who named 110 million victims."
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He says he even admires the way his grandfather allowed his oldest son Yakov -- Mr. Dzhugashvili's father -- to die. An artillery lieutenant, Yakov was captured in 1943 by German troops who offered to trade him for a captured field marshal. Stalin refused.
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"War is war," he supposedly said. "All soldiers are my sons. What am I going to say to other mothers? I don't exchange a soldier for a field marshal." He even had Yakov's wife interrogated, bizarrely fearing it was all a plot to embarrass him. The Germans left Yakov's bullet-riddled body hanging on a barbed-wire fence for the advancing Red Army to recover.
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Diana Suvarova was eight years old in 1937, when the knock at the door that all Soviet citizens feared came. A year later, her father, Mikhail Suvarova, was executed by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police.
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"Nobody knows why they chose him," the 78-year-old retired librarian now says. "It was totally unexpected. They just came one night and took him."
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The crimes he was accused of were many. While he was a farmer, the police said, Mr. Suvarova had been poisoning the wells and killing cows. Later, when he worked on the railway near the city of Kursk, he had been "organizing train wrecks." According to the case file, the NKVD also believed the elementary-school graduate had been spying for an unnamed foreign country.<br />
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Ms. Suvarova says her father, like many of Stalin's victims, was a good Communist who taught his children to look up to their country's leader.
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She got the same sort of education at school. Stalin, she learned, was a selfless man who did everything for his country and his people. Ms. Suvarova learned this lesson so well that when her father disappeared, she believed he must have been guilty of some crime.
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After his arrest, the whole family was tainted for being associated with an "enemy of the people." Thrown out of their comfortable apartment in central Moscow, they moved to the outskirts of the city, and her mother kept her job only because her employer took a personal risk and chose to look the other way. People on the street shunned them, not wanting to raise the suspicion of the NKVD. "Even when I was a child, people would cross the street so as not to meet a child of an enemy of the people," Ms. Suvarova recalls.
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For years, the family believed her father was just in prison, and that all would be made well as soon as Comrade Stalin realized how his secret police were running out of control. Right to the end, Ms. Suvarova believed that Stalin was unaware of the terror his thugs had unleashed. She cried on March 5, 1953, when she heard that he had died, grieving for the man who was ultimately responsible for her father's death.
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"We really believed, like good young Communists. Despite what happened to our parents, we believed in him, we loved him. That's how we were educated. We thought maybe he didn't know."
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Arseny Roginsky has devoted his life to proving just the opposite. Born to two political prisoners in a camp near the northern city of Archangelsk, he now heads Memorial, a Russian human-rights organization dedicated to chronicling the true extent of Stalin's crimes.
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Memorial has compiled a list of 12 million victims of the gulags, and another one million who were executed by the secret police. Documentary evidence shows Stalin personally signed off on at least 40,000 of the murders.
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For Mr. Roginsky, the painstaking work is a way of trying to understand his own past. His father was arrested for anti-Communist activities in 1938, just before the war. His mother endured the "900 days" Nazi siege of Leningrad, then travelled to the Velsk prison camp, whose supervisor gave them special dispensation to live together since the father's sentence was formally over, even if he was not yet allowed to leave.
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Being born in a prison camp, Mr. Roginsky says with a smile, had its advantages. The people Stalin terrorized the most -- because he saw them as potential threats to his power -- were the intellectuals. As a result, many of the country's top doctors were in the camps, to the extent that average citizens often asked to be treated at prison hospitals.
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His father was eventually released, only to be arrested again a few years later. He died during his second stint in the gulag. It was 1951, two years before Stalin's death. Thirty years later, near the end of Leonid Brezhnev's reign as Soviet leader, Mr. Roginsky himself was arrested for trying to research Stalin's crimes, and sent to a labour camp not far from the one in Velsk where he'd been born. He was released four years later, shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev took over as Communist Party boss.
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Although Mr. Gorbachev's policy of glasnost,or openness, made it possible to discuss Stalin's crimes frankly, many Russians still choose not to listen. A poll conducted this week asked 1,500 people what they think of Stalin, and 36 per cent, the largest share, feel the dictator did the country more good than harm. Another 29 per cent disagreed with that statement, while the remaining respondents were so split on how they felt they couldn't answer one way or the other.
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Forty-five years after Nikita Khruschev denounced Stalin in his famous "secret speech" to the 20th Communist Party Congress, it's clear that many Russians are either unconvinced by the evidence, or believe that whatever Stalin did, he did for the good of the country.
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Mr. Roginsky thinks that it's the latter phenomenon -- and that many Russians today still believe in the idea of a "Great Russia" that personal sacrifices must sometimes be made for.
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Unlike in Germany, or post-apartheid South Africa, there has never been a concentrated attempt to prosecute those who knowingly took part in crimes against humanity. There has been no public discussion of compensating victims or their families. Stalin's grave remains on the Soviet Walk of Heroes along the Kremlin wall. A fresh rose is place on it every day.<br />
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"The official history still remembers Stalin as the great commander-in-chief who defeated Hitler," Alexander Yakovlev, the former Soviet ambassador to Canada and one of the chief architects of glasnost, said in an interview last year.
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"No one wants to face the fact that he killed 30 million of his own people, most of whom disappeared without a trace. No one has apologized for what they did, and most people do not seem to care whether we confront this chapter in our history or not."<br />
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Mr. Roginsky sees something more sinister than a collective wish to forget in Russia's unwillingness to deal with its past. To him, it's proof that some of the traditions Stalin initiated -- notably, the idea of putting the needs of the state ahead of the rights of the individual -- still hold sway in the Kremlin today.
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"It's not that Stalin, this short, plain man matters much anymore, it's what he left behind, his legacy," Mr. Roginsky says. "The spirit of Stalinism stayed with us. It's around us. . . . Physically, we outlived him, but he's still with us."
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Tamara Shumnaya, director of Moscow's Museum of Contemporary History, is taking fire from all sides right now because of an exhibit entitled, "Stalin, the Man and the Symbol."
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No one objects to the subject matter. It's just that no one is satisfied with what she and the museum staff decided to include. Some see too much about Stalin the great ruler, and not enough about the executions and the gulags. Others have exactly the opposite complaint. The exhibit "should have helped people remember the greatness of the country and the greatness of the people under strong leadership," reads one of the more tame entries in the museum's guestbook.
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Ms. Shumnaya says she expected nothing less. "Fifty years ago, there were different, controversial opinions about Stalin, and there are the same opposing perspectives now, too. We wanted both opinions represented here. To be objective."
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The exhibit opens with thick books that list the victims of Stalin's purges, which are in a display case alongside a simple green banner that reads "our parents don't have graves." On the wall above are photographs from the gulags.
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The next room, however, is where most museum visitors spend a lot of time -- among the photographs and propaganda posters of Stalin at the height of his power. The most jarring display features a group of dolls in a case, against a background painted to resemble Red Square, holding aloft a banner: "Thank you Stalin for our happy childhoods."
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Eventually, visitors gather around a small TV set in the corner to watch a black-and-white video of the scene in Moscow the day of Stalin's funeral. It's a short loop, and many of those staring and remembering watch it three or four times, as though comparing every detail with their memories of that day. Asked what they are thinking, they burst into lengthy personal stories, as though they've just been waiting to release pent-up emotion.
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"I listened to the funeral on the radio. All the people were crying," 75-year-old Yuri Timofeyev, a retired metal worker, says as tears well in his eyes at the memory. "He was a great leader. It was a great loss."
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Like many older Russians, Mr. Timofeyev is dismayed at how society has become more cutthroat since communism ended and a wild breed of capitalism swept into Russia to take its place. Life was much better under Stalin, he insists, gesturing sheepishly at his tattered clothes.
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"It was a good time for us. We could study and we could learn and we were never hungry. There were no bandits, no hooligans -- there was order. It would be a good thing to have that order now. I will toast him on March 5th."
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Standing two paces away, 54-year-old Ludmilla Shumskaya has the opposite reaction. "He was a bloody monster. He destroyed all the talented people, and all the witnesses of his crimes." It's clear she has a personal story beneath her rage, but she says she's still not ready to talk about it, even half a century later.
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While most of those taking in the exhibit one afternoon this week are older Russians personally connected with the Stalin era, a few backpack-toting students show up after school.
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"The idea is to form our own impressions," says 19-year-old Anatoli Balykin as he and two friends pause by a poster that reads: "Glory to Lenin, Glory to Stalin, Glory to the Great October."
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The history books he is given in school offer a "neutral" portrait of the former dictator, mentioning both the days of the Red Terror and Stalin's role as a successful wartime leader, Mr. Balykin says. "Many young people respect him," he adds, and some of his classmates regard the evidence that millions were executed and sent to the gulags as "just some figures."
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His friend, Artiom Dojev, also 19, says Russians alone have the right to judge Stalin. "It's interesting that in the West he is considered a monster, but nobody there suffered because of him. Here, people suffered, and they still admire him."
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"Stalin wasn't just a symbol," the daily newspaper Kommersant declared last week. "He continues to exist in mass consciousness, not like a historical figure, but like a folklore image, someone like Dracula. Such persons are doomed to be liked by the masses."
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Of course, they're also doomed to be imitated. An acquaintance of the young Saddam Hussein said the future Iraqi ruler used to sleep on a cot under bookshelves that sagged with books by and about Stalin. "One could say he went to bed with the Russian dictator," the friend famously quipped.
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Since taking power, Mr. Hussein has repeatedly showed what he learned from his readings, ruthlessly using terror and frequent purges to keep a firm grip on power, staging phony elections and mass executions.
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Meanwhile, his alleged "axis of evil" partner Kim Jong Il has modelled his entire state on the Stalinist vision. Run down a list of notorious dictators -- from Fidel Castro in Cuba to such lesser lights as Turkmenistan's Sapuramad Niyazov and Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko -- and each could cite the Soviet icon as as a leading influence.
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But in Russia, even a dozen years into its experiment with democracy, the echoes ring eeriest. Every year, it seems, Russia has taken another small step toward embracing a past that most countries would be ashamed of and apologizing for. This pattern has accelerated since Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, took office as president. In the past four years, he has issued a set of coins commemorating Stalin as war leader and unveiled a Kremlin plaque in his honour. The tune of the old Soviet anthem was brought back, albeit with new words, and most recently the red star was reinstated as the symbol of the Russian military.
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While political opponents accuse Mr. Putin of being a closet admirer of Stalin, it's likely that much of his desire to turn back the clock stems from the popular support for doing so. Communists remain the country's single biggest political party, and their current leader, Gennady Zyuganov, has won points with his largely rural following by praising the Stalin era as a "great period" and denouncing the allegations against him as "slanderous."
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Mr. Putin also is the focus of a growing personality cult that makes some observers nervous. The President's likeness now can be found everywhere -- on matryoshka dolls, T-shirts and photographs hanging in homes and offices. A recent pop hit referred to the need for "a man like Putin." Entrepreneurs across Russia have tried to name everything from restaurants to a new breed of tomato after him. Some are reminded of a time when Stalin's image hung on every wall.
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Mr. Roginsky of the Memorial group says that "I don't blame Putin. He's not the guilty party in this; he's just a creation of the system. He's like Russian leaders always have been. Most people don't share democratic ideals. They just want order, no corruption, security and social justice. They think it's as simple as some nice guy, some strong leader, coming in and doing it."
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One young man has a much more basic interpretation of what's going on. Yakov Dzhugashvili, 30-year-old son of Yevgeny, believes that, having kicked away at his great-grandfather's reputation for 50 years, history is taking a fresh look.
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Unlike his father, he doesn't believe that everything Stalin did was right. Embarrassed by his ancestry for years, he studied at the Glasgow School of Art under a false name. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his native Georgia's spiral into chaos and poverty, he says he has come to understand why his great-grandfather did what he did.
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"He was right in having ideals. Bad or good, people had aims to reach in his time. Now, we don't have any ideals at all, and that's very bad. The deeper the crisis in Georgia gets, the better I understand that Stalin wanted society to be perfect. He wanted people to live better."
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On Wednesday, he says, his family will gather to toast Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili -- who will be back among them. Yakov's father Yevgeny explains that he insisted his infant grandson be given the name his famous forefather had been born with, and changed as a young revolutionary.
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"I wanted to bring back the name of Stalin," he says, "so it will live forever."
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</div>markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-60226332716545487382011-11-15T19:06:00.004+04:002011-11-15T19:28:10.688+04:00Vladimir Putin wins 2011 Confucius Peace Prize<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZIBy8e2sdcS4MQqtI8tGQKxAqZkVDajxE7TW4VN4ypJ8B3PkS2e-J9u2CN5Vtb2kwoidMXWP0UCmJETJYkBNyFm7yKzTbGslKiRkLi3AJh0ADJhaz7h8cb1ii9Y1wWm60eGe0PhCTUIM/s1600/confucius-peace-ceremony.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 120px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZIBy8e2sdcS4MQqtI8tGQKxAqZkVDajxE7TW4VN4ypJ8B3PkS2e-J9u2CN5Vtb2kwoidMXWP0UCmJETJYkBNyFm7yKzTbGslKiRkLi3AJh0ADJhaz7h8cb1ii9Y1wWm60eGe0PhCTUIM/s200/confucius-peace-ceremony.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5675240439915402738" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Beijing: </span> Vladimir Putin, man of peace?<br /><br />Mr. Putin, the former and future President of Russia who is currently doing an internship as the country’s prime minister, has been called many things. Supporters have written pop songs about wanting “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2212885.stm">a man like Putin</a>” in their lives, while his detractors think the precise opposite of the former KGB agent accused of demolishing Russian democracy and <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/fear-factor-back-in-the-ussr/article957795/singlepage/">restoring parts of the old Soviet system</a>.<br /><br /> One imagines that even Vladimir Vladimirovich himself would have been surprised by Tuesday’s news that he had been named <a href="http://shanghaiist.com/2011/11/15/breaking_vladimir_putin_winner_of_t.php">this year’s winner</a> of something called the Confucius Peace Prize. Mr. Putin is, after all, a man who shot to power by crushing the Chechen separatist movement with brute military force, famously vowing to hunt down the “terrorists” behind a series of mysterious Moscow bombings and to kill them “in the outhouse” if necessary.<br /><br /> Mr. Putin beat out a field that also included South African President Jacob Zuma, whom many see as tainted by allegations of rape and corruption, and Gyaltsen Norbu, the Tibetan whom Beijing controversially named the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchen_lama">Panchen Lama</a> after the 6-year-old boy identified by the Dalai Lama as the real 11th Panchen Lama disappeared in China in 1995. Other nominees reportedly included Bill Gates and Kofi Annan.<br /> <br /> The inaugural Confucius Peace Prize was awarded last year in response to the somewhat more reputable Nobel Peace Prize being given to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who is currently sitting in jail for his role in drafting a pro-democracy manifesto known as <a href="http://www.hrichina.org/crf/article/3203">Charter 08</a>.<br /><br /> That <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/with-chinas-peace-prize-the-only-winner-is-china/article1830872/">first Confucius prize went to Lien Chan</a>, a Taiwanese politician who said he’d never heard of the award, and who didn’t bother to pick it up. The prize – a glass statuette – was instead received at a Beijing ceremony by a baffled young girl (pictured) with no apparent connection to Mr. Lien.<br /><br /> “China is a symbol of peace…. With over one billion people, it should have a greater voice on the issue of world peace,” the prize committee explained on its website at the time.<br /><br /> Nobel Peace Prize host Norway, meanwhile, was dismissed as “only a small country with scarce land area and population” thereby unqualified “to represent the viewpoint of most people.”<br /><br /> This year’s prize will be again handed out on Dec. 9, one day before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo.<br /><br /> The award has evidently embarrassed China’s Ministry of Culture, which once backed the Confucius Prize, but earlier this year disavowed it and set out to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/world/asia/competing-confucius-award-bares-discord-in-china.html">establish its own Confucius World Peace Prize</a>. That trophy is also scheduled to be handed out on Dec. 9, though a winner has yet to be named.<br /><br /> The announcement of Mr. Putin’s award was only briefly available on Chinese news websites Tuesday before those webpages disappeared. The choice was considered a jaw-dropping one by those who saw the news before it was censored.<br /><br /> “This prize is insulting to Confucius,” was one commonly expressed sentiment on the popular sina.com web portal, where the news was briefly available.<br /><br /> “If it goes on for another two years, Ahmadinejad will be the next winner, and then will be [Hugo] Chavez and Kim II [Kim Jong-il]. What a pity that Gaddafi died too early, otherwise he would have had a turn too,” wrote another commentator.<br /><br /> Gaddafi may indeed have had a chance. One of the reasons the Hong Kong-based China International Peace Research Centre said it chose Mr. Putin was his push to prevent NATO from intervening in Libya’s civil war. Though Russia decided against using its United Nations Security Council veto to prevent military action – and Moscow later switched its support to the rebels when it became clear that Gaddafi’s regime was nearing an end – Mr. Putin’s efforts were deemed “outstanding in keeping world peace.”<br /><br /> Meanwhile, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15195263">Liu Xiaobo remains in a prison in northeast China</a>. He has another nine years to go on his sentence.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-9080211293251738122011-09-28T09:25:00.002+04:002011-09-28T09:28:22.744+04:00Democracy, managed (po-russki!)Мой анализ решение Путина вернуться в Кремль, которая была переведена на русский язык сайта "<a href="http://openufa.com/2011-07-12-14-26-37/2011-07-12-14-28-58/218-2011-09-26-01-31-17">Открытая Уфа</a>".markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-28262080018539396852011-09-25T19:05:00.005+04:002011-09-25T19:22:56.550+04:00Democracy, managed<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsshVBqY6ZZPrlecrAkE7SKhwMzfO-twNFW2Mzn-9D3mjvtLPebvVV7ytkKrGvynoU_uy3RtDVuHhG_ocQdG9Xm9xKNRaXrVOW8MuOXuy9aCuAbofjbl2pj-fAnT-eg_xUYsWTB2h5lMk/s1600/p12_RTR2PIYA.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 156px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsshVBqY6ZZPrlecrAkE7SKhwMzfO-twNFW2Mzn-9D3mjvtLPebvVV7ytkKrGvynoU_uy3RtDVuHhG_ocQdG9Xm9xKNRaXrVOW8MuOXuy9aCuAbofjbl2pj-fAnT-eg_xUYsWTB2h5lMk/s200/p12_RTR2PIYA.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5656317000333215746" /></a>(<span style="font-style:italic;">My article below is now online - with a vibrant comments section - at <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/europe/analysis-with-putin-as-president-russias-experiment-with-democracy-comes-to-an-end/article2179374/">The Globe and Mail</a></span>)<br /><br />Saturday afternoon, at a political rally in Moscow's Luzhniki Sports Palace, Russia's two-decade experiment with democracy came to an end. A different, more authoritarian, system with only a mirage of choice, is now firmly in place.<br /><br />Russia's new political model is often called Putinism, after the man who built it and who will soon return as its unequivocal head. Elections are still to be held, and Putinism is far freer in most aspects than the totalitarianism that Russians lived under for most of the Soviet era. But it is a one-man show, completely dominated by Vladimir Putin, the man who served as Russia's president from 2000 to 2008, and who is now primed to return to the Kremlin after a token four years as prime minister.<br /><br />Dmitry Medvedev, a longtime Putin aide who was drafted into the presidency in 2008 (when Mr. Putin stepped aside in deference to an annoying clause in the post-Soviet constitution that limits presidents to a maximum of two consecutive terms) told a gathering of the dominant United Russia party on Saturday that Mr. Putin should be their nominee in the presidential election scheduled for next March.<br /><br />"I think it would be correct for the congress to support the candidacy of the party chairman, Vladimir Putin, to the post of president of the country," a stoic Mr. Medvedev said. Mr. Putin quickly accepted, and said it would be "a great honour" to take his old job back.<br /><br />The announcement brought an end to hopes that Mr. Medvedev, who had shown a slightly more liberal side than Mr. Putin and who had occasionally flashed a willingness to challenge his former boss, would stand against Mr. Putin next spring and give Russians a real choice. In recent months, Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin had both fed speculation about a head-to-head race by refusing to answer questions about which of them would run for the presidency.<br /><br />Instead, Mr. Medvedev - at Mr. Putin's suggestion - agreed to lead United Russia into December's parliamentary election, putting him on track to switch jobs with Mr. Putin and become prime minister. Mr. Putin told the party congress that the decision had been made "a long time ago, several years back."<br /><br />The game of musical chairs will only affirm what most Russians believed about Medvedev's time in the Kremlin: the real power remained with Mr. Putin throughout, even while in the nominal No. 2 job.<br /><br />(A key part of Mr. Medvedev's legacy is a constitutional change extending presidential terms from four to six years, starting with the 2012 election. The change makes it possible for Mr. Putin, 58, to remain Russia's president until he's 70.)<br /><br />Other parties will contest the Duma elections in December and the Kremlin will ensure that other candidates will be found to run against Mr. Putin in the spring. The appearance of choice is an important facet of Putinism, or "managed democracy," as the system's creators prefer to call it.<br /><br />But those other parties and candidates will face a host of obstacles - ranging from the Kremlin's near-complete control of the media to physical intimidation and ballot-stuffing - that will make an electoral upset close to impossible. As the cases of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch now serving his seventh year in a Siberian prison, and Anna Politkovskaya, the Kremlin critic who was murdered for her investigative journalism in 2006, have made all too clear, there's no tolerance for genuine threats to the system.<br /><br />Ten days ago, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov - one of the last figures who could have made Russia's election season somewhat interesting - bowed out in disgust, withdrawing as a candidate for a Kremlin-backed opposition group (another unique feature of Putinism). "We have a puppeteer in the country, who long ago privatized the political system," Mr. Prokhorov said, in remarks taken to refer to Vladislav Surkov, a political strategist who remained a key figure in both the Putin and Medvedev presidencies.<br /><br />Few Russians seem to mind. Aided by national media he hammered into submission after coming to office, Mr. Putin - who has been shown on state television fighting forest fires, tracking tigers and flying fighter jets - is easily the country's most popular politician, credited with stabilizing the country's economy (which remains heavily reliant on energy exports) and restoring its international prestige, in part via the 2008 war against neighbouring Georgia, a former vassal.<br /><br />Western-style democracy, which the country briefly experienced in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was president, is associated with corruption, lawlessness and economic collapse.<br /><br />The man who oversaw the end of the Soviet Union has warned that Russia is headed for disaster if Mr. Putin and his coterie insisted on clinging to power.<br /><br />"The unwillingness to start reform or the desire to have partial change is often explained by the fear of losing power and the desire to prevent a new collapse of Russia," Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in an article carried this week by two Russian newspapers. "But it is the very absence of change which threatens to provoke instability and put the future of the country in question."markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-49181614285488000292010-05-25T20:43:00.005+04:002010-05-27T09:56:31.952+04:00The revolution shall be tweeted<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCutWyB7uttnUdka5f9XyP_Mjt4yWDy3IqowCmbqAHqKbeVT7yacE_fZl1Z7hQ6Em0W7FbiIC31w3mibwR7VG9ZwWPx4sdM6ZrIrxKoMEAyOdhczyGIJ_Oh-ztwh3IhQQPXj8E2I2nXpE/s1600/Bangkok_23_653503artw.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCutWyB7uttnUdka5f9XyP_Mjt4yWDy3IqowCmbqAHqKbeVT7yacE_fZl1Z7hQ6Em0W7FbiIC31w3mibwR7VG9ZwWPx4sdM6ZrIrxKoMEAyOdhczyGIJ_Oh-ztwh3IhQQPXj8E2I2nXpE/s200/Bangkok_23_653503artw.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475254266227262962" /></a><br />Bangkok - Once more, I'm in Bangkok, and once more <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/how-the-crackdown-unfolded/article1573974/">The Globe and Mail</a> has done me the favour of assembling a collection of some of what I posted before and during the Thai government's military crackdown on the Red Shirt protesters.<br /><br />In case you missed them, here they are. As I mentioned in <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/twitters-role-in-bangkok-conflict-unprecedented/article1578064/">another article for The Globe</a>, Twitter played an unprecedented role in the Thailand turmoil.<br /><br />On the downside, it was a propaganda outlet for both sides and served to amplify the hatred and prejudice that exist in Thai society, arguably helping push the situation towards its bloody conclusion.<br /><br />But it allowed hosted some top-notch reporting and, more importantly, allowed Bangkok residents to warn each other about what was happening in their neighbourhoods. In at least two occasions, one of which I was involved in<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/in-a-bangkok-buddhist-temple-the-groans-of-the-wounded-shot-seeking-sanctuary/article1575108/"></a> inside the supposed sanctuary of the Wat Pathum temple, Twitter may have helped saved lives.<br /><br />Here's how it went down (note these are not all my tweets from this period, but a selection chosen by editors at The Globe and Mail):<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight:bold;">May 18, 2010</span><br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 12:29 p.m.</span> Thai media reporting govt has rejected Red ceasefire offer. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 12:31 p.m.</span> Bad news for peace fans - Thai government has extended "holiday" for rest of the week. <br /> <br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 2:22 p.m.</span> What blockade? Piles of fresh vegetables arrived today in Bangkok Red Shirt camp <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 3:06 p.m.</span> Amnesty International slams Thailand's "reckless use of lethal force" against "unarmed people who posed no threat whatsoever". <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 4:29 p.m.</span> Question of the Day: if Red uprising is about equality, why is there a VIP toilet? #thailand <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;"> * 6:41 p.m.</span> East Bangkok, far from the Red Stage, supporters gather to watch latest speeches <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 11:39 p.m.</span> Series of bangs heard from direction of Rama IV road, scene of much fighting in recent days. #thailand <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;"> * 11:41 p.m.</span> Thai media reporting "strong rumours" of dawn crackdown in Bangkok standoff.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">May 19, 2010</span><br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 12:05 a.m.</span> I should add to last tweet that if I had a baht for every crackdown rumour I've heard in recent weeks I could buy land in Rajprasong. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;"> * 1:38 a.m.</span> Thailand's tourism minister says number of arrivals at Bangkok airport has fallen from 30,000 to 20,000 a day because of crisis. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 2:46 a.m.</span> Another explosion in the distance. By now, I should have function key that types that sentence. #thailand <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 8:02 a.m</span>. Breaking: Soldiers, armoured personnel carriers seen advancing towards main Red Shirt protest in Bangkok. Much gunfire. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 9:07 a.m.</span> New checkpoints sealing off military operation area. BBC's @aleithead says filmed Black Shirts firing back at soldiers. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;"> * 9:30 a.m.</span> "Thai troops open fire on protesters" - http://tinyurl.com/2953utq <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 9:59 a.m.</span> Thai govt spokesman "we would like to reassure citizens of Bangkok... operations are designed to stabilize the area." <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 10:03 a.m.</span> Thick smoke rising from Lumphini Park. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 10:12 a.m.</span> Thai govt spokesman says "operations designed to... provide security, safety to public at large." Will continue all day. <br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br /> * 10:15 a.m.</span> Thai Red Cross calling for urgent blood donations. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 10:19 a.m.</span> Thai media reporting military now controls Lumphini Park area. Red Cross calling for urgent blood donations. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 10:43 a.m.</span> Now at Chulalongkorn hospital. Heavy gunfire. Helicopters overhead<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 10:48 a.m.</span> Thai troops advancing near Lumphini Park. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 11:28 a.m.</span> Closing in on Red stage at protest centre. As soldiers advance, Reds still defiantly sitting on ground, playing music. about 9 hours ago <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 11:29 a.m.</span> Approaching Red stage. As army advances, Reds still defiantly sitting on ground, playing music. #thailand about 9 hours ago <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 11:34 a.m.</span> Doctors and nurses prepare to receive casualties at Police Hospital in centre of Bangkok protest site. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 11:48 a.m.</span> At police hospital, 13 injured, six from gunshot wound. One dead, a foreign journalist killed at Sala Daeng. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 11:55 a.m.</span> Police Hospital adjacent to main protest stage says 13 injured so far, six from gunshot. One dead, a foreign journalist. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 11:55 a.m.</span> Hundreds of Red protesters gather at main stage as battle rages a few hundred metres south. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 12:07 p.m.</span> Praise my lovely wife who made me a medical kit with everything in. I just dressed a colleague's bullet wound. Shot in leg. All safe now. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 12:08 p.m.</span> Four dead, 50 injured across Bangkok in crackdown today, Thai media reporting. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 12:27 p.m.</span> Soldiers allowing Red Shirts to exit camp if they come forward with hands raised. Lt Col I talked to on way in said 10 surrendered to him. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 12:33 p.m.</span> Smoke rising from two locations north of main Red camp in central Bangkok. Din Daeng and one other area. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;"> * 12:39 p.m.</span> No Red leaders behind main stage when I visited. Reports some surrendering to police. Still thousands of protesters at main site.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 12:58 p.m.</span> Thai TV reporting that Red Shirts have occupied Bangkok's Century Park hotel. Years ago, in other Thailand, my cousin got married there...<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 1:25 p.m.</span> Chidlom BTS station burning. Red shirts on tracks. Heavy explosions and gunfire. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 1:31 p.m.</span> Fire at Bangkok's Chidlom skytrain station. Heavy gunfire. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 1:34 p.m.</span> Al-Jazeera reporting Red Shirts stormed town hall in north Thailand. Could this spread? <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 1:52 p.m.</span> Getting a bit dangerous now around Chidlom <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 1:56 p.m.</span> Reuters reporting Canadian journalist injured in Bangkok clashes. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 2:01 p.m.</span> Massive fire now at Chidlom BTS. Something else burning besides tires. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 2:33 p.m.</span> As Red leaders surrender, hard-core elements reported to declare independence. Fighting coninues around Bangkok. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 2:34 p.m.</span> Canadian Embassy says avoid all travel to Bangkok, avoid non-essential travel to Thailand. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 2:35 p.m.</span> Thai military to impose curfew on Bangkok tonight. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 2:36 p.m.</span> Smoke rising from near Central World shopping mall in Bangkok. Reports that protesters tried to set it on fire. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 3:05 p.m.</span> Almost deserted. Rajprasong main Red stage. Now. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 3:12 p.m.</span> Rajprasong main red stage. Deserted. No sign of soldiers.<br />http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif<br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 3:43 p.m.</span> In Wat Patum Wanaram, with hundreds of civilians. All just ran deeper into temple area because of nearby gunfire. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 3:45 p.m.</span> Hundreds of civilians begginf for UN to protect Buddhist temple in middle of site. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 3:51 p.m.</span> Smoke rises from fire behind Buddhist temple sanctuary for civilians caught in Bangkok fighting. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 3:59 p.m.</span> Thais in temple offering us water and a place to sit. "We're only kind to foreigners, not to each other," woman says. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 4:00 p.m.</span> Gunfire, explosions close to temple where unarmed Red Shirts have taken sanctuary. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 4:01 p.m.</span> Colleague say "Black Shirts" with rifles battling soldiers outside temple. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 4:31 p.m.</span> Ambulance attendees take cover in alley outside Wat Patum, <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 5:17 p.m.</span> Red Shirts gather abandoned food in anticipation of long stay in Wat Patum temple. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 5:19 p.m.</span> Smoke rises from Bangkok's burning Central World shopping mall. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 5:37 p.m.</span> Thais in temple begging me to take them out. "You can go, right? Take me!" Also "Is the UN coming?" <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 5:50 p.m.</span> Sustained gunfire outside temple serving as sanctuary in middle of Bangkok. People moving further away from entrance. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 5:56 p.m.</span> More shooting, explosions outside Wat Patum. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 6:03 p.m.</span> Inside Wat Patum as firefight rages outside. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 6:06 p.m.</span> Firefight outside temple escalating. Hundreds of people still sheltering inside. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 6:08 p.m.</span> Air smells of fire. Twenty buildings around city said to be in fire, including Central World. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 6:10 p.m.</span> At least one person inside temple has bullet wound. No idea what happened. Gunfire escalating.<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 6:27 p.m.</span> Fighting rages all around temple. Tear gas in the air. At least three shot, either inside or just outside sanctuary. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 7:44 p.m.</span> At least five wounded around me at makeshift medical centre in park behind Wat Patum temple, one a friend and colleague.. gunfire continuesm <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 7:54 p.m.</span> Somehow we're the only corros left in temple. People around us terified. Red Cross can't get ambulance in to injured because of gunfire. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 8:27 p.m. </span>Medics around me say 7 dead 10 injured inside Wat Patum temple, which was supposed to be sanctuary. I'd guess 1500 to 2000 terrified ppl <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 8:49 p.m.</span> Please RT. People around me are dying because they can't get to hospital across the road because of fighting<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 8:51 p.m.</span> More people will die inside Wat Patum unless we get ceasefire to get to hospital across the road. <br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">* 10:15 p.m.</span> Wounded in ambulance leaving Wat Patum. Ceasefire negotiated to let wounded leave. </blockquote>markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-29093278279292809872010-04-25T17:00:00.006+04:002010-04-25T17:15:19.095+04:00One week in Bangkok<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig_QfYl0S9R41xLWseKUPaYE3f1ZqP2WUsQabCUZj-IOXAgji9mMFSXmL5KGwLVFjee-EQorX_CsF-_B6IrrvEFI2MFJ1CoLAC9PPnedH2heFzmXkO19x5XYSabXl_02cPJniud2AriX4/s1600/Picture15_Thaila_604656artw.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig_QfYl0S9R41xLWseKUPaYE3f1ZqP2WUsQabCUZj-IOXAgji9mMFSXmL5KGwLVFjee-EQorX_CsF-_B6IrrvEFI2MFJ1CoLAC9PPnedH2heFzmXkO19x5XYSabXl_02cPJniud2AriX4/s200/Picture15_Thaila_604656artw.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5464062716818180354" /></a><br /><br />Bangkok - In case you've missed it, I've been covering the ongoing political crisis in Thailand live from the streets of Bangkok for <a href="http://www.globeandmail.com">The Globe and Mail</a>.<br /><br />You can read my newspaper reports on the standoff between the government and the Red Shirt protesters on the website, but here's a snapshot of the minute-by-minute stuff I filed via my Twitter account (www.twitter.com/@markmackinnon).<br /><br />(Note, this isn't a complete transcript of what I sent to Twitter, just a selection of "greatest tweets" compiled by the staff of <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/seven-days-in-thailand/article1544694/">globeandmail.com</a>. They've posted more of my photos over there too.)<br /><br />Timestamps reflect local time in Bangkok...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">April 17</span><br /><br />• 10:38 a.m: Three more Bangkok malls shut by Red Shirt protest. Hyatt Erawan closed too RT @RichardBarrow SIAM PARAGON/SIAM CENTER/SIAM DISCOVERY closed<br /><br />• 10:39 a.m: Thumping rain in Bangkok this morning has sent many Red Shirts running for cover. Protest site emptiest its been in days.<br /><br />• 12:24 p.m: Bangkok Post: Thailand future "precarious." Thaksin party a threat to "revered institution," civil war possible: http://tinyurl.com/y2ydxkq<br /><br />• 7:23 p.m: The waiter in the Japanese restaurant I'm in just blamed the lack of tuna on the Red Shirts. Thaksin, what have you done??<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">April 18:</span><br /><br />• 10:16 a.m: Red Shirt leaders claim part of army would defend Reds if new crackdown. "Tanks would fire at one another."<br /><br />• 12:51 p.m: Thai Red Shirt protestors plan move to Silom banking district, military says will block them. Silom "out of bounds."<br /><br />• 4:48 p.m: Thailand "Red Shirts" plan mass rally Tuesday, call on supporters to withdraw savings from "symbol of the aristocrats" Bangkok Bank.<br /><br />• 5:56 p.m: Thailand: Pro-government "Yellow Shirts" give military one week to end Red Shirt protests or will act "to preserve the nation and monarchy"<br /><br />• 5:59 p.m: Thai army vows to block Red Shirts if they try to move protest to Silom financial district: http://tinyurl.com/y7npxy6<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">April 19</span><br /><br />• 10:16 a.m: Thailand: Red Shirt leaders back away from clash with military, cancel plans to expand protest to Silom Road financial district.<br /><br />• 12:57 p.m: Shoppers, Yellow Shirts and soldiers in riot gear mingling on Silom Road. Bizarre. Half of Bangkok still acting like place not falling apart<br /><br />• 1:01 p.m: Army Humvee parked where the food inspector's car should be in front of KFC on Silom Road.<br /><br />• 2:04 p.m: Barbed wire, soldiers on Silom Road, Bangkok <br /><br />• 2:33 p.m: Red Shirts, not police, control Chitlom BTS station over demo site<br /><br />• 7:58 p.m: Uh-oh. Intercontinental Hotel in centre of Red Shirt protests in Bangkok closing its doors, citing troop movements.<br /><br />• 10:05 p.m: Sigh. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. I moved out of the Middle East to escape the word, now everyone in Thailand is using it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">April 20</span><br /><br />• 10:22 a.m: is being evicted from my second hotel this week. You'd think I was throwing TVs out the window.<br /><br />• 10:32 a.m: Red Shirts have erected black tarp over main stage area in central Bangkok. Will obscure both the sun and the view of anyone spying above.<br /><br />• 11:59 a.m: Death toll from Qinghai earthquake now over 2,000. Another 200 still missing.<br /><br />• 4:27 p.m: Mood still tense, Red Shirts on motorbikes patrolling beyond usual protest camp borders, some carrying bamboo poles.<br /><br />• 10:05 p.m: Amnesty International: "All sides in Thailand’s widening political conflict should immediately commit to ending human rights abuses."<br /><br />• 10:05 p.m: Amnesty "urges [Thai government] to provide accountability for any violations by security forces as well as abuses by violent protesters."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">April 21</span><br /><br />• 10:21 a.m:Thailand's Red Shirts preparing for new army move, building tire barriers at all six entrances to their central Bangkok protest site.<br /><br />• 5:22 p.m: As both sides talk war, there are scattered reports that negotiations are finally taking place... #thailand<br /><br />• 7:23 p.m: Extremely tense now at Silom front line. Hundreds of Yellows chanting "get out!" at Reds from behind line of soldiers.<br /><br />• 7:24 p.m: Tuk-tuk backfired near front line between army, Reds, and everyone ducked. #thailand <br /><br />• 8:32 p.m: Red Shirts have expanded positions north of Lumphini Park. Checking IDs of drivers before allowing them to pass. #thailand<br /><br />• 8:33 p.m: As army defends Silom financial district, Reds slowly taking over other parts of Bangkok beyond long-time camp. <br /><br />• 8:58 p.m: Police have moved in to break up clashes between Red Shirts and local residents near Silom intersection. Tense. #thailand<br /><br />• 11:23 p.m: Helicopters in sky over Bangkok. Several loud bangs heard. Fireworks or flares.<br /><br />• 11:34 p.m: Orange flares all over the sky as helicopter buzzes over Bangkok Red Shirt protests.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">April 22</span><br /><br />• 3:12 a.m: Anyone thinking about upsides, downsides of Twitter shld check #thailand tag. Up-to-the-second updates blended with vitriolic hate speech.<br /><br />• 11:54 a.m: Several thousand Red Shirts marching today to United Nations office in Bangkok to request presence of peacekeeping force.<br /><br />• 12:25 p.m: How charged is the rhetoric in Thailand? Government says Red leader Thaksin akin to Hitler and Stalin. Reds say PM Abhisit like Pol Pot.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">April 23</span><br /><br />• 7:24 p.m: Scene at Sala Daeng intersection more relaxed than yesterday. Pro-govt crowd is bigger, but police doing better job of keeping sides apart.<br /><br />• 7:27 p.m: Police have parked five large trucks across intersection, which should prevent easy restarting of last night's clashes. #thailand<br /><br />• 7:34 p.m: Yep, real-live Yellow Shirts have joined the crowd on Silom Road. Mood more festive here than at Red rally, but of course Reds on Day 41...<br /><br />• 7:35 p.m: Army deployed to Silom to keep district's businesses from suffering fate of Rajprasong. But stores shutting down here anyway... <br /><br />• 8:22 p.m: Two explosions heard in Bangkok's business district; at least one person wounded, Reuters reporting.<br /><br />• 8:23 p.m: Was there and heard blasts. Thought little of them. #toomuchtimeinwarzones<br /><br />• 8:28 p.m: What I saw/heard were fireworks fired from Red side over police barricade. Not M79s, as some reporting. <br /><br />• 9:19 p.m: Situation tense on Red side of barricade after mystery explosions. Reds leaving 40 metre gap behind wall of bamboo and tires. Plan to light? <br /><br />• 10:30 p.m: Helicopters flying over Red Shirt protest site, Reds target them with jeers, fireworks.<br /><br />• 10:31 p.m: Man beside me with club assuring me it's still safe to travel in his hometown. "No trouble! just relax! Welcome!"<br /><br />• 10:38 p.m: pro-govt supporters now thowing rocks, bottles over barricade. Reds respond with firework into crowd. police caught in middle...<br /><br />• 10:44 p.m: series of small blasts at Silom intersection. police still holding back<br /><br />• 10:44 p.m: police now withdrawing with shields raised. leave field open for street fight between yellow, red<br /><br />• 11:02 p.m: Police withdrawing further away from ongoing clash. Handful of pro-govt types tossing bottles and rocks over. Reds replying with firecracker<br /><br />• 11:12 p.m: Two tourists pulling rolling suitcases just ran through centre of Bangkok street fight. <br /><br />• 11:16 p.m: street fight escalating. police unit I'm with retreating a block.<br /><br />• 11:20 p.m: Men in motorcycle helmets advance toward Red barricade hurl projectiles over. Amazingly no effort by police to intervene. <br /><br />• 11:16 p.m: street fight escalating. police unit I'm with retreating a block.<br /><br />• 11:20 p.m: Men in motorcycle helmets advance toward Red barricade hurl projectiles over. Amazingly no effort by police to intervene. <br /><br />• 11:29 p.m:Thai police hiding under overpass (with me) as fighting escalates (pictured)<br /><br />• 11:38 p.m: riot cops finally moving in between two sides.<br /><br />• 11:39 p.m: Reds cheering (Bronx cheer?) as riot cops move in <br /><br />• 11:42 p.m: Riot police moving down Silom driving back pro-govt rioters. Reds playing music and dancing. If this the end, a victory for them.<br /><br />• 11:58 p.m: Thai police making arrests on Yellow side of clash. Red rally continues<br /><br />• 12:08 a.m: If it was this easy to end the fighting, the question needs to be asked why it wasn't done hours ago... <br /><br />• 12:14 a.m: Yellows on Twitter talking of arming themselves because of government "weakness" in facing Red Shirts.<br /><br />• 12:16 a.m: Reds bamboo fortress unbreached despite clashes<br /><br />• 12:44 a.m: Battle of Silom Road over for now.Question is what next? Helicopters in the air now, Reds appear to be targeting them with fireworks...markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-68336877917371656442010-01-18T09:24:00.004+03:002010-01-18T09:31:07.696+03:00Google and China go to war<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNIZrxOKNujJoxSeffbC4Xl_G5Tv4HQqPjzLQ2P1l67RlGHJabHStnjnCpK0sBvVsFKswJa95FeTdA5KqLqohCTa0Op8tNvFGmSqYue5Qsk_lNwmmmLTKzruUUBmfTDto97XNgigoAixU/s1600-h/google_china.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 194px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNIZrxOKNujJoxSeffbC4Xl_G5Tv4HQqPjzLQ2P1l67RlGHJabHStnjnCpK0sBvVsFKswJa95FeTdA5KqLqohCTa0Op8tNvFGmSqYue5Qsk_lNwmmmLTKzruUUBmfTDto97XNgigoAixU/s200/google_china.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5427963236760081090" /></a><br />The world’s most populous country and its best-known brand are in a new kind of war today, with the search engine formally opening hostilities after a series of incursions by the e-PLA.<br /><br />Both sides have plenty to lose, with Google admitting it may have to withdraw from the potentially lucrative Chinese market – the world’s largest, with more than 300 million Internet users – and the Chinese government likely to lose international respectability over allegations that it participated in or tolerated the hacking of Gmail accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists and others.<br /><br />Another risk for the Communist Party is that it seems to be incurring the wrath of that same online community, which has already learned to live, grumpily, without sites such Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.<br /><br />The Chinese Internet is abuzz today with news that Google will stop censoring searches on <a href="http://www.google.cn">google.cn</a> – and may soon withdraw from China completely; raising the possibility of a Chinese Internet that increasingly exists as a separate entity from the rest of the World Wide Web.<br /><br />Here’s a quick sampling of some of what is being said (note: Baidu, which cooperates with Chinese government censors, is the most popular search engine in the country, with more than 60 per cent of the market):<br /><br /><blockquote>“Alas, a huge country of 1.3 billion people and 9.6million square meters land can't accept a website, sad” – a netizen named “Han” from Beijing who posted at the news.qq.com site.<br /><br />“I knew this day was coming. (With a slogan like) “Don’t be evil” Google, you can’t stay long here.” – “Liyuan” from Wuhan, also at news.qq.com<br /><br />“How sad this news is indeed! A world with only Baidu’s rules is not what I want to see!” – “Tianlu” from Wuhu City at the same site<br /></blockquote><br />Tianlu’s post drew a reply from a netizen who gave their name as “Xiangmatou”: “This is what the people in power would like to see the most. It is easier and more convenient for them to rule people’s views and the direction control of information.”<br /><br />The discussion at the Chinese website of the Global Times newspaper was tamer, with some openly doubting whether Google would carry through on its threats:<br /><br /><blockquote>“Isn’t it a hype? China is such a big market. How can Google be willing to give up such a big cake? But if it is true, it is a loss for us, because Google has more sources than Baidu. It’ll be a pity!” was one representative reader post.</blockquote><br /><br />(Interestingly, the state-run Xinhua news service <a href="http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2010-01/13/content_12804080.htm">took a similar line</a>, suggesting that Google’s decision was not yet final and that the government was “seeking clarity” on the Internet giant’s intentions.<br /><br />The U.S.-based China Digital Times, meanwhile, has been <a href="http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/01/its-not-google-thats-withdrawing-from-china-its-china-thats-withdrawing-from-the-world/">translating and compiling some of the reaction</a> to the Google-China spat on Twitter (which can be accessed in China by those able to reach a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network">Virtual Private Network</a>. Some of the most interesting:<br /><br /><blockquote>@hecaitou: After Google leaves China, the world’s top three websites on Alexa —Google, Facebook and Youtube are all blocked in China. This is not an issue of Google abandoning China, but one of China abandoning the world.<br /><br />@mranti Withdrawal of Google means: 1 Scaling the wall is now an essential tool 2 Techies, you should immigrate<br /><br />@lysosome On campus discussion forums Google tag has been removed<br /><br />@Fenng Ten years online has turned me from an optimist into a pessimist</blockquote><br /><br />Speaking of Twitter, I’m regularly “tweeting” on this (and other topics) over at http://twitter.com/markmackinnonmarkmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-22474230601725952552009-12-14T16:50:00.003+03:002009-12-14T16:54:26.588+03:00A victory for Beijing in the New Great Game<span style="font-weight:bold;">Beijing:</span> A few hours ago, in a place called Samadepe on the rarely visited border between the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the global balance of power tilted ever so slightly.<br /><br /> Flanked by the leaders of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, Chinese President Hu Jintao <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h2ySwtf_yx7ojznvMBz0S0wmqFvg">today turned a symbolic wheel</a> as oil started flowing into a new 1,833-kilometre pipeline that snakes east from Turkmenistan and across Central Asia to Xinjiang in the far west of China, where it will connect with China’s own pipeline network.<br /><br /> Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has insisted that <a href="http://www.ogj.com/index/article-display/8473986760/articles/oil-gas-journal/transportation-2/pipelines/construction/2009/12/putin_-turkmen_gas.html">Russia is not bothered by the opening of the pipeline</a>, but that’s difficult to believe. Mr. Putin’s nine years in power (the first eight as president) have been spent trying to reestablish Russia as a global force. Key to that effort has been its role as one of the world’s biggest producers of natural gas, a position that was strengthened by its effective monopoly over the pipelines coming out of the former Soviet states of Central Asia.<br /><br /> That monopoly has now been broken. The Turkmenistan-Xinjiang pipeline is the first that will transport gas from Turkmenistan, the world’s fourth-largest producer, to market without going through Russian territory. When it reaches full capacity in another three years, it will pump up to 40 billion cubic metres annually, feeding China’s rapidly-growing and energy-starved economy, meeting half of the country’s current demand.<br /><br /> In building the new pipeline, China can also claim victory in a race with both the United States and Europe. Both have sought for years to establish a route to bring Turkmen gas west without going through Russia, efforts that were repeatedly thwarted by interference from Moscow as well as Iran, which blocked efforts to build a pipeline underneath the Caspian Sea.<br /><br /> Though Mr. Hu was characteristically <a href="http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-12/14/content_12645369.htm">understated about the importance of the moment</a> his new partners were effusive in welcoming Beijing to centre stage in Central Asia.<br /><br /> “This project not only has commercial or economic value. It is also political,” Turkmen Presidnet Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov told reporters. “China, through its wise and farsighted policy has become one of the key guarantors of global security.”<br /><br /> It’s a change that happened slowly. Russia has seen its already waning influence over its former backyard plummet since the onset of the global recession, which has hit the Kremlin’s coffers – and thus its ability to speak the language the Central Asia’s kleptocrats prefer – hard. The United States and Europe, meanwhile, have danced back and forth between courting the region’s leaders and condemning them, occasionally breaking ties completely, over human-rights abuses.<br /> <br /> In the meantime, China, a late joiner to struggle for influence in Central Asia (dubbed “The Great Game” in the 19th Century as Russia and Britain jostled there), has quietly used its financial clout to make fast friends in the region, handing out massive loans and building the pipeline connecting Kazakhstan to Xinjiang. China’s Communist leaders, naturally, have no qualms about doing business with the unelected “presidents-for-life” who rule Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.<br /><br /> Last year, I was invited to the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan to address the <a href="http://www.eamedia.org/">Eurasian Media Forum</a> on the theme of a “new Cold War” between Russia and the West, sitting on a panel alongside such combatants as former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky.<br /><br /> When the Americans and the Russians took a break from verbally attacking each other, an audience member asked a Chinese panelist where Beijing stood in the escalating dispute. His response came back to me today as I watched the television footage from Turkmenistan. <br /><br /> “We leave matters of war and peace to the Americans and the Russians,” he said, adding that China preferred to focus on building up economic relations with its neighbours.<br /><br /> The audience, made up of Central Asia’s business and political elite, gratefully applauded.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-62867756248955066962009-11-26T19:13:00.003+03:002009-11-26T19:15:05.307+03:00Face to face with Comrade Duch<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtmKgDjM2l8Aw0BjV9HYlzCxgUOfUwFIIkkfi5WZpffu4pJsfnurLub55mDJhWWjzfjwJlGbIVXG0nbTTVT-z2VXk8wwL5Xz2vHxp3xHImzhfuNYCW0nAjFzPY5rgxnwy7c2_WT4a26Zc/s1600/duch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 135px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtmKgDjM2l8Aw0BjV9HYlzCxgUOfUwFIIkkfi5WZpffu4pJsfnurLub55mDJhWWjzfjwJlGbIVXG0nbTTVT-z2VXk8wwL5Xz2vHxp3xHImzhfuNYCW0nAjFzPY5rgxnwy7c2_WT4a26Zc/s200/duch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5408446291091957570" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Phnom Penh:</span> At first, I was going to rush outside with everyone else in the courtroom, to gulp some fresh air and a plastic cup of water after a morning of listening to prosecutor William Smith list off the crimes committed by Kaing Guek Eav, the murderous Khmer Rouge jailor better known as Comrade Duch.<br /><br />But then I remembered that I had surreptitiously stuffed my Blackberry in my blazer pocket on the way in to the court (mobile phones aren't allowed in court but I had been reluctant to hand it over to an unknown fate with the security guards outside). I had snuck it through security once, but trying again might be pushing my luck. I decided to stretch my legs by wandering around the courtroom instead.<br /><br />As the courtroom rapidly emptied. I realized there was someone else doing the same thing: Comrade Duch.<br /><br />I couldn't help but stare. Here was the man who stands accused of - and has confessed to an indirect role in - the deaths of more than 12,000 people while he ran Phnom Penh's notorious S-21 torture and interrogation centre.<br /><br />Just two days before, I had visited S-21 which, other than the gallows and the graves that stand in front of it, still looks from the outside like the high school it was before the Khmer Rouge arrived in 1975. It's a haunted place, filled with room after room of black-and-white photographs of those who spent their final days there.<br /><br />Some stare at the camera with anger or defiance, others with fear plain on their faces. But most wear no expression at all, as if they've had all emotion beaten out of them. They look as though they no longer cared whether they lived or died.<br /><br />Watching Duch pace around the courtroom - separated from the audience area where I stood by a pane of bulletproof glass to prevent revenge attacks - it was difficult to imagine this small, ordinary looking 67-year-old as the same man who oversaw a place where men were forced to eat human feces, women were raped and babies were bashed to death against trees.<br /><br />Hands thrust deep in his pockets as he paced, perhaps thinking about the final statement and apology he would deliver to the court in a few minutes time, he looked like what he should have been: a retired mathematics teacher. Someone's grandfather. With nearly parted grey hair and a crisp white shirt, he looked exactly like a man I had seen outside Phnom Penh's disused train station earlier that morning.<br /><br />As I pondered this, Duch turned and faced the almost-empty auditorium. His slightly watery eyes scanned the seats as if looking for someone. Eventually, they met mine.<br /><br />A moment passed quietly as I uncomfortably returned his gaze. I don't know what he was searching for - a smile? a wave? - but I think I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the inner monster, the thing that separated him from the rest of us and made him capable of doing such horrible things. Or maybe a hint that he is, as he says, tormented by "excruciating" remorse over what he'd done.<br /><br />In Duch's blank eyes, I saw neither. Just an old man in a cage looking out curiously at those looking in.<br /><br />The courtroom started to fill back up again. Duch turned to consult with his lawyers.<br /><br />A few minutes later, he stood and told the court again how sorry he was.<br /><br />I had no idea whether to believe him.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-89630696703324229562009-10-27T08:45:00.007+03:002009-11-26T19:15:33.840+03:00Mr. Hu, tear down this firewall!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoUUBAka7CGB1hF28Q6rXXO-GZbavbzksltQ9FgxiJeX7E-TH4EvC5_U3D_a3bcEzaJtOeB5MF76F5AMh0AfuWJBdLVsGKt1qeK5-xq6RWQsjXwFe8SR-wXR83Lp564E3staB6Z8GtbMU/s1600-h/berlintwitterwall.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 222px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoUUBAka7CGB1hF28Q6rXXO-GZbavbzksltQ9FgxiJeX7E-TH4EvC5_U3D_a3bcEzaJtOeB5MF76F5AMh0AfuWJBdLVsGKt1qeK5-xq6RWQsjXwFe8SR-wXR83Lp564E3staB6Z8GtbMU/s400/berlintwitterwall.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5397155686141566386" /></a><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Beijing:</span> It was supposed to be a place to remember where you were and what it meant to you on Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell between East and West Germany, marking the beginning of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.<br /><br />But something very different – and fascinating – is happening instead at the <a href="http://www.berlintwitterwall.com">Berlin Twitter Wall</a>, a website that went online last week as part of the city of Berlin’s anniversary celebrations. Instead of reminiscences about life behind the old Iron Curtain, the site is being overloaded with complaints about a new barrier sealing people off from the outside world: China’s thick web of Internet censorship, referred to locally as the Great Firewall (or GFW, in character-saving Twitterspeak).<br /><br />Most of the writers posted in Chinese, and claimed to be doing so from inside China, where Twitter and dozens of other popular websites have been blocked by the Communist government headed by President Hu Jintao. (Click <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_china">here for an incomplete list of the banned sites</a>.)<br /><br />Blocked sites can be accessed from inside China via virtual private networks, provided you have both a private computer and the tech savvy to do so. The entire province of Xinjiang – home to 21 million people – has been <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jDByyshZ0Foc4Oir2dwLSfBmpj4A">almost completely without Internet service</a> since deadly ethnic riots hit the city of Urumqi on July 5.<br /><br />Here is a sampling of some of the postings the Berlin Twitter Wall has seen in the past couple of days. The tag #fotw refers to “fall of the wall”:<br /><blockquote><br />“All kinds of walls will have their day of collapse. #fotw” – posted Monday, Oct. 26 by “xtzc.”<br /><br />“The collapse of the wall needs everyone’s help.” – posted Monday, Oct. 26 by xiaopohen,<br /><br />“I have a dream: We will see the anniversary if the fall of the Great Fire Wall in near future.” – posted Monday, Oct. 26 by guoyumin</blockquote><br /><br />Here are a few others translated by the <a href="http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/10/chinese-twitterers-mr-hu-jintao-tear-down-the-great-firewall/">China Digital Times</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>“#fotw We climb the Great Firewall because it has blocked out all of the dissent, and we do so to eventually get rid of the Wall.” – by miaofeng<br /><br />“The wall built for others will eventually become a grave for the builders. #fotw” – by liujiang<br /><br />“#fotw It has been twenty years, and we are still in the Wall.” – by gengmao<br /><br />“#FOTW All Chinese on the electronic Berlin Wall, spectacular!” – by peterlue<br /><br />“My apologies to German people a million times [for taking over this site]. But I think if Germans learn about our situation, they would feel sorry for us a million times.” – by ChrisicGong</blockquote><br /><br />Predictably, by Monday evening local time, the Berlin Twitter Wall was no longer accessible in Beijing.<br /><br />Mr. Hu, please?markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-46110705255472583642009-10-19T06:48:00.002+04:002009-10-19T06:56:34.676+04:00A police state without traffic police<span style="font-weight:bold;">Beijing:</span> “<span style="font-style:italic;">Qiguai</span>. It means strange,” my Chinese teacher said, repeating the new word again so that I could grasp its rising-then-falling pronunciation.<br /><br />“What did you find <span style="font-style:italic;">qiguai</span> when you first arrived in Beijing?”<br /><br />“The taxi drivers,” I responded, without hesitation. The teacher giggled as my classmate/wife tried to explain that Canada’s rules of the road are somewhat different than those in China, primarily because, well, there are rules and people follow them. Getting into a Beijing taxi is often akin to taking a seatbeltless ride on the Zipper, or one of those other rides that tour Canada’s exhibitions each summer.<br /><br />The only thing more dangerous than being in a Beijing taxi is daring to cross the street in front of one. After 10 months of living here, I’ve concluded that the rules of the Beijing road are roughly as follows:<br /><br />- Trucks and buses are supreme, and can pretty much drive any where and any way they choose. Bus drivers may be public servants in other countries, but in Beijing they’re threats to public safety.<br /><br />- Cars come next, with bigger cars clearly having the right to force themselves into any lane they choose, even if occupied by a smaller vehicle. This may be a Communist state in name, but there’s a rigid caste system when it comes to travelling on paved surfaces.<br /><br />- Bicycles and those old-fashioned enough to still ride them are expected to scatter out of the way of anything with a motor.<br /><br />- Pedestrians are the bottom of the ladder, and enjoy the exact opposite of the right of way. Even if you’re already in the intersection, and the walk signal is green, you’re expected to dive out of the way of any car that happens to turn right through the crosswalk. If pedestrians really needed to get where they are going, they’d be in a car, preferably a large one.<br /><br />It really is that bad. In his farewell to China blog entitled “<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/fallows-health-china">How I survived China</a>” James Fallows, the outgoing correspondent from The Atlantic magazine, writes about the advice he got from a Chinese doctor: “The most important ‘medical’ step you can take is to put on a seat belt in a car, wear a helmet on a bike, and run for your life in crosswalks,” the doctor told him.<br /><br />Fallows goes on: “For the foreign diplomatic corps, the leading cause of death is traffic accidents. I worried every day about being mowed down by a bus, since they don’t stop at lights. My wife was run over in Beijing by a motor scooter that was going the opposite way down an eight-lane one-way road and was running a red light too. She’s fine now; the driver roared away, still against traffic, as soon as he climbed back on the bike.”<br /><br />No one who lives in Beijing could have been surprised by that story (my parents are still recovering from the shock of a minor accident that occurred earlier this month when our car was struck by a driver backing down the wrong lane of a highway near the Great Wall). But sitting in our taxi this afternoon as it idled in thick Sunday traffic on the way home from our language lesson, it struck me that the drivers aren’t the problem – it’s the police who do so little to enforce the rules of the road that actually do exist.<br /><br />It’s the oddest thing about living in this still-authoritarian state. The police are ubiquitous and absent at the same time. They stand on street corners (or nap in their cars) as cars recklessly run red lights right in front of them. It’s little surprise that – according to the official Xinhua news agency – <a href="http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/6378731.html">China had the highest rate of road accident deaths in the world</a> in 2007, at 5.1 per 100,000 cars.<br /><br />Part of the problem is corruption. According to the Shanghai Oriental Morning Post, 47.2 per cent of all the new drivers they surveyed paid a bribe (the average price was 502 RMB, or about $75) to get their licenses <a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2009-08/10/content_8547604.htm">rather than take the official drivers’ test</a>. (Though could you pass the English-language version? <a href="http://www.chinacartimes.com/quiz/">Here it is</a>.)<br /><br />To my eyes, another factor seems to be that no one has told the policemen that they’re supposed to do police-y things like protect the public. During the National Day celebrations earlier this month, armed police were deployed on nearly every street corner to ensure the day passed smoothly and no one would do something outlandish like wave a Tibetan flag.<br /><br />But that didn’t mean that any of them would lift an arm to help get snarled traffic moving again, or intervene to question a taxi driver who sped through a crowd of terrified pedestrians without so much as using a turn signal to warn anyone of his intention to do so.<br /><br />The latter example is something that happens frequently, and right in front of the police who stroll about my east Beijing neighbourhood. (Nor do the same police ever intervene to break up the obvious drug-pushing and prostitution that takes place on the corners they patrol, but that’s another blog.)<br /><br />But try walking through the streets with a T-shirt reading “One-party dictatorship is a disaster” (<a href="http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/10/rights-lawyer-held-for-four-hours-over-t-shirt/">as lawyer Liu Shihui did recently in Guangzhou</a>) and the police tend to move quickly and decisively.<br /><br />Now I’ve never been entrusted with running a one-party police state, but as a pedestrian living in the capital of one, it’s all just a little <span style="font-style:italic;">qiguai</span>.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-65524889064807117772009-09-05T11:53:00.004+04:002009-09-05T12:03:29.121+04:00Chinese democracy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKoIOv1CB7dLDKdc19IAU5t8UE4WYDlwua56iGMc1gWtCULrrj2UdcH1Toa8UaMF_a3_eb5f3gB5KLGeAIS0ixWiwBZSVliHkmVlJSLpKG_y5_UAYwpVTBwxni8Kib5zlmQJooLhQfy1k/s1600-h/northkorea+758.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKoIOv1CB7dLDKdc19IAU5t8UE4WYDlwua56iGMc1gWtCULrrj2UdcH1Toa8UaMF_a3_eb5f3gB5KLGeAIS0ixWiwBZSVliHkmVlJSLpKG_y5_UAYwpVTBwxni8Kib5zlmQJooLhQfy1k/s200/northkorea+758.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377890648930431954" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Beijing, Saturday, Aug. 29:</span> Living and working in China can sometimes be difficult, especially for a foreign journalist. The ever-growing restrictions on the Internet and freedom of speech can be truly depressing for those of us who make a living saying what we think and trying to coax others to do the same.<br /><br />Sometimes it feels like the government in Beijing can behave abysmally and get away with it simply because it is far too economically powerful and important to be challenged any more.<br /><br />But a week in North Korea (you can see all the writing, photos and video Sean Gallagher and I produced from our trip <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/inside-north-korea-will-these-people-see-change/article1276923/">here on The Globe and Mail website</a>.) has given me some important perspective on where China is, and how far it has come in the 30 years since Deng Xiaoping renounced Mao's excesses and implemented his policies of reform and opening.<br /><br />North Korea hasn't had its Deng Xiaoping or Mikhail Gorbachev yet. It's still trapped in an era many Chinese would recognize from the bad old days. The paranoia that ruled during the Cultural Revolution – the fear that you could be denounced, arrested or worse for the smallest indiscretion – is still thick on the streets of Pyongyang. Catastrophic economic decisions that recall Mao's Great Leap Forward still wreak havoc on North Korea's industry and agriculture.<br /><br />Halfway through our week in North Korea, Sean and I confided half-jokingly to each other that we were starting to miss the relative freedom of China. By today, we were lusting for Beijing's smoggy air like a long-remembered lover.<br /><br />Following one last scare at Pyongyang Airport that involved a border guard suspicious of my passport, we boarded our Air Koryo flight home after one of the most interesting and intense weeks either of us had ever experienced. As our Russian-made Ilyushin-62 lifted off, Sean and I looked at each other, smiled and exhaled deeply. When it touched down at Beijing Capital Airport at just after 10 a.m., we started laughing out loud.<br /><br />Safely back on Chinese soil, we could talk freely for the first time in days. While in Pyongyang, we had been guarded in what we said even inside our shared hotel room, assuming it was listened to (a suspicion that was bolstered every time we opened our door and spotted a Workers' Party cadre lingering in the hall outside with seemingly very little to do).<br /><br />In the presence of our minders, who stayed with us from dusk until dawn, we stuck to our cover stories. He was an English teacher, obsessed with correcting my Canadian pronunciation. I was the author of a book on recent Russian history (true enough), and fascinated by the Soviet-era friendship between Moscow and Pyongyang.<br /><br />Repeating our lines was nearly as dull as it was difficult. Maybe it gave us some small insight into how careful North Koreans have to be in what they say every day of their lives.<br /><br />For all modern China's flaws – and there are many – it is now a place where ordinary people, at least in Beijing and other big cities, can act and dress how they want. No one has to wear a Mao pin or join the Communist Party if they don't want to.<br /><br />My earlier caveats aside (and they remain important), Chinese can also largely think and say what they want, provided they don't get too deeply into politics, or try and post those thoughts on the Internet.<br /><br />Many Chinese are affluent now, and many more are no longer poor. Most of them are free to decide which way is the best for them to make money and feed their family. Those who have cash spend it how they choose, often travelling the world as they do so.<br /><br />All of this progress gets too often forgotten by Western journalists such as myself who see a country in mid-journey and judge it by the distance it still has to go, rather than how far it has travelled.<br /><br />Several large Chinese tour groups were in North Korea at the same time that Sean and I were there. Though our North Korean minders limited our interaction with them, I suspect the younger Chinese wanted to see what it looks like to live in a fanatically ideological country that has cut itself off from the world. The older ones came perhaps to remember what it was like to live in just such a place.<br /><br />They can do that now. For them, it's the past, no matter how painful.<br /><br />Sadly, for North Koreans it remains the here and now.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-3119862831748585922009-09-05T11:49:00.003+04:002009-09-05T11:53:36.757+04:00The pool hustlers of Pyongyang<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVUK5-sa8L0i1x2n5CIrt4-vrISFOn0spaC8TrCC03Wquw_rX6Y5gS33PnTmJI6UC5Ymrdzzc9n88MsBzYG3Ghwi_wGGnO2UnUnbmR9V7XTwGUiC-oyKIZXuQ3pM658TljDlnzyr8tD0o/s1600-h/northkorea+555.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVUK5-sa8L0i1x2n5CIrt4-vrISFOn0spaC8TrCC03Wquw_rX6Y5gS33PnTmJI6UC5Ymrdzzc9n88MsBzYG3Ghwi_wGGnO2UnUnbmR9V7XTwGUiC-oyKIZXuQ3pM658TljDlnzyr8tD0o/s200/northkorea+555.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377888076237510578" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Pyongyang, Friday, Aug. 28:</span> Finally, on the last day of our tour, Sean and I were given a few hours in the evening to unwind, a rare and badly needed break from a carefully packed itinerary that required us to be up and eating breakfast by 7 a.m. every day and that kept us busy until at least 9 p.m.<br /><br />Today we started with the 2.5-hour drive south to the Demilitarized Zone (between North and South Korea), then returned to Pyongyang in time to tour the city's Soviet-style metro system. Fascinating, but exhausting.<br /><br />Throughout the week here, our days have seemed designed to be so busy as to keep us from having any unscripted moments where we might meet and interact with real live North Koreans. At one point I suggested that we skip some of the formal sights and spend an afternoon in a park. Our guides just laughed, the same as they did when I inquired what Pyongyang nightlife was like.<br /><br />So we were grateful to discover that the 47-floor Yanggakdo Hotel that we were confined to at night came equipped with bowling alleys, a casino and a billiards room in the basement. (The photo, in case you're wondering, is completely unrelated. It's from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arirang_Festival">Arirang Mass Games</a> that we saw the previous night.)<br /><br />Sean and I settled on pool as our leisure of choice, and he quickly demonstrated that he had spent far more time in the pool halls of London, England than I had in Stittsville, Ontario. I always struggle in games where there's no ice involved.<br /><br />After three rapid, easy wins, Sean set off in search of what the British call the loo, leaving me to practice bank shots on my own. It didn't amuse me for long.<br /><br />I went up to the empty bar and asked the long-haired young woman behind the counter for two more Taedonggang beers. She handed the drinks over, then smiled sweetly.<br /><br />“Me, I play with you?”<br /><br />I was momentarily confused about what she was suggesting, but followed her gaze to the ready pool table behind me.<br /><br />“You play pool?” I asked.<br /><br />“A little,” she replied, still smiling.<br /><br />It proved to be quite an understatement. She gracefully potted a ball off the break and then proceeded to sink six more in a row without missing. Each time she made a particularly improbable shot, she would give me an apologetic look and say “sorry.”<br /><br />In the corner, the nightly news played on a muted television. Looking over, I could see Kim Jong-il had visited some establishment and given advice to those working there, just as he seemed to every day. And yet, no one ever seems to have seen the Dear Leader in person.<br /><br />Finally, it was my turn to shoot. Dazed, I knocked a ball uselessly down the table, missing the corner pocket by several inches. “Ooh, unlucky,” my tormentor said, covering her mouth to stifle a giggle prompted by my ineptitude. She swiftly put me out of my misery by dunking the eight-ball.<br /><br />By this time, Sean had returned, and another waitress had emerged. She suggested that we play in teams – North Korea versus the United Nations, 1950s style.<br /><br />I'm slightly embarrassed to report that despite Sean's best efforts, the North Koreans – dressed in matching blue uniforms that made them look like air hostesses from the 1970s – ran the Western imperialists out of the room, winning four of five games.<br /><br />Though they spoke little English, my missed shots and bumbling attempts at speaking Korean gave everyone something to laugh about. Until a Workers' Party cadre wandered in and saw four people having fun that hadn't been government sanctioned.<br /><br />He barked at the two women and ordered them back to work.<br /><br />On the television set, images of life in this socialist paradise flickered silently.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-90266321424108053312009-09-05T11:37:00.002+04:002009-09-05T11:42:57.934+04:00Passport games - trying to stay out of Pyongyang Prison<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHITlrvYzJj-pChDCL02bcNKj6Uw5chWozoe8AaMLRBHXAKdAIqOBJexnu52FYUoHSZ7pnT1sykySNNbUeTPuqFaa1rf_kGPJ8tpXxC-QU0qzbC_NAYDtxEzNVTP1fh7qmzq39tm4aM-Y/s1600-h/mark1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHITlrvYzJj-pChDCL02bcNKj6Uw5chWozoe8AaMLRBHXAKdAIqOBJexnu52FYUoHSZ7pnT1sykySNNbUeTPuqFaa1rf_kGPJ8tpXxC-QU0qzbC_NAYDtxEzNVTP1fh7qmzq39tm4aM-Y/s200/mark1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377885561980841058" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Pyongyang, Thursday, Aug. 27:</span> For several days now, I have been inside North Korea with a secret. Jammed deep in my pocket, under my wallet, was a passport containing stamps that identified me as a Canadian journalist living in China.<br /><br />It was not the passport I'd presented at the border. When we crossed from China, I had handed over an older document that was still valid but had nothing in it hinting at my profession. One of the North Koreans assigned to mind and monitor us had kept that document, saying it would be returned to me when I was leaving the country.<br /><br />It was the second passport that occasionally made it difficult to sleep at night. Two U.S. television journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were arrested earlier in the year for illegally crossing North Korea's border with China. They had been sentenced to 12 years hard labour, and served nearly five months before Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang to rescue them.<br /><br />I found myself wondering if Jean Chrétien would do the same for me.<br /><br />Keeping the incriminating document in my pocket worked until this sunny morning, when our tour guides informed us that we would visit the mausoleum of Kim Il-sung to bow before the waxy remains of the “Great Leader” who is still so revered here.<br /><br />As we pulled up in the parking lot, our guide turned around in her seat and struck fear into my heart with one politely uttered phrase. “You will have to empty your pockets in front of the security guards before you enter the mausoleum.”<br /><br />Terror. My run of luck – I had gotten in and out of such journalist-unfriendly places as Zimbabwe, Syria, Belarus and Iraq in recent years without serious incident – was over. If I hid my passport on our government-provided minibus, there was no guarantee it wouldn't be uncovered while I was touring the mausoleum. Putting it in my backpack and handing it over at the coat check seemed equally foolhardy.<br /><br />I had no other options that I could think of, so I did the only thing that came to mind. I let our minders exit the tour bus ahead of me, and waited until I was the last person on the bus. Then I took my passport out of my pocket and jammed it down the back of my pants.<br /><br />Pleased with myself, I took a few confident steps towards the security guards who were supposed to frisk me. Almost immediately I had the unfamiliar and disconcerting sensation of a small blue booklet sliding slowly over my backside. It picked up speed as it headed south down my right leg.<br /><br />Looking and feeling desperate for a bathroom break, I asked where the nearest toilet was and broke into a stiff-legged run as soon as I was pointed in the right direction. I got inside (it was mercifully empty) and slammed the door just in time to grab the passport as it landed on the top of my shoe.<br /><br />I still hadn't gone through the pocket-emptying security check, so I had no choice but to try it again. This time, the passport went down the front of my pants. If the guards check there, I decided, we have problems no matter what they find.<br /><br />Though I was drenched in sweat by this point, the trick worked and the guards spent only a few seconds at my wallet and the lint I retrieved from my pocket. I joined the long line of tourists and North Koreans who had come to pay their respects to the corpse of a megalomaniac dictator who died 15 years ago.<br /><br />Some wept openly, apparently in sadness, at the sight of the man who instigated the pointless Korean War and oversaw one of the cruellest police states in modern history. Others stared at him expressionlessly.<br /><br />Maybe it was the uncomfortable placement of my passport, but I found myself wanting to laugh at the absurdity of it all.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-17047965379375314992009-09-05T11:28:00.003+04:002009-09-05T11:36:03.319+04:00What to do with a stuffed Nicaraguan crocodile<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwKgnhsM_cQjblJz3uu6dWtUSENFNgtha-xoUsOSEI8a0tS_LiPKdKWKXNvtbGKWcOwueT2OI2akOgMOzDmOwYiBZ7O__chlHrGNnpB5_N4ooVJYlpABMxB23jw_4-irBhMi9dlzrued8/s1600-h/sean4.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwKgnhsM_cQjblJz3uu6dWtUSENFNgtha-xoUsOSEI8a0tS_LiPKdKWKXNvtbGKWcOwueT2OI2akOgMOzDmOwYiBZ7O__chlHrGNnpB5_N4ooVJYlpABMxB23jw_4-irBhMi9dlzrued8/s200/sean4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377883522064335538" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Pyongyang and Myohyangsan, North Korea - Wednesday, Aug. 26:</span> Ever wondered what to do with that tacky gift you got for your birthday?<br /><br />Kim Jong-il has come up with the perfect solution: build a palace in the mountains an appropriate distance away, and stick all the stuff that clashes with your kitchen cupboards up there.<br /><br />Like the stuffed crocodile carrying a tray of drinks that Nicaragua's Sandinista rebels thought his father, Kim Il-sung, would just love. Or that stylish but out-of-date bulletproof limousine that good old Joseph Stalin gave his family back in the day.<br /><br />The so-called International Friendship Exhibition, two buildings tucked high in the Myohyangsan mountain resort area north of Pyongyang, has to be one of the odder tourist sites in the world. The front room features a map of the world with three digital numbers on it – the first counting the number of gifts received by Kim Il-sung, the second the number given to Kim Jong-il. If you're wondering, father (who apparently continues to receive gifts from admirers even 15 years after his death) still leads son in this who-is-more-loved race. The third number, which glows at 180, keeps track of how many countries gifts have been received from.<br /><br />While some gave fancy cars and stuffed crocs, others were more circumspect in their gifting. A serving tray with the word “Jamaica” painted on it looked like it had been swiped from a beach bar. A small blue pinny, again from Nicaragua, seemed like something you'd receive for taking part in, but not winning, a sporting competition.<br /><br />Canada, you'll be pleased to know, was among the 180 countries that showed their admiration. A polar bear skin (head still on) was sent to Kim Il-sung's by an anonymous Canadian citizen and now hangs upside-down in a glass display case. The Communist Party of Canada apparently once saw fit to present the tyrants of Pyongyang with a Group of Seven coffee table book.<br /><br />After a brief stop at a nearby Buddhist temple (where a token monk spoke to us in the company of a female soldier), we made the 21/2-half hour drive to Pyongyang and were taken to one of the sites I had been most anxious to see: the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, which in another country might be called the Korean War Museum.<br /><br />To visit the museum, in north-central Pyongyang, is to be told to forget everything you know about what happened in the 1950-1953 conflict. The official view put forth by the North Korean government has nothing to do with what's in Canadian history books.<br /><br />In a succession of films, murals and moving battlefield mock-ups, visitors are pounded with a single message: that it was the United States that started the war on June 25, 1950 and that the Korean People's Army eventually handed the superpower an embarrassing defeat.<br /><br />“Some of the Americans who come argue and say this isn't the case,” said our tour guide, a cheerful woman sporting a military uniform and an unreadable smile. “But history is history. You can't change it.”markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-1239790142200233612009-09-05T11:21:00.003+04:002009-09-05T11:28:53.771+04:00Into the land of the Kims - a journey in North Korea<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyXvtGoT9PiUjKq1784XUSb3Q53p_0ytK4lGWGPc9xc-iuaI9Wsp50QDL2yeOaSV_j7IMjjgkthRNQF_UpaOtuIh7KZQuL8SF6D3jK5v-VGp_rdcUqb9OegmEuM7wIlUSajzeCwSrKgqM/s1600-h/northkorea+119.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyXvtGoT9PiUjKq1784XUSb3Q53p_0ytK4lGWGPc9xc-iuaI9Wsp50QDL2yeOaSV_j7IMjjgkthRNQF_UpaOtuIh7KZQuL8SF6D3jK5v-VGp_rdcUqb9OegmEuM7wIlUSajzeCwSrKgqM/s200/northkorea+119.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377881230676181090" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Sinuiju, North Korea - Tuesday, Aug. 25:</span> There was, of course, always the likelihood that the North Koreans wouldn't let in the country two foreigners with suspicious back stories (I entered on the premise that I was a Russian historian, Sean as an English teacher living in China). Or worse, that they'd let us in and keep us there until Bill Clinton's next trip to Pyongyang.<br /><br />But the border and customs formalities went surprisingly smoothly, likely because we ran into a Chinese tour group that was crossing at the same time and cheerfully adopted the two crazy laowai (foreigners) as their own. By the time they got to the customs room, the guards were too busy going through bags stuffed with boil-in-bucket noodles (some of the Chinese were apparently worried they wouldn't be fed in North Korea) to give our documents more than a peremptory look.<br /><br />(I presented a passport that had no markings identifying me as a reporter anywhere on it, and kept my other one – which has an incriminating Chinese journalist visa in it – jammed deep in my pocket. More on that later.) The weather was a warm and clear, and Sean and I were soon working on what we would come to call our Pyongyang tan.<br /><br />Our first stop inside North Korea was a massive bronze statue on the main city square of the “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung, the founding leader of North Korea, shaking his fist like he's playing rock-paper-scissors.<br /><br />In the official narrative here, the Great Leader didn't really go anywhere when he died and passed his tyrannical powers on to his son Kim Jong-il in 1994. Under the country's constitution, the elder Kim is North Korea's “eternal president,” though it's unclear what his day-to-day responsibilities are beyond appearing in old propaganda films. Red posters around the country tell citizens that Kim Il-sung will be with them forever.<br /><br />“In our country, it is custom to bow before the statue of the Great Leader. Will you join us in this custom?” our tour guide said flatly. Sean and I had known this moment was coming. There was nothing to do but bow. When in Sinuiju…<br /><br />After a quick tour of the Sinuiju Historical Museum, which was dedicated to the life stories of the two Kims (the elder apparently visited Sinuiju 217 times, the younger 186), as well as Kim Jong-suk, the mother of Kim Jong-il (only two visits to Sinuiju), we ate a lunch of beef, rice and kimchi and boarded the 2:10 p.m. train for the five-hour-20-minute hour journey to Pyongyang.<br /><br />The wood-panelled train car looked like something out of the 1950s Soviet Union, with portraits of Kim Il-sung and a youthful Kim Jong-il hanging where Stalin and Lenin would once have been. The scene on the platform as we pulled away was similarly out of a Second World War movie: we could see weaponless soldiers milling around as martial music played over the loudspeakers. Merchants in grey Mao suits tried to shove their wares on the train as it began to roll away, and women waved farewell to men heading south to the capital city.<br /><br />We were accompanied for the journey by a group of government-assigned tour guides who were assigned to watch us during our time in North Korea, as well as Workers' Party cadres who silently kept watch over all of us. They spent much of the ride to Pyongyang grilling us about our backgrounds. Why did you want to come to North Korea? How long were you in China? Where did you go to university? What was the theme of your book about Russia?<br /><br />(Sometimes the conversations veered into the bizarre. Later in the trip, Sean, a Londoner, was asked what year the Tower of London was built. When he failed that test, our minders began to openly question his Britishness. He tried to brush it off by jokingly saying he was more into science than history, and wound up having to explain the concept of a vacuum as proof of that scientific bent.)<br /><br />Out the window, a scene of abject poverty rolled by. Grey industrial with no sign of functioning factories and endless fields of rice and corn that were being worked by hand or by oxcart in the absence of farm equipment and fuel. There were few cars or even bicycles on the roads, and people could be seen walking tens of kilometres from anywhere.<br /><br />“Long Live Kim Jong-il, a leader for the 21st Century!” proclaimed a red propaganda poster that we saw in almost every town we passed.<br /><br />Our minders strictly warned us not to turn our cameras out the window, and it was easy to see why. This was not the image of a powerful country the Kim regime is trying so desperately to present to the world.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-46908799620221273982009-09-05T11:15:00.005+04:002009-09-05T11:27:56.555+04:00Through the looking glass: peeking at North Korea from across the Yalu<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji0n-pCy67BgaoXZwO-MLpRJfDA0Bx9hcYe__ueO20xzU6R_jIXc8lWAWjXgbFg6Vn8NG8Zc5attqxn7OpCg6jGroWBoUihtrFWQIc1QOf-bSxwKgFQW-6k36lqW11tc4GJq46Ry_2TNI/s1600-h/northkorea+039.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji0n-pCy67BgaoXZwO-MLpRJfDA0Bx9hcYe__ueO20xzU6R_jIXc8lWAWjXgbFg6Vn8NG8Zc5attqxn7OpCg6jGroWBoUihtrFWQIc1QOf-bSxwKgFQW-6k36lqW11tc4GJq46Ry_2TNI/s200/northkorea+039.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377879641695669538" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Dandong, China - Monday, Aug. 24:</span> Photographer Sean Gallagher and I landed today in the northeastern Chinese city of Dandong after a 90-minute flight on Air China from Beijing. We were met at the airport and taken straight to a hotel called the Pearl Island Golf Club.<br /><br />There's a driving range here, but no golf course that we can find. Our room does offer a nice view across the Yalu River into North Korea, though.<br /><br />It's our first glimpse into the Hermit Kingdom: a row of grey two- and three-storey buildings that appear to be uninhabited. Further east, there's a Ferris wheel that doesn't turn and an industrial zone where a single smokestack pumps black smoke into the air. The other factories, whatever they make or made, appear closed.<br /><br />The contrast with the Chinese side is unmistakable. This side of the river is a construction site, with multi-storey apartment blocks and office buildings rising before your eyes. The locals stroll along a paved boardwalk and sit on the banks to stare at the Hermit Kingdom across the Yalu.<br /><br />The North Korean side is deathly quiet in contrast. Even using the zoom lenses on our cameras, we only see a handful of residents, most of them walking or cycling. Not a single car drives by in the time we watch the other bank, though there is the occasional truck.<br /><br />After an hour on our own, our tourist agent picks us up and takes us to the waterfront. Our first stop is the Broken Bridge, a broken metal span that was cut in half by a U.S. B-29 during the Korean War.<br /><br />But that history is not what draws people here any more. Like the rest of the tourists, Sean and I walk right past the photographs explaining what happened here in 1953. It's at the end that we get our cameras out and resume photographing the south bank of the Yalu. The B-29's intent may have been to cut off a vital supply route for the North Korean army that was then pushing UN forces back south with the help of Chinese “volunteer” fighters, but 56 years later its lasting impact has been to create a tourist stop that allows voyeurs to get a few hundred metres closer to North Korea without the need for a visa.<br /><br />“I feel a bit dirty,” Sean confesses in his London accent after we finish the 20 yuan (about $3.50) tour. It does indeed feel wrong to stare and point at the people across the river as though they are zoo animals.<br /><br />But peering into Stalinism's last redoubt is a lucrative industry here in Dandong. After our walk to the end of the Broken Bridge, we board a tour boat crammed with more than 70 Chinese tourists. The boat crosses the middle of the river – presumably into North Korea waters – as cameras snap away and tourists pose against a backdrop of patrolling soldiers and bare-chested men wading waist-deep into the water to fish with nets. Another packed boat leaves every 30 minutes.<br /><br />Our boat captain has chosen The Carpenters as the soundtrack for the 30-minute excursion. Every sha-la-la-la. Every whoah-oh-oh. At first it seems wildly inappropriate, but later it occurs to me that Yesterday Once More (the song's title) might be exactly how many Chinese feel as they peer at a country still living through the disastrous leadership China itself experienced decades ago during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.<br /><br />Dinner that night is an alcohol-soaked affair at a North Korean restaurant in Dandong. Beef, rice, kimchi and a fruit alcohol that our guide mixes into our Taedonggang beers.<br /><br />The patrons are in a great mood, singing and clapping along with a lively stage show. It's just a guess, but it feels like they're delighted to be among the very few allowed to leave the paranoid and impoverished place across the river.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-18213912401262770672009-07-11T14:43:00.002+04:002009-07-11T14:51:25.240+04:00The bum's rush out of Kashgar<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyp6oRIYK8ARDreeNPVbxreODjKTr3z9GAiXUSdwObe25mPs6yWNoHSA_ov4CUriH2NhJBkEoHGQpsk9rSVxm9CzUlh-iJGWq_kkLAUDHxjTMDvGk68YeRFGQya5runpBN3JxSRObpsyU/s1600-h/kashgar.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyp6oRIYK8ARDreeNPVbxreODjKTr3z9GAiXUSdwObe25mPs6yWNoHSA_ov4CUriH2NhJBkEoHGQpsk9rSVxm9CzUlh-iJGWq_kkLAUDHxjTMDvGk68YeRFGQya5runpBN3JxSRObpsyU/s200/kashgar.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357153401831144130" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Kashgar, China -</span> I was in deep sleep when I heard someone ringing the doorbell of my room at the Tian Yuan Hotel. I looked at the clock, saw it was only 8 a.m. and rolled over to go back to sleep. Whoever it was could come back later. There was a “do not disturb” sign hanging in the door.<br /><br />The bell rang again, then a third time. If it was housekeeping, they obviously thought some sort of emergency cleaning needed to be done.<br /><br />Groggily, I put my glasses on and opened the door a crack. A short man in a red shirt peered back earnestly. He told me he was from the local government, and that I had to leave the city on an 11 a.m. flight. There were four other men in the hall, two of them in blue police uniforms.<br /><br />“I'm sorry, but the security situation is not good,” the man in red told me. “You must leave the city for your own safety.”<br /><br />I told him that I had a flight back to Urumqi the following morning. (I had been in the city for less than 24 hours, reporting on <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/china-plans-massive-change-in-uyghur-cultural-capital/article1214548/">the local government's plan to demolish most of Kashgar's historic Old City</a>.) The man in red seemed to know this already.<br /><br />“No, you must leave today,” he said firmly, shaking his head.<br /><br />Arrangements had been made for me to be on the 11 a.m. flight out.<br /><br />After awkwardly gobbling down my breakfast under the supervision of two police officers, I was taken to the lobby where Elizabeth Dalziel, a photographer with the Associated Press, was already waiting with her own security entourage. Together we were driven to the airport and instructed to book flights back to Urumqi.<br /><br />That's when it descended into farce. Elizabeth and I sat down and waited for the security men who were escorting us to buy us tickets and put us on a plane. That's how it goes in the movies after all.<br /><br />But the security guys did nothing for the sort. They stood at the other end of the ticket counter from us, expectantly us to buy our own way back to the provincial capital, Urumqi. (Why they thought we'd be “safer” in Urumqi – where 156 people died in riots this week – than Kashgar was never explained. The best answer I got was from the man in red, who said that while Kashgar appeared safe, that “it could change at any second.”) The 11 a.m. flight took off without us, and the standoff dragged on.<br /><br />The police instructed Elizabeth and I to buy tickets for the next flight out, just after 2 p.m. We called the Department of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, as well as the government media office in Urumqi, looking for clarification of our situation.<br /><br />Were we under arrest? If not, could we return to the city? Why hadn't we been put on a plane, as the man in red said we would be?<br /><br />Revealingly, the answers were different depending on which government department we called. Officials in Beijing had no idea we had been detained or why. The propaganda officials in Urumqi – who had made a show of being accommodating to the media this week, a clean break from a year ago when foreign journalists were completely barred from Tibet in the wake of riots there – told us that the officers in Kashgar had made a mistake and that we were free to go.<br /><br />We passed that on to the officers guarding us, who retorted that they had been ordered to take us to the airport, and that those orders hadn't changed. An official from the local government promised to come out and mediate the situation, but never showed up.<br /><br />“It's not possible to arrange interviews today,” she said. “You should leave.”<br /><br />Even if we wanted to, we couldn't have. After the 11 a.m. flight, commercial air traffic in and out of Kashgar was stopped, apparently so that a succession of military planes could land and offload more troops.<br /><br />Though Xinjiang is Chinese soil, both Urumqi and Kashgar have the feel of occupied cities this week.<br /><br />Elizabeth got frustrated and – noticing that our guards had long since stopped paying attention us – made a daring run into the city to photograph afternoon prayers at one of the city's many mosques.<br /><br />She was eventually found by police and brought back to the airport. Our fates were sealed, so rather than spend the night in Kashgar Airport, we gave up and bought tickets to the next flight out to Urumqi.<br /><br />What happened in Kashgar today that they didn't want the foreign media to see?<br /><br />To the best of my knowledge, nothing major. But with foreign journalists kicked out of the city, the Internet switched off and international calls blocked, we may never know for sure.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-18242731010959663792009-07-11T14:40:00.000+04:002009-07-11T14:42:05.232+04:00Climate change and Japan: Lost in perspiration<span style="font-weight:bold;">Tokyo, Monday, July 6, 2009 - </span>As I sat facing the Foreign Minister of Japan in a boardroom adjacent to his downtown Tokyo office last week, I felt a bead of sweat form on my forehead. Trying to look as calm and sophisticated as possible, I reached up and dabbed at it with a tissue, but it was soon replaced by others.<br /><br />The more I thought about it – more specifically, the more I thought about trying not to sweat – the damper I got. Soon, my body was a rain forest.<br /><br />Was I nervous? Perhaps, though the interview could hardly be called highly charged, given that I'd been requested to submit the questions I would ask weeks ahead of time. Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone wasn't so much responding to my queries as he was reciting answers off a sheet that had been prepared for him by aides.<br /><br />It could have been the three-piece suit I was wearing. If I was ever waterboarded in Guantanamo Bay, my interrogators would quickly find out that one of the reasons I became a foreign correspondent was to avoid having to wear a suit and tie every day. My wife swears that my mood changes for the worse – and I start to sweat – as soon as I have that extra piece of cloth around my neck.<br /><br />But the biggest reason I was sweating is that it was 28 degrees inside the central Tokyo building that hosts Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.<br /><br />Four years ago, as Japan (like nearly every other industrialized country) lagged behind the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets set out for it in the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, Environment Minister Yuriko Koike made a decision that lands somewhere between the visionary and the sadistic: Tokyo would slash energy use by decreeing that thermostats in government departments could never be set lower than 28 C.<br /><br />Businesses were urged to set the same standard and many did. By the end of the year the government had a genuine success in the fight against global warming to crow about. In 2005, the Cool Biz campaign, as it became known, was estimated to have resulted in a 460,000-tonne reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide, a number equivalent to that emitted by one million households in one month. The next year was even better: a 1.14 million-tonne reduction in carbon dioxides, equivalent to 2.5 million households for one month.<br /><br />Cool Biz also set off a sartorial revolution in Japan (one that no one bothered to inform your correspondent about) as instinctively formal businessmen and government officials were forced to ditch their jackets and ties or sweat to death. That said, at least two government officials I met last week had ties that they sheepishly pulled out of their pockets whenever the occasion demanded.<br /><br />All of which makes Japan's recent dithering over climate change a bit hard to fathom. Prime Minister Taro Aso <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8092866.stm">enraged environmentalists</a> last month by setting a new emissions-reduction target that many felt falls short of what Japan is capable of. The way Japan presented the new number – a 15 per cent cut over the next 11 years – sounded impressive enough, but put up against the Kyoto Treaty baseline of 1990 emission levels, it translates into only an 8 per cent cut from that point, or barely beyond the 6 per cent reduction that Japan and many other countries have already committed to back in 1997.<br /><br />When I asked Hirofumi Nakasone, the Foreign Minister, about the international reaction to his government's new targets, he politely retorted that Japan was still a leader in the climate-change fight and that what the world needed post-Kyoto was a new climate change pact that bound rapidly developing countries such as China and India (who got a pass in 1997) to make reductions as well. He mercifully avoided reminding me that <a href="http://knowledge.allianz.com/en/globalissues/climate_change/climate_politics/canada_scorecard_09.html">Canada was recently named the country that has done the least to reduce emissions</a> of any in the G-8 (Japan came fifth).<br /><br />Still, coming from the government that hosted Kyoto, Nakasone's point-the-finger-at-others defence had me wondering how serious Japan really is in 2009 about curbing carbon emissions.<br /><br />I'd hate to think I got all hot and sweaty for nothing.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-36694508057839966152009-07-11T14:34:00.002+04:002009-07-11T14:40:01.120+04:00The ‘Anonymous Netizen’ declares war on Beijing<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZS7Moz-UYanFV9dEn4SXs_GoRsnQ3VitP8G9k-hR2-kRtDTwwE7dxt6x0gECClSz4Vt7fAi1Bh_v6nQm9aCzTD4Qys_cLHmUPFDMbyTGRk6v-C6ulWBBcuNR00ThEoyf0nam319hXuYo/s1600-h/anonymous2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZS7Moz-UYanFV9dEn4SXs_GoRsnQ3VitP8G9k-hR2-kRtDTwwE7dxt6x0gECClSz4Vt7fAi1Bh_v6nQm9aCzTD4Qys_cLHmUPFDMbyTGRk6v-C6ulWBBcuNR00ThEoyf0nam319hXuYo/s200/anonymous2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357150235435543650" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Beijing, Thursday, June 25, 2009 -</span> It has, until now, been a one-sided fight. For years, the censors employed by the Chinese government have launched wave after wave of attacks against China’s vibrant online community, blocking access to websites, shutting down discussions and sending police to deal in person with those who get too chirpy online for Beijing’s liking.<br /><br />The war on what are known as China’s “netizens” has escalated in recent months. First, it announced a sweeping crackdown on Internet pornography that also had <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/181312">the side benefit of shutting down websites</a> better known for hosting dissident bloggers and lively political discussions. Popular sites such as YouTube, Blogspot and Wordpress were among the sites barred.<br /><br />Earlier this month, the Chinese government <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/points-east/tweet-twitter-blocked-in-china/article1164656/">moved to block Twitter</a>, and all its edgy Tweeting about the 20th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.<br /><br />The net result is infuriating. Often, I find myself swearing at the computer screen as attempts to do simple research are blocked by the net nannies. Even blogs about my beloved Edmonton Oilers often fall on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China. Instead of gossip about this weekend’s NHL draft, all I get is the familiar notice: “The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.”<br /><br />Like many Internet-savvy Chinese, I can get around the blocks using a virtual private network. But many of China’s 298 million Internet users are believed to lack the know-how, or the funds, to circumnavigate the Great Firewall.<br /><br />Pressing its case – and perhaps seeking to close the VPN loophole – Beijing recently announced that all personal computers sold in the country after July 1 would include a creepily named software package known as Green Dam Youth Escort that would spare the censors some work by blocking a lot of websites itself. Beijing has since <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/beijing-eases-back-on-harsh-plan-for-online-censorship/article1186367/">backed down somewhat</a>, but you get the sense that the relative freedoms many Chinese enjoy online is something the government will continue to craft ways to restrict.<br /><br />This morning, the Chinese version of Google, <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gaGtTuaVVOyT9IiBXqAqAi1qLUxQ">google.cn, was blocked, again</a> as part of the stated effort to crack down on Internet pornography. Google responded meekly by saying it would do what it could to comply with China’s new demands, which include that it prevent Chinese surfers from accessing foreign-based websites.<br /><br />Others were not so willing to take the latest assault lying down. Within hours of the Google block, an angry cry dubbed the “2009 Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens” began circulating on the Chinese Internet.<br /><br />Here it is, in a translation provided by www.shanghaiist.com . It you want to see the original page in Chinese, click <a href="https://docs.google.com/View?docid=df563ttp_0c4tt2fdp">here</a>.<br /><blockquote><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">2009 Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens</span><br /><br />To the Internet censors of China,<br /><br />We are the Anonymous Netizens. We have seen your moves on the Internet. You have deprived your netizens of the freedom of speech. You have come to see technology as your mortal enemy. You have clouded and distorted the truth in collaboration with Party mouthpieces. You have hired commentators to create the "public opinion" you wanted to see. All these are etched into our collective memory. More recently, you forced the installation of Green Dam on the entire population and smothered Google with vicious slander. It is now clear as day: what you want is the complete control and censorship of the Internet. We hereby declare that we, the Anonymous Netizens, are going to launch our attack worldwide on your censorship system starting on July 1st, 2009.<br /><br />For the freedom of the Internet, for the advancement of Internetization, and for our rights, we are going to acquaint your censorship machine with systematic sabotage and show you just how weak the claws of your censorship really are. We are going to mark you as the First Enemy of the Internet. This is not a single battle; it is but the beginning of a war. Play with your artificial public opinion to your heart's content, for you will soon be submerged in the sea of warring netizens. Your archaic means of propaganda, your epithets borrowed straight from the Cultural Revolution era, your utter ignorance of the Internet itself - these are the tolls of your death bell. You cannot evade us, for we are everywhere. Violence of the state cannot save you - for every one of us that falls, another ten rises. We are familiar with your intrigues. You label some of us as the "vicious few" and dismiss the rest of us as unknowing accomplices; that way you can divide and rule. Go ahead and do that. In fact, we encourage you to do that; the more accustomed you are to viewing your netizens this way, the deeper your self-deception.<br /><br />You are trying in vain to halt the wheels of history. Even with your technocratic reinforcements, you will not understand the Internet in the foreseeable future. We congratulate you on your adherence to your Cultural-Revolution style conspiracy theories in your dealings with dissent; for we too get nostalgic at times. We toast to your attempts to erect a Great Wall among your netizens, for such epic folly adds spice to any historical narrative. Still, there's something we feel obliged to tell you.<br /><br />NOBODY wants to topple your regime. We take no interest whatsoever in your archaic view of state power and your stale ideological teachings. You do not understand how your grand narrative dissipated in the face of Internetization. You do not understand why appealing to statism and nationalism no longer works. You cannot break free from your own ignorance of the Internet. Your regime is not our enemy. We are not affiliated in any way with any country or organization, and we are not waging this war on any country or organization, not even on you. YOU are waging this war on yourself. YOU are digging your own grave through corruption and antagonization. We are not interested in you, destined for the sewage of history. You cannot stop the Internetization of the human race. In fact, we won't bat an eyelid even if you decide to sever the transpacific information cables in order to obtain the total control you wanted. The harder you try to roll back history, the more you strain the already taut strings, and the more destructive their final release. You are accelerating your own fall. The sun of tomorrow does not shine on those who are fearing tomorrow itself.<br /><br />We are the Anonymous Netizens. We are the sum of the world's entire online population. We are coordinated. We are dominant. We are innumerable. For every one of us that falls, another ten joins. We are omnipresent. We are omnipotent. We are unstoppable. We have no weaknesses. We utilize every weakness. We are the humanity under every mask. We are the mirrors of conscience. We are created equal. We are born free. We are an army. We do not forgive. We do not forget.<br /><br />LIBERTY LEADS THE INTERNET.<br /><br />WE'RE COMING.</blockquote>markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-78319636993158795412009-06-03T08:34:00.003+04:002009-06-03T18:51:02.364+04:00TWEET! China blocks Twitter<span style="font-weight:bold;">BEIJING –</span> One minute, I was marveling at all the free-flowing chatter on Twitter about the looming anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. There were links being posted to information about that day that has never been shown in China’s state-controlled media. A campaign encouraging Chinese to wear white, a colour of mourning, on Thursday was spreading tweet by tweet.<br /><br />I found myself wondering how long it would be allowed to continue.<br /><br />Then I hit the refresh button and a far-too-familiar message appeared on my computer screen: “The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.”<br /><br />The Great Firewall of China has grown again. Forty-eight hours ahead of the most sensitive date on the Chinese calendar, a host of popular websites, including photo-sharing site Flickr.com, search engines Livesearch.com and Bing.com (Microsoft’s answer to Google), as well as Hotmail, are all suddenly inaccessible, in addition to Twitter.com.<br /><br />Video-sharing site YouTube and blogger portals Wordpress and Blogspot have already been blocked for weeks.<br /><br />No one needed to tell Chinese Twitterers why the crackdown on free expression happened at the start of June.<br /><br />“Isn’t it rather obvious why? Because of certain events that transpired just shy of 20 years ago,” wrote Kaiser Kuo, a well-known Beijing-based Twitterer who identifies himself as a guitarist, writer and a father of two. “Hopefully this will pass after the [expletive] sensitive date.”<br /><br />“I believe that this website is closed because of two days of later -- June 4,” chimed in Zuola, a popular Chinese blogger whose own page also falls on the wrong side of the Great Firewall, but who had still been managing to reach a wide audience through Twitter.<br /><br />Earlier this year, China announced that it now had 298 million Internet users, more than any other country. An estimated 70 million Chinese have personal blogs, forcing a government used to having complete control over the flow of information to adopt new tactics. But China’s Internet community has been learning and adapting just as fast.<br /><br />Many of the Chinese on Twitter were quickly back to tweeting as normal within minutes of the new block, logging on through virtual private networks to go around the censors. However, less web-savvy Chinese (and those unable to afford the cost of a VPN) will no longer be able to read what they write. Nor will they be able to see pictures posted on Flickr, or use their Hotmail accounts.<br /><br />The move appears part of a wider effort to censor media ahead of Thursday’s anniversary. The hard copy of the South China Morning Post that I get delivered from Hong Kong has stopped arriving in recent days, although the International Herald Tribune that gets delivered by the same company keeps coming through.<br /><br />BBC World television goes off the air each time one of their anchors tries to introduce a piece about the anniversary. They’re getting slow on the trigger finger though, I actually caught a brief glimpse of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_man">Tank Man</a> the famous unknown rebel who stood alone in front of a row of tanks in 1989, on BBC today before the screen went blank.<br /><br />The government also seems to have moved to silence well-known dissidents ahead of the anniversary. Bao Tong, a former top Communist Party official whom I <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/subscribe.jsp?art=1128289">recently interviewed for The Globe and Mail</a> was taken from his home today by security agents and reportedly driven to his home village in southern Zhejiang province. Ding Zilin, head of the Tiananmen Mothers organization (I also interviewed her for <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/tiananmen-dream-dead-in-one-generation/article1160927/">my piece this weekend about today’s generation of Chinese students</a>), was also told to leave the city, and phones at her apartment rang busy all day.<br /><br />All this over an anniversary that many loudly insist is a non-event. "The party and the government long ago reached a conclusion about the political incident that took place at the end of the 1980s and related issues," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference today.<br /><br />No question there. The party and the government are decided.<br /><br />But today they don’t seem quite so certain about the people.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Addendum:</span> An interesting little moment developing that may say something about the futility of trying to censor the Internet in 2009.<br /><br />"China blocks Twitter" is now the No. 3 topic on Twitter, behind only "Air France" and "goodsex."<br /><br />Number 8 is the conversation this was meant to squelch: "Tiananmen." (http://twitpic.com/6gqvl)markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8119431684867910557.post-32099551599226325282009-06-03T08:28:00.004+04:002009-06-03T08:34:01.449+04:00Change, all of a sudden, in Mongolia<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwYk9j4d46FsbSmLutI7FZCTYoA9e7645YRXnN2u6IIpkWnvY5jqdKxEOe9AdEKME45wePcocRg249rD4NoaZ0yVD8e7ZWXoC5kW2DFbAJeJsorbnjtpxuL0jgccpm0Ya1Wxk7Qb1vdNs/s1600-h/mongoliavote.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 144px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwYk9j4d46FsbSmLutI7FZCTYoA9e7645YRXnN2u6IIpkWnvY5jqdKxEOe9AdEKME45wePcocRg249rD4NoaZ0yVD8e7ZWXoC5kW2DFbAJeJsorbnjtpxuL0jgccpm0Ya1Wxk7Qb1vdNs/s200/mongoliavote.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5342954930549979074" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Beijing -</span> Amid all the alarming news about <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/a-new-kind-of-erratic-in-n-korea/article1158593/">North Korea’s recent nuclear test</a> and the <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/tiananmen-dream-dead-in-one-generation/article1160927/">reflections on the Tiananmen Square massacre</a> of 20 years ago this week, a little piece of promising news from this region got far less attention than it deserved.<br /><br />Last Sunday, June 24, some 1.1 million Mongolians, or nearly three-quarters of all eligible voters, went to the polling stations. It was the country’s sixth presidential election since the country left the Soviet Union’s orbit and embraced multi-party politics in 1990 and <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE54O2HX20090525">this time around</a>, another milestone was reached: a candidate other than the leader of the Mongolian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party won.<br /><br />Following a hard-fought campaign, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj of the opposition Democratic Party won 51 per cent of the vote, ousting incumbent Nambariin Enkhbayar of the MPRP. And while the MPRP’s narrow victory in parliamentary elections a year ago had sparked deadly riots amid accusations of electoral fraud, there was no violence this time around or allegations of improprieties this time around.<br /><br />Mr. Enkhbayar, whose party has dominated Mongolia politics for nearly 90 years, gracefully conceded defeat even before the final results were officially announced. The street parties began soon afterwards.<br /><br />The vote was hailed as “free and peaceful” by the U.S. State Department. “This election is a clear demonstration of Mongolia’s continued commitment to democratic reform and represents a real achievement for such a young democracy,” spokesman Ian Kelly said in a statement. Even more remarkable was the fact that Mongolia’s democratic evolution has happened despite the fact the country is wedged between Russia and China, two giants somewhat less concerned with the will of the people.<br /><br />Those who observed the process up close were just as impressed. “The riots last year had everyone a little worried. Here was the one country in the region that was seemingly doing very well in terms of building democracy and institutions – compared with everything else going on in Asia – and suddenly maybe that wasn’t the case. This election really reassured everyone,” said Julian Dierkes, an assistant professor at the Institute of Asia Research at the University of British Columbia who was on the ground in Mongolia as a monitor last week.<br /><br />There is, unsurprisingly, a whiff of big-power politics in all this. Though Mongolia was never formally part of the old USSR, its political scene is very similar to that in former republics like Ukraine, Georgia and parts of Central Asia, with one party (in Mongolia’s case, the MPRP) seen as aligned with Russia and the other (Elbegdorj’s Democratic Party) closer to the United States. The early analysis is that the Mongolia’s new president will try and decrease the country’s reliance on Moscow by upping ties with the U.S., Europe and Canada. (China is also increasingly a player in Mongolia’s business scene, but until now has played only a background role in the political struggle.) All that aside, no one but the Mongolians cast their vote last week, and they now appear to have chosen a Democratic Party president who will have veto power over an MPRP-controlled parliament. Now all they have to do is work together to deliver on voters’ hopes that they can lead the country out of endemic poverty.<br /><br />Despite opening its mining sector and signing lucrative deals with international firms, one-third of Mongolians live below the poverty line.<br /><br /><br />p.s. Speaking of Tiananmen Square, I’m watching BBC World in The Globe and Mail’s Beijing office as I type this. Each hour, when the anchor tries to introduce the piece BBC has done for the 20th anniversary of June 4, 1989, the screen here goes blank. I assume the piece they don’t want people to see is <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8066992.stm">this one</a>.markmachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08667875925403626247noreply@blogger.com0